Nostalgia puts Stalin back in public eye

MOSCOW -- One poster stands out among the billboards splashed across Moscow for celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany: Josef Stalin against the backdrop of a Red Army soldier raising the Soviet hammer-and-sickle over the Reichstag in Berlin.

Stalin always has been a contradictory figure in Russia, seen as either the powerful boss who led the country to victory over the Nazis and made it a 20th century industrial giant or the tyrant responsible for killing millions of his own people.

Under President Vladimir Putin, he appears to be making a comeback, with monuments in the works and criticism muted.

After waves of denouncements following Stalin's death in 1953 and as Soviets learned in the 1980s the full extent of his crimes, the Kremlin has been quiet about Stalin in recent years.

Putin rarely has harsh words for him. In a rare critical statement, Putin told Germany's Bild newspaper on Thursday that Stalin was a tyrant, but added that he should not be compared to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

"I can't understand you equating Stalin and Hitler. It goes without saying that Stalin was a tyrant, whom many call a criminal. But he wasn't a Nazi," Putin said.

Stalin came to power after the death of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and began a reign of terror that lasted nearly three decades, ending only with his death in 1953. An estimated 20 million people were executed, imprisoned or deported to other parts of the former Soviet Union. Altogether, 10 million are believed to have died.

Critics warn that Russian leaders' failure to condemn Stalin's crimes means dismissing the values for which the Allies fought.

But the Kremlin may have pragmatic reasons for its silence: Recent opinion polls have shown that nearly half of Russians hold a largely positive view of Stalin and give him credit for the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War -- as World War II is known here -- despite evidence of his grave strategic errors.

Stalin had actually concluded a nonaggression pact with Hitler in August 1939 that cleared the way for Hitler to go to the war on Sept. 1, 1939, when he invaded Poland. As part of the pact, Stalin seized eastern Poland and took the three Baltic countries, but then Hitler turned around in June 1941 and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union, plunging it into the war Stalin sought to avoid.

Many Russians actively show their nostalgia for Stalin.

A few thousand people in the Siberian town of Mirny, 2,500 miles east of Moscow, attended the presentation Sunday of a monument to Stalin featuring a bust of the dictator, Russian media reported.

Local leader Anatoly Popov praised Stalin as "a great son of Russia who gave the people everything he had ... and took nothing in return," Ekho Moskvy radio reported.

Lawmakers in the western city of Oryol recently called on the central government to name streets after Stalin and restore memorials in recognition of his wartime achievements. Several other Russian cities also are considering erecting monuments to Stalin.

"We should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague," Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov said.

Zurab Tsereteli, a controversial Russian sculptor, has made a massive bronze statue featuring Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to honor the historic Yalta conference held by the three leaders in 1945. Tsereteli is donating the statue to the southern city of Volgograd, where there is a movement afoot to bring back the city's previous name -- Stalingrad.

"I am just describing the facts," Tsereteli said, brushing aside criticism that he is erecting a monument to a dictator.

"Did they meet? Yes, they did. ... Did they save us from the Nazis so that we don't have to wear swastikas? Yes, they did ... I don't go any deeper," he said.

Yevgeniya Furman, 75, who saw many of her Jewish friends sent to camps or killed under Stalin, says the despot should not be honored.

"Stalin was a tyrant, that's all there is to it," she said. "Look at how many people he killed."

Critics blame Putin for overseeing the revival of positive attitudes toward Stalin and failing to denounce him as an authoritarian dictator.

Alexander Yakovlev, a war veteran who was a key architect of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms, said Stalin's leadership during the war brought more harm than good.

He pointed to Stalin's purges of tens of thousands of senior army officers before the war and his decision to imprison hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war whom he declared traitors for surrendering to the enemy.

"The victory was achieved despite Stalin's leadership, not thanks to it," Yakovlev told The Associated Press.