Stalin’s bust erected in the city of Lipetsk last year
I’ve written on NewsLanc several times about popularity of Stalin in today’s Russia. This popularity keeps growing, turning this matter into one of the most popular subjects of discussions in Russian media.
The most popular Russian statistical institution, Levada Center, recently published the results of its latest survey “Role of personality in history”. The survey shows that approval of Joseph Stalin and his policy among Russians has grown considerably in the last years.
Now 34% of Russians believe that “whatever faults and defects are attributed to Stalin’s policy, the most important thing is that under his leadership Russian people emerged victorious in World War II”. In 2007 only 28% of Russians supported this opinion.
The idea that “Stalin was a wise leader who led the USSR to power and prosperity” is shared now by 20% of Russians. In 2007 it was shared only by 14%.
Today, as in 2007, 15% of respondents believe that “just a hard ruler could maintain order in the state under the conditions that Russia had 50-70 years ago: acute class struggle, external threat and the general lack of discipline.”
12% believe today that “Russian people will never be able to do without the head of such type as Stalin, sooner or later such leader will come and restore order”. In 2007 only 9% of Russians shared this opinion.
The share of Russians critical of Stalin got smaller since 2007.
Now 21% of Russians believe that Stalin was “a cruel, inhuman tyrant, guilty of the destruction of millions of innocent people.” 29% of Russians shared this believe in 2007.
The opinion that the “policy of Stalin led to the fact that the country was unprepared for war in 1941, and suffered a grave loss”, now shared by 13% vs. 17% in 2007.
11% of Russians believe that “we do not yet know the whole truth about Stalin and his actions”. 30% believed it in 2007.
45% of Russians expressed the view that “Stalin brought equally good and bad to our country “. 44% believed it in 1999.
25% said now that there was more good than bad in Stalin’s actions. 19% thought so in 1999. For 13%, Stalin’s time was more bad than good. 21% thought so in 1999.
3% keep believing as they did in 1999, that Stalin brought Russia only good.
We started this article with the photo of Stalin’s bust erected last year in the city of Lipetsk. The member of State Duma Nikolai Razvorotnev reported that “from the moment the monument was erected dozens of passers-bys were taking photos with it. Cars that drove by honked in approval.”
According to the plan proposed by the Russian Communists, last year,the Russian Federation should erect fifteen such monuments in the various regions. Local authorities gladly give permits for such projects.
Three meters tall, Stalin’s monument was erected recently in the town of Shelenger, Russian Republic Mari El.
Visual propaganda of Stalin is not limited to erection of monuments. Here is a tooth brash with Stalin’s portrait.
The Levada-Center’s survey showed the attitude of Russians not only to Stalin, but also to other Russian rulers.
Russian citizens’ attitude towards the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin is much worse then to Stalin. 38% of respondents described their attitude towards Yeltsin as “neutral”, 24% as “rather negative”, 16% as “sharply negative”. Partial or full support for Yeltsin was demonstrated only by 11% of Russians.
With regard to other historical figures, 40% of respondents believed that more good than bad for Russia was made by the last Emperor Nicholas II; 36% held the same view with regard of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin; 19% believed of rather positive historical role of Gregory Rasputin; 15% of Leon Trotsky.
The current rating of the president Vladimir Putin is at historical highs. He is supported by 86% of Russians.
Interesting that a brutal dictator, probably responsible for 30-50 million deaths over a 30 year rule, is held in so high regard by the Russian people. He’s right up there with Hitler and Mao according to most historians. This is a strong statement about the Russian people and why they would support a tyrant like Putin.
Well memory is a fallible function, collective memory even more so. It was Stalin’s stupidity that, ignoring many direct warnings from intelligence and from the British, allowed his borders to be attacked, with no precaution for reinforcements, leaving warplanes sitting in the ground close to the frontier etc etc etc. huge blunderer.
EDITOR: Even worse he went into seclusion for several days after the invasion, leaving his armies without direction. On the other hand, he subsequently became a very competent leader during the war effort.
The Russians like a strongman. They will not abide what they see as weakness. And to many Russians, concepts such as democracy and human rights are signs of weakness.
The Russians invented the most universally successful personal weapon of the 20th century – the AK-47. Make no mistake. Russia has guns. Plenty of them.
“Historians” like Robert Conquest, who worked for the British IRD, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an Anti-Semitic Czarist White Guard revanchist Fascist sympathizer. You don’t know anything, but bourgeois propaganda.
Putin and Stalin are incomparable as well. Putin is a Russian bourgeois nationalist and Stalin is a Georgian proletarian Internationalist.
Typically stupid ‘Murican that thinks they “Won” the Cold War, but still thinks the Soviet Union exists.