(MOSCOW) – More than 70 years after his death, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is making a remarkable comeback in Russia. In Moscow, a Stalin relief from the 1960s has been reconstructed and put back on display, while new monuments to the dictator are appearing across the country. In a 2025 survey, Russians named Stalin as humanity’s “most outstanding person of all times and all nations,” followed by the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Lenin. Nearly 75 years after his death, it seems as if he is triumphing in Russia once again, a development that historians and human rights advocates find deeply frightening.
Stalin, born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, later adopted the name meaning ‘man of steel’. After his predecessor Lenin’s death in 1924, he gradually rose to power, becoming the Soviet Union’s unchallenged leader by the late 1920s. He was not a very appealing figure, described as small, pockmarked, and famously rude, speaking with a heavy Georgian accent that was almost incomprehensible even to those around him.
Under Stalin’s rule, the Soviet Union underwent rapid industrialisation, overseeing huge infrastructure projects like the Moscow Metro and the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. However, this industrialisation required collectivisation, a harsh system of forced labour that involved seizing food from peasants and was incompatible with any form of peasant freedom. Free trade did not exist anymore, and the regime relied on squeezing the peasantry to free resources for heavy industries. This led to a series of famines in the early 1930s that claimed millions of lives. In Ukraine, the worst of these, the Holodomor, meaning “killing by hunger,” is considered a genocide by most Ukrainians and is remembered as a defining historical trauma. While people also died in southern Russia and among Cossacks, the enormous number of deaths in Ukraine leads many to conclude there were elements of genocide.
It is often said of authoritarian leaders, including Stalin, that they replaced chaos with order. One way Stalin consolidated power was by having the police crack down on his opponents within the Communist party, using the secret police and forced labour camps to break resistance. He cut local autonomy, centralising Moscow’s authority over the one party Soviet system. His ambition for total control ushered in a period now known as the Great Terror. After the assassination of high ranking communist Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Stalin claimed there was a vast anti Soviet conspiracy, using it as a pretext to purge perceived opponents from 1935 to 1938. Over 14 months, 1.5 million people were arrested and 700,000 were executed. This machinery of terror operated at an insane pace, with thousands of death sentences signed in a single night. In Moscow, there were days when as many as 7,000 to 8,000 people were arrested.
At the same time, Stalin expanded a vast system of forced labour camps and penal colonies known as the Gulag, which spanned much of the Soviet Union, from the Baltic Region and Crimea all the way to Chukotka. At least 550 camp locations are documented today, and roughly 18 million people passed through the system between 1919 and 1960. Conditions were so bad that prisoners would be marched out to work details before sunrise, scantily clad in shoes that could barely handle the cold and rocks, and if they fell out of formation, they would be shot. One of the best known accounts comes from writer Varlam Shalamov, who was first arrested in 1929 and sent to the Kolyma camps in 1937, one of the most brutal parts of the Gulag. He survived many years there and later wrote Kolyma Tales, one of the starkest literary accounts of life in the Gulag, depicting hunger, brutality and moral collapse.
Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. Just days earlier, Hitler and Stalin had signed a non aggression pact accompanied by a secret protocol dividing parts of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, but the agreement did not hold for long. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin was caught off guard. He mobilised the country for war, but the Soviet Union came close to collapse in the first months of the invasion. The year 1941 was disastrous, with the Germans coming almost to the borders of Moscow, literally within sight of the city. Stalin had not been on radio for the first three days of the war at all, and there was lots of indication that he thought it was the end.
Russian historian Irina Scherbakova has made it her life’s mission to preserve testimonies and evidence of Stalinist repression. She co-founded the Russian human rights organisation Memorial. Since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she has lived in exile in Germany. She notes that the war was fought with appalling brutality, which lies on Stalin’s conscience, just like the fate of millions of prisoners of war.
In the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 to 43, the Soviets proved that the German army could be defeated. In 1946, Stalin said that 7 million people had died in the war against the Germans, deliberately understating the numbers so the Soviet Union would not look weak. If you look at Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, which was the first time Stalin was criticised, Khrushchev does not start with the purges or with collectivisation. He starts with the war, accusing Stalin of sacrificing people unnecessarily and for being unprepared. The estimates today reach from 8.7 to 10 million dead Soviet soldiers, and up to another 18 million civilians.
Three big monuments commemorate the Soviet victory over Berlin in 1945. While it is true that Soviet forces played the decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany in Berlin and that they suffered heavy losses, these memorials tell a one sided story of victory. The main reason Stalin’s image has been rehabilitated to an extent that monuments can now be erected again is the cult of victory, which has become the foundation of Putin’s ideology. This portrayal completely transforms Stalin’s role from a bloodthirsty tyrant and dictator into the architect of that victory.
Stalin was one of the most widely depicted political figures of the 20th century. Soviet propaganda put his image everywhere: on posters, newspapers, statues, monuments, stamps, and edited photographs. Stalin’s image was so carefully controlled that Soviet photographers and censors often retouched photos to make him look taller and younger, with smoother skin. Sometimes they removed other figures from photographs entirely, like secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov, making Stalin appear more dominant and statesmanlike. After and during the war, he directed deportations of whole nations who could challenge the myth of him as the great saviour, directing the propaganda away from people and all towards him.
In the years after 1945, Stalin extended Soviet style repression into territories and states brought under Soviet control, notably East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. The Baltic states he actually annexed into the Soviet Union. The USSR and its satellites became one of the largest political blocs in the world, held together by repression and one party rule. Once you come to Czechoslovakia, to Poland, to Hungary, these are established states with very sophisticated education systems functioning already from the 19th century. It is not as if they are coming into being as a modern state coincides with their Stalinification. Socialist rule for them is one option, but they have both a memory and an imagination that goes beyond that.
Since the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, and especially since his full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, historical research into Stalin’s atrocities has come under attack. Russian historical and human rights organisation Memorial was dissolved by Russian authorities, and access to parts of its archives has been restricted.
Today, Memorial operates in exile. In practice, it is now almost completely impossible to obtain documents related to repression. That is why we are seeing this process of re-Stalinisation. In times of chaos or uncertainty, people often long for strong guidance and even for authoritarian leaders. But history shows us they come at a huge price. Whether that part of history gets told or not depends on who is telling it.
Be First to Comment