70 years after Stalin’s death, his ghost still haunts Russia

70 years ago, on the night of March 5, 1953, died Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known by his nom de guerre Stalin, “the man of steel”.

A muzzled society terror as a mode of government, all-powerful political police, real or imaginary enemies forced to confess to the most absurd crimes under torture, mass graves, purges (700,000 people executed in 1937-1938 alone), deportations, famines, concentration camps, “total” censorship and propaganda, a war against Hitler won at the unimaginable cost of 27 million Soviet deathss (including 8.6 million military deaths against 4.1 million Germans), a divided Europe and a Cold War about to get hot: that was the legacy of the Void (Chief).

Three years after his death, in February 1956, the “excesses of the cult of his personality” were denounced by his successor, Nikita Jruschovat the XX Party Congress. In October 1961, his body was finally removed from Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. to deposit, more modestly, in the necropolis near the wall of the Kremlin. During the perestroikacon gorbachevand especially in the early 90s, with YeltsinWhen the archives were opened and previously forbidden testimonies were published, much of the truth about his thirty-year reign became known to all, and a large majority of his former subjects were able to freely express their revulsion. and their horror at the memory of his bloody times.

But this rejection did not last long. According to the polls, Russians like him more and more. There are many explanations for this. Por supuesto, deben en gran medida a la personalidad ya la visión histórica del hombre that lleva en el Kremlin desde 2000 y que consider que su lejano prédecesor fue un “gestor eficaz” y, sobre todo, la encarnación de la victoria en la Segunda World War. The truth is that for Vladimir Poutinethe reference to Joseph Stalin can also be cumbersome…

The “Stalinist renaissance”, it must be emphasized, is a more recent phenomenon than one might imagine. In 2008, at the end of Vladimir Putin’s second term, 60% of people polled by the Levada Institute (one of the country’s main polling stations) believed that the crimes committed under the Stalin era were not justified ; in 2012, at the end of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential term, “only” 21% of those polled said they considered Stalin a “great leader”, a result lower than the 29% recorded in 1992, less than a year after his disappearance from the USSR.

Negative opinions about Stalin only really started to fade in 2015, the year after the annexation of Crimea, a time of patriotic exaltation and glorification of state history. In 2019, 70% of respondents said that for them Stalin played a fairly or very positive role, and only 16% perceived him negatively. It is also from this year that young Russians, until then rather indifferent to Stalin, begin to express favorable opinions on the dictator. Finally, in 2021, a few months before the invasion of Ukraine, 56% considered it a grand entrance (large guide), a new record.

Although naturally we must be wary of opinion polls in a “memory”, a dictatorship that draws part of its legitimacy from rewriting the past for political endsHowever, opinion polls reflect a reality that must be analysed.

The first reason for these feelings favorable to Stalin is historical: the “strong leader”, the “tough leader” is a cliché firmly anchored in a fundamentally conservative political culture, which has never really known democracy.

On the other hand, in Russia never really turned the page on Stalinism. After the death of the Leader, the country experienced two brief waves of “de-Stalinization” under Khrushchev (1953-1964) and Gorbachev (1985-1991), and above all a long period of “re-Stalinization” under Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko years (1964-1985).

The Yeltsin years (1992-1999) were characterized, on the one hand, by an “archives revolution” which revealed or confirmed the extent of Stalinist crimes, but also by the absence of a real decommunization on the legal-moral. The famous “Communist Party Trial” of 1992 was a failure due to a problem of definition of the Communist Party, which was never a political party in the classical sense, but a “mechanism of control of power”. Russia will therefore not have had its “Nuremberg trials” of the CPSU, which could have educated the younger generations.

This leads us to the failure of the transformation of post-Soviet Russia into a true democracy.

During the second half of the 1990s, against a backdrop of the country’s geopolitical and economic decline, we witnessed the return of discourses and practices that reconnected with the long tradition of a strong Russian state (“the vertical of power”), a trend resumed and amplified during the first two terms of Vladimir Putin, in 2000-2008.

