If that headline doesn’t catch your attention, well, then you must not know who Joseph Stalin is. The leader of the USSR from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953 was responsible for killing more than 20 million people. His rule was marked by repressions, purges, show trials, the Great Terror, labor camps, the Gulag, man-made famines, genocides. Stalin was the mastermind behind the Holodomor, during which millions in Ukraine were subjected to death by forced starvation and through which he sought to destroy the Ukrainian nation. Stalin was responsible also for the 1944 genocidal deportation of another nation, the Crimean Tatars, from their homeland.
Nonetheless, in today’s Russia – a country also victimized by Stalin – Stalin has become ever more popular, a mythologized figure hailed as a strong leader who led the USSR to greatness, an effective manager who enforced order and, astoundingly, a leader who championed the oppressed. In April 2018, a poll conducted by the Levada Center reported that 44 percent of Russians “fully or mostly agree Stalin was ‘a cruel, inhuman tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.’ ” Incredibly, that was down from the 68 percent who felt that way 10 years earlier. At the same time, 57 percent agreed that the dictator was “a wise leader who led the Soviet Union to might and prosperity,” and 18 percent mostly agreed with that assessment. In 2008, those figures were 50 percent and 37 percent, respectively.
This week, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that, according to the latest survey by the independent pollster Levada, Russians’ respect for Stalin has risen sharply. Seventy percent of Russians polled said they believed that Stalin played a completely or relatively positive role “in the life of the country.” That’s a record high, according to the analytical center, which been carrying out surveys about attitudes toward Stalin since 2001. In 2016, such approval was voiced by 54 percent of respondents. On the flip side, only 19 percent of those surveyed this year said Stalin played a relatively negative or sharply negative role; in 2016, the number was 30 percent. What’s more, 41 percent of respondents now say they respect Stalin, while 26 percent say they’re indifferent. And, here’s another incredible finding: 46 percent say Stalin-era victims could be justified, relatively or completely, by the country’s achievements. That’s a huge jump from the 27 percent who were willing to justify Stalin’s repressions when polled in 2008.
What do such poll results say about the future of Russia? We know that Vladimir Putin has praised Stalin for leadership during the Great Patriotic War and that “excessive demonization” of Stalin is “one way of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia.” Monuments to Stalin have begun appearing in Russia in recent years and a teachers’ manual actually called the murderous dictator “one of the most successful leaders of the USSR.” A 2018 survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center revealed that nearly half of Russia’s 18- to 24-year-olds had not even heard about Stalin-era repressions. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group commented: If young people are not learning about the crimes against humanity of Stalin and his regime, and television is full of programs glorifying everything about the second world war and treating security service officers as heroes, it’s not surprising that Russians recently named first Stalin, then Putin, as “the most outstanding figures in history.” A disturbing trend indeed.