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Stalin's light is shining bright in Mother Russia
By Adrian Blomfield in Volgograd
(Filed: 25/02/2006) The two portraits on the wall of the director's office in the Battle of Stalingrad Museum look as incongruous a pairing as one is ever likely to find. An oil painting, flanked by two ceremonial swords, shows Josef Stalin in military regalia. Below him hangs a delicate watercolour of the late Queen Mother.
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Nikita Khrushchev
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"She was very fond of him, you know," said Boris Usik, the director of the museum in the centre of Volgograd, as Stalingrad was renamed in 1961. "They were both great people, people with extraordinary vision." The Queen Mother was enormously popular in Volgograd, remembered for the funds she raised for the devastated city after the epic Second World War battle. But Stalin's picture is the more startling. Previously it would have been unheard of for a state-appointed official such as Mr Usik to so honour the dictator. Stalin was disgraced 50 years ago today when his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered what many regard as the 20th century's most influential speech. Stunned, delegates at the 20th Communist Party Congress heard for the first time a party leader denounce Stalin's brutality. The Soviet "thaw" was about to begin. Within months Hungary was in the grip of an uprising against communist rule, within a decade the first Soviet dissidents were challenging Moscow at home. Many view the speech as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, among them Mikael Gorbachev, who says it planted the "glasnost" idea in his mind. But Khrushchev is remembered in a negative light. According to polls, only Mr Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin are more hated former Russian leaders. In the past decade, 200 books and films about Stalin, some eulogies, have appeared. Polls show that 18 per cent of Russians believe he was their best leader since 1917, while almost 50 per cent view him in a positive or very positive light. In May the first major museum dedicated to Stalin in half a century will be opened in Volgograd by his three grandsons. Among the exhibits will be telegrams from Stalin to Churchill, a model of the train he lived in after the 1917 revolution and his famous cap. Valentina Klyushina, the deputy curator of Volgograd's famous statue to Mother Russia, is an enthusiast for the project, even though her mother was jailed for seven years in Stalin's time. "He was a great man with a great personality," she said. "Even his enemies, even Churchill, acknowledged that he took a backward country with an illiterate population and turned it into a global powerhouse with a nuclear bomb." It is unclear how the Kremlin views the growing popularity of Stalin and the vilification of Khrushchev. But President Vladimir Putin has been less willing to condemn Stalin than his predecessors. Stalin is remembered by some as a champion of equality. "Would there have been a Roman Abramovich under Stalin?" asked Mr Usik, repeating a refrain frequently heard these days. He is popular among the young, say pollsters, mainly because of rising nationalism, the result of the humiliation of Russia's diminished place in the world. Volgograd University students lauded Stalin on everything from collectivisation, the agricultural policy that resulted in the deaths of millions through famine, to his supposed love for human rights. "To change a weak country into the world's greatest power, we had to collectivise," said Andrei Ivanov, a history student. "We were able to produce tractor factories and to win the war." Students insist Stalin's crimes were exaggerated by Khrushchev to avenge the death of his son, Leonid, whom they believed was executed during the war for passing secrets to the Nazis - a rumour that has long been debunked. |
