STALIN IS BACK!

(This entry, written in March 2010, follows the previously posted entry Waiting For Stalin.)

It is doubly ironic that less than two decades after the publication of Waiting for Stalin in the IJ, the promise that Stalin would return has now been demonstrably fulfilled on two fronts, both figuratively and literally. A return to the particular brand of Vladimir Putin’s Stalinism has long been observed, and complained about both by the West and by the Russian pro-Western opposition. (The fact that the latter exists in Russia after all the misery suffered by the Russians at the hands of the West during the 1990’s can mean only one thing, namely that the Russian government gives these oppositionists some pretty good protection from violence at the hands of the countless millions of outraged victims of that abominable Yeltsin pandemonium.)

But Stalin is also returning literally these days. One does not need a formal word count analysis to find out, just by random sampling of the Russian press, that the name of Stalin is the most frequently occurring word in the Russian language today, and that Stalin/Stalinism is by far the most discussed topic in Russia, which easily dwarfs all competition. Stalin also took the third place in a fairly recent national survey The Greatest Russian (behind St. Alexander Nevsky and Peter Stolypin, but above Peter the Great and all other royalty, significantly, above Lenin, and also above such treasures of Russian culture as Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and a host of others, and all this honor despite the fact that ethnically Stalin was not a Russian, but a Georgian!)

There are other striking specific examples of Stalin’s triumphal return as well. In August 2009 after a major reconstruction of the monumental Metro/Underground station Kurskaya-Koltsevaya in Moscow (all Metro stations were designed as impressive monuments in Stalin’s times and this tradition has apparently returned in the most recent designs) built in 1950, its original wall decorations were restored featuring the text of the Soviet National Anthem, as it had been sung prior to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign of 1956, with a special prominence given to the following lines of the Anthem (words by Mikhalkov and El-Registan):

The sun of freedom was shining upon us through the storms,

And the great Lenin illumined our way:

We were raised by Stalin---to keep faith with the people,

To hard work, to great deeds--he inspired us!

The most recent return of Stalin has not happened yet, but passions are rising high around it. By the Victory Day celebrations in May 2010, Moscow will be decorated with iconic billboards of Stalin, “in a continuing effort to restore his name and positive contribution to Russian history.”

How soon now, I wonder, will the great Russian city with the ridiculous name of Volgograd be restored to its historical glory as Stalingrad? I am betting on the year 2015... May 2015 would be nice!

One does not have to be waiting for Stalin any longer. He has returned!