Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008
From: Vladimir Shlapentokh <shlapent@msu.edu>
Subject: Stalin in Russian Ideology and Public Opinion: Caught in a Conflict between Imperial and Liberal Elements
Stalin in Russian Ideology and Public Opinion:
Caught in a Conflict between Imperial and Liberal Elements
By Vladimir Shlapentokh and Vera Bondartsova
Abstract
This article examines the views of today’s Russians toward one of the blackest periods of their relatively recent history, the years under Stalin. It focuses on their attitudes toward the mass repressions. We will examine the views of the country’s political and cultural elite (both the ruling and oppositional elite). Finally, we will explore public opinion on the mass terror in Stalin’s time. The authors conclude that public attitudes toward Stalin and the mass repressions are deeply contradictory. It is another powerful indicator that Russia still, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, does not have an ideology that can unite the majority of the elite and the masses. Russian society continues to oscillate between imperial dreams and liberal values, between beliefs in the authoritarian rule and democratic institutions as the desirable future of the country.
Stalin in Russian Ideology and Public Opinion: Caught in a Conflict between Imperial and Liberal Elements
It is hardly arguable that the greater the consistency of a public ideology, the greater is its impact on people’s thoughts and behaviors. We can refer to three militant ideologies. All of them were internally consistent and did not permit, under the threat of harsh punishment, any deviations from the dominant idea. The Nazi ideology was attractive to many Germans, particularly young people, because it offered them a consistent and very simplistic view of the world, which would be controlled by them, the perfect race. Today, the great influence of fundamentalist Islamic ideology on Muslim youth should be ascribed, to a great degree, to the ability of the extremists to present the ideology as internally coherent, with its orientation toward a confrontation with the infidels. The golden age of the Soviet ideology took place during the first two decades after the revolution when the class approach was its single theme and Russians were called to see the world through the prism of class struggle. The erosion of the Soviet ideology began when Stalin included another component in it, Russian nationalism, which deeply conflicted with the class component. The contradictory character of the Soviet ideology ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet empire, which prospered with an internationalist class approach and was not compatible with Russian nationalism.
Many problems of post-Soviet Russia lie in the contradictory character of its official ideology, which directs Russian political life, media, education and the arts. Since the middle of the 1990s, this ideology includes two components: imperial and liberal. The imperial part of this ideology is inspired by the nostalgia for the Soviet empire. It demands a belief in Russian greatness and the future restoration of the country’s previous geopolitical role. Quite often this yearning for the restoration of the empire is formatted into a call for a special historical road for Russia, which can be reduced to an obsession with greatness. It is easy to imagine what would have happened in the postwar history of Germany and Japan if the dominant ideologies in the two countries were permeated by a longing for the past and its military successes.
Another part of the official Russian ideology sees the collapse of the Soviet order as progress, hails private property and the market, as well as some liberal freedoms, but accepts only a show democracy. The two parts of the ideology are in permanent conflict with each other. The Kremlin regularly swings from a focus on one of these ideological elements to the other. In the second half of the 1990s, there was an evident slant in favor of the liberal component, but the imperial part was clearly dominant in the 2000s. However, even with Putin as president, the conflict between the two ideological positions was quite strong. Take, for instance, the Moscow policy toward Ukraine. It was always torn between two different ideological goals. The imperial part demanded political pressure on Kiev and threats to take back some regions of the country if Ukraine joined NATO. The liberal part demanded a full and sincere recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and close cooperation between the two countries in political, economic and cultural areas. The policy toward the West is also torn between two ideological imperatives: geopolitical (the desire to show Russia’s high role in the world) and liberal (the desire to maintain good relations with the West as a trade partner and as a place where the elite keeps its wealth). In fact, the imperial part of the official ideology is mostly addressed to the domestic audience. It legitimates the post-Soviet regime, since it abets the nationalist sentiments among Russians and exploits their feeling of national humiliation in the aftermath of the collapse of their empire. At the same time, the liberal part of the official ideology, with its praise of private property and the market, so heartily accepted by the ruling elite, arouses negative attitudes among most Russians, who suffered from the skewed liberal reforms of the 1990s.
For the troubadours of the imperial ideology, Stalin is the key figure. No one political leader in the past symbolizes the success of the Soviet empire more than Stalin. For this reason, these people have to separate Stalin from the mass repressions that denigrate him. At the same time, Stalin’s terror was a symbol of the destruction of the ruling elite, a fact that encourages the liberal component of the official ideology. It is remarkable that the most ardent opponents of the real fight against corruption in the last years regularly scared the public with the specter of “1937.” They argued against the use of public trials of corrupt officials, suggesting that such trials would be a repetition of the notorious show trials of the 1930s.
