Comrade Stalin is back — at least underground.
A monument to the Soviet dictator, once torn down, has been replicated and reinstalled in a Moscow metro station.
The original statue, depicting Joseph Stalin with a wry smile, surrounded by admiring children and worshipful workers, was removed long before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was pulled down in the 60s, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor at a secret session of the Communist Party and started the long process of "de-Stalinization".
Joseph Stalin is not remembered for his winning smile. He unleashed the Great Terror of the 1930's, in which hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were executed in a political purge. He oversaw the deportation of ethnic minorities his government called "enemies of the people," including Chechens, Ingush, and Crimean Tatars. His policies starved millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor, the mass famine of 1932 and 33. He annexed the Baltic states and parts of several other neighboring countries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been known as a public apologist for Stalin. At the unveiling of the Wall of Sorrow monument in Moscow, which remembers victims of Stalinist purges, Putin said, "It is very important that we all and future generations…know about, and remember this tragic period in our history…"
Nonetheless, an estimated 105 statues honoring the brutal dictator have been erected since Putin came to power.
Britain's Sky News reported this week that some passersby have left red carnations in front of the new subway Stalin. In a country in which people can pay dearly for speaking out, a woman named Olga told the news agency, "It's excellent. History of art, culture, significance, beauty."
But someone identified only as Svetlana asked "What were they thinking? How many died under his leadership? And suddenly he appears here, this bloodsucker. How is this possible?"
Architectural historian Alexander Zinoviev pointed out that the restored monument does not include several features of the original. He wrote on Telegram that the statue is, "…more of an ideological gesture than a genuine attempt to restore the historical architectural appearance."
You might wonder, more than three years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, if the vision the Putin regime has for Russia's future is set in the stone of that subway station.
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