Stalin in contemporary Russia

Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

The end of the Soviet Union was preceded by a flood of materials that portrayed in graphic detail the bloodiest period of the Soviet era, Stalin’s rule from 1924 to 1953. Because of these revelations, the Soviet state and the Communist Party lost whatever legitimacy they had. It seemed that the Soviet system, or at least its Stalinist period, was so discredited that it could never be rehabilitated.

This conclusion turned out to be premature. A mere 15 years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the moustached tyrant was again favoured by both the authorities and much of the population. Stalin’s approval rate among the general public went as high as 53%. In a recent contest on the Internet, in which the authorities invited the people to choose the historical figure that would personify for them “the name of Russia”, i.e. be Russia’s national symbol, Stalin came third. For a while he even ranked first.

In a recent Russian high school history textbook, covering the period from 1945 to 2006, Stalin is proclaimed “the most effective”of Soviet leaders. His reign of terror, in which at least 20 million people died, is described as a necessary means for running the country effectively.

Monuments and bas-reliefs to this monstrous dictator have been built or restored. Unbelievable as it is, an icon depicting this persecutor of religion together with a woman saint was painted and put up in a church near St. Petersburg.

Russia’s leadership, including Vladimir Putin himself, while recognizing the terror and occasionally paying tribute to its victims, mostly stresses his achievements as an effective leader, builder of a superpower, and victor in World War II.

This rehabilitation is happening while Russians have ready access to many volumes on Stalin’s terror and repression, his forced collectivization, and the artificially created Ukranian famine. The human rights organization “Memorial” is preserving and promoting the memory of Stalinist terror. Paradoxically its historical documentation shares the bookstore shelves with numerous newly published apologies for Stalin, some of which deny terror and repression under Stalin altogether, while others shift the blame for terror to Stalin’s enemies while reducing the number of terror victims to between half a million and a million and a half, compared to the real number of 20 million to 25 million. Most of the people prefer the apologetic works to the documentation of Stalin’s terror.

How can this be happening? In my next post, I will propose an explanation.

Writing about the Nazi Holocaust and about Stalin’s terror

By Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

Nazi holocaust and Stalin’s terror are the greatest massive crimes against humanity in the last century. The first took the lives of 6 million Jews within 6 years, the other, by reliable estimates, about 20 million Soviet citizens (and an uncertain number of foreigners) of various national and class background within a quarter of a century. From a logical point of view the second deserves as much historical memory and representation as the first. However in reality that is not the case. More so, most of our contemporaries do not even see a connection between Hitler and Stalin and, while preserving active memory of the Holocaust, prefer to forget Stalinist terror. I think there are two factors which can explain this.

First, the Nazi regime was vanquished and completely dismantled. All its archives and other materials were made publicly available. Besides, Auschwitz and Dachau were taken over by enemy troops, and what was happening there became public terrifying knowledge (though even in this case there are Holocaust deniers). Nothing like that happened in post-Soviet Russia. The KGB archives were opened only partially and in the mid-90's were closed again. No surprise - many people in authority at that time were former Soviet officials, who for understandable reasons were not interested in complete disclosure of the dark parts of Soviet history. Around then the campaign for so-called “national reconciliation and concord” started under the motto “not everything was bad”. This attitude reached its peak in recent years under the Putin-Medvedev government. It made it known to the international community that it would regard the mere comparison between Nazism and Communism as an act of hostility towards Russia, which most of the Western public prefers not to engage in. There are notable exceptions, for example Gulag: a History by Anne Applebaum and Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe by Robert Gallately.

Secondly, there was a difference in the strength of the struggle to prevent historical amnesia towards the particular tragic events. The Western Jewish community, with the support and understanding of the majority of the people, did its best, and is still doing its best, to prevent the Holocaust from being forgiven or forgotten–and rightly so. Alas, there is no equally powerful pressure with regard to the GULAG. The “Memorial” society, which is trying to describe and document Stalin’s terror, is practically marginalized by the contemporary Russian establishment.

It looks like it is proper time for novelists to explore the subject and say their word. I tried to do this in Against Destiny, whose main characters got under the wheel of history in Stalin’s time, but dared to fight back.