In his later years, Ioseb Jughashvili, or Joseph Stalin, the self-styled “Man of Steel,” was a physical wreck. Myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, rendered lame his left hand. Rheumatoid arthritis ravaged his joints. Severe sclerosis of the cerebral arteries resulted in hypertension, with its regular spasms of dizziness. A series of heart attacks and strokes deprived him of articulate speech. His mind was decaying as quickly as the ruins of his body, with dementia and clinical paranoia taking hold. Yet propaganda, even of the Soviet realist variety, has never been particularly beholden to verisimilitude, and so monuments continued to be erected in honor of the decrepit dictator, showing him as hale and hearty as he was in his genocidal prime, rather than as a pathetic figure with a dying brain, and a body slowly drowning in its own fluids.
One such work from the late Stalinist era, Gratitude of the People to the Leader-Commander, was installed in Moscow’s Taganskaya metro station in 1950. Sculpted out of plaster by Yevgenia Blinova and Pavel Balandin, the life-size bas-relief featured Stalin in a resolute, Napoleon-esque pose, one hand thrust into his coat, the other clutching a rolled-up document. Surrounding him are his adoring subjects, most of them on the younger side, hence the alternate title for the sculptural group, Stalin and the Youth. There are no smallpox scars on Stalin’s cheeks, no withered hand, no contorted limbs, just as there are no famine victims with gaunt ribs, no slave laborers, no political prisoners kneeling in a forest clearing, pistol barrels pressed against the nape of their necks. As a work of art, the low relief left a great deal to be desired. As a piece of clumsy propaganda, it could only have moved the most ideologically blinkered communists. And as a tribute to one of history’s most accomplished mass murderers, it was little more than a moral excrescence smeared on the walls of the Moscow Metro. Thankfully, it disappeared during the Khrushchev Thaw, when the sheer horror of Stalin’s political purges, terror famines, and forced labor camps was at least tentatively being acknowledged. (RELATED: The Great Lesson: Statue of Stalin Consecrated in Russia)
Seventy-five years after the installation of Blinova and Balandin’s sculptural atrocity, present-day passengers on the Moscow Metro, passing through Taganskaya metro station, might imagine that they had been caught in some sort of temporal anomaly. Gratitude of the People to the Leader-Commander had reappeared, as an alleged “gift” to passengers on the occasion of the metro system’s 90th birthday. Careful observers, like Elizaveta Likhacheva, the recently ousted former director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, quickly recognized that the Stalin sculpture was obviously a “poorly-made 3D-printed” copy of the original, “crudely painted to look like glazed porcelain.” An ersatz Putin-era recreation of a ghastly piece of Stalin-era propaganda. What better summation of modern Russia could there be?
The return of Gratitude of the People to the Leader-Commander to Taganskaya is only the most recent example of the resuscitation of the Stalin personality cult. It is a phenomenon that often manifests as pure kitsch — street entertainers dressed like Stalin, miniature Stalin busts and Stalin-themed matryoshka dolls on sale in souvenir shops, Soviet-themed plombir ice-cream in every corner shop, that sort of thing. The kitschification of a figure like Josef Stalin is its own sort of moral squalor, but far worse is his ongoing posthumous rehabilitation in the public square. Nearly a hundred Stalin monuments and statutes have been installed in Russian cities in recent years, as well as in temporarily occupied cities in Ukraine, popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, in places like Melitopol, where on the most recent Victory Day the Communist Party of Russia unveiled a bust of the architect of the Holodomor terror-famine, with a plaque dedicated to the “Generalissimo of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, from grateful descendants.” Volgograd International Airport, meanwhile, has been renamed Stalingrad International Airport. It was almost a miracle that the Russian Orthodox Church scrapped plans for a Stalin mosaic in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, but that was back in the relative halcyon days of 2020. Give it some time.
Equally disturbing is the literal rewriting of history now in progress. Take the former NKVD (Soviet secret police) building in Taganrog, which until recently featured a plaque that read:
В ЭТОМ ЗДАНИИ с 1928 ПО 1941 ГГ.
РАСПОЛАГАЛСЯ ОТДЕЛ НКВД В ЗАСТЕНКАХ КОТОРОГО ТОМИЛИСЬ НЕОБОСНОВАННО РЕПРЕССИРОВАННЫЕ ЛЮДИ[In this building from 1928 to 1941 was located a department of the NKVD, in which baselessly-repressed people languished in cells.]
Astoundingly enough, passersby are now informed that
В этом здании с 1929 по 1941 г.г. располагался городской отдел
ОГПУ/НКВД, сотрудники которого внесли значительный вклад в освобождение города Таганрога от немецко-фашистской оккупации в годы Великой Отечественной войны[From 1929 to 1941, this building housed the city department of the OGPU/NKVD, whose employees made a significant contribution to the liberation of the city of Taganrog from Nazi occupation during the Great Patriotic War.]
