At Stalin’s death Ustinov had been Minister for Armaments, Gromyko had been ambassador to the United Kingdom and Tikhonov the Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy.
The idea of rehabilitation came to nothing because Gorbachev, who had avoided saying anything about Stalin in the Politburo, became Party General Secretary in March 1985. The movement quickened to reseat Stalin on the bench of the accused. The massive scale of his abuses, which had been only partially revealed under Khrushchev, was described. The ‘administrative-command system’ established by Stalin was denounced. Films, novels and poems as well as historical works pointed in the same direction. Gorbachev encouraged the intelligentsia to convince society that total repudiation of the Stalinist legacy was vital for the regeneration of Soviet society. The process slipped out of his control as several critics of Stalin insisted that Lenin too was guilty of fundamental abuses. They traced the administrative-command system to the origins of the USSR. Yet this same openness of discussion also allowed some intellectuals to offer praise for Stalin. His role in securing industrialisation in the 1930s and then victory in the Second World War was repeatedly proclaimed.
Yet there was no going back. Gorbachev went on to castigate Stalin as one of history’s greatest criminals. When the USSR fell apart at the end of 1991 and the Russian Federation became a separate state, Boris Yeltsin continued the damnation of Stalin — and, unlike Gorbachev, he rejected Lenin and Stalin in equal measure. So things lasted until 2000 when Vladimir Putin became President. Putin’s grandfather had worked in the kitchens for Lenin and Stalin. President Putin was averse to hearing about the abuses of power in the 1930s and 1940s; instead he wished to praise the achievements of the Soviet state in those decades.12 ‘Denigration’ of the past was frowned upon again. Putin, in a symbolic gesture, restored the old USSR national anthem, albeit with new words. He spoke fondly of his own early career in the KGB, the successor organ to Stalin’s security police agency.13 It was not Putin’s purpose to rehabilitate Stalin but rather to affirm the continuities linking the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This process, though, relieved Stalin’s shade from torment for the first time since the late 1980s. Putin was relegating him to the status of a historical figure and leaving it to the scholars to battle out their verdict. This was the ultimate indignity for the long-dead dictator. So long as he was being posthumously denounced, he remained a living force in Moscow politics. Stalin suffered the ignominy of official neglect.
He was not forgotten, however, in society. Despite the revelations about his despotism, a residual nostalgia remained for Stalin and his period of rule. Surveys of popular opinion in 2000 confirmed this. When asked which period of twentieth-century history they regarded with greatest admiration, most respondents chose the Brezhnev years. Khrush-chev’s rule attracted the approval of 30 per cent. The Revolution gained 28 and Nicholas II’s reign 18 per cent. Yet Stalin’s despotism, with 26 per cent, did not do badly. Adverse opinion about the despotism was still higher at 48 per cent, but the fact that over a quarter of respondents rejected the case against Stalinist rule was depressing to those in Russian public affairs who aspired to a transformation of social attitudes.14 Not everyone was kindly towards his memory. Families existed whose members solemnly toasted the health of ‘the American doctor’ Cheyne-Stokes on each anniversary of Stalin’s death. They were recalling the fatal breathing problem diagnosed at Blizhnyaya in March 1953. (In fact there had been two doctors, Cheyne and Stokes, and they were not Americans but Irishmen.)15 Indeed millions of Soviet citizens regularly spat on his memory while the politicians switched between public semi-denunciation and, at least in many cases, private admiration.
Abroad the decline in his reputation was precipitate and near-universal. The communist order collapsed in eastern Europe in 1989 and in every country no one could speak or write in defence of Stalin without incurring massive public displeasure. In the West most communist parties had long ago disavowed Stalinism. ‘Eurocommunism’ in Italy and Spain had been critical of both Lenin and Stalin since the 1970s. Western communist parties anyway fell apart with the dismantling of the USSR and it was no longer a matter of much interest what they thought about the Stalin period. Even in the People’s Republic of China, where a general respect for Stalin was formally maintained, spokesmen stressed the difficulties he had caused for China’s particular interests. In only one little country were many admirers of Stalin widely to be found. This was in his native Georgia, which regained its independence at New Year 1992. Georgians frequently forgot his maltreatment of their forebears. He was celebrated as a Georgian of worldwide fame who had tamed the Russians and given them a lesson in statecraft — and this was enough to save him from execration. Both his statues and the shrine of his childhood house stand untouched and venerated in Gori. Surviving relatives, especially grandchildren who did not know him personally, tend his cult. Georgia’s veteran communists praise his memory.
This is not a unique fate for homicidal leaders. Genghis Khan is revered in Mongolia. Hitler has admirers in Germany and other countries (including even Russia). People remember what they want in the circumstances in which they do the remembering; they always select and often invent their memories. In Stalin’s case those who think fondly of him — at least many of them — are reacting against the contempt shown towards the achievements of themselves or their parents before 1953. Like Putin, they want to remove the taint on the name of their families. They are also reacting against the unpleasantness of their situation in Russia after communism. They feel that Stalin gave them pride, order and predictability; they overlook the fact that his rule was characterised by systematic oppression. His era has become a reassuring fiction for those individuals and groups who seek a myth for life in the present. Even many persons whose forebears were shot or imprisoned on Stalin’s orders have taken comfort in fairy stories about a ruler who made a few mistakes but usually got the basic direction of state policy right.
This is evident to anyone who visits Moscow. Down from Red Square by the side of the Manege there is a building which used to be the Lenin Museum. In the early 1990s it became a favourite gathering place for assorted kinds of Stalinist. Passers-by could listen to elderly Russians denouncing everything that had happened in the country since 1953. Individuals sold newspapers rejecting the entire course of history from Khrushchev to Yeltsin. (Mingling with the Stalinists were still odder individuals advertising herbal cures for AIDS.) Their ideas were a jumble. The Stalinists hate Jews, freemasons and Americans. They support Russian nationalism while advocating the restoration of a multinational state. They hymn social sacrifice. They are a pathetic bunch, steeped in nostalgia, and the police refrain from arresting them even though their wild statements contravene the Russian 1993 Constitution.
The authorities have acted as if they assume that the reverence for Stalin will fade as the older generation dies off. Yet what will count in popular opinion is the degree of success attained by the Russian government in improving the living conditions of most citizens. Such amelioration seems far off. Wages are low and the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy minority known as the ‘new Russians’ earns deep resentment. Moscow flourishes while most cities and nearly all villages languish. About a third of society subsists below the UN- recognised poverty level. The political and economic elites have no strategy to effect a rapid transformation whereas parties of the far right and far left argue that simple solutions do indeed exist. Both Vladimir Zhirinovski’s Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation under Gennadi Zyuganov have invoked the name of Stalin as a figure who did the country proud in his day. They contend that but for him the USSR would not have become an industrial and military power capable of defeating Hitler’s Germany. Neither party has won a majority at elections to the Presidency or the State Duma; and although nostalgia for Stalin persists, most Russians abhor the prospect of a return to violent politics. Until Russian society becomes materially more comfortable, however, the menacing icon of Joseph Stalin will be waved in banners raised by extremist politicians.
He continues to stir up controversy in Russia. Stalin bequeathed a consolidated system of rule to his successors. Personally he had remained devoted to Lenin and his rule had conserved and reinforced the Leninist regime. The one-party state established by the Bolsheviks within months of the October Revolution stayed firmly in place. The exclusion of alternative ideologies from public life was strengthened. The instruments of dictatorship, terror and a politicised judiciary were oiled and sharpened, and society and economy continued to be treated as a resource to be mobilised at the Kremlin’s command. The state’s economic control, substantial since the Civil War,
