Stalin’s head was discovered in a garden. With the tip of his nose broken, a crack spanning his entire cheek, and half of his moustache missing. A man from the Kortkeros village in the Russian Republic of Komi dug it out, cleaned it, and brought it to the local historian, Lithuanian deportee Anatolis Smilingis. The local newspaper published an article about it.
A month later, as Smilingis told me, an older man knocked at his door. When that man was a child, this head had stood at the entrance to the local school. Everyone who entered had to remove their hat and greet it: ‘Good morning.’ Then in 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took place, during which Nikita Khrushchev condemned the cult of Stalin and blamed him for the mass repressions. The era of Stalin was over. The school’s principal came to this man’s grandfather, who was a warden at the school, and ordered him to remove Stalin from the pedestal, destroy the bust, and dispose of its pieces.
The Jailed and Their Jailers. Former deportees visiting an exhibition at the Sybir Memorial Museum. 2021
The warden was a deportee himself, but he loved Stalin. He did not dare damage the bust. As his grandson later told Smilingis, the night he received this order, his grandfather woke him up, brought him to the school, measured the distance from the corner of the building with his steps, dug a hole, buried the bust there, and told his grandson: ‘Remember this spot. I will be dead already, but when the time comes, you will dig Stalin out.’ The time, it seems, had come.
A boom in erecting monuments to Stalin and other Soviet torturers began in Russia in the late 2000s. According to anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova, at least 132 Stalin monuments and memorials were erected in Russia between 1998 and 2017, with their number growing by the year.
Stalin was no exception. In the past few years, monuments to Felix Dzerzhinsky, one of the October Revolution leaders with the most blood on his hands, the founder of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting the Counter-Revolution (the Soviet secret police commonly known as Cheka), as well as labour camp system, have been erected in Moscow, Krasnodar, Izhevsk, Gus-Khrustalny, Balashikha, Ryazan, annexed Simferopol, and other cities. In Magadan, the capital of Kolyma, where millions of labour camp prisoners died, a monument to the public security officials responsible for those deaths was erected just last summer. Lenin still lies in a mausoleum on the main square in Moscow, and new statues of him are still appearing throughout Russia, covered with scarlet carnations on every Soviet holiday.
Monuments to victims and monuments to torturers were erected simultaneously, sometimes even in the same cities. It is worth nothing that a ‘Russian Nuremberg’, where the perpetrators of communist crimes would have been convicted, never took place. The regime was never legally recognised as criminal. Why was communism not condemned in Russia, and why is Russia still under Stalin’s shadow? And why do monuments to Cheka officials still appear in this country?
A Useless Truth
Russia went through two phases of de-Stalinisation, the second one of which seems to have ended only recently. The first was the 20th Congress. The opportunity to bid a final farewell to Stalin and the Soviet past emerged during the time of Perestroika (1985 – 1991) and the 1990s. The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union established a Rehabilitation Committee in 1987. It confirmed the innocence of political prisoners. Irina Kalina, a Moscow citizen sentenced to five years of forced labour for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’, told me how in 1988 she was summoned by the KGB to collect her rehabilitation certificate. The KGB’s image was still associated with fear. Irina went there as if she had been sentenced to death. ‘It is so scary! You walk through a beautiful, narrow corridor, all carpeted. Obviously, no one is harming you, but you still have the feeling that you will never walk out of there’.
In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree on the restoration of the rights of victims of political repression. People started to speak up about their ancestors who disappeared in labour camps and look for their criminal cases in the KGB archives. Grandchildren of the repressed told me that, in the files they were given, they found their inquiries neatly glued to the last pages, right after the execution protocols. Newspapers were writing about the regime’s crimes, and people were queueing up in bookstores to get a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ or Varlam Shalamov’s ‘Kolyma Tales’.