The relative role of each component, imperial and liberal, defined the Kremlin’s attitudes toward the two oppositions: left nationalist (Communists and Russian nationalists) and liberal. The ideology of the first opposition is deeply imperial and therefore very apologetic of Stalin. The second is anti-imperial and consistently hostile toward Stalin.
Since Putin’s ascension to power, the official ideology incorporated a lot of views of the Communists and nationalists. In fact, the differences between the ideologies of Putin, the Communists and nationalists as they relate to Stalin were not significant. This permits us to treat them, with some reservations, as a united one, as opposed to the liberal ideology. Since the official ideology is quite ambivalent toward Stalin, some of its representatives are almost indiscernible when it comes to their views of the left-nationalist ideologues. At the same time, none of the official ideologists who are somewhat critical of Stalin intermingle with true liberal intellectuals in their evaluations of this Soviet leader. In view of the proximity of the views of the ruling elite and the left-nationalist opposition on Stalin, we will operate with the concept of “official ideology.”
The deep inconsistency of the official ideology was revealed in a very clear way in the treatment of the mass repressions that were directly related to Stalin. We will concentrate in this piece on the mass repressions because the public’s attitudes toward them clarify the ideological position of people much better than any other development ascribed to Stalin. The treatment of mass repressions even among Stalin’s apologists is far from being uniform. Some of them prefer to simply deny that the mass repressions occurred. Close to them are those who simply ignore the repressions as much as possible, reducing the narration of them to a few lines. Some of Stalin’s sympathizers found that a better way to achieve their goal was to justify the terror as necessary. Others recognize it, but hold everybody except for Stalin responsible. We labeled these deniers of the terror as “Stalin’s vulgar defenders,” while others are called “sophisticated apologists.” As a matter of fact, the handling of Stalin’s repressions in the dominant ideology is a perfect illustration of the complex technology of historical falsification.
Stalin’s vulgar advocates: The denial of mass repressions
The leading forces among Stalin’s vulgar defenders are the Communists and nationalists who influenced the official ideology’s attitude toward the repressions. Gennadii Ziuganov, the leader of the Communist Party, never mentioned the mass repressions. He said only that “there was some bitterness and difficulties” during Stalin’s time, but he did not elaborate on them. In 2005, he called for Stalin’s full rehabilitation and the revision of the decision of the 20^th Party Congress. “The name of Stalin, as Ziuganov declared, is tightly linked with the history of our country … in many respects it represents the 20^th century … during which the civilization moved several steps forward.” Pursuing the party line, the majority of Communist newspapers tend to avoid the issue of the mass repressions. Most Russian nationalists, such as Dmitrii Rogozin, also come up as Stalin’s vulgar defenders and deny the repressions.
Not only Communist and nationalist politicians try to deny or avoid the topic of repressions but also many historians. Yurii Zhukov is among the best known deniers of the repressions. He received a PhD in history and is currently a leading member of the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Science. Zhukov argues that during the time of the great threat to the Soviet Union from western spies and the party members who plotted against Stalin, repressions were used against traitors and criminals. Repressions against farmers and ordinary people were initiated by Stalin’s enemies. According to Zhukov and many other authors, the Stalinist system was the only appropriate one for the country during that era. The system led by Stalin assured a victory in WWII and turned Russia into a superpower.
The military historian Arsen Martirosian can compete with Zhukov in his denial of the mass terror. He is a professional military person and the author of many books on military-historical issues. He is an author of a five-volume publication called /200 myths about Stalin/, which aims at destroying anti-Stalin myths. The second volume of this series was called “Stalin and the Repressions of 1920-1930”; it mocked the “47 myths” about the repressions. For example, he tried to destroy “the myths” by stating that everywhere a cruel secret war against the USSR was going on, and 932,000 people were imprisoned for terrorism, plots, spying and border trespassing during the period 1921-1941.
Martirosian also uncovered “truths” about the repressions against generals who had been in the Gulag, saying that “only” 56 percent of them were killed or imprisoned afterwards, and 44 percent were reinstated. In his opinion, this was evidence that the punishments were well deserved. Like other authors, he talked about an elaborate plot of military commanders against Stalin and tried to prove the fairness of the punishment.
A third well-known vulgar defender of Stalin is Sigizmund Mironin. Mironin, a medical doctor by education, became disillusioned about the post-Soviet reforms, got interested in Soviet history, and became a journalist and essayist. Mironin used the term “so-called repressions” and described himself as another destroyer of the myths about Stalin. In his publications, Mironin tried to demolish “the myth” about the great famine in the Ukraine, “the myth” about “the Leningrad affair” when hundreds of local officials were executed in 1948, and “the myth” about the repressions against Soviet genetics in 1948. He also “de-masked” “the myth” about Stalin’s anti-Semitism and insisted that both the accusation against the participants of “the doctor plot,” which was aimed at killing Stalin (1951) and his colleagues, as well as the accusation lodged against the Jewish anti-fascist committee for its subversive anti-Soviet activities in 1948-1953 were well founded. He also insisted that the accusation against Stalin for the genocide of deported peoples was totally wrong. He argued that the repressions against different ethnic groups, such as Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Ingush, during WWII were deserved and justified, because many of them escaped from the Soviet Army, collaborated with the Nazis and even served in the German army.