Stalinist feelings were then fueled by the idea of ​​continuity between the Russian Federation and the USSR, and the disappearance of the latter was no longer presented by the authorities as an inevitable event, but rather as a combined effect of the alleys and Western and American arrivals. on the action of a “fifth column” inside the country.

Let us recall that in 2005, before the Russian Federal Assembly (the two chambers of the bicameral parliament combined), Putin described the dismantling of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. The same Putin who, for years, has not ceased to insist on a simple idea: it was Lenin, with his plan for a federal state adopted in December 1922, who was retrospectively responsible for the disappearance of the USSR. In other words, the “catastrophe” would not have happened if Stalin’s “autonomist” plan had prevailed at the time: the republics that made up this unified and centralized state simply could not have been separated as in the case of a federation, which is what happened in the early 1990s.

This brings us to the essential element of Stalinophilia, the conspiracy. Vladimir Putin has often argued that while he does not deny Stalinist crimes or the reality of the Great Terror of the 1930s, he is also wary of criticizing Stalinism as a means of weakening today’s Russia by presenting it like a country that hasn’t changed much. from her to her totalitarian past. From this point of view, For Putin, attacking Stalin amounts to participating in the plot hatched by the West to make Russia a second-rate country, even a third-rate country, contrary to what would be its “natural place”.

Criticism of Stalin becomes suspect especially when it focuses on his actions during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Stalin’s ‘cult’ has its roots in the Brezhnev era, when Putin was a young KGB officer; it was through this cult that Stalin was rehabilitated in the eyes of millions of Russians, for whom he remains closely associated with the 1945 victory. the Great Terror.

This policy of voluntary amnesia had the results that we know. Thus, in a 2005 poll, 40% of those questioned believed that the Red Army had been decimated by the Stalinist purges; only 17% said so in 2021. As the “memory wars” with the Baltic countries and Poland over the origins of the Second World War are in full swing, Putin does not hesitate to qualify the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of “triumph of diplomacy”. Even the Gulag has been relegated to the category of “unfortunate side effects”.

On February 2, 2023, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad (Volgograd since 1961, but returning to its old name during the commemoration period), the city had seen giant busts and banners glorifying the leader, while propaganda was referring to Stalin. like the “generalissimo” (a title actually awarded in 1945), the architect of victory: a new shameless rewriting of history.

The “Stalinophilia” of the population continues to be a double-edged sword, since it can also generate resentment towards the rulers. For Russians who express respect for Stalin, he is not so much a historical figure as a symbol of a powerful and respected “Great Russia”, a Russia of justice and order, much like the sentiments of the Russian peasantry towards Tsar Nicholas II. .

From this point of view, Stalin risks losing his status as an “ally” and “guarantor” and becoming an awkward competitor for Vladimir Putin. With Stalin, the bar is set very high, and the Russian president is doomed not only to be constantly measured against his illustrious predecessor, but also to see his popularity erode, as happened in 2020-2021, in the framework of the promulgation of the pension reform, and the no less unpopular management of the Covid-19 pandemic, where not wearing a mask has become an act of defiance towards the authorities.

distani, to parody a famous slogan from the Soviet era. Undoubtedly, Putin felt the “icy breath of the commander” who spoke of the easy conquest of Ukraine and the installation of a puppet regime in kyiv. It is also Stalin’s model that guided him in his decision to mobilize to drown the Ukrainian army “under heaps of corpses”, as the Leader had done during the Second World War. On February 28, 2023, speaking to the leadership of the FSB, Russia’s counterintelligence agency, Putin told his men to redouble their efforts to “eliminate the vermin that seek to divide Russians with the support of the Russians.” ‘West’: Is a 1937-style witch hunt brewing? At least, we cannot say that the Russians were not warned. Did they want Stalin? It can come.

*Article originally published by The Conversation – By Andreï Kozovoï, University Professor, University of Lille.

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