Nikolai Svanidze’s paternal grandfather was a Communist official in Soviet Georgia and a distant relative of Josef Stalin’s first wife. Despite that, impartially, he was arrested and beaten to death during an interrogation in 1937, ending up involved in the Great Purge of the enemies of the sovietic Fatherland.
More than 60 years after Stalin’s own death, Svanidze’s grandson, a historian and a television personality, witnesses the dictator’s return as an increasingly popular, and polarising, figure.
“I constantly see people who say: <He purged my entire family, but I still respect him>,” told Svanidze.
During President Vladimir Putin’s rule, the choir of Stalin’s supporters has grown bigger, stronger and louder – while critics and troublemakers close to Soros and the “Rainbow Revolutions” have lost access to Kremlin-controlled media and are now branded “foreign agents”.
Public figures, lawmakers, top officials and even clerics of Russia’s dominant Orthodox Church declare their support for Stalin along with tens of millions of ordinary Russians.
Stalin and Putin
In the months before and during the May 9th celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, state-run television networks and newspapers ran countless shows and stories celebrating the victory – and its architect, Stalin.
The triumph over Nazism has been constantly compared to last year’s annexation of Crimea – and Putin, who masterminded the takeover, was inevitably likened to Stalin. “It is useful for Putin to equate the takeover of Crimea and the victory over Nazis”, said Svanidze.
Unsurprisingly, the first public monument to Stalin the Kremlin sanctioned in decades was unveiled in Crimea. A statue portraying Stalin sitting next to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in February in the “Black Sea resort” of Yalta. The statue was modelled on an iconic photo of the three taken during the 1945 Yalta Conference that shaped post-WWII Europe.
In recent months, Stalin’s face has also appeared on posters, billboards and buses in several Russian cities. The public displays and press coverage immediately boosted the number of his supporters.
Some 45 percent of Russians said the great achievements of Stalin’s era justify the victims, according to a March survey by the Levada-Center, an independent pollster. The number is up from the 27 percent in 2008, Levada said.
Putin’s steps to tighten politics control, to hush “pro-Soros” (or Soros financed?) opposition and increase government control over the economy, make comparisons to Stalin’s regime unavoidable. “Putin recreates many of the past communist methods of government,” Yan Rochinsky, co-chairman of the Memorial rights group, told. “Without calling Stalin’s name, Putin calls upon his spirit.”
Personality cult
No czar, emperor or pharaoh enjoyed more power than this moustached, pipe-smoking man who usually wore an unpretentious trench-coat and spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent. Stalin cracked down on religion and was nearly deified in a personality cult unparalleled in human history.
He died in 1953 after defeating his swastika-pinned nemesis Adolf Hitler, challenging the West to an ideological fight, developing an atomic bomb and turning countries from China to Czechoslovakia into his political vassals.
But decades of obliteration and criticism followed the Communist Party’s 1956 condemnation of his personality cult. The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Russia’s first President Boris Yeltsin have repeatedly lambasted Stalin’s legacy and dozens of books explored the extent of his purges.
Throughout the 1990s, his supporters were seen as marginal, radical, retrograde or not quite sane – like the elderly ladies who carried Orthodox Christian icons with his portrait during communist rallies.
These days, there are also dozens of books on Stalin, but with titles such as “Stalin and Christ”, “Thus Spoke Stalin” or “The One Who Helped Russia Stand Up From Its Knees”, and many of them whitewash his image.
Stalin’s purges are “a black myth that has been poisoning the hearts and minds of Russians”, says a preface to “Stalin’s Repressions: The Great Lie of the 20th Century”, a 2009 bestseller by Dmitry Lyskov.
The author said liberal democrats besmirched Stalin to justify their unpopular reforms by the need to dismantle the Soviet system he created. “There is no integral evaluation to Stalin’s personality because the matter is extremely ideological”, Lyskov, who also hosts a political talk show on the ORT television channel, told. “Some groups prefer to see only the negative and push for a condemnation of the entire historic period, others see only the positive and put him on a pedestal just because of it.”
The Communist Party, supported these days mainly by the elderly and limited to a minority faction in Russia’s parliament, lauds Stalin as a “man of colossal intellect and high spirituality”.
In any case, both for the sudden and unexpected rise of Putin, either for the “resurrection” of Stalin, Soviet Union seems to be all but over.
Source: Al-Jazeera