The technology of denial
The deniers of the repressions elaborated a special technology for persuading the public that the mass terror was a myth, a fabricated lie and deception by the enemies of Russia. The major device was to ascribe the “myth of terror” to Khrushchev, whose motives were mean. The authors condemn Khrushchev for lying about Stalin at the 20^th party congress and starting anti-Stalin and anti-socialist campaigns that ultimately resulted in the break-up of the Soviet Union. They are convinced that Khrushchev wanted to increase his political power and secure his place by not telling the truth about Stalin. Sukhodeev, for instance, claims that Khrushchev’s address and his efforts to dismantle the cult of personality were motivated by his personal hatred of Stalin. Some authors also suggested that Khrushchev’s major motive in denouncing Stalin was as revenge for the execution of his son Leonid for a military crime during the war.**
Emelianov blamed Khrushchev for the repressions against pseudo-Trotskyites and for sending them to their death or to be tortured. The same authors also tried to discredit the accounts of Yakovlev, Radzinksy, Rybakov, Volkogonov and many other prominent liberal authors who described the mass repressions in detail.
Among the elements of the technology of falsification are the interviews with some pseudo-experts who deny the terror. Sigizmund Mironov, for example, cites Igor Pykhalov (a publicist, the creator of the project “For Stalin,” a computer programmer with a technical education and a communist) as an “expert on the repressions and deported peoples.” He is the author of /Great lies about war,/ in which he “reconsiders the meaning of the repressions.” Mironov uses an “expert,” P. Krasnov, in order to uncover the lies about the number of repressed people. Krasnov is an unknown writer of internet articles such as “Lies about golodomor” (the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s) and “Were there any repressions?”
This technology also supposed the use of evidence in favor of their approach, such as the written confessions of the repressed people to their tormentors (for instance, the testimony of Tukhachevsky). They side with people of similar pro-Stalin opinions (Martirosian, for instance) and cast away the myth that confessions were taken by force. As an argument, he cites German writer Leon Feuchtwanger’s /Moscow// 1937/ in which he described the show trials of the 1930s and commented that everything seemed natural and not staged by any means. The prisoners looked very healthy, well-dressed and taken care of.
Under the pretense of historical objectivity, the authors try to imbue their narrations with the emotional characteristics of historical figures and events. Another interesting factor is the style of these pro-Stalin books. They are written using very simple conversational language, so they can be easily read by poorly educated people. The authors use many non-standard slang words and idiomatic expressions, which are not appropriate for traditional scientific publications and often impossible to translate into English. For example, they call the authors who do not share their opinions, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, various insulting names, including “idiots” and “rotten liars.”
Silencing the repressions
Some of Stalin’s apologists distort the past simply by not mentioning the terror or saying only a few things about it. In a big article devoted to glorifying Stalin, two Russian nationalists, Alexander Eliseev and Egor Kholmogorov, did not say even one word about Stalin’s terror. The same disregard of his atrocities can be found in an article by Viktor Tiul’kin, the leader of the radical Russian Communist-Workers’ Party. Close to those who hush terror are those who reduce their descriptions of it to a few lines, as in the case of Bushkov.
These tactics have been used by many members of Putin’s ruling elite and by those journalists and scholars who openly serve them. Boris Gryzlov, the leader of the party “United Russia” and the speaker of the State Duma, praised Stalin in connection with the 125^th anniversary of his birth and recognized some “distortions” in his domestic policy. Gryzlov clearly reflects the position of the majority of the Duma’s deputies, as well as most bureaucrats.
A new high school history textbook by Alexander Filippov and Leonid Poliakov (/The newest history of Russia, 19452006/), which has been endorsed by the Kremlin, is another illustration of this tactic. Almost ignoring the repressions, the book refers to Stalin as “one of the most successful leaders in the USSR.” The book considers the repressions of 1937 and the creation of concentration camps as a way to develop the country after the crisisa necessary measure to build a great country and mobilize the administrative cadres. According to Filippov and Poliakov, Stalin’s “revolution from above” was similar to the reforms of Peter the Great and was based on the “responsibilities of all classes before the government.” They write that “this goal was achieved by political repressions among other means that were used for the mobilization of not only regular citizens but also the administrative elite.”
Vitalii Tretiakov, a known political observer and journalist, also chose this tactic. He suggested that before Putin there were only three great Russian leaders: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin. All these leaders, as Tretiakov wrote, belong to the same group, because the characteristics of their reigns included “victorious deeds, omnipresent power and an increase of Russia’s might and territories.” He said nothing about the repressions.
