Whoever it is demanding all of these unwanted sequels and reboots and sequel-reboots, I am once again begging them to please stop it right now. It’s bad enough that we had that awful “reimagining” of Home Alone on Disney+ not long ago.1 I didn’t think anything could be worse.
But then I saw that Vladmir Putin is de-de-Stalinizing Russia.
Well, not just Putin: exact figures are almost impossible to come by (as with the Republicans under Trump, many Russians under Putin have learned it’s best to keep their true feelings to themselves) but the rehabilitation of Uncle Joe definitely has strong public support. That Putin’s government gradually reintroduced Stalin to polite society, instead of snapping his fingers and making him “good” again after decades of him being put forward as a cautionary tale, illustrates the old KGB man’s devious brilliance.
Yeah, a return to celebrating one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century is indeed worse than a new Home Alone movie, though it’s closer than one would think. (Seriously, Home Sweet Home Alone really was that bad.)
The rehabilitation of Stalin has been a feature of the Putin era since the former KGB officer came to power nearly a quarter-century ago. The independent Levada Center polling agency began asking Russians to name “the greatest figure of all times and peoples” in the early 1990s. In 1994, the Soviet dictator polled about 20 percent to take a distant fourth place in the ranking. By 2012, however, he took over first place, a position he has held ever since. By 2021, Stalin was the pick of more than 40 percent of Russians. In 2023, 47 percent of Russians said they regarded Stalin with “respect.”
“‘Respect’ in modern language signifies a warm, sincere feeling but also a recognition of the superior power of the object of the respect,” wrote Levada Center chief analyst Aleksei Levinson in an essay in August. “‘They fear us, which means they respect us’ is commonly heard these days. And it crops up a lot among the responses to questions about Stalin.”
The Kremlin’s manipulation of Stalin’s image and of the psychological legacy of the Soviet experience for the Russian people has evolved since Putin first became president on the last day of 1999, observers say. In the early years, Stalin was promoted as an “effective manager” who led the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany. His image was almost always tied to World War II, cropping up with increasing frequency on banners and posters illustrating the Putin government’s glorification of the Soviet role in the war.
Over time, however, the tight connection between Stalin and the war has been loosened, and Stalin and Stalinist imagery appeared in a much wider array of contexts -- from advertising to the arts. He features prominently and positively in the dozens of jingoistic Russia: My History exhibitions the government has set up across the country.
In the glasnost era under the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Stalin largely appeared only in the context of the condemnation of his crimes, as gruesome details emerged and became a topic of media conversation across the country. Now, analysts say, he has become fully normalized in the everyday lives of Russians.
[…]
In parallel with the rehabilitation of Stalin, Russia has also seen the return of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the notorious founder of the Soviet secret police and ruthless practitioner of political terror. The popular destruction of the massive statue of Dzerzhinsky that stood outside the KGB’s headquarters on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square in August 1991 was seen at the time as a decisive rejection of authoritarianism and repression.
But in September, a slightly smaller version of the pompous statue was unveiled in front of the Moscow headquarters of the SVR foreign intelligence service. SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin, a former KGB officer and Putin ally who headed the government’s Historical Truth Commission from 2009-12, presided over the event.
Dzerzhinsky “dreamed of creating a future based on the principles of goodness and justice,” Naryshkin told the gathered intelligence officers.
About one month later, on October 24, a bust of Stalin was unveiled in a children’s park in the town of Orlov in the central Kirov region. The ceremony was attended by Stalin’s great-grandson, Selim Bensaad, and Dzerzhinsky’s great-grandnephew, Vladimir Dzerzhinsky. The city’s mayor said the site of the monument was chosen because “in the period of Soviet power, there was a monument to Stalin on that very spot.” Local media reported that “far from all citizens support the initiative” and that complaints had been sent to local prosecutors.
Putin’s plan has long been to reboot the USSR, a military colossus which controlled a third of the globe, though preferably without the ten-hour lineups to buy chicken feet.2
Hence the rehabilitation of Stalin. And the attempted takeover of Ukraine. And, according to the BBC Russian Service, dusting off the old playbook and sending political dissidents to psychiatric institutions:
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