President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “playing with fire” by refusing to accept American negotiations and instead proceeding with aerial assaults on Ukraine. In response to Trump’s denunciation of Russian aggression, the Kremlin refused to proceed with ceasefire talks in Ukraine and insulted America’s president, describing him as going through an “emotional overload” for his attempts to seek peace in a war that has claimed thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives and cost the world billions.
The famed Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once conceded that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” In the case of Russia, its culture is one shaped by a history of murder. Amidst attacks on the Ukrainian people and the American administration, a new debate over a statue in Moscow displays the country’s continual veneration of its communist past, and thus the brutality that remains at the heart of its culture.
Days before vituperations were launched against Trump’s peace offerings, a new statue of Joseph Stalin was unveiled by the Russian government at Taganskaya Station, the crown jewel of Moscow’s subway line. The statue depicts the dictator flanked by two young laborers and an adoring crowd offering him bouquets. For any unaware, Joseph Stalin ruled as the totalitarian despot of the Soviet Union for 30 years. From 1924 until his death in 1953, Stalin presided over crimes against humanity including the mass killing of his political opponents and large-scale ethnic cleansing. It was Stalin who began the Cold War, supporting pro-Soviet communists in overthrowing democratic capitalist governments worldwide.
Russian political culture has in recent years moved even closer toward revisionist praise for this blood-soaked Marxist past. The Moscow Times reported in 2021 that 48 percent of Russians favored erecting a statue to honor the Soviet leader. In comparison, just 20 percent opposed the idea, a reversal of results found in a poll taken a decade earlier. All in all, 56 percent of Russians described Stalin as a great leader as of 2021 and 70 percent held a generally positive view of him as of 2017. There has not been a survey on Stalin’s legacy taken since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, although Russian media since has focused on drawing parallels between this conflict and World War II, which in Russia is hailed as the “Great Patriotic War,” with Stalin at the helm.
As always, however, there have been Russians opposed to the glorification of Marxist murder. One bystander interviewed by the New York Times described Stalin as “a bloody tyrant.” He echoes the words of the dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that anti-communist Russians would have been completely crushed under Stalin if only they “didn’t love freedom enough” to survive.
Survival remains the issue today to the Ukrainians who fight with memories of Stalin’s repression of their parents and grandparents in mind.
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