Stalin’s sophisticated defenders: Justification of repressions
It was relatively easy to hide the mass repressions from the public during Stalin’s time. The term “Ezhovshchina” (i.e., the terror ascribed to the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Ezhov), even if it was put into circulation by the Kremlin, was dangerous to mention publically. The short period during which the theme of the repressions was legal lasted only a few yearsbetween 1956 and 1964. However, after that and up to Perestroika this topic was taboo. It was forbidden, even in Encyclopedias, to say anything about the circumstances of the deaths of prominent people (politicians or scholars) who perished in the Gulag. But now information about the terror is accessible to everybody, which can be seen from public opinion surveys, as discussed later.
At the same time, those who decided not to deny the repressions relied on several other assumptions. First, they assumed that the value of human life in Russia has been quite low in the public mind. As noted by historian Gennadii Bordiugov, the war victory, with its gigantic number of victims, helped mitigate the memory of Stalin’s repressions. Second, with the lapse of time, the horror of tragic events gradually loses its grip on the human mind. Is it untrue that many nations are inclined to forget the terrible events in their histories, as suggested by Putin and his propagandists several times?
With these premises in mind, it would be possible to take a more “honest” position and avoid the absurdity of denying the repressions. One strategy includes the justification of the terror, while another ascribes the responsibility for the terror not to Stalin but to his adversaries.
* *
The repressions were justified
Those who belong to this group prefer not to deny the repressions but rather to justify them or to separate them from Stalin.
One of the most active defenders of Stalin who justifies the terror is Alexander Prokhanov. For him the repressions were a necessary condition for building a modern Russia that could confront the imminent danger from the West. In one of his articles in defense of Stalin’s repressions, Prokhanov talks about “the mobilizing project of 1937,” the year that symbolizes the repressions and “helped to preserve the Russian civilization in the 20^th century.” After Prokhanov, Stalin was totally right “when he destroyed the Trotskyites and the whole of Lenin’s guard, which, having seized the country, executed the civil war, and created the gigantic international power in order to create the international government in Europe.” Only with repressions, contends Prokhanov, was it possible to transform, “through total violence,” “the petit bourgeois and sleeping people” into “military legions,” which made victory in the war possible. All authors of his paper /Zavtra /cling to the same position: the repressions were horrible but necessary.
Several other authors share the same view as Prokhanov and his newspaper: the terror was necessary for the salvation of socialism and Russia. The justifiers of the terror differ from each other in their focus on the enemies, such the former dominant classes, foreign agents and Zionists, who could be considered legitimate targets of persecution. As the major enemies of the state, Vladimir Logunov, for instance, talks about the Trotskyists who were engaged in preparing plots to kill Stalin.
The repressions were wrong but it was not Stalin’s fault
After the deniers of the repressions and those who recognize them as justified, we come to the apologists of Stalin who are closest to the liberal viewpoint. They acknowledge the dreadfulness of the terror, but ascribe it other actors, not Stalin.
The first group of the accused includes those from Stalin’s milieu who escaped the attention of the great leader or who could temporarily outplay him. As a rule, all these people were later executed for their crimes against the Soviet people. Among them were the members of the old guard, such as Rudolf Eikhe, a member of the Politburo and party secretary of the West-Siberian region. He and other apparatchiks were the initiators of the terror and its executors. A special place among the guilty belongs to Nikolai Ezhov, whom Stalin was unable “to halt” during the time of Ezhov’s terror.
But it was, of course, Nikita Khrushchev who, with his anti-Stalinist campaign in 1956, became the pet culprit of the terror for Stalinists. They tried to discredit Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20^th congress about Stalin’s atrocities by emphasizing that Khrushchev took a very active part in them and was even guiltier than Stalin. Yurii Zhukov is a typical example of this sort of critique. He named Khrushchev “the most bloodthirsty official in the party.” According to Zhukov, in 1954, by Khrushchev’s recommendation, general-colonel Ivan Serov was promoted to the position of chief of the KGB and after a year he became an army general. Many historians believe, according to Zhukov, that Khrushchev asked Serov to remove all documents that incriminated him in the organization of mass repressions from the KGB archive. Another vulgar critic is Stanislav Kuzmin. He and Konstantin Zalesskii ascribed to Khrushchev, without direct evidence, various numbers of victims in Ukraine and Moscow, including the arrests of 35 of the 38 secretaries of the Moscow regional and city party committees. Another historian said that Khrushchev was the first secretary of the Ukrainian party in August 1939 when 2,386 families were deported from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Some authors who belong to this group suggested that Khrushchev initially wanted to release only apparatchiks from the Gulag and only later “was carried away by de-Stalinization.” **
Stalinist authors hold the victims themselves responsible for the terror in the country. They accuse them of voluntarily naming (often as part of a plot against the Soviet regime) hundreds of honest people as their accomplices. In this way, they multiplied the number of Gulag prisoners and stirred up the discontent of the population with the hope for a general uprising. According to Martirosian, one of the reasons for the great scope of repressions was the agreement of the anti-Stalin opposition to incriminate as many innocent people as possible in the case of arrests. Martirosian argued that 99.9 percent of arrested persons named innocent people as being involved in various crimes. For example, the famous actor Vsevolod Meierkhold, according to Martirosian, named more than 100 people that were later arrested.
