‘A deliberate policy’

How reverence for Stalin stopped being a fringe view among Russian politicians

Russian politicians are increasingly speaking about Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin not as a tyrant or orchestrator of mass repressions but as a charismatic leader and a strong statesman. Officials hang his portraits on the walls, the country has over 100 monuments to him, and the Communists of Russia party has opened a “Stalin Center” (and is planning more throughout the country). The independent outlet Novaya Vkladka recently took a closer look at the trend of growing admiration for Stalin in Russia and how the authorities have encouraged it since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Below, Meduza shares an abridged translation of their report.

In May 2024, dozens of people gathered in Barnaul, the capital of Russia’s Altai Krai, hoping to see performers “contact” the ghost of Joseph Stalin. The unusual event was an interactive play based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s story “Séance” and a chapter from his novel The Master and Margarita.

After the lights were dimmed, audience members were invited one-by-one to sit at a table with a static electricity ball and a Ouija board to “summon” the spirits of famous figures like Napoleon, Socrates, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the longtime leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

Stalin’s ghost was never summoned; the media had advertised the event incorrectly, and the play’s action took place years before the Soviet leader’s death. At the end of the play, one of the characters reported the séance to the Soviet secret police, referring to its participants as “foreign agents.” Afterwards, “Stalin” walked in, accompanied by an NKVD entourage, and addressed the audience:

Leaders are nothing without the masses. Hannibal and Napoleon perished when they lost the masses. The masses allow new historical milestones to be reached. It’s thanks to the masses that people make new and noble accomplishments. Today, there are many young and brave people among you. We can’t know many of your names, of course. But you are a source of strength and power. Long live the Soviet people! Hurrah, comrades!

‘We’re focused on the future’

The séance event was held in a “Stalin Center,” an institution opened in late 2023 by the regional chapter of the party Communists of Russia (not to be confused with the larger, more popular Communist Party of Russia, or KPRF). On the day of the center’s opening, local party members promised to “deal with enemies of Stalin, supporters of Yeltsin and Navalny, enemies of Russia, and foreign agents” in a “Stalinist fashion.”

Communists of Russia’s Altai Krai chapter has never hidden its admiration for the Soviet Union’s most notorious leader. In 2019, the party’s members asked their governor, Viktor Tomenko, to install a memorial to Stalin in front of the regional government building in Barnaul (so far, he hasn’t complied).

In 2023, activists from Communists of Russia dressed up in 1930s period costumes on Barnaul’s Museum Night and visited various museums along with an actor dressed as Stalin. When they encountered Governor Tomenko on the street, the Stalin impersonator shook the governor’s hand and thanked him for his work.

The Barnaul Stalin Center itself is little more than a cultural center in the basement of an office building. The room is small and full of Stalin-related artifacts, including a large bust of the leader from the 1930s; one supporter of the Communists of Russia dug it up from his garden and donated it to the Communists of Russia, who restored and painted it.

“Our ‘Stalin Center’ strives to focus on the future and attract young and middle-aged people, and we’re managing to do just that. We welcome people of all ages. Most of our visitors are young people under 35,” said the center’s chairman, Sergey Matasov, who also heads the Communists of Russia faction in the Altai Krai Legislative Assembly.

This fall, the party plans to hold a large-scale academic conference dedicated to “Stalin and Russia.”

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‘To open these centers is to not know history’

According to local historian Daniil Degtyaryov, Russia’s first Stalin Center opened in Barnaul because Altai Krai is one of the regions where the Communists of Russia party is most popular: the party has more seats in the Altai Krai legislative assembly than in any other Russian region.

The party’s Stalin Centers are aimed less at repopularizing the Soviet leader than at boosting their own PR, according to Degtyaryov:

The Communists of Russia party may dress up in communist garb, but they consistently lose to the KPRF. To draw more attention to themselves, they opened the Stalin Center and even held “séance.” […] I see this as a PR stunt for a specific party and nothing more.

