{"id":86,"date":"2020-06-10T19:01:35","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T23:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/?page_id=86"},"modified":"2020-06-10T19:01:35","modified_gmt":"2020-06-10T23:01:35","slug":"stalin-rises-again-over-vladimir-putins-russia-six-decades-after-his-death","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/stalin-rises-again-over-vladimir-putins-russia-six-decades-after-his-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Stalin rises again over Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia, six decades after his death"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"primary\" class=\"content-area\">\n<article id=\"post-421\" class=\"post-421 page type-page status-publish hentry\">\n<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h1 class=\"entry-title\"><span style=\"font-size: 16px;font-weight: 400\">Sixty years on from Kruschev\u2019s \u2018secret speech\u2019 denouncing Stalin, Russia has still not fully acknowledged the horrors perpetrated by its dictator \u2013 and now there are fears that Putin is returning to his methods. Nadia Beard reports<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<article id=\"full-article\" class=\"full-article premium-nsc article-article\">\n<div id=\"top-container-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"top-container image\">\n<div class=\"top-container-inner \">\n<div class=\"meta-wrap\">\n<ul class=\"meta\">\n<li class=\"author author-last \"><a title=\"Nadia Beard\" href=\"https:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/author\/nadia-beard\">Nadia Beard<\/a><span class=\"author-twitter\">\u00a0<a title=\"@NadiaWBeard\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/NadiaWBeard\">@NadiaWBeard<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><em>The Independent<\/em>, 24 February 2016<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"hero-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"hero-wrapper-inner\">\n<figure class=\"hero hero-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"i-amphtml-fill-content i-amphtml-replaced-content\" title=\"A Russian woman carries a portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in a Victory Day celebration in Moscow\" src=\"https:\/\/static.independent.co.uk\/s3fs-public\/thumbnails\/image\/2016\/02\/24\/16\/pg-31-stalin-1-getty.jpg?w968h681\" alt=\"A Russian woman carries a portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in a Victory Day celebration in Moscow\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\"><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"caption\">A Russian woman carries a portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in a Victory Day celebration in Moscow\u00a0<span class=\"copyright\">( Getty Images )<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"main-wrapper\">\n<div id=\"main\" class=\"main\">\n<div class=\"main-content\">\n<div class=\"body-content\">\n<p>As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stood on the podium, a hush fell over the room. It was 25 February 1956 \u2013 60 years ago to the day \u2013 and the country\u2019s highest-ranking Communist party members had assembled at the 20th Congress, a closed session that would be the last convened at the party\u2019s headquarters in Moscow. When Khrushchev, Josef Stalin\u2019s immediate successor, began to talk, some among the crowd erupted into shrieks, others collapsed and were carried out by friends. Everybody was in a state of shock.<\/p>\n<p>For the next four hours, Khrushchev did what no other Soviet politician had dared in the decades before, launching a ferocious attack on Stalin\u2019s reign of \u201cbrutal violence\u201d and \u201ccruel repression\u201d since coming into power in 1922.<\/p>\n<p>In what became known as \u201cthe secret speech\u201d, Khrushchev denounced his predecessor, who had died of a brain haemorrhage three years before, as \u201cdespotic and capricious\u201d and lambasted the system of violence that stemmed from Stalin\u2019s invention of the \u201cenemy of the people\u201d. It was the greatest blow ever to have been delivered to Stalin\u2019s world of cruelty and paranoia, which for decades had battered the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. Millions of people had been shot or sent to labour camps, accused of harbouring anti-Soviet feelings. A society whose state apparatus thrived on accusations of sabotage and counter-revolution had been called into question.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-wrapper ad-wrapper--teads\">\n<div id=\"teads\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<figure class=\"inline-media align-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"i-amphtml-fill-content i-amphtml-replaced-content\" title=\"pg-31-stalin-2-wiki.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/static.independent.co.uk\/s3fs-public\/thumbnails\/image\/2016\/02\/24\/17\/pg-31-stalin-2-wiki.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\"><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"caption\">Not-so-smooth succession: Nikita Khrushchev \u2013 who later denounced his master \u2013 with Josef Stalin in 1936<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Within hours, Khrushchev\u2019s words were speeding towards Europe and the United States. The CIA was allocated $1 million from the US government to obtain a copy, and the State Department published it in full within weeks. The contents were met with delight abroad as world leaders finally saw the sign they had been waiting for: the walls of Stalin\u2019s terror had finally started to crumble.<\/p>\n<p>But the speech was left out of the Soviet Union\u2019s official narrative for years. Circulating the Eastern bloc in samizdat for three decades, it wasn\u2019t until 1989 that it was finally published in full in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n<p>The effects of Khrushchev\u2019s words were almost immediate: monuments to Stalin across the country were torn down and thousands of political prisoners were released. But the limits of Khrushchev\u2019s thaw soon became clear. He continued to preside over political persecution and the represseion of religion, and protected Communist Hungary by sending Soviet forces to crush a revolt.