Stalin as a victim
Along with the crass denial of Stalin’s responsibility for the repressions, his many apologists resorted to a device that would supposedly appeal to the compassion of the Russians. They declared that Stalin was a victim, because he was perfidiously murdered by the people whom he trusted. The murderers happened to be agents of the West or ambitious politicians who yearned for the dominance of the Kremlin. With this move, the focus in movies and books was shifted from the Gulag’s victims to the almost naïve leader, the martyr of the revolution.
The circumstances of Stalin’s death, of course, deserve attention. The famous book by Abdurakhman Avtorkhamov (/The puzzles of Stalin’s death/), written in West Germany in the 1970s, attracted the attention of serious researchers who almost unanimously rejected the theory of his murder. A few of Stalin’s admirers made the propagation of this theory their main business. Among them is Nikolai Dobriukha, the author of several publications on this subject.
The idea of Stalin’s violent death is advanced by media and movie directors close to the Kremlin. /Argumenty I Fakty, /a pro-Kremlin weekly newspaper, published the article “How they were murdered” on the eve of Stalin’s birthday in 2005. /Komsomol’skaia Pravda, /a newspaper with a pro-Kremlin orientation, published the/ /article “Stalin did not die from natural causes” on the eve of his birthday in December 2007. Pro-Stalin websites are full of articles by mostly obscure authors who have supposedly analyzed medical data that suggests that the poisoning of Stalin is a proven fact.
A major contribution to the spread of the theory of Stalin’s murder was made by Russian State TV. The TV series “Stalin, Live” (2007), evidently endorsed by the Kremlin, devoted two of its parts to convincing viewers that Stalin was a victim of a well-elaborated plot headed by Beria and Khrushchev, who were both connected with the West. This TV show was followed by a documentary, “How they murdered Stalin” (Sergei Kostin, 2008), which was based on Dobriukha’s book with the same title.
Putin: Stalin and the repressions
When Putin was president, his position toward the mass repressions and Stalinism was a perfect example of an attempt to separate Stalin from the repressions. As a matter of fact, during the seven years of his stay in the Kremlin, Putin said almost nothing negative about Stalin when he talked inside the country. He used several occasions to mention Stalin in a positive light. He, for instance, cited Stalin as a leader who knew how to stimulate the activities of Soviet academics, which was necessary for industrialization. As president, he used many occasions to mention Stalin in a good light. Putin’s presidential website is full of materials that praise Stalin unconditionally. He talked about the bad things that happened in “Stalin’s time,” but never talked to a domestic audience about his responsibility for the atrocities. In his contact with foreigners, Putin also separated Stalin’s imperial and foreign policy, which he usually defended (Stalin’s role in the war in particular), from his domestic policy, which he labeled “dictatorial.” The restoration of such powerful symbols as the Stalinist hymn and the flag of the USSR in the army was, of course, a good sign of Putin’s attitude toward Stalin.
The first line of defense: The Soviet past is not worse than the past of other nations
As the imperial component of the official ideology demanded, Putin tried to restore respect for the Soviet past as much as possible without challenging common sense. His major thesis was that Stalin’s period reflected “the complex and controversial character of the history of my country.”
However, recognizing the ordeals of the Russian people under Stalin, Putin did his best to de-dramatize this period, suggesting that the histories of other nations were the same or even worse. He equated Stalin’s terror to any other negative development in history, such as the invasion of foreign countries or the dropping of nuclear bombs. Putin declared that Russia was not the only country with “black pages” in its history and highlighted the fact that the United States used the atom bomb on Japan and conventional bombing in Vietnam. He went on to insist, “We can’t allow people to force a sense of guilt on us. Let them think about themselves.” Giving an address at a conference in July 2007 before teachers in his countryside residence, Putin acknowledged that Stalin’s repressions of 1937 (1.5 million people were imprisoned and 700,000 were killed) were horrific, but he added that “so much worse things happened in other countries.” In defense of the repressions in the Soviet Union he said, “We did not have such black pages in our history as Nazism.”
