Russia: Activists Denounce Stalin in Station (Stalin worship at metro station)

The freshly renovated Kurskaya metro station reopened this week as the newest front in a bitter controversy over the legacy of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, whose name was returned to the facade after more than 50 years.

The entrance hall of the Circle Line station once again bears a verse from the 1944 version of the Soviet anthem: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation; He inspired us to work and be heroic.”

Human rights activists condemned the reference to Stalin as distasteful and said it was part of broader effort to soften history’s depiction of him, while the Moscow metro maintains that it was just trying to be faithful in its restoration of a historical monument.

“Recreating the original station with Stalin’s name is the same as restoring a Nazi memorial with Hitler’s name on a swastika,” Oleg Orlov, head of human rights organization Memorial and an outspoken critic of the Stalinist terror, told The Moscow Times.

Stalin ordered mass executions during the Great Terror in the 1930s and beyond. The disputed inscription — penned by Soviet poet Sergei Mikhailkov, who died Thursday at the age of 96 — was removed after Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, launched a campaign against his personality cult in the mid-1950s.

The verse was replaced by another from the anthem: “The sun of freedom shone through thunder, and great Lenin lit up our path.”

Alexander Cherkasov, also from Memorial, said Stalin’s return to the station might have been encouraged by the current political establishment. Last year, the Education and Science Ministry approved a new history textbook for Russian schools, which argues that Stalin’s terror was justified as an “instrument of development.”

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html

Photos are from the 2008 "Victory Day" parade in Moscow:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22russia%22%22parade%22%222008%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2

Russia's Medvedev hails "comrade" Obama

Associated Foreign Press (AFP) ^ | April 2, 2009 | Anna Smolchenko

"Russia's Dmitry Medvedev hailed Barack Obama as "my new comrade" Thursday after their first face-to-face talks"

http://www.france24.com/en/20090402-russias-medvedev-hails-comrade-obama

April 1, 2009:
"Obama, Medvedev pledge new era of relations":
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090401/wl_afp/usrussiadiplomacynuclear_20090401152002

From Accuracy In Media | AIM.ORG

Obama’s Red Mentor Praised Red Army
AIM Report | By Cliff Kincaid | April 30, 2008

Frank Marshall Davis

Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA), wrote a poem dedicated to the Soviet Red Army. “Smash on, victory-eating Red Army,” he declared. He also wrote poems attacking traditional Christianity and the work of Christian missionaries.

The “Red Army” poem goes beyond hoping for the communists to beat the Nazis in World War II and hails the Soviet revolution. It says:

Show the marveling multitudes
Americans, British, all your allied brothers
How strong you are
How great you are
How your young tree of new unity
Planted twenty-five years ago
Bears today the golden fruit of victory!

http://www.aim.org/aim-report/obamas-red-mentor-praised-red-army/
_______________________________________________

Barack Obama, from Dreams from My Father, Three Rivers Press, New York, Revised Edition, 2004, ISBN 1-4000-8277-3, p. 76-7:
"But by the time I met Frank [Frank Marshall Davis] he must have been pushing eighty, with a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar."

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