Degtyaryov said that in Altai Krai, a “left-wing” region where communist ideas are relatively popular, the opening of the Stalin Center didn’t spark the same outrage that it might in other more liberal parts of the country like Moscow or St. Petersburg. And while many Barnaul residents disapproved of the center’s creation, he said, only one person chose to speak out publicly against it: priest Alexander Mikushin.

Mikushin told Novaya Vkladka that he was shocked to see the Stalin Center opened in Barnaul:

Thousands of people were killed, put behind bars [under Stalin]. This includes the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church. One striking example is the Butovo Firing Range, where priests were executed. Look at how many people were buried there, how many were killed during the construction of the Chuya Highway [which runs through Altai Krai]. This man committed crimes against the Russian people and other Soviet peoples, orchestrating their genocide. To open centers in his honor is to not know history. All one has to do is study the history of one’s own family. My relatives, for instance, were branded kulaks and exiled.

Mikushin believes more Barnaul residents didn’t speak out against the Stalin Center simply because they “have little interest in politics and history”; in recent years, he said, there’s been less discussion in Russian society about Stalin’s repressions. Still, he doesn’t think the center will hold much appeal for the wider public.

Meanwhile, Matasov said he sees “demand in society” for more Stalin Centers. According to him, the Communists of Russia party has plans to “provide help and support to enthusiasts” from other regions who want to open their own.

“We’ll have an office in Moscow. There, people will be able to learn about our center’s work, become friends of the Stalin Center, and let us know they want to help open branches in their home regions,” Matasov said.

‘A tribute to his achievements’

In the town of Bor in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, entrepreneur and philanthropist Alexey Zorov, who heads the local branch of the KPRF, is building his own Stalin Center, unaffiliated with the Communists of Russia.

“It’s going to be a beautiful building overlooking the city. A cultural and historical museum grounded in socialist ideas. The scientifically-backed ideology of Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin] will be the foundation of our center,” Zorov told the newspaper Sovietskaya Gazeta.

The website for Zorov’s Stalin Center says the new institution will be a “tribute to the achievements of J. V. Stalin and the entire Soviet era” and an “island where history is preserved and passed down from generation to generation in an accurate, truthful form, without distortions.”

In 2020, a monument to Stalin was put up next to the site of the future Stalin Center in Bor. The city’s mayor, Alexander Kiselyov, spoke out against the new monument and called for it to be taken down, but police later determined that there were no grounds for its removal as it was merely a “garden figure” on private property.

While the Bor Stalin Center is not officially affiliated with the one in Barnaul, the people behind the two projects are in contact. According to Barnaul Stalin Center chairman Sergey Matasov, he’s fully supportive of the Bor initiative.

“We and the leadership of the Stalin Center that Alexey Zorov is currently building have agreed to collaborate and help each other,” Matasov said. “We plan to share information, experience, and maybe some artifacts.”

Statue proliferation

While Stalin Centers are a new phenomenon in Russia, monuments to the Soviet leader have become fairly commonplace. Four new ones went up in 2023: one at a museum in Volgograd, one at a microelectronics plant in the Pskov region, one in a park in the Moscow region, and one at a memorial complex dedicated to the victims of political repressions in the Tver region.

And more Stalin monuments are likely on their way. In May 2024, the acting governor of Russia’s Vologda region called the idea of installing one “useful and timely.” In February, the mayor of Novokuznetsk in Russia’s Kemerovo region said he had instructed city planners and city district leaders to look into possible locations for a Stalin statue. In March, the organization Defenders of Russia made a similar request to the mayor of Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia.

Russian politicians have been discussing renaming the city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad for several years. In 2023, local authorities passed a law that temporarily restores the city’s Soviet-era name nine times a year, including on the country’s Victory Day holiday.

In May 2024, locals near the village of Novaya Uda in Russia’s Irkutsk region installed Stalin’s name in large letters on the side of a small mountain and built a gazebo in his honor.

Out of the 110 monuments to Stalin in Russia, 90 percent were erected under Putin, according to the Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit. Since 2014, new ones have appeared at twice the previous rate.