The repressions without Stalin
Two years later, speaking in front of a Russian audience, Putin made the repressions a major theme in one of his speeches for the first time, even if he did not mention Stalin by name. On October 30, 2007, the Day of Remembering the Victims of Political Repressions was officially celebrated. Putin, along with the Moscow Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Aleksii II, came to the memorial ceremony in Butovo, a district in Moscow, where the mass killings had taken place. In his speech, which, according to many analysts, served as the first official evaluation of the repressions from the new Russian government, Putin acknowledged the fact that millions of people were victimized by the repressions during the years of terror. He called the period of mass repressions an “exceptional tragedy” for our country, which “took away the best members of our nation.”
The refusal of Putin to mention Stalin in his big declaration about the mass repressions drew the attention of the liberal media. As suggested by an author in /Novaya Gazeta, /the fact that the name of Stalin was not mentioned even once in the address of the president definitely tells us something about Putin’s view on Stalin’s responsibility for the repressions. Putin also gave his address almost one month after his administration approved the publishing of a history textbook in which Stalin was called “the best leader” in Soviet history.
Putin’s Stalin in his contact with foreigners: Stalin better than Hitler
One of the old Soviet traditions is to differentiate between domestic and foreign audiences. The substance of the programs and even the news on Moscow radio, which was broadcasted abroad, was very different from the content of the radio station “Maiak,” which addressed a domestic audience. A special press agency (“Agentsvo Pechati Novosti”) disseminated propagandistic materials among foreign media through its branches in 73 countries. As a rule, these texts were much more “free” in comparison with the articles of the Soviet newspapers.
Though it may seem strange even in the age of the Internet, Putin differentiated between two audiences (foreign and domestic) when he talked about Stalin. Perhaps, when addressing foreigners, Putin wanted to choose another position as a flexible and realistic politician and understood how awkward it would be for him to pretend that Stalin had nothing to do with the repressions. Talking to foreign audiences, Putin was much more outspoken about the repressions. He talked about the difficult and controversial period in Russian history and suggested that people should know and remember its lessons. Talking with German Prime Minister Schroder and journalists, Putin said “dictatorship and suppression of freedoms is a dead end for the country. Uncontrolled regimes of individual power inevitably lead to crimes. During Stalin’s time there were many crimes: political repressions, deportations of entire peoples.”
Talking with the American journalist Chris Wallace, Putin mentioned “the horror of Stalin’s camps,” terms that he never used in his communication with the Russians. In an interview with German TV on May 5, 2005, as well as at a press conference with foreign journalists on May 10, 2005 in Moscow, Putin condemned Stalin for his agreement with Hitler about the Baltic Republics in 1939, which helped the USSR “return this part of Europe under the wings of the Soviet Union.” At the same time, he did everything that a good Stalinist lawyer could have done to soften Stalin’s crimes. On the verge of the 60^th anniversary of the WWII victory, Putin recognized, in an interview with the German newspaper /Build,/ “Stalin’s crimes against his own people.” At the same time, he used an array of strategies to save Stalin’s reputation as much as possible. He, for instance, compared Stalin to Hitler, a device often used in court when a lawyer tries to suggest to the jury that his defendant is less ferocious than another criminal. Putin insisted that Stalin’s crimes against Russians were not comparable with those of Hitler. He said that it was wrong to equate Stalin and Hitler: “Stalin certainly was a tyrant and many call him a criminal, but he was never a Nazi. It was not a Soviet army that crossed German borders on June 22, 1941.”
The position of the Russian state
While Putin’s attitude toward the repressions (and Stalin’s responsibility for them) is quite ambivalent, the position of the state that he controlled in 2000-2008 was clearer. In the last years of Perestroika, the Kremlin was clearly poised to undertake actions that were similar to those of Germany and East European countries. However, these actions were reduced to publications about the repressions by Gorbachev’s aid Alexander Yakovlev. The attempts of Yeltsin’s regime to declare the Soviet Communist Party a criminal organization failed, as well as the attempts to sue the perpetrators of the mass terror in Soviet times. A proposal to study the Communist past of current officials (an idea that was implemented in Eastern Europe) was also rejected by the Kremlin. Putin’s Kremlin was even farther from Yeltsin’s leadership in terms of its intentions to officially condemn the terror and its perpetrators and to ask for forgiveness from its victims. In May 2008, the developments surrounding the law “About the rehabilitation of the victims of political repression” (a long-delayed concession to public opinion in the West and Russia) were quite typical for Putin’s regime. While providing the victims and their families with material compensation, the government and State Duma refused to recognize the moral responsibility of the state to the victims. Evgenii Bunimovich, a prominent Russian liberal, titled his article on this issue “Now Stalin has to be accepted by ‘Unity of Russia.’” In fact, the state is very passive in its activities aimed at the commemoration of Stalin’s victims.
