Foreign Policy
March 1 2013
Stalin Lives
The Soviet dictator died six decades ago. But Russians have yet to say
farewell.
BY MASHA LIPMAN | MARCH 1, 2013
When Joseph Stalin died sixty years ago, Soviet citizens sensed that
their lives had changed forever — and they were right. During his
nearly 30 year rule, Stalin transformed the USSR from the ground up
and led it to victory in World War II. He also killed, imprisoned, or
displaced tens of millions of his own compatriots; the full extent of
his crimes will probably never be fully known. His successors ruled on
an altogether more modest scale.
In October 2012, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
commissioned a survey of perceptions of Stalin in Russia and three
South Caucasus states: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The results
show with startling clarity that, for many, the Soviet tyrant lives
on. Of the four post-communist states surveyed, only Azerbaijan (which
seems to be more interested these days in emulating Dubai than
dwelling on its Soviet past) appears to have set Stalin on a path
toward irrelevance: 22 percent said they had no idea who he was.
(Among the young this number reached almost forty percent.) In
Georgia, by contrast, a shocking 45 percent of the respondents shared
a positive view of Stalin — presumably because he remains, as the
most famous (and infamous) ethnic Georgian, a powerful nationalist
symbol. In Armenia this number was 25 percent, in Azerbaijan it was
21.
Yet Russia is the place where, in many ways, the legacy of Stalinism
runs deepest. In the Carnegie survey, conducted Moscow’s respected
Levada Center, 42 percent of Russians named Stalin the public figure
that has had the most influence on world history — up from just 12
percent back in 1989, at the peak of Gorbachev’s liberalization push.
Meanwhile, the number of those who express a positive opinion of
Stalin in the Carnegie survey reached 28 percent. To quote the Levada
Center’s Gudkov, these figures represent “an astonishing resurgence of
Stalin’s popularity in Russia” since the end of the USSR.
There is, however, something curious about this recognition: Traveling
around Russia, one would never guess the Russian people believe Stalin
is their greatest compatriot. Stalin statues or portraits are nowhere
to be found, and there are no streets or cities named after him. For
comparison the embalmed body of Lenin, Stalin’s Bolshevik predecessor,
is still on display in the mausoleum in Red Square. Lenin’s name and
monuments adorn every Russian city. Yet Lenin is slowly slipping into
oblivion: During the same period of 1989 to 2012 his popularity
dropped from 72 to 37 percent.
Stalin is a hidden hero, and this status is part of the inherently
vague nature of Russia’s post-communist statehood and national
identity. Russia does not have a nationally recognized narrative of
the origins of the new, post-Soviet Russian state and no consensual
perception of its Communist past.
Russian Stalinist groups, Communists, war veterans and others have
repeatedly come up with initiatives of paying tribute to Stalin, such
as bringing back the name of Stalingrad to the Russian city (now known
as Volgograd) where one of the major battles of WWII was fought. Most
recently, a Duma deputy has talked about naming a street in Moscow
Stalingradskaya (after the battle of Stalingrad). Neither of the two
ideas has been fully implemented, but Stalinists can claim some
successes in endowing their hero with physical presence. Buses adorned
with Stalin’s image have appeared in some Russian cities on Victory
Day and other wartime anniversaries.
In Russia the official discourse on Stalin is evasive, and public
perception of him is ambivalent and divisive. Almost half of Russians
surveyed agree with the statement that “Stalin was a wise leader who
brought power and prosperity to the Soviet Union.” But over half in
the same poll believe that Stalin’s acts of repression constituted “a
political crime that cannot be justified.” And about two-thirds agree
that “for all Stalin’s mistakes and misdeeds, the most important thing
is that under his leadership the Soviet people won the Great Patriotic
War” (the name Russians give to World War II).
During the six decades since Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union and then
post-communist Russia have gone through two and a half phases of
de-Stalinization — but though his images are absent from the Russian
physical space, Stalin’s presence can be easily felt in the Russian
political order and in state-society relations.
The first attempt to purge his legacy was launched in 1956 by Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev, who exposed Stalin as the mastermind of mass
repressions of innocent people. On Khrushchev’s orders countless
streets, factories, and cities that bore Stalin’s name were renamed.
Stalin’s body was quietly removed from the mausoleum, but it still
remained in Red Square — right next to where Lenin rests.
Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization only went so far.
In 1964, Khrushchev was deposed in a bloodless coup d’état. The
post-Khrushchev Soviet leadership, led by Leonid Brezhnev, quickly
wrapped up his attempts to achieve a reckoning with Stalin. During the
“creeping re-Stalinization” that followed, the condemnation of Stalin
stopped, but he was not publicly exonerated. Instead his name was
practically removed from official discourse.