‘Some not-so-good moments’

Disapproval of Stalin monuments is decreasing in Russia, while the number of Russians who say they view the dictator positively has been on the rise in recent years. In a 2023 survey by the independent Levada Center, 47 percent of respondents said they view Stalin with respect, 23 percent said they’re indifferent, and 16 percent said they feel sympathy or admiration for him. Only eight percent of those surveyed said they have negative feelings towards him, compared to 60 percent in 1998.

Sergey Matasov told Novaya Vkladka that he believes Stalin has become popular among Russians again because for them, he’s come to symbolize “social justice, a strong economy, victory over Nazism, geopolitical power, and confidence in the future.”

“People in Russia, especially those who come to Stalin Centers, have a heightened sense of justice. They believe that Russia needs to become stronger, that the power of the Soviet Union should return, and that the social economy, politics, and stability should exist according to Stalin’s principles,” Matasov said.

Matasov admitted that there were “some not-so-good moments” under Stalin’s rule. However, he insisted that many of the atrocities attributed to the Soviet leader are myths and fabrications created by the “sick mind” of writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

“Well-founded criticism based on specific facts can be a topic for discussion, a chance to learn from past mistakes and understand what to avoid in the future. The Stalin Center operates as a forum for debate and discussion,” Matasov said.

‘An easy way to shift the blame’

Barnaul historian Daniil Degtyaryov believes that Stalin’s popularity in Russia has grown in the last decade or so due to a “deliberate state policy aimed at shaping a positive image of Stalin as an ‘effective manager,’ an architect of victory, and a great statesman,” he told Novaya Vkladka.

Publicist Stanislav Savushkin, who runs a Telegram channel dedicated to preserving Russian architecture, told Novaya Vkladka that he believes Stalin’s popularity is growing because of a desire among many Russians to see a “strong and just leader against the backdrop of today’s disorder and instability.”

“This desire aligns perfectly with the myth of the great leader, which is pushed by red propagandists. [...] Many people fall into binary thinking: if the bad liberals of the 1990s criticized Stalin, then Stalin must be good,” Savushkin said.

He also argued that the rise of Stalin’s popularity is more a factor of Russia’s current economic situation than of the war in Ukraine and other geopolitical factors. Many Russians chalk their financial situation up to the assumption that “things were better in the past,” he said.

“It’s an easy way to shift the blame. That plus external factors like the propaganda of greatness and imperialism on TV and the lack of decommunization [in Russia] lead people to see Stalin as a red monarch,” he said.

Savushkin believes that statues of Stalin in modern Russia are “an insult not only to people’s relatives and loved ones who suffered from his policies, but also Russia and Russian culture as a whole.”

‘Knowingly or unknowingly justifying repressions’

Russia’s federal authorities have tried to distance themselves from issues surrounding the veneration of Stalin. When asked about the installation of statues and busts of the Soviet leader in October 2023, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said it was “the prerogative of local municipal authorities.”

The Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights has begun taking a similar position. In October 2023, its chairman, Valery Fadeyev, said that installing monuments honoring Stalin is a private initiative and not part of state policy.

As recently as 2019, the council’s Permanent Commission on Historical Memory published a letter titled “On Monuments to J. V. Stalin” in which it said that anyone who erects monuments to the Soviet leader is “knowingly or unknowingly justifying repressions.”

While the letter’s authors didn’t call for a ban against Stalin statues on private property, it emphasized that “public officials at all levels should be clearly aware that the use of state and municipal land and buildings for this purpose is unacceptable” as it “contradicts not only morality and respect for our deceased and innocently suffering ancestors but also official state policy.”

This position began to change at the state level after February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Large portraits of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Beria are on display, for example, in the Vologda region in the governor’s reception room. Georgy Filimonov, who Putin appointed to be the region’s acting governor, often shares posts from a Telegram channel about Stalin and writes positively about him.

In November 2023, Filimonov met with residents of the town of Nikolsk. Hundreds of locals came out to hear him speak. After the acting governor’s speech, one of the audience members came to the stage. “Our governor set a high standard: to reach a level where we’re all living well. To do that, he needs to understand what level he needs to reach: roughly the level of this man,” the man said, handing Filimonov a photo of Stalin.

The audience applauded.

Story by Artem Antonov for Novaya Vkladka. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.