Stalin in the conflicts among liberals
Contrary to common opinion, the Russian liberal opposition is divided on Stalin’s repressions. In fact, behind this division lie attitudes toward democracy in Russia and the Kremlin (active or passive participation in the opposition). Still, among liberals, the strongest group is made up of those who believe that the repressions have a Communist origin and that today Russia still has a chance to build a genuine democratic society. Those who hold a pessimistic view on the future of democracy tend to share the culturological vision of Stalin’s repressions, considering them “normal” from the perspective of long-term Russian traditions.
Structuralist (or anti-Communist) vision
Among liberal politicians, Grigorii Yavlinsky is the most consistent and fervent denouncer of Stalin and his Communist regime as being responsible for the terror. He reminds young people that the system of mass repressions, the slave labor of millions of innocent prisoners in concentration camps and the forced farm labor contributed to the economic development of Russia during Stalin’s period. State terror, according to Yavlinsky, was part of the economic mechanism in the country.
Yavlinsky calls the Stalinist government “state terrorism” a special brand of terrorism when the government undertakes a “purposeful, planned and methodically executed extermination of its own people. And most of all the best people: the most talented, independent thinkers, creative, open and honest.” He adds that their elimination on such a mass scale had irreversible consequences on the nation.
Another liberal, Irina Khakamada, also declared her belief that millions of innocent victims were too high a price to pay for the development of the country. Stalin’s political regime diminished the value of human life to nothing and this fact should never be forgotten.
Several liberal historians, in the 1990s and 2000s, took a clear anti-Communist stand on the repressions. A history textbook edited by the famous historian A. Sakharov contains a special section called “Great terror,” which ascribes all the responsibility for the mass terror to Stalin personally. The authors of the book, /Russia// in the 20th century/ (2005), a collection of historical documents, brought forward many archived materials that left no doubt about the scale of the repressions and Stalin’s responsibility for them. Several prominent scholars and writers took the same position. Among them Eduard Radzinsky stands out. His book, /Stalin,/ emphasizes Stalin’s personal involvement in the organization of the repressions. According to Radzinsky, Stalin gave orders to Yagoda and Ezhov and nothing happened without his command. Zhores and Roi Medvedev were also prominent in the analysis of the “terrorist machine” created by Stalin. They described the atrocities that were practiced by the NKVD. They spoke of the mechanisms of repressions and how widely torture was used. In /Neizvestnyi Stalin/ based on numerous accounts of survivors of the concentration camps and witnesses, the authors describe intricate interrogation mechanisms, involving torture and humiliations. They also talk about staged trial processes, and discuss the total physical elimination of the political opposition and thousands of bystanders, as well as fear and dictatorship in the country. Liberal authors agree that Stalin’s modernization was the result of paying too high of a price and that the millions of victims, the dictatorship and the terror cannot be justified by it.
In media, the most persistent defender of the anti-Communist perspective on Stalin’s mass repressions is /Novaya Gazeta,/ which regularly publishes materials about the mass terror. The newspaper works in close cooperation with the foundation /Memorial/, which considers the task of revealing the truth about Stalin’s atrocities as its main goal. Along with /Novaya Gazeta, /Nikolai Svanidze is an energetic liberal journalist and director of anti-Stalinist movies (we will talk about them later), who sees the mass repressions in the 1930s as an exclusively Communist phenomenon and Stalin as a leader who eliminated his opponents. He insists that the victims of the terror, if to include among them the victims of collectivization, were not so much apparatchiks, but ordinary Russian people. Arsenii Roginskii, the head of the /Memorial Society/, the newspaper /Novaya Gazeta/, and some other people tried to organize a monument or a museum devoted to the victims of the repressions and totalitarianism.
The culturological vision
The tendency to view Stalin and his repressions from a cultural perspective began developing in Russia and abroad in the mid 1990s when it became evident that the chance for true democracy in the next years was slim. A growing number of Russian scholars began to share the view that the failure of democracy is “normal” for the country, with its centuries-old authoritarian political culture. As a matter of fact, many Western experts on Russia, since the mid 1970s, also moved in the same direction and focused on Russian political culture.
With the vision of Russia as doomed to be authoritarian, the appearance of Stalin as another cruel leader in history should not be considered an extraordinary development. Moreover, Stalin, like many other totalitarian leaders, emerged as a response to the public’s call. The masses wanted such a ruler for the maintenance of order in the country. In his historical novel, with the symbolic title /Jupiter,/ Zorin (2002) described how Stalin resorted to mass terror because the Russians asked him to do so as a condition for their national survival. A famous liberal journalist Leonind Mlechin, in his analysis of Putin’s popularity, contends that it has the same roots as the love of Stalin by his contemporaries.
Another famous Russian liberal Dmitry Bykov, in his publications and talks in 2007 and 2008, consistently defended the thesis that the people were under the spell of authoritarian culture and that they are doomed to love a strong and aggressive leader. He even tried to prove that, in fact, Stalin was irrelevant to the terror because one half of the Russians were poised to exterminate the other half. The same views were dominant in the first years of the twentieth century in the novels of many authors such as Vladimir Sorokin.
