Soviet dictator Stalin, once virtually banished from Russian public spaces for his role in the country’s violence and genocide, received 100 new statues of Vladimir Putin as president, the last of which stands on a children’s playground.
The latest statue of Stalin (1878-1953) was erected on Tuesday in a children’s park in the city of Oriol, located in the Volga Federal District. According to the local press, the ceremony was attended by Selim Bensaad, great-grandson of the dictator, and relatives of Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, the first Soviet “secret” and predecessor of the KGB, as well as members of the Communist Party of Russia and members of the public.
“The installation of the monument to Stalin was an initiative of the regional office of the Russian Communist Party. The location was chosen because during the Soviet Union the statue of Stalin stood at that location” until 1956, the press service of the Russian Communist Party reported. Kirov Regional Government.
Dmitry Peskov, the Russian president’s press secretary, downplayed the case in the media, indicating that “this is the prerogative of municipal authorities throughout the country.” “They are the ones who make these decisions,” he emphasized about the new statue in the Kirov region, in the European part of Russia.
According to yesterday’s edition of Novoi Izvestia, the regional government’s Ministry of Internal Policy recommended that the city council “first carry out the most extensive possible consultation with the population, as not all Oriol residents would agree with the initiative.” However, the city council did not conduct a public consultation, a fact that prompted some residents of Oriol to send a document to the Public Prosecutor’s Office expressing their dissatisfaction with the installation of the monument.
Recently, the publication Vedomosti Countri counted eleven busts of Stalin and figures from the former USSR in North Ossetia.
On October 6, a bust of Stalin was installed in the Mednoye memorial complex in the Tver region. On August 15, another identical monument was inaugurated in Velikie Luki, Pskov region, with the participation of an Orthodox Pope. Subsequently, the press service of the diocese of that city began an internal investigation to discover the initiators of the tribute to Stalin. On February 1, another monument appeared, this time in the courtyard next to the Panorama Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad, in Volgograd.
According to data collected by the press, there are currently about 110 memorials to Stalin throughout Russia, 95 of which appeared during President Putin’s time, a trend that appears to have increased since the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Moreover, authorities have glossed over the historical role of Stalin – who led the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953 – in the new history textbooks for the last two years of secondary school.
Stalin is a figure who stirs up minds and extreme views and many, in Russia and beyond, condemn him as one of history’s worst criminals; others recall the fundamental role he played in the fight against Nazism and Adolf Hitler’s forces in World War II, making him a symbol of Russian power.
Bensaad, for example, argues that Stalin was not a “bloody dictator,” and wrote to Putin in late 2022 imploring him to rehabilitate his great-grandfather.
In one of the reference works on Stalinism, “Genocides,” historian Norman Naimark concludes that the Soviet dictator executed nearly a million of his own citizens starting in the 1930s.
According to the history professor at Stanford University (USA), during the decades when Stalin led the Soviet Union, countless millions of people fell victim to forced labor, deportations, starvation, massacres and tortured detentions and interrogations.
Naimark argues that the dictator was the author of several genocides, including the elimination of a social class – the kulaks (who were peasants with higher incomes), and the subsequent deadly famine of all Ukrainian peasants – as well as the infamous 1937 order (no. 00447), which called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people”.
Source: DN
