Almost half of Russians want a state-sanctioned monument to Joseph Stalin, according to an independent poll that shows the figure has nearly doubled in ten years.
The Levada Centre said that 48 per cent of respondents said they would be “positively disposed” to the idea of a statue to the Soviet despot to celebrate victory over the Nazis. Only 20 per cent firmly opposed the idea, and 29 per cent said they were “indifferent”. A decade ago 25 per cent backed a statue.
Approval of Stalin’s legacy has steadily grown in Russia during the time of President Putin, who has made celebration of winning the “Great Patriotic War” a pillar of his rule, though his government has neither sanctioned nor denounced Stalin. About 27 million Soviet military personnel and civilians were killed during the war.
Stalin’s supporters say that the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialisation during his 28-year rule justified his brutal policies. He expanded the Gulag forced labour camp network that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and staged show trials to convict leading opponents and perceived enemies of the state.
Monuments to him were erected en masse as part of an unrelenting personality cult. However, a process of de-Stalinisation was launched after his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, excoriated him in a speech in 1954, the year after his death, and the statues were soon dismantled.
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Stalingrad, the city that bore his name and endured some of the worst fighting of the Second World War, was returned to its historical name of Volgograd in 1961. However, in 2013 the city’s council, under Putin’s United Russia party, voted to change the name to “Hero City Stalingrad” for six days a year to coincide with military anniversaries.
The changing public mood has recently emboldened Russia’s enfeebled communist party to secure approval for several Stalin statues. They stand mostly on private ground in Russia’s cities and towns.
