The newly opened Stalin sculpture at Moscow's Taganskaya metro station. Photo: Alexander Avilov/Moscow City News Agency
Activists in Moscow staged a protest against a freshly recreated sculpture of Joseph Stalin at the city’s Taganskaya metro station on Friday by placing quotes from Vladimir Putin and former president Dmitry Medvedev criticising the Soviet dictator next to the monument, Telegram channel Moskvybory reported.
Footage circulated widely on Russian Telegram channels showed crowds gathering around the sculpture to look at three placards left by the activists, two of which featured quotes alongside images of Putin and Medvedev, while the third displayed only a clown emoji.
“All the positives [of Stalin’s reign] were achieved at an unacceptable cost. Achieving results through repression is unacceptable. During that period, there was not only a cult of personality, but also massive crimes against the people”, read the quote from Putin, taken from his annual televised call-in show in 2009.
Another quote, from Medvedev on Russia’s Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions in 2012, said that Stalin and other Soviet leaders deserved the “harshest criticism” for their actions against the people of the Soviet Union.
Both placards rhetorically asked whether Moscow’s Transport Department “agreed” with Putin and Medvedev’s remarks on Stalin.
The protest aimed to draw attention to the “absurdity” of restoring the “inappropriate and unnecessary” monument, the organisers told Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti, stressing that the negative assessment of Stalin’s legacy had “long been widely acknowledged” in Russian society.
All three placards were later removed by metro security staff, Moscow news outlets reported.
The bas-relief sculpture — a replica of the original named The People’s Gratitude to the Commander-in-Chief that commemorated the Soviet Union’s defeat of fascism in World War II — was unveiled on Thursday to mark 90 years since the opening of the Moscow metro.
The original had been on display at Taganskaya Station since its opening in 1950 until 1966, when it was destroyed during construction of the interchange between the station’s two lines.
The news comes as cities across Russia increasingly embrace the idea of restoring or erecting monuments to Stalin amid the Kremlin’s ongoing campaign to reshape historical memory. Earlier in May, the northwestern Vologda region — governed by self-proclaimed Stalin admirer Georgy Filimonov — unveiled its second monument to the Soviet dictator in just a matter of months.