Faces in the crowd

How did Stalin's right-hand man end up at a WWII memorial parade?

On May 9, after witnessing perhaps the biggest military parade ever in Red Square, more than half a million people marched through Moscow is what is one of the city’s largest ever public demonstrations. Participants in the march, known as the Immortal Regiment, are supposed to carry portraits of their relatives who fought in World War II. The event, which emerged in 2011, was once considered one of Russian civil society’s greatest triumphs. It owes its early popularity to an independent television station in Tomsk, TV-2, which was recently shut down. In the past two years, the All-Russia People's Front (ONF), a movement started in 2011 by Vladimir Putin, has seized control of organizing the Immortal Regiment, instead. As a result, the march has become more centralized and arguably less civic, with demonstrators allegedly being bused in and handed mass-produced portraits, sometimes of extremely controversial Soviet figures.

Shed a tear for Stalin’s right-hand man

This year, Moscow’s Department of Culture invited a scandal, when it shared on Facebook an image from the May 9 Immortal Regiment that included someone carrying a portrait of Lavrentiy Beria, the most influential of Josef Stalin's secret police chiefs. Beria was executed in 1953 for treason, terrorism, and counter-revolutionary activity.

Moscow city officials first posted the image to Facebook on May 10 and then deleted it soon after. Three hours later, however, the Department of Culture reposted the photograph, only to delete it once again afterwards. The photograph features Night Wolves biker gang leader Alexander Zaldostanov, also known as "The Surgeon,” alongside Alexander Kibovsky, the head of Moscow’s Culture Department. Behind Zaldostanov, someone is carrying a portrait of Beria. The image used on the sign is one of the first photos found when searching online for pictures of Beria, raising suspicions that the banner was made with a cursory Internet search.

Somebody call the cops

Another photograph made popular online by anti-Kremlin blogger Andrei Malgin shows Immortal Regiment portraits discarded in piles. Malgin asks his readers rhetorically, “If people carried portraits of their own fallen relatives, would they throw them out at the end [of the march]?”

Sergei Lapenkov, the chairman of the interregional historical-patriotic movement also known as Immortal Regiment, has asked the Attorney General to investigate Malgin’s photographs, which Lapenkov says might violate Russia’s law against “publicly insulting the symbols of the nation’s military glory,” insofar as some of the signs in the picture feature St. George’s ribbons.

Lapenkov offers three possible explanations for the images of the allegedly discarded portraits: (1) the photographs were staged with some ulterior motive, (2) volunteers threw away the signs, after organizers neglected to collect them, or (3) the portraits were discarded by students bused in to create a larger crowd for the march.