However, according to Soviet culture historian Ilya Venyavkin, the new president of the country, Boris Yeltsin, was not interested in historical and symbolic politics. The government cannot be expected to criticise its own past crimes and dismantle established institutions. It would require a social pressure which was not present in the 1990s. The societal demand for de-Stalinisation was not strong enough. There were people in the power elite who had built their careers under the previous regime and were not interested in dredging up the past. In August 1991 a mob destroyed the Dzerzhinsky monument outside the KGB building, but the door to the KGB itself remained closed. The office was not liquidated: it was only renamed as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the attempt to conduct an open trial against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was unsuccessful. Arseny Roginsky, historian, human rights activist, and founder of the ‘International Memorial’ organisation, wrote that the memory of repressions in Russia remained a memory of the victims, but not of the crimes. Everyone felt sorry for those who were tortured and killed, but no one directly and unequivocally called the state out as their killer. Without an official legal assessment of the regime’s crimes, or the CPSU’s and Stalin’s roles therein, the truth about the Soviet regime dissipated and was quickly forgotten.
‘Be True to the People, Thus Stalin Has Reared Us’
In 2009, after a big public discussion and media scandal, a bas-relief with a verse from the USSR anthem was restored in one of Moscow’s underground stations: ‘Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us, inspired us to labour and valorous deed!’. Many were outraged back then, but as it turned out, that was only the beginning. For years afterwards, the state undertook a mild reconstruction of Stalinism. Vladimir Putin has mentioned from time to time that Stalin is a ‘complex character’ and that his ‘demonisation’ is ‘one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia’. In September 2022, he stated directly that Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Nicholas II ‘have made Russia a great power’.
At the same time, the history of this ‘great power’ was being rewritten. In 2014, Putin criticised history textbooks for ‘ideological rubbish’ and ‘deliberately diminishing the role of the Soviet nation in the fight against fascism’. As a result, new textbooks published between 2019 and 2021 featured numerous mentions of Putin himself, as well as his fight against the collective West and Western values. For example, in a 2021 textbook edited by Sergei Karpov, it is said that ‘V. V. Putin turned out to be a much more serious adversary than his domestic opponents, as well as their foreign patrons and sponsors, believed’. A 2019 textbook edited by Anatoly Torkunov mentions that modern weapons ‘destroyed the USA and NATO’s efforts to shift the military-strategic parity to their advantage’.
At the same time, the topic of Stalinist repressions almost entirely disappeared from textbooks. If previous editions had taught that anyone could have become a victim of the repressions, cited the number of people murdered, and did not try to rehabilitate Stalin, new textbooks claimed that only the political opposition and former nobility had been prosecuted in the USSR. One of the reasons for the Great Terror, according to Torkunov, was ‘the threat of a new World War’, on account of which Stalin ‘decided on a “general purge” of a potential “fifth column” of Soviet society’. While new monuments appeared on the streets of Russian cities, citizens were told that they should be proud of the historical figures represented by those monuments.
Not that the new authorities were particularly interested in the rehabilitation of Stalinism or denial of the repression. In the absence of a modern ideology, the Soviet past, with its primacy of the state over human rights, has become the political regime’s means of legitimisation. Stalin as a symbol of a strong power, Dzerzhinsky as a symbol of the state’s punishing hand, repression as a memento mori for the political opposition, history as the main justification of state policy.
In various speeches, President Putin does not tire of calling himself a Chekist. Anne Applebaum, author of a book on the Gulag, asserts that the Russian ruling class sees itself as the heir to the Soviet system of power. Of course, it is also important for this class that the KGB is perceived positively by the public. Meanwhile, the memory of repressions, deportations, and peasant uprisings breaks the narrative neatly engineered by the state of a unified nation in conflict with external enemies.
This persistent rehabilitation of the Soviet past has done its job. Since 2015, more or less, the attitude towards Stalin and his role in the country’s history began to improve, according to opinion polls. In May 2021 (when the independent Levada Centre last conducted this poll) 56% of Russians agreed that ‘Stalin was a great leader’. In a different poll, 55% expressed respect or sympathy towards the leader (although 28% reacted ‘with indifference’). The installation of a monument to Stalin was supported by 48% of respondents, with only 20% in opposition. More respondents expressed a positive attitude towards Stalin than towards Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, or other politicians from the Russian past.