(Keep in mind that the primary contribution of the NKVD to the war effort, aside from murdering those critical of the regime, was to serve as blocking units or anti-retreat detachments, forcing penal battalions into battle and gunning down any soldiers who retreated.) Russians of conscience (or basic historical awareness) who push back against this twisted narrative, or allude to, say, the Nazi-Soviet dismemberment of Poland that started the Second World War, risk draconian fines or lengthy jail sentences. Whether out of genuine enthusiasm or fear of reprisals, Russia’s collective opinion of Stalin is growing ever more sympathetic, with a 2023 study by researchers at the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology finding that 63 percent of Russians, and 48 percent of Russians aged 18 to 24, have a positive attitude toward the long-dead Red Czar.
The Kremlin apparatchik and Putin stooge Alexander Kharichev, in some of his recent writings on so-called “Russian Civilization,” has asserted that the Russian people are uniquely motivated by concepts like “service,” “collectivism,” “paternalism, orientation toward autocracy, and the personification and sacralization of power,” “family values” (that’s a funny one), and, yes, “sacrifice.” Vladislav Inozemtsev of the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe describes this mindset as “lazy fascism,” a “blatant ersatz” that “is neither based on a spontaneous mass movement nor on a pre-formulated doctrine — it was built ‘from above’ and ‘from whatever was available.’” An ersatz ideology, just like the ersatz bas-relief in Moscow’s Taganskaya metro station.
Russians are clearly still searching for a raison d’être. In a recent interview on Russian state television, the nationalist propagandist Dmitry Rogozin spoke of how:
We are all searching for our identity. We are all wandering, wandering. Who are the Russians? Yes, Russians are those who are not [Ukrainian] Bandera supporters. You understand, that’s the Russians for you. Who speaks Russian and is not a Bandera supporter. And not the scoundrels who fled the country during difficult times. All the rest are Russians…For me, they are all Russian people who speak Russian and respect Russian culture, who, with weapons in their hands, fight the enemy for a common cause.
Set aside for the moment that Russian identity is here first being defined purely in opposition to Ukrainian identity, which is a fascinating admission in and of itself. What Rogozin eventually settles on is that Russian identity is vaguely a matter of language and culture, but primarily a thing forged in the fires of war. The last leader who could lay claim to having upheld Russia’s martial tradition was Stalin, and so the cult of Stalin must be revived, and the fall of the Soviet Union construed not as a full stop but as a semicolon, a pause before a new wave of revanchism and conquest. Stalin is a natural mascot for such a movement, which is how you get another propagandist, the repugnant television presenter Vladimir Solovyov, rambling about how Russia could “erase the hell out of America” with nuclear weapons, which coming from two sides would “cause the formation of a radioactive tsunami” that would turn North America into a “strait named after Comrade Stalin,” of all people.
Last month, the U.S. Department of State issued warm congratulations to “the Russian people on Russia Day,” adding that the “United States remains committed to supporting the Russian people as they continue to build on their aspirations for a brighter future.” Yet these days, Russia appears to be going backward towards a dark past, redolent of the days of czarist and Soviet tyranny. The poet Mikhail Lermontov, as he went into exile in 1841, left behind a poem entitled “Proshchay, nemytaya Rossiya,” or “Farewell, Unwashed Russia,” in which he bid a less than fond adieu to his countrymen:
Прощай, немытая Россiя,
Страна рабовъ, страна господъ,
И вы, мундиры голубые,
И ты, имъ преданный народъ.
Быть можетъ, за стѣной Кавказа
Сокроюсь отъ твоихъ пашей,
Отъ ихъ всевидящаго глаза,
Отъ ихъ всеслышащихъ ушей.[Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Land of slaves, land of masters,
And you, gendarmes in blue uniforms,
And you, the people in thrall to them,
Perhaps behind the walls of the Caucasus
I will hide from your pashas,
From their all-seeing eyes,
From their all-hearing ears.]
Putin’s “lazy fascism” has not reached the depths plumbed by Stalin’s Soviet Union, but Russia remains a land of masters and slaves, with an all-encompassing police and propaganda apparatus, notwithstanding any remote and purely notional “aspirations for a brighter future.” Diplomatic niceties are all well and good, but it is earnestly to be hoped that our leaders can recognize the sickness at the heart of the Russian body politic, the cultural sclerosis and moral myasthenia that has produced such aesthetic abominations as the bas-relief in Taganskaya, and the unconscionable acts of savagery being inflicted on innocent Ukrainians on a continuous basis. Yet while the reintroduction of the Stalin cult is a moral (and aesthetic) abomination, it does at least have one use: like the aposematism of brightly-colored poisonous animals, it serves as a clear warning that the Russian polity is sinister and unreliable, just as it was in the days of Joseph Stalin.
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