Putin’s Next Mistake: Trying to Make Stalin into a ‘Hero’

Moscow has unveiled a new statue of Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, or “Uncle Joe” to his World War II fans.

His revolutionary nom de guerre meant man of steel, a tragically accurate description.

Stalin the Hero? More Like Murdered of Millions of People

He died 72 years ago. His “accomplishments” included overthrowing a historic dynasty, creating a new industrial state, remaking Europe’s map, murdering millions of his own people, and establishing a suffocating personality cult. One of the latter’s many features was the statue of a beatific Stalin surrounded by adoring children that adorned one of the Soviet capital’s many ostentatious subway stations.

However, after his death, his loyal lieutenant, Nikita Khrushchev, a middling reformer, famously denounced him and dismantled the vestiges of his rule. The monument was removed in 1966, when the wounds from Stalin’s rule were still raw. Much of the surviving communist leadership could remember relatives and friends consigned to the Gulag or simply killed during the Great Terror. Alas, those memories have faded, and the city has erected a replica of that statue. Reported the New York Times, it “quickly became an attraction, with people leaving flowers, stopping to pose for pictures, including with their children, or just watching pensively.” How quaint: A selfie with a brutal, murderous dictator.

The Stalin Comeback

Stalin is making a comeback of sorts.

Characteristically, Putin is cynical and pragmatic, using Stalin for nationalistic purposes. In contrast, ideology plays a relatively minor role in Putin’s policy.

Much has been made of his statement: “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” However, his next line was “Whoever wants it back has no brain.”

Rather like Stalin, who feared oblivion after Germany’s invasion, Putin bases his appeals on Mother Russia rather than Father Marx. Nevertheless, a government that seeks to bolster its image by embracing one of history’s most destructive actors undermines its own credibility and even legitimacy. (Notably, so does the People’s Republic of China, where Mao Zedong remains a venerated figure.)

Stalin: A History

Stalin was born in difficult circumstances on December 18, 1878, in Gori, a nondescript Russian city in present-day Georgia. However, he was bright, initially attending seminary.

Unfortunately, he came to embrace atheism and later communism, meeting Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1905. Similar to the violent misfits who came to dominate Nazi Germany, the Bolsheviks were an unscrupulous, disputatious lot who would have died in obscurity had desperately inadequate Tsar Nicholas stepped back from the abyss of “The Great War” in 1914, a conflict both stupid and tragic. Less than three years later his dynasty had been overthrown, and several more–German, Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman—later disappeared in the conflict’s aftermath.

In March 1917 even the military backed Nicholas’ ouster. The liberal provisional government, which continued the war, fell in November to Lenin’s coup. Stalin became a power in the regime, played an important role in the ensuing civil war, was appointed communist party general secretary, and ruthlessly consolidated power after Lenin’s death. Eventually he sidelined his better credentialed rivals—Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin—who all ended up dead, either assassinated or executed. He dealt no less harshly and conclusively with other rivals and enemies, both real and imagined. Stalin continually rewrote history, famously airbrushing historic photos to erase his onetime revolutionary comrades.

Although Stalin’s remorseless brutality seemed unique, Lenin was no wimpy peacenik. Trotsky, who looks like a typical ivory tower intellectual in later photos, directed the Red Army during the civil war and played the lead role in eradicating the Kronstadt uprising, led by sailors demanding humane, even liberal rule. Stalin did not originate terror into a weapon. Rather, he perfected its use.

Stalin the Brutal

Through it he effectively industrialized and modernized the Russian Empire, renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. The cost was enormous, but mattered not at all to Stalin. The Russian Civil War was one of history’s worst, resulting in perhaps 7 to 12 million dead. This obviously was not all Stalin’s doing, but his callous disregard for human life was evident.

He was responsible for The Great Famine, or Holomodor, as part of his campaign to force agricultural collectivization and urban industrialization. This required destroying the “kulaks,” peasants who inconveniently wanted to keep their property. Estimates of the dead range up to ten million, with as many as 70 million people starving between 1930 and 1933. Most affected were Ukraine and Kazakhstan, but the impact ranged well beyond.

Even more dramatic was The Great Terror or The Great Purge. Highlighted by the infamous show trials in which former revolutionary heroes confessed to the most outrageous and improbable crimes, Stalin ritualistically culled the party elite, including, disastrously, the Red Army officer corps. The victims often seemed random, privileged apparatchiks who suddenly lost the lottery of life. These servants of the Soviet state unexpectedly reaped the horror that they had sown on the party’s and Stalin’s behalf.