<\/p>\n<div id=\"taboola-carousel-thumbnails\" class=\"ad-wrapper ad-wrapper--inline-taboola ad-wrapper--mobile\"><\/div>\n<figure class=\"video\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\"><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"caption\">Drone captures mill untouched since Stalingrad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Khrushchev condemned the world Stalin had created, but he never fully broke from it. It was the beginning of what was to become a difficult path to understanding Stalin\u2019s legacy. Even now, 60 years after those damning words, Russia has failed to fully reckon with the atrocities committed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome people say it\u2019s demoralising to remember and talk about the horrors of the past,\u201d says Roman Romanov, director of a new, state-funded Gulag Museum in Moscow. \u201cSome people say that it\u2019s better to forget \u2013 or that it was only criminals who were sent to the camps, so why memorialise them? We have to find a language with which to communicate about these things again, even if it\u2019s difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The museum, which describes the system of gulags and political repression under Stalin using artefacts and video testimonies from gulag survivors, is fully funded by the state. Vladimir Putin has also authorised a new monument to victims of political repression to be unveiled later this year. Yet the perception of Stalin as an \u201ceffective manager\u201d has significantly risen under Putin, while Stalin-era rhetoric has returned. Opposition figures are increasingly branded \u201cenemies of the state\u201d again and non-governmental organisations labelled \u201cforeign agents\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>And while critics accuse Putin of presiding over the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin \u2013 preferring to downplay the human cost of his rule to focus on the Soviet Union\u2019s successes \u2013 an independent poll conducted in Russia in March last year revealed that 45 per cent of those questioned said they thought that the sacrifices made under Stalin were justified given the speed of the Soviet Union\u2019s economic growth during his rule. It\u2019s a statistic that has nearly doubled since the same poll was taken two years before.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-perform js-ad-placeholder js-ad-placeholder--perform\"><\/div>\n<figure class=\"inline-media align-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"i-amphtml-fill-content i-amphtml-replaced-content\" title=\"pg-31-stalin-5-getty.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/static.independent.co.uk\/s3fs-public\/thumbnails\/image\/2016\/02\/24\/17\/pg-31-stalin-5-getty.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\"><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"caption\">A placard depicting Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin, in Independence Square, Kiev, in 2014 (Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Stalin may have been a leader whose tenure saw many dark moments, but they were ultimately overshadowed by his greatest success, guiding the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War \u2013 or so the story goes. And it\u2019s a narrative that takes on profound resonance in Russia today. Putin\u2019s efforts to make Russia a resurgent superpower call on grand images of the country\u2019s past: great, internationally feared, and militarily capable of winning wars. Be prepared, the narrative warns, Russia\u2019s greatness comes at a price.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are groups of people, most of whom grew up and were educated in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, who have a kind of nostalgia for the USSR, who think life before its collapse was better than today,\u201d says Romanov. \u201cFor them, Stalin is tied up with that, so his rehabilitation becomes part of an effort to restore the \u2018great Soviet past\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>In January this year, a new cultural centre celebrating Stalin was unveiled in the Tver region near Moscow. Local communists declared 2016 to be the Year of Stalin throughout the region. Alongside this, new staff at Perm-36, a former gulag that was turned into a museum in the Urals, have come under fire for softening the image of Communist-era repression after pressure from the regional administration.<\/p>\n<p>Alexander Drakler, a history teacher at a Moscow school, says that downplaying the bleaker aspects of Stalin\u2019s rule has seeped into education. \u201cThere is pitifully little on so many of the dark periods of Soviet life under Stalin. The deportation of the Chechens, for example, [when in 1941 Stalin forcibly expelled nearly half-a-million Chechens to Central Asia, with thousands dying along the way], has only one or two paragraphs devoted to it in history textbooks for kids. Why is something so important given such little attention?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Stalin\u2019s rehabilitation in Russia comes amid Putin\u2019s shift towards authoritarianism. Some of the Soviet Union\u2019s darkest practices have made an ominous return: curtailing freedoms and consolidating his power, Putin has created a modern Russia in which dissent once againcarries a high price.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Eyewitness: \u2018For two weeks they didn\u2019t let me sleep\u2026 they kept trying to get me to confess to crimes\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It was a cold January day in 1951 when Yury Naydenov-Ivanov, a factory technician, was sitting with his friends in a caf\u00e9 on Moscow\u2019s central street, Old Arbat. The trio had ordered drinks when a stranger sat down in the empty chair next to them. The men stiffened. Terrifying tales of arrests and disappearances that had circulated the Soviet Union for years often began with the presence of a stranger.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe need to ask you some questions,\u201d the man said quietly. The man was a member of Josef Stalin\u2019s dreaded secret police, the NKVD. Seemingly out of nowhere, more men entered the caf\u00e9, took Yury and his two friends by the arms and bundled them into a van. The next time Yury saw light, it was reflected from the bright ceiling of a cell in the NKVD\u2019s headquarters in Lubyanka Square, and in front of him were his interrogators.