However, according to researchers, it is impossible to explain this phenomenon with super-imposed Stalinisation alone. As anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova notes, one third of Stalinist monuments were erected in small towns and villages. In many cases, it was not the local administration who proposed they be installed (they may have even opposed them), but groups of citizens or, for example, local branches of the Communist Party (KPRF). People would often raise money and design the monuments themselves. Stalin’s busts are often ordered from workshops in North Ossetia, where they are still mass-produced, and memorial plaques are ordered from funeral parlours. Monuments are also located on Communist Party office premises, as in Volgograd, Novosibirsk, or Bryansk, or on private plots, as in Zakomelye village in the Ivanovo Oblast, or in the Shelanger settlement in the Mari Autonomous Oblast.
For such grassroots enthusiasts of Stalinism, unhappy with the modern, corrupt regime and social stratification, the figures of the executioners from the past become an indirect form of protest, a symbol of everything they lack in modern government: a welfare state, a change of government, a fight against corruption, and equality. Stalin turns out to symbolise a ‘strong hand’, and a super-paternalistic state which will rise and solve all its citizens’ problems. Some of them may be shot, but it could be worse: as they said in the times of repressions: ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’.
Ironically, even state propagandists resort to the same rhetoric. For example, Zakhar Prilepin, a writer and politician having already been sanctioned by the EU for fighting in the Donbas, proposed erecting a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky in 2021. He argued that Dzerzhinsky was a ‘symbol of overcoming all the disgrace that is now being observed in our country. It is a reminder for all bureaucrats, corrupt officials, scoundrels, and other fifth-column scum that Felix will come and punish you all’.
The protest takes on performative forms, and so monuments, memorials, rallies with scarlet flags, and carnations on the graves of Soviet leaders appear all over the country. However, according to Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Centre (a sociological research organisation), Stalin and his executioners’ rehabilitation is not the goal of state policy, but rather its by-product. When asked ‘Would you like to live under Stalin’s rule?’ as part of a Levada Centre poll, 60% of respondents answered ‘no’. Stalin and his era remain an imaginary construct, and not a time to which Russians would like to be transported.
‘Those Who Were in Prison Are the First in Line to Be Arrested’
There is one more reason why the country’s citizens did not condemn the perpetrators of state crimes. Television propaganda shows the great Soviet past every day, presenting it as a parade of successes and achievements. Stalin is associated with victory in the Great Patriotic War, the only unifying symbol of Russians’ national pride. Historian Arseny Roginsky compared the argument: ‘Stalin, of course, was a villain, but he won the war’ with the claim: ‘Cain, of course, killed his brother Abel, but he contributed to agricultural development’. At the same time, as Volkov claims, the state sets an image of a great past, which citizens should love and respect indivisibly. Since this is impossible, all the bloody parts of the past are erased. All that is left is heroism.
In emphasising the reasons which make it impossible for the country to leave behind its bloody past, we should note one more, the most banal one: fear. In the late 2010s, while working on a book about the Gulag, I was travelling through Russia, looking for the last, very old people who had endured Stalin’s labour camps. The majority of them refused to speak with me. An old man who had spent 20 years in the Vorkuta labour camps and remained there to live out his days explained it to me as follows: ‘Those who were in prison are the first in line to be arrested’. Most of the ex-prisoners who stayed in the camps did not notice the periods of Glasnost and Perestroika; the publication of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov’s books; the collapse of the country and construction of the new one. They did not experience this brief period in the 1990s when Russia actually appeared to be democratic and free, or they might have been so far-sighted as to not believe in this freedom. Even many years later, they still obeyed the eternal Soviet rules: Do not stand out. Do not speak loudly. Do not have your own opinion. Do not argue with the authorities. They were still afraid of being re-arrested. Afraid of repressions, hunger, and violence. Mentally, they remained in the Gulag – as many of those who had never been there physically. The fear that gripped the USSR never disappeared after its dissolution. The mitigation of the regime was too short-lived, and the rehabilitation of innocent victims went unnoticed. Stalin and Lenin were not identified as executioners, the Great Purge was not labelled a crime, the jailers were not lustrated. In their interviews with me, former camp staff, decrepit old men, said that they were all still proud of their work and were ready to serve the state again if necessary.