The masses
The attitudes of the masses toward the repressions and Stalin were shaped by various factors. The ruling elite and the media under its control, which had deeply contradictory attitudes toward Stalin, had a crucial impact on the position of the masses toward the repressions and the role of Stalin. At the same time, during Perestroika and in the 1990s, when Stalin’s time was analyzed and described by media, movies and literature, many people received a great deal of information about Stalin’s atrocities. Even in the 2000s, liberals were able to continue their attacks against Stalin in some media and in TV movies. Several movies have been shown to big audiences on the most popular TV channels in the last two years: the 16 part /Children of Arbat/ (2004), about the terrible fate of young Muscovites in 1939-40, the 22 part /Moscow Saga/ (2004), about the life and tribulations of one family during Stalin’s times, and the 12 part /Lenin’s Will/ (2007), about life in Stalin’s concentration camps. The suffering of the Russians was at the center of these movies. The TV series /Historical Chronicles/ (2004-2007), by Nikolai Svanidze, a pro-Kremlin journalist with a liberal orientation, also described the rather unflattering image of Stalin and talked a lot about the repressions. The 40 episode TV movie /Stalin, Live/ (2007), which was evidently endorsed by the Kremlin, was treated unanimously by film critics as apologetic. But even this movie includes many scenes describing Stalin’s cruelty and his merciless terror. Several popular young Russian writers also took a clearly hostile position toward Stalin’s past. These authors included Viktor Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin and others.
As a result, with the gravitation of public opinion toward the position of the ruling elite, the public turned out to be, in the beginning of the 2000s, more critical of the Stalinist past than the official ideology.
The Russian public is much more resolute in its recognition of the mass repressions than the Kremlin and its ideologues. According to the Levada-Tsentr, 89 percent of those who responded to the question (19 percent did not respond) in August 2007 characterized the repressions as “a political crime which cannot be justified,” while 11 percent believed that “the repressions were politically necessary and justified by history.”
The overwhelming majority of the Russians believed in the innocence of the victims: 83 percent in one poll and 57 percent in another poll thought that innocent people went to prisons and concentration camps during Stalin’s rule. However, 20 percent considered the repressions necessary and said that Stalin was not guilty. What is more, answering the question, “What was the role of Stalin in the life of our country?”, 50 percent gave a positive assessment and 49 percent a negative one. In another poll, 62 percent of the respondents said that Stalin’s role in Russian history was positive (38 percent, negative) and the number of people who think that Stalin’s personality and his actions are purposefully “painted black” in today’s media is three times greater than those who think that Stalin’s actions are “sugarcoated.”
At the same time, Khrushchev’s contributions to the liberation of Russia and the rehabilitation of millions of victims of the repressions do not seem to be well recognized by ordinary people. The public tends to view Khrushchev as a weak leader who was unable to preserve the same level of geopolitical power for Russia that Stalin maintained. He is also seen as unsuccessful in improving the socio-economic conditions of Russia. Khrushchev ranks quite low (lower than Stain, Brezhnev and even Andropov) as a leader who “provided the best well-being to ordinary people.” He also does not come close to them in terms of “the leadership under which Russia was the most powerful state.”
Conclusion
Examining the views of different groups of contemporary Russians toward Stalin’s mass repressions showed a strong polarization of opinions among the elite and an extreme ambivalence of the views of the general public. Liberal political and cultural elite condemn the repressions and Stalin as the main perpetrator of the horrific crimes against his own people. Communist and nationalist political leaders, along with pro-Stalin communist pseudo-historian writers, shamelessly try to deny or diminish the impact of the repressions and glorify Stalin as a builder of a great country. The ruling elite are much closer to the Communists than to liberals. Their position is deeply contradictory. On one hand, the major element of this ideology is the glorification of the Soviet empire and a call for its restoration in one form or another. The ideology also praises private property and the market economy. While the first element demands the praise of Stalin, the second demands the condemnation of the repressions as a threat to the dominant class.
The general public is caught between these two positions. On the one hand, ordinary Russians do not deny that the repressions were carried out against innocent people and most blame Stalin for what happened. On the other hand, a majority consider Stalin’s role in history to be positive and believe that he was a great leader, under which Russia became a powerful state. Moreover, according to the polls, Stalin was ranked third (after Brezhnev and Andropov) on the issue of “providing the best well-being to ordinary people.”
By all accounts, the ambivalence toward Stalin will persist for a long time until the imperial complex stops playing such an important role in the public mind.
The author thanks Lubov Alievskaia-Shlapentokh for her valuable research contributions to the text.
The full text of this article will be published in _Russian History_, Part 3, 35, nos. 3-4 (2008).