You're reading: Re-Stalinization of Moscow subway sparks debate

MOSCOW (AP) — A Moscow subway station is the newest focus of Russia's bitter dispute over the legacy of Josef Stalin, whose outsize shadow still haunts the nation more than 50 years after his death.

Critics of the Communist era were outraged when old Soviet national anthem lyrics praising Stalin were restored to a rotunda in the Kurskaya station this summer. Now there is talk of putting a statue of the dictator back where one used to stand, facing commuters entering the station.

Moscow’s chief municipal architect Alexander Kuzmin, who raised the idea of returning the Stalin statue last week, said there was nothing behind it but a desire for historical accuracy.

Subway officials have said the same thing about the gold-colored lettering unveiled in August, which proclaims that "Stalin raised us to be true to the people, inspired us to labor and heroic deeds."

But opponents say the changes are part of a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and hold up an image of his iron-handed rule as a positive example for Russia today.

"This is Stalinist propaganda — nothing else," said Yuri Bondarenko, director of a group that is seeking to restore Czarist-era names of streets and buildings that were renamed after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. "They are trying to throw our country back decades, to the Gulag."

Bondarenko, at a news conference Tuesday, was referring to the sprawling system of labor camps where Stalin and his henchmen sent a large number of Soviets to suffer and die as political prisoners.

The memory of Stalin has been a divisive issue since his death in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, unleashed a de-Stalinization campaign in which Stalin’s name and image were erased from many streets and public buildings across Russia. In the 1980s, the glasnost campaign of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, made new revelations about Stalin’s crimes public.

But Stalin is revered by many who say he led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II and turned a struggling nation into a superpower. His image has been burnished in recent years, leading Kremlin critics to suspect Russia’s leaders of encouraging a more positive view of Stalin to justify their own retreat from democracy.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev have mostly avoided open praise or criticism of Stalin, rarely mentioning his name in public, but they have bristled at any effort to liken Stalin’s Soviet Union to Hitler’s Germany.

Putin has used both Soviet and czarist imagery to encourage national pride and bolster his own popularity.

Last year, Stalin tallied third place in a state television channel’s contest to name Russia’s greatest historical figure. History textbooks painting Stalin in a positive light have gained prominence, and Gorbachev recently denounced efforts to cast Stalin as a "brilliant manager" rather than a murderous autocrat.

Vladimir Lavrov, deputy director of Moscow’s Institute of Russian History, said about 10 Stalin statues of have been restored or erected in Russia in recent years.

He said he did not believe Russia’s top leaders were behind efforts such as the subway station restoration, but suggested their silence on the issue was sending a dangerous message. He warned that "reanimating Communist idols" will hinder Medvedev’s stated goal of making Russia into a more modern, law-based society.

"With Stalin monuments, there can be no revival of Russia — there can only be a dead end and stagnation," Lavrov said.

It’s fitting that the Stalin debate should focus on Moscow’s majestic subway system, much of which was built under his rule — an achievement that came, like the others of his era, at a dreadful human cost.

Looking up at the lettering in the rotunda Tuesday, 35-year-old lawyer Alexei Korchaganov said such achievements could not justify the return of the words praising Stalin — or the line praising Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, which was hastily added on in an effort to dispel criticism.

"Stalin and Lenin were tyrants who terrorized the country," said Korchaganov.

But retiree Nikolai Shulipin, 62, was pleased by the restoration and said he hoped the statue would be erected. He said his family had suffered under Stalin’s forced farm collectivization campaign, his grandfather dying after the family was exiled from their fertile farmland to the barren steppe.

"But my mother always remembered those years with reverence, as a time when the nation was united and its goals were the right ones," he said.