Alternative Memory
However, in the last few years, a different, unofficial memory has appeared. Since 1998, the non-governmental ‘International Memorial’ (which received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022) has been compiling a database with the names and brief biographies of around 3 million victims of political repression. It also collected the names and biographies of over 41 thousand employees of the USSR state security agencies responsible for the Great Purge. Since 2015, the Last Address Foundation has placed over 800 metal plaques on the houses of the victims of Stalin’s terror in Russia, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Germany.
Denis Karagodin, a resident of Tomsk, spent many years in archives uncovering the names of all the Chekists involved in the execution of his great-grandfather (the descendants of one of these Chekists have since apologised to Denis).
Anatolis Smilingis, a historian and local history expert (the one who protected Stalin’s head found in the garden), grew up in the Komi Republic, where his family was deported to from Lithuania in June 1941. He worked with other deportees in the logging industry from the age of 14. He survived. Unlike other deportees, he stayed in Komi after Perestroika and devoted his entire life to the commemoration of Gulag victims. He looked for camp burial sites, described cemeteries, and placed crosses on graves.
Since 2007, an action called ‘Returning Names’ has been held outside Moscow’s KGB building on 29 October, a day before the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. Thousands of citizens queue up to read aloud the names, ages, occupations, and dates of death of 40 thousand killed compatriots. Those people had been shot in secret, but their memory has been made public. In 2022, Moscow authorities banned this action, so it took place online. As the organisers wrote: ‘This action reminds us of the most important and fundamental principle: there is nothing more valuable than human life, therefore, the state has no right to kill people. Not in 1937, not in 2022.’
For the past two decades, the country’s memory, cast in metal, locked in state institutions and under temple roofs, has dictated what Russians should remember and what they should forget. It tried to prevent them from speaking about their personal experiences and their pain, trying to avoid the question of responsibility and guilt. In spite of this, citizens are trying to rethink the past, revive history, and ask the difficult questions. The deeper they dig, the more such work becomes forbidden. The Nobel Prize Winning ‘Memorial’ has been banned. Archives, as in Soviet times, have been closed, and foreign scholars are no longer allowed to enter the country.
Historian Ilya Budraitskis claims that after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and after the destruction of the remnants of public policy in Russia, private memory was also outlawed. ‘Historical policy’ – as a justification of the present with the past – has become policy. History has been placed in the service of ideology. This means that private, grassroots resistance to state memory, the history of repressions, deportations, and imperial oppression of people and their uprisings against it have all gone underground, but continue to be preserved there.
I would like to believe that the existence of this alternative memory, as well as the people ready to fight for it to come out, will undermine the empire from the inside. When (and if) the present power in Russia ends, this memory will come through and help create a new country.
Elena Racheva
Elena Racheva (PhD) is a researcher in the Sociology Department of the University of Oxford. Her main research interests are the legitimisation and justification of violence, its perpetrators, and its place in popular consciousness. Elena worked as a correspondent for the independent Russian Novaya Gazeta. She is the author (together with Anna Artemyeva) of the book 58-ya. Neizyatoye: Istorii lyudey, kotorye perezhili to, chego my bol’she vsego boimsya. [The 58th. Unseized: Stories of People Who Survived What We Most Fear], Warsaw 2019, which includes interviews with prisoners and guards of the Soviet Gulags.