Translated material
Cult of history
A strong business executive honors the memory of an “effective manager”
The Moscow City Hall does not intend to abandon plans to decorate the capital for Victory Day with posters depicting Stalin. Yesterday, at a regular meeting of the capital's government, city officials approved the program of celebrations dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Victory. It provides for the placement of information stands with the image of Stalin in different areas of the city. At the same time, the mayor of the capital, Yuri Luzhkov, for the first time publicly responded to criticism from Muscovites who were dissatisfied with the return of the “leader of peoples” to the streets of the city. He called the public outrage over the inflated press an “orgy” and said that “objectivity requires that those who led the state not be erased from history.”“I am not an admirer of Stalin, but I am an admirer of objectivity in covering historical events,” said the mayor. “Erasing his name from the history of the victory over fascism is as unacceptable as demolishing monuments.” Mr. Luzhkov shifted responsibility to the press for fanning the scandal caused by information about the city hall’s readiness to report on stands and posters about Joseph Stalin’s contribution to the victory over fascism. “We will do this in appropriate proportions, and not, as some media reported, that we will cover the whole of Moscow with portraits of the head of state of those times,” the mayor assured.
City officials insist that in the information campaign accompanying the anniversary celebrations, it is necessary to present the Generalissimo “in that totality, in the proportion that shows his role in the war and the restoration of the economy after it.” At the same time, as Vladimir Makarov, head of the Moscow Advertising, Information and Design Committee, said yesterday, information propaganda will be conducted “in a calm manner,” and portraits of Stalin will be placed along with images of other Soviet military leaders.
It is expected that stands measuring 1x1.5 m will be placed throughout the city for the entire duration of the celebrations on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Victory, including on the square in front of the Bolshoi Theater, on Poklonnaya Hill and on the square in front of Gorky Park. “Out of two thousand posters, only ten information stands are dedicated to Stalin’s activities in the role of supreme commander in chief,” the capital’s advertisers justify their actions. The mayor's office believes that hushing up the leader's merits is just as wrong as exalting his name. “It is wrong to fight Stalinism using Stalinist methods,” says Mr. Makarov.
The mayor's office assures that the idea to recall Stalin's role in the Great Patriotic War was submitted by representatives of the Moscow city public organization of war veterans, headed by the former secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, candidate member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee Vladimir Dolgikh. It is noteworthy that the initiative of the former representative of the Soviet party nomenklatura is fully consistent with the wishes of many representatives of the current government, who also emphasize the ambiguity of the figure of Joseph Stalin, and the strengthening of the opinion in historical circles that mass repressions were inevitable costs in the process of transition of a backward agricultural country to industrialization under the leadership of “ effective manager." Yesterday, Comrade Dolgikh himself made it clear that he was expressing not only the will of his comrades - his initiative, it turns out, was also an attempt to prevent the distortion of Russian history. “Moscow veterans condemn the repressions, but at the same time appreciate the results achieved under the leadership of Stalin,” he noted.
Naturally, the mayor’s office’s readiness to satisfy the wishes of the veterans found full support among the capital’s communists, including quite young ones. The 30-year-old leader of the Communist Party faction in the Moscow City Duma, Andrei Klychkov, told Vremya Novostei that the benefits that Stalin brought to the population of the USSR were disproportionately greater than the negative associated with his name. Both recording the merits of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Army and debunking the cult of his personality in the 60s of the last century, in his opinion, are the elements that allow an objective interpretation of historical events. “Why, for example, does the monument to Peter I stand in the center of Moscow, although under him the country lost a quarter of its population?” - Comrade Klychkov parried all attacks on the “father of nations”.
But some historians believe that the capital’s authorities, by their actions, risk offending the feelings of those who themselves visited Stalin’s camps or lost relatives there. “There will be protests, and among the veterans there are a lot of those who went through the camps,” said Yan Rachinsky, a member of the board of the Memorial human rights society, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent. In his opinion, “Yuri Luzhkov’s words are a reason for a special statement” and human rights activists will soon publish an official protest and their position.
President of the Holocaust Foundation Alla Gerber is also ready to join the protests. “I cannot allow portraits of this man to hang in Moscow with a plus sign. And not only because my family personally suffered. There are no families that would not have suffered from Stalin’s policies,” Ms. Gerber told Vremya Novostey. In her opinion, the persistence with which the authorities of modern Russia are trying to impose a new cult of personality on society is connected not only with the desire to make “a nod to those veterans for whom the name of the leader is associated with youth and Victory,” but also for the purpose of “a kind of rehabilitation of the totalitarian regime "