Russia Retreats

As a younger naive person, I used to be thrilled by the USSR, eager to step behind the Iron Curtain and see the reality for myself. I didn't make it to Russia until 2000 and watched with the masses as Yelstin resigned and everyone flicked their fingers under their chin and raised an eyebrow over whether he was even sober in his resignation.

I knew that with the installation of Vladimar Putin as Chief of State, Russia would edge back to its former self but in a way so discrete that the mass public would not notice. Or more to the point, in a way so overtly not Communist that America would not scream at its evils. Communism and socialism being a far greater crime than human rights abuse, corruption, and ethnic wars to name a few.

And of course, this has happened. I wouldn't enter again with the words "media" anywhere near my visa application. People are still disappearing, and the world blinks and misses it.

The country is forming a new image of itself, illustrated with nouveau riche and a reinstated glorious history. St Petersburg's recent bicentennial celebrations were a successful international nod at Russia's pretty past. Now the country feels encouraged to rewrite and promote its more recent, albeit controversial, history.

The council in the western Russian city of Oryol has called for Stalin's name to be restored to streets and for monuments and statues to him to be re-erected to celebrate the end of the second world war.

This to me is major news. Can you imagine if a town in Germany wanted to have statues to Hilter or a Hitler Highway? There would be international furor. But want to commemorate someone just as evil without a mass of Jews pointing fingers behind him, and that's okay?

I can never understand how Stalin is tolerated by some as an acceptable dictator and mass murderer. Is it really the power of promotion? If movies were made about piano players smuggling people to safety under Stalin's regime would we all be a little more sentimental about the tens of millions that died?

Why is it that in the west we can use the word gulag without flinching, joke about salt mines in Siberia, but we would never do so about a concentration camp or we'd face social death (look at Mayor Ken Livingstone in London)

A BBC news article reports:

"The 60th anniversary of [Russian] victory obliges us to support widespread calls to restore historical justice with respect to the historical role played by the commander-in-chief Josef Stalin," a [Russian] resolution said.

One regional official was quoted by the newspaper Izvestia as denying that Stalin was behind the purges that killed and imprisoned millions.

"It is not a simple issue. Stalin was not really responsible for the repressions. In all official documents the orders are from the NKVD [the predecessor of the KGB], military tribunals. A system of repression existed and functioned by itself," she said.

There is also a movement in favour of restoring the name Stalingrad to the city where the German advance in the southern Soviet Union was halted. It was renamed Volgograd by Nikita Khrushchev, who led the anti-Stalin criticism after the dictator had died.

Veterans who fought there had hoped the old name would be restored in time for the anniversary of the German surrender in 2003, but accepted that the procedure would be "unpredictable" because Stalin was still a "controversial figure."

A contraversial figure indeed. On his CV, Stalin can add an estimated 1.5 million deported to Siberia and Central Asia (though some got to go back home, even if for groups like the Tatars, it was as late as 1991). Then there's an estimated one million that were shot and the millions in Gulag labour camps. In Georgia, he had 80,000 shot and 100,000 sent to the Gulags. The Katyn massacre, again under Stalin, saw about 25,000 Poles shot.

If a young man shaves his head, paints a swastika clumsily on a public building in his home country of France, the English papers for example, are quick to paint France as a racist nation on their front pages. I don't have access to English papers here, but I can tell you that no one's dinner party small talk is about the reinstating of Stalin and rewriting of his wrong doings.

Stalin himself said: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

He knew how easily we'd forget.