<\/p>\n<p>The nature of the events that led to their seizure were by no means exceptional. Zhenya Petrov, one of the three men at the caf\u00e9, had purchased a copy of a magazine called America, a Russian-language illustrated monthly, chronicling life in the United States. Inspired by its content, Zhenya telephoned the magazine\u2019s office in Moscow with a question: what is life like for Russians in America? The magazine wasn\u2019t illegal. It circulated with permission from the Soviet authorities even then, despite a deep-rooted paranoia that viewed anything foreign as a threat to Soviet values. But the question Zhenya asked proved his undoing. \u201cThey tapped his phone and heard the whole thing,\u201d Yury recalls. \u201cThey were waiting for him that day.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"inline-media align-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"i-amphtml-fill-content i-amphtml-replaced-content\" title=\"pg-31-stalin-3.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/static.independent.co.uk\/s3fs-public\/thumbnails\/image\/2016\/02\/24\/17\/pg-31-stalin-3.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\"><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"caption\">Yury Naydenov-Ivanov in 1955<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The journalist Zhenya had spoken to on the phone invited him to come down to his office in the city centre; Yury and another friend agreed to come along, too, all three meeting first at the caf\u00e9. Zhenya was the target for arrest. Yury was collateral damage. \u201cFor two weeks they didn\u2019t let me sleep,\u201d Yury says. \u201cThat was worse than being beaten. My interrogators kept trying to get me to confess to crimes I hadn\u2019t committed. Each time that I\u2019d nearly fall asleep, they\u2019d wake me up and start it all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After a fortnight\u2019s interrogation and four months sitting in the NKVD\u2019s jail, Yury was accused of \u201canti-Soviet propaganda\u201d and attempting to flee the country, sentenced to 10 years of labour and sent to a camp near the border with Kazakhstan. He was 20 years old.<\/p>\n<p>Yury was one of around 40 million people who passed through the Soviet Union\u2019s gulags after they first appeared in 1918. An abbreviation for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps, the gulags were a vast network of forced labour camps that symbolised the cruelty of Stalinism. Described by writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn as \u201ca chain of islands\u201d, the gulags became the graveyard for millions of Soviet citizens who were accused of harbouring \u201canti-state\u201d thoughts. \u201cEvery day we were woken up at 5am and worked on constructing the colony,\u201d Yury recalls. \u201cThe summers could get really hot \u2013 which made the building work we had to do uncomfortable \u2013 but winters were worse.\u201d Still, he could be called one of the lucky ones. \u201cBeing near the border [with Kazakhstan],\u201d he continues, \u201cwe didn\u2019t have it as bad as those near the Arctic, for example.\u201d These unfortunates included Zhenya, who worked for two years in northern Russia before he perished.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"inline-media align-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"i-amphtml-fill-content i-amphtml-replaced-content\" title=\"pg-31-stalin-4-beard.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/static.independent.co.uk\/s3fs-public\/thumbnails\/image\/2016\/02\/24\/17\/pg-31-stalin-4-beard.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\">\n<div class=\"caption-wrap\"><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"caption\">Yury Naydenov-Ivanov today. \u2018We were freed, yes, but we were amnestied, not rehabilitated,\u2019 he says (Nadia Beard)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Yury\u2019s imprisonment should have ended sooner than it did. Although Stalin died in 1953, thus starting the staggered release of most gulag prisoners, it wasn\u2019t until 1955 \u2013 two years after sentencing \u2013 that he was freed. \u201cNone of us even knew that Stalin had died!\u201d he says. \u201cWe kept working as normal because nobody said anything to us. I couldn\u2019t believe it. We used to say that SSSR [USSR] stood for \u2018Smert Stalina Spaset Rossiu\u2019 [The Death of Stalin Saved Russia].\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But his ordeal didn\u2019t end there: \u201cWe were freed, yes, but we were amnestied, not rehabilitated. The state pardoned me for political misdeeds I\u2019d never committed, and that was it. It was written in all my documents, which meant, as soon as prospective employers saw my documents, that was it. I was turned away from every job I applied for until I won my rehabilitation. Before then I was seen as a criminal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It took another two years of lodging petitions to the general prosecutor until Yury was finally fully rehabilitated in 1957. Now he breathes a sigh of relief that Russia\u2019s Communist Party won\u2019t win a general election any time soon. \u201cBut,\u201d he whispers, \u201cthat dreadful motto we lived under for such a long time \u2013 \u2018whoever\u2019s against us will get it\u2019 \u2013 hasn\u2019t died yet.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sixty years on from Kruschev\u2019s \u2018secret speech\u2019 denouncing Stalin, Russia has still not fully acknowledged the horrors perpetrated by its dictator \u2013 and now there are fears that Putin is returning to his methods. Nadia Beard reports Nadia Beard\u00a0@NadiaWBeard\u00a0The Independent, 24 February 2016 A Russian woman carries a portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/stalin-rises-again-over-vladimir-putins-russia-six-decades-after-his-death\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Stalin rises again over Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia, six decades after his death&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-86","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-fall-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}