By Simon Shuster
The Russian Communist Party has asked the nation for a daylong moratorium on criticising Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as they celebrate his 130th birthday.
Despite overseeing political purges and widespread famine that killed millions of Soviet citizens, Stalin is still embraced by many Russians nostalgic for Soviet times.
His popularity has even risen in recent years amid a Kremlin-backed campaign to burnish his image as the man who led the nation to victory in World War II.
Hundreds of Communists on Monday laid flowers at his grave on Moscow's Red Square, and about 3,000 people attended an evening concert in his honour. In his home town in the southern nation of Georgia, a few hundred admirers including his grandson marched to a towering statue of the dictator in the main square.
"We would very much like for any discussion of the mistakes of the Stalin epoch to be silenced today, so that people could reflect on Stalin's personality as a creator, a thinker and a patriot," Communist deputy parliament speaker Ivan Melnikov said in comments on the party's website. The Communists represent the country's second most powerful political party after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia, and at times have defeated Putin's party in regional elections.
Putin, like the Communists, has made efforts to rehabilitate Stalin's image by pushing for his accomplishments to be recognised at home and abroad. Some have criticised Putin's drive as an effort to whitewash history and paint Stalin in a positive light in order to justify the Kremlin's own growing power and retreat from democracy.
On December 3, Putin lauded Stalin's drive to industrialise the Soviet Union and his victory over the Nazis as deserving of respect despite the human cost.
"In my view, you cannot make one gross assessment," Putin said during his annual live radio and TV call-in show. "Any historical events need to be analysed in their entirety."
President Dmitry Medvedev, on the other hand, has taken a more critical stand against Stalinism - a sign that the issue is still debated both among Russia's political elite as well as its populace.
"It is impossible to imagine the scale of the terror inflicted on the people of our country," Medvedev said in his video blog on October 30, the day commemorating the victims of Stalinist repression. "I am convinced that no national development, no success, no ambitions can be achieved at the price of human suffering and death."
The remarks represent perhaps the Kremlin's strongest condemnation of Soviet repression since Putin, Medvedev's predecessor, became president almost a decade ago.
The leader of the opposition Yabloko party, Sergei Mitrokhin, warned against reading too much into Medvedev's more liberal rhetoric. "This statement had appeal on the day of remembrance, but he has never followed with any actions or a united program of de-Stalinization in the government," Mitrokhin said Monday.
A majority of Russians - 54 percent - have a high opinion of Stalin's leadership qualities, according to a survey released Friday by state-run polling agency VTsIOM, while only 23 percent rate his personal character traits as below average. The survey questioned 1,600 people nationwide December 5-6 and gave a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Stalin's legacy of repression and persecution only became fully known in Russia after the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, lifted the taboo against criticising Stalin as part of the 1980s perestroika campaign of political and economic reforms that precipitated the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse. Since then, the Russian public has been exposed to dozens of documentaries, books, memoirs and biographies detailing the atrocities committed by Stalin's regime.
A core of followers, mainly elderly people educated before perestroika, nevertheless uphold the view that Stalin was a valiant leader whose repressive grip on the nation was needed to ensure security and industrial growth.
"In Stalin's name, our grandfathers and grandmothers went into battle, they died with his name on their lips. They built our country's industry, so for them Stalin means a lot," said Yevgeny Teterev, a member of the Young Communist Organisation laying flowers at Stalin's grave.
"What does he mean for me? First of all he is a great personality of global dimensions," Teterev said.
Stalin was born as Josef Dzhugashvili on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian town of Gori. At the time, Georgia was part of the Russian Empire and was later absorbed into the Soviet Union.
Stalin was among the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, and manoeuvred to discredit his rivals and consolidate control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the 1924 death of its first leader, Vladimir Lenin. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist until his own death in 1953, having unleashed brutal purges which killed millions. Million more died in a famine triggered by his brutal collectivisation of agriculture and confiscation of grain to fund the frenetic industrialisation drive.
On Monday about 300 mainly elderly people carrying Soviet flags and copies of Stalin's portrait gathered in his home town of Gori to praise Stalin for transforming the country from an agrarian society into an industrial superpower.
AP