by Stefano Caprio

Novaya Gazeta documents how, since the 1990s and increasingly during Putin's quarter-century of rule, 213 new monuments have been erected to Stalin, along with hundreds of actions of various kinds to commemorate him. This tribute, instrumental to the cult of Victory, today allows Putin to crack down harshly on any form of dissent.

While Russia’s military is trying to directly provoke NATO members with a drone flotilla over Poland, throwing the entire world into panic over a possible nuclear escalation, Moscow boldly displays its cynical side even when it comes to peace negotiations and possible further economic sanctions, exhibiting confidence in its ability to assert itself, emboldened by China’s grand military parade alongside China’s "new Mao", Xi Jinping.

Economic forums from Vladivostok to St Petersburg continue, with Putin reassuring everyone by contradicting the prophets of doom who speak of recession, reassuring everyone that "Russia has infinite energy and mineral reserves," enough to survive any crisis and any war.

Indeed, just as Russian drones crossed the country’s borders, the president welcomed a group of young Russian scholars who demonstrated the discoveries of new "fruits of immortality," grapes and strawberries that guarantee rejuvenation and long life.

The rhetoric of the Great Victory is reiterated in increasingly grotesque and apocalyptic ways, from 9 May in Moscow to 3 September in Beijing, showing the world that history is "taking a new course," largely retracing the paths of the past.

If China’s leader presents himself as a new version of the Great Helmsman, wearing the historic Mao suit, the Russian leader increasingly sees himself as the reincarnation of the Father of Peoples, the Russian-Georgian Joseph Stalin, who ruled the USSR for 30 years, a milestone Putin himself is about to reach, albeit without a military jacket, but confident in an equally universal Victory.

Research by journalists Aleksandra Arkhipova and Yuri Lapshin in Novaya Gazeta documents the re-Stalinisation process, underway since the 1990s and picking up speed in Putin's quarter-century, with 213 new monuments to the dictator and hundreds of actions of various kinds, largely at the initiative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF: Коммунистическая партия Российской Федерации, КПРФ), but also of many regional authorities and patriotic institutions.

The most glorious year in this regard was 2019, with the 140th anniversary of Stalin's birth and the opening of around 20 new memorials, just as anxiety was mounting to resolve the crisis with Ukraine, which broke out three years later with a “special operation”.

After years of unstructured resurgence in the personality cult of the man who effectively created the Soviet Union, Stalin's memorialisation has recently taken on a more official and institutional format in Russia. This was confirmed in May of this year during the ceremonies commemorating the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, when a bas-relief of Stalin was unveiled at the Taganskaya station of the Moscow Metro.

The monument shows the dictator surrounded by loyal subjects offering him bouquets of flowers. It is an exact replica of the original that was installed in the same location in 1966 as a symbol of the "neo-Stalinism" of then Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, when Putin was 14 and a street thug, as he himself notes in his memoirs.

The same happened in other places across the Federation like the Republic of Buryatia, Siberia, where a new monument to Stalin was erected on 6 May to mark the founding of the Komsomol in the Mongolian region; Vologda, where a bust was dedicated to the generalissimo; and Kurgan, where the local governor organised a "Stalin Quotes Marathon."

In July, the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Vice Admiral Sergei Lipilin, donated another bust of the Vozhd (вождь), another of Stalin’s title (Leader), to the officers' home in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, where tensions are currently at their highest.

On a purely political level, recent years have seen a shift in perceptions of the Stalinist years, not only because of the glorious Victory over Nazism – the central theme of the wartime, patriotic rhetoric accompanying the war of "liberation from Ukraino-Nazism" in Ukraine and throughout the world – but also because of a broader appreciation of Stalinism in its relations with neighbouring peoples and states.

Stalin's crimes and terror are no longer questioned; instead, they are justified by an assessment Putin has repeatedly made. In his view, the "great revolutionary" Vladimir Lenin lacked a clear vision of the new political creation that emerged from the events of 1917 and the following years, and committed the crucial error of "creating Ukraine" and the other separate republics, while Russia's greatness should have been imposed on other peoples. Stalin attempted to "correct Lenin's mistake," and for this reason was forced to sacrifice a number of people (tens of millions) by locking them up in concentration camps.

This version reflects the circumstances that saw the revolutionary leader weakened by illness and held hostage by Stalin in the last years of his life, between 1922 and 1924, after having exhausted his strength during the years of the civil war between 1918 and 1921. Lenin opposed “Greater Russian chauvinism” promoted by Stalin, who eventually eliminated all his rivals within the party, hiding the final appeals by the fading paramount leader.

It is no coincidence that, after a systematic struggle to assume full power, Stalin took particular aim at Ukraine, which from 1930 was subjected to the most radical measures to implement the agricultural collectivisation with the kolkhozes, to the point of subjecting independent Ukrainian farmers (and even those in the Caucasus and Central Asia) to de-kulakisation, the persecution of private farmers called kulaks, deemed traitors to the homeland (today they would be called "foreign agents"), deprived of essential goods during the "state-organised famine" called Holodomor, one of the most inhumane actions of ethnic and social oppression, which today is referred to as genocide.

As if that were not enough, after the tragedy of the war and the Nazi invasion (Operation Barbarossa), which some Ukrainians backed not out of ideological sympathy, but as a way to free themselves from the Soviet yoke, Stalin, immediately after the victory, restored the Moscow Patriarchate for his own glory, concocting the reunification of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church with the Russian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, achieved in 1947 at the pseudo-synod of L’viv (Lvov) by his closest collaborators, the Patriarch of Moscow Alexei I (Simansky) and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the future "reformer" Nikita Khrushchev.

Everything fits today in Putin's Russia, from the centralisation of power by suppressing the opposition, to the collectivisation and "wartime" industrialisation, to the support for the Russian Church in Ukraine, one of the strongest ideological motivations for the start of the "special operation."

Russian media today no longer discuss Stalin's concentration camps and the victims of the terror of the 1930s. In fact, monuments to the victims of those persecutions are being removed, especially those of non-Russian ethnicity such as Lithuanians, Poles, Finns, and many others, and museums and associations dedicated to the memory of political repression are being closed.

The facts are not being denied, but public opinion tends to recognise the "merits" of the dictatorship, with the increasingly frequent use of expressions such as "this didn't happen under Stalin," "Comrade Stalin would have shot them all," "we need Stalin again," which is indeed happening under Putin. The entire world feared Stalin, but "they respected him," just like in Alaska during the meeting with Donald Trump.

Another memorable phrase reads, "Stalin did everything for the Fatherland, not for his own benefit," sending his own sons to war, and when he died, only 800 rubles remained in his bank account, as communist leaders often repeat today.

Of course, the same standard cannot be applied to the current president, who possesses vast assets and has placed his daughters and granddaughters in every possible position of power, but projects a key image of a great leader who sacrifices himself for his people.

Evoking Stalin today allows Putin to act harshly in repressing any form of dissent, especially since it is no longer necessary to send millions to Siberia; it is enough to clip the wings of a few dozen dissidents and let their leaders die in the winter cold, like Alexei Navalny. For the rest, all it takes is blocking the Internet and force everyone to use the patriotic messenger app Max, since everyone now lives on virtual communications.

Without Stalin’s revival, it would not have been possible to recreate the cult of Victory, the only true ideological dimension of Putin's Russia, given that there is no prospect of a "Russia of the future," for economic, social, and political reasons. The most fitting definition comes from Putin himself: "The future will be like the past, and the past was wonderful."

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• russia
• moscow
• soviet union
• stalin
• putin
• memory
• ukraine
• re-stalinisation
• holodomor