The witty and even more sarcastic oxymoron created during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, "We Russians live in a country with an unpredictable past", became relevant again during the rule of Vladimir Putin.
In the Russian city of Vologda, everything is ready for the ceremonial installation of a life-size monument to Joseph Dzhugashvili Stalin. Vologda Oblast Governor Georgi Filimonov justifies the erection of the statue by the pressure and demands of the people. Of course, it is no coincidence that the monument to Stalin is being erected in the period when Ukraine is commemorating the Holodomor, whose order was the Georgian dictator.
In Filimon's office in Vologda, the city founded by the Orthodox monk Gerasim Vologda, next to a picture of Putin, who appointed him to the post of governor by decree, there are portraits of the strikers of the Stalin regime, Lavrentiy Beria and Felix Dzerzhinsky, and a photomontage of Filimonov shaking hands with Stalin. In other words, Putin's confidant admires the people who sent tens of millions of people to their deaths, most of whom were Russians.
Putin did not only change the present of Russia, but also remade, to his own extent, its past, recruiting the grandchildren of the tsars and the sons of communist nostalgics, monarchists and Bolsheviks into his ranks. In Putin's political-historical borscht, there were the Russian Orthodox Church and Tsar Nicholas II on one side and the Communist Party of the USSR and Stalin on the other. To tell the truth, Putin showed his sympathy for Stalin as soon as he came to power by imposing the Soviet anthem - it was chosen by Stalin himself - for the Russian one, giving the task to Sergei Mikhalkov to adapt only the words of the solemn song, that is, to replace the communist flavor with a nationalist one.
If the descendants of the victims of Stalin's thirty-year purges were gathered, not only in Russia but in all of Europe, their mass would far exceed the number of participants in the Immortal Regiment, i.e. the descendants of the Red Army from World War II. It is a cynical play on the story that today they are in the same column as Putin, just like Stalin's admirers and the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The only exception when Putin backed down in the face of outrage over the glorification of Stalin occurred before the opening of the Church of the Resurrection, dedicated to the Russian military, in Moscow four years ago. Depicting on a fresco as a saint in a church the man who is responsible for the most massive killing of clerics in the history of mankind and for the destruction of the largest number of churches and monasteries was too perverse even for Putin himself, so he ordered that Stalin's image be removed.
The Stalinization of Russia did not begin with the invasion of Ukraine, but it accelerated it. The ironing and adaptation of Russian history for the needs of the Putin regime began about twenty years ago. First, books glorifying Stalin, relativizing or even denying his crimes and disastrous decisions that cost the lives of tens of millions of citizens of the USSR and members of communist parties around the world began to appear in Russian bookstores. Then Putin, immediately after returning from the Munich Security Conference, where he gave a speech announcing Russia's return to autocracy, defined Stalin as an "effective state manager."
Since Putin's return to the presidency, efforts have been made to embellish Stalin's biography. That is, from the moment when Putin, after mass demonstrations in Moscow in 2011, decided to return Russia to the track of Tsar Nicholas I's maxim "autocracy, Orthodoxy, nation" in a confrontation with the West. In that propaganda, Stalin was the only one who could be taken as a victorious role model.
At the Kremlin's directive, all school history textbooks were adapted to a new narrative, starting with the fact that Stalin was a great statesman and patriot. It goes so far as to justify the alliance with Hitler's Nazis, the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, as well as the dismemberment of Poland, Moldova, and the attack on Finland.
Of course, in the new history textbooks Stalin is not attributed the responsibility for the murder of several tens of millions of people. "Great purges", "Gulag", Holodomor, mass killings of people without trial, liquidation of numerous categories of the population, from peasants to doctors, massacre of Polish officers and employees in Katyn forests, forced relocation of entire populations from their historical hearths. For Putin's Russia, the mentioned crimes did not happen or Stalin is not responsible for them.
Anyone who questions the correctness of Stalin's decisions is exposed to attacks, threats, blackmail, bullying, and the obligation of state authorities to "defend historical truth" has been introduced into the Russian legislative system. The sentence from Orwell's masterpiece "1984": "Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past" has become the reality of today's Russia.
In Oliver Stone's 2017 film, Putin claims that Stalin was deliberately over-demonized by Western historians because they did not want to acknowledge his credit for defeating the Nazis in World War II. As if Prokofiev, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Sinyavsky, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Sakharov, Shalamov and others were not Russian citizens and did not describe or sing about what they saw and experienced firsthand during Stalin's and communist regimes.
How much Russia and Russians have changed in the previous 30-odd years is best illustrated by the fact that the citizens of Moscow, finally free from Bolshevism and Communism, tore down the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the infamous founder of the even more infamous Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police from which the NKVD, KGB and today's FSB), which was located on Lubyanka Square, in front of the KGB headquarters. The head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, known by the acronym SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, in front of the headquarters of the SVR in Moscow, placed last year a monument to Dzerzhinsky, the creator and creator of the Main Administration for Correctional Labor Camps and Colonies, whose acronym was "Gulag" even today no one thinks of tearing it down.
A few years earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin rehabilitated Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, Stalin's KGB chief who, along with his countryman, was responsible for the deaths of several million Russians and other citizens of the former USSR.
The rehabilitation of Stalin and the head of the communist secret services is a direct message to the Kremlin's urbi et orbi, both to the internal audience and to the outside: power remains in the hands of the secret services even after Putin's departure. Since the establishment of the Third Department under Tsar Nicholas I nearly two centuries ago, power in Russia has been under the control of the secret police, regardless of whether it is called the Third Department, the Guard, the Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB, or the FSB.
The KGB, renamed the FSB, is the only institution that survived the collapse of the USSR and with uninterrupted continuity, from Imperial Russia through Bolshevik Russia to Yeltsin's and Putin's. When Putin came to power, the KGB/FSB had already set the stage for him, everything was in place to create an authoritarian regime, which explains the speed and ease with which he consolidated power.
Putin used the first half of his reign to dismantle the already fragile and shaky pillars of a democratic and free society. The first to be attacked were the oligarchs who did not want to "swear loyalty" to Putin. Then it was the turn of journalists, judges, civil activists, non-governmental organizations and politicians who did not agree to the return of Russia to an autocratic-plutocratic regime.
The Levada Center, the only credible Russian agency for public opinion research, published the results of a survey in 2012, according to which 23 percent of the citizens of the Russian Federation had a positive opinion of Stalin. Research in the last two years shows that more than two-thirds of Russians consider Stalin a positive historical figure. How successful the propaganda was shows that only 9 percent of young Russians, aged 18 to 24, have a negative opinion of Stalin. After all, it is enough to look at the souvenir shops in Georgia, one of the main targets of tourists from the Russian Federation and Dzhugashvili's native country, filled with objects with the image of Stalin.
In a speech in Westminster in 1948, Winston Churchill modified the remark of American philosopher of Spanish origin George Santayana "those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it" to "those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it". The Russians, apparently, have not learned anything and unfortunately they are not the only ones.
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