A new wave of de-Stalinization was launched two decades later in the
Gorbachev era. In contrast to Khrushchev’s, this round of
de-Stalinization engaged broad public constituencies and radically
de-legitimized the Communist regime. By the end of 1991 the meltdown
of Soviet Communism was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But the enthusiasm for dismantling the Soviet legacy was soon
overshadowed by the hardship and turmoil of the early 90s. In the face
of a collapsing economy, rising crime, growing inequality, and a tough
Communist opposition, Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin did not
follow through with de-Stalinization at a state level. Stalin’s grave
remained in Red Square (and Lenin’s body stayed in his mausoleum). The
one attempt to secure a legal condemnation of Soviet Communism
fizzled; the 1992 trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
failed to reach a verdict on the crimes committed by the Soviet
regime.
When Vladimir Putin emerged as Yeltsin’s successor, he put an end to
the political turmoil and built a regime inspired by the Soviet
version of Russia’s traditional model: centralized and uncontested
state power drawing heavily on the domestic security forces. From
Putin’s Soviet-style emphasis on powerful state and powerless people
stemmed a symbolic return of Stalin. It was under Stalin, after all,
that Russia, in its Soviet guise, was at its most powerful.
Dmitry Medvedev, whose job was to put a softer face on Putin’s Russia,
embarked on a third wave of de-Stalinization. In late 2009, Medvedev
posted a passionate video blog on the Kremlin’s website in which he
condemned “Stalin’s crimes.” The following year Medvedev’s Council on
Human Rights and Civil Society announced an ambitious program of
de-Stalinization. Yet not too long after that, in an address to
officers of the FSB (the successor of the KGB, the Soviet secret
police), Medvedev expressed confidence that the current generation of
FSB officers would “carry on the traditions of its predecessors with
dignity” — those same predecessors who carried out the mass
repressions referred to in his video blog “as one of the greatest
tragedies in the Russian history.”
The FSB itself has never rejected its Soviet legacy. Its headquarters
are still located in the Lubyanka, where so many of Stalin’s victims
were tortured and shot in the building’s infamous basements. In the
Russian informal system of patronage, the agency’s political clout is
unparalleled. Throughout his leadership, Putin has drawn on the FSB
for many of his high-level government appointments and put members of
the FSB in charge of lucrative business assets.
Medvedev’s half-hearted de-Stalinization basically wound down as soon
as his substitute presidency ended and Putin returned to the Kremlin.
To this day there is no consistent official narrative of the Soviet
past in general or Stalinism in particular. Nor is there a memorial to
the victims of Stalin’s rule.
While the official discourse reduces mentions of Stalin to a minimum,
public discussions have merely been marginalized, not banned or
suppressed. Memorial, a well-known nongovernmental organization that
conducts archival research documenting Stalin’s crimes, has been able
to continue its commemorative work. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago and other literature about Stalin’s terror are easily
available in bookstores and libraries. At the same time, books
glorifying Stalin, with titles such as The Forbidden Truth about
“Stalin’s Repressions” or USSR Without Stalin: The Path to
Catastrophe, are on sale in major bookstores. A conservative estimate
of the total print run of the most popular titles amounts to over one
hundred thousand copies.
This juxtaposition reflects controversial perception of Stalin as both
a dictator to blame for the deaths of millions and a wise and powerful
leader who won the war against Hitler. In the minds of many Russians,
in fact, the two perceptions are not infrequently combined. In the
collective post-Soviet psyche, national greatness is inseparable from
violence and brutal force.
For the Russian people, their nation’s greatness is best embodied by
the Soviet Union’s 1945 victory in the Great Patriotic War. In today’s
Russia, the man who led the nation to this victory, comes in handy as
symbolic compensation for a nation suffering from Russia’s loss of
status in the period following the collapse of the Communist empire.
Stalin’s ranking as the greatest Russian may be seen as an indirect
reflection of a mentality that is common to many of today’s Russians,
who maintain passive loyalty to the nation despite the injustice,
corruption, and egregious abuse of authority by state government
officials. The historical experience has taught the Russian people
that they are powerless against the omnipotent state and that their
best strategy is to adapt to the will and whims of their rulers. About
80 percent of Russians tell pollsters that they have no “influence on
political life in Russia.”
The years of post-communist development have not been fully wasted,
however. The past few years have witnessed the rise of what one might
call “non-Soviet Russians”. It was these younger Russians — and
particularly those better-educated Moscow residents with modern
professional skills — who joined the mass protests against Putin’s
regime that erupted in the Russian capital in late 2011. In the
Carnegie survey these same younger Muscovites do not agree that “our
people will always need a leader like Stalin, someone who will restore
order.”
Russian society is becoming more diverse, and people’s relation to the
state is a major line of division. The paternalistic model that Putin
has established derives its legitimacy from a system of symbols that
could be called “Stalinist”: an infallible state, patriotism
understood as loyalty to the ruling authorities, disloyalty regarded
as a criminal act. These symbols may still be accepted by a
conservative Soviet-style majority, but they have also become
divisive.
A true de-Stalinization process will require no less than a
reinvention of Russian nationhood based on a rejection of the
traditional concept of the state, an end to the political and
historical immunity of the secret police, and the emergence of a
concept of “we, the people.” It is impossible to say whether and when
Russia will rise to this challenge. But until that happens, Stalin
will not die.