In early July, at its 19th congress, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) declared a sensational speech that Nikita Khrushchev had given to high-ranking Soviet communists in 1956 to be wrong. In that “closed report,” Khrushchev condemned the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin. Today, the CPRF argues, when “the NATO military machine is intensifying its aggression against Russia,” Stalin (a man who executed about a million citizens and sent many millions more to the gulags) should not be condemned, but admired—and even emulated.
In its resolution, the KPRF, on the contrary, accuses Khrushchev of “for the sake of cheap popularity, subjecting the results of 30 years of Stalin’s leadership to unfounded denigration.” In addition, the KPRF claims that Khrushchev faced an “objective lack of materials that would tarnish the name and work of Stalin,” and that “the fact of the planned removal of authentic documents from state archives and the insertion of forgeries” has been “reliably established.”
Such claims are astonishing. The cruelty and lawlessness of the Gulag system are not a matter of historical dispute. We know that in the first two years of Stalin’s “great purge” alone, more than 1,5 million people were arrested, and more than 680 were killed. When the archives were opened in the late 80s (during Mikhail Gorbachev’s “glasnost” policy), it was reliably established that they contained authentic documents about even more terrible crimes than those that Khrushchev considered necessary to publish. Nevertheless, in the publications of the KPRF, Stalin is presented as a model of “principle”, a “demanding and just leader” who “saved our people from enslavement and ruin”.
The absurdity of the KPRF resolution is further enhanced by the fact that the party, founded in 1993, is not the legal successor to the CPSU, which was dissolved in 1991. It has no authority to declare the official actions of Khrushchev or any other Soviet leader wrong. This was pointed out to the KPRF by one of its high-ranking deputies - but not in order to defend Khrushchev. The bottom line is that the ruling United Russia party simply wants to be at the forefront of the newly launched restalinization campaign.
The work to improve Stalin’s image began 25 years ago, shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power. Textbooks, including the teacher’s book “The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006,” provided justifications for Stalin’s “firm hand,” which was supposedly necessary for the survival and development of the “besieged” country: “the formation of a solid militarized political system” was presented as a means of “solving extraordinary tasks in extraordinary circumstances.”
Textbooks published in 2023 (a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine) go much further, portraying Stalin as a revered, victorious figure. (One of the textbooks’ co-authors, Vladimir Medinsky, was the head of Putin’s delegation in the peace talks with Ukraine.) At least 105 of the 120 monuments to Stalin that can be seen in Russia today were erected during Putin’s rule. A recent addition to the list is a white plaster cast of a marble bas-relief of Stalin at the Taganskaya metro station in Moscow—which was removed in 1966 as part of the de-Stalinization process.
Through textbooks and monuments, Putin's regime is trying to repair Stalin's image in the public memory, and the insidious consequences of this restalinization are already visible. In addition to the repression of those opposed to the war in Ukraine, there has been a wave of deaths among the Russian elite, including the recent suicide of Russia's Minister of Transport and former governor of the Kursk region, Roman Starovoit.
Starovoit was dismissed because he failed to prevent the penetration of Ukrainian forces into Russian territory last year. The top authorities assessed that it was under his leadership that the country's borders were insufficiently fortified. Starovoit knew that he had no chance of saving himself; he could not defend himself, or even quietly step down from office. In Putin's time, as in Stalin's, the rule is true - if the supreme authority decides that you are guilty, it means that you are guilty, and you must accept the punishment, whatever it may be.
In such circumstances, suicide becomes an act of disobedience. A number of Stalinist-era officials chose this method of protest. Visarion Lominadze, the former leader of the Communist Party of Georgia, shot himself in the chest in 1935 to avoid arrest for deviating from the party line. When the Old Bolshevik and trade union activist Mikhail Tomsky committed suicide at his dacha in 1936, he left a note denying any involvement in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Despite this, he was posthumously sentenced to death (and later rehabilitated).
The suicide of Serge Ordzhonikidze was a different form of protest. In 1937, at the height of the “Great Purge,” this old Bolshevik and high-ranking Soviet official committed suicide out of despair. This was preceded by brutal repressions against his brother Papuli, who was arrested on vague charges related to his position as head of the Transcaucasian Railway.
These high-profile suicides infuriated Stalin. He saw them as a sign of dishonesty and an attempt at manipulation. When the highly respected Ordzhonikidze committed suicide, Stalin did not even want to acknowledge the truth about his death. According to the official version (which Khrushchev later refuted in a “closed report”), Ordzhonikidze allegedly died of a heart attack.
Putin, it seems, was equally enraged by Roman Starovoit’s latest act of insubordination: he ordered his Kremlin aides to withdraw the wreath that, according to protocol, should have been sent to his funeral. Yet many state officials attended the ceremony. One can only speculate whether this was a silent bureaucratic protest against the unachievable demands and arbitrary punishments that threaten those tasked with carrying out Putin’s orders in a climate where the slightest sign of corruption, incompetence, or chaos can be declared treason.
During Stalin's time, an anecdote circulated: when his train stopped because the tracks were destroyed, Stalin requested that some of his entourage members be killed so that their bodies could be used as rails.
As the death of Roman Starovoit shows, officials in Putin's entourage do not enjoy a higher level of security today either.
The author is a professor of international affairs at the New School of New York University
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. (translation: NR)
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