The Monster Returns: Stalin Looms Large Over Putin's Russia - www.rferl.org

[BootinUp]

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More than 100 monuments to Stalin can now be found across Russia, the majority of them erected over President Vladimir Putin’s 24 years in power. But the one in Naberezhnye Chelny may come closest to capturing the country’s paradoxical and ongoing interaction with a man who died 70 years ago but whose legacy continues to touch and even shape the lives of so many of its citizens. And key parts of that legacy are being manipulated by Putin’s Kremlin as it advances a statist, nationalist, militarized vision of Russia that many analysts say is effectively, if not ideologically, “neo-Stalinist.”

“In Russia today, ‘Lenin’ is just a figure in the mausoleum and in museums and nothing more,” wrote Leonid Nevzlin, a businessman who fled Russia for Israel in 2003 amid Putin’s takeover of the oil giant Yukos, in a 2020 essay for RFE/RL’s Russian Service.

“‘Stalin’ is our everyday reality. The Putin regime has a completely defined relationship to Stalin, to Stalinists, to Stalinism. This relationship is primarily tied to the roots of the regime. The KGB [and other Soviet security agencies] cannot be against ‘Stalin’ as an idea and as a practice. Stalin is their patron, their fate, and their biography.

The rehabilitation of Stalin has been a feature of the Putin era since the former KGB officer came to power nearly a quarter-century ago. The independent Levada Center polling agency began asking Russians to name “the greatest figure of all times and peoples” in the early 1990s. In 1994, the Soviet dictator polled about 20 percent to take a distant fourth place in the ranking. By 2012, however, he took over first place, a position he has held ever since. By 2021, Stalin was the pick of more than 40 percent of Russians. In 2023, 47 percent of Russians said they regarded Stalin with “respect.”

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-stalin-putin-legacy/32755048.html

[Charging Triceratops]

1. That nation of savages will never learn

Murderous autocracy is their way, be it under a czar, Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev or Putin. They had their chances in 1905, 1917, 1920 and 1991. They'll never learn. Happy that my grandparents left there in 1902 and never went back.

Meanwhile, pray and fight for FREE UKRAINE!