Suffering and More Suffering from Stalin

The Soviet Union became a national abattoir. No one knows the true toll. Stalin initialed long lists of purported enemies set for liquidation as readily as a typical corporate executive approves proposed bonus recipients.

Formally “legal” executions, though for imaginary crimes based on nonexistent evidence, may have taken a million lives, according to historian Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, the most celebrated chronicle of Stalin’s crimes. Many more died in the Gulag: “Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime’s terrors can hardly be lower than some fifteen million.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago detailed the operation of Stalin’s labor/​death camps, later joined by Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History.

Stalin’s intent remains unclear: did he actually believe that much of the population was suborning the system and his rule, or did he simply assume that widespread and continuous terror was the best way to ensure a compliant leadership cadre? Perhaps it was a mix of both. However, his reasons didn’t matter much. He wanted more victims, always more victims. And the NKVD, as the security service was then called, provided them.

Although it was Stalin who demanded The Great Purge, it was many others, such as Lavrentiy Beria, who enthusiastically implemented the former’s desires while serving as the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. Equally fascinating and horrifying is the process described by social scientist R.J. Rummel in his compelling Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900: “Murder and arrest quotas did not work well. Where to find the ‘enemies of the people’ they were to shoot was a particularly acute problem for the local NKVD, which had been diligent in uncovering ‘plots.’ They had to resort to shooting those arrested for the most minor civil crimes, those previously arrested and released, and even mothers and wives who appeared at NKVD headquarters for information about their arrested loved ones.” For many in the Soviet Union, life and death was a matter of chance. Although The Great Terror ended in 1938, brutal repression continued for decades.

A Horrible Legacy

There was much more. Reported the New York Times: “Under [Stalin’s] leadership, entire ethnic groups, like Crimean Tatars, were expelled from their homelands.” German POWs were held a decade after the end of World War II.

Mercifully, Stalin died on March 5, 1953. He may have been planning a new purge, which likely would have started with his intimates, led by Beria. It is possible that the latter poisoned the dictator, but doubts remain. In any case, Beria, feared by his colleagues, was ousted and executed in a bizarre plot comically depicted in the movie “The Death of Stalin.” It took a few years, but Nikita Khrushchev eventually ousted his opponents. Notably, unlike Stalin, he did not kill them. Moreover, he launched a process of “destalinization,” highlighted by his famous “secret speech” before the Central Committee on February 25, 1956. Khrushchev removed Stalin’s body from Lenin’s tomb in Red Square a few years later.

Khrushchev was eventually defenestrated by the colorless Leonid Brezhnev, but allowed to live a life of relative comfort at a dacha outside Moscow. Brezhnev chose neither reform nor terror, but rather sclerotic repression, authoritarian but not murderous. It was left to Mikhail Gorbachev to again confront Stalin’s atrocities. Alexander Yakovlev headed the Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions. He later wrote: “The task is a weary one. To descend step by step down seventy years of Bolshevik rule into a dungeon strewn with human bones and reeking of dried blood is to see your faith in humankind dissolve.”

Putin Looks Back to History

Alas, Vladimir Putin and his cronies appear to feel no such distaste for tyranny. To be fair, Putin has criticized Stalin’s crimes. But this is the history that Putin’s Russia is slowly but steadily embracing. A single statue at one subway station might seem like a minor crime, though it is seen by thousands of people every day. But there is much more. Reported the Times: “Since Vladimir V. Putin took power more than 25 years ago, at least 108 monuments to Stalin have been erected across Russia, and the pace has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said Ivan Zheyanov, a historian and journalist who has kept track of the statues.” And there is related repression, such as closing down Memorial International, a human rights group founded by dissidents including Andrei Sakharov that established an archive of Stalin’s crimes.

Even democracies construct idealized versions of their history and behavior. However, Joseph Stalin was sui generis, a malign force of extraordinary power and horror. Even the authoritarians who now rule in Moscow should be able to distinguish between promoting an autocratic history characteristic of many modern states and celebrating well-nigh unlimited totalitarianism and slaughter. Their inability to do so further undermines their credibility as negotiating partners and, more broadly, participants in the larger international order.