Stalin makes a comeback in Putin's wartime crackdown on dissent
With President Vladimir Putin tightening the screws of repression as his invasion of Ukraine drags on, the Soviet dictator is making a comeback as a victorious World War II leader rather than the man responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens. Russia's Communist Party, still the second-largest in the parliament, voted this month to press for full political rehabilitation of Stalin, who's shown flanked by children offering flowers and gratitude in the metro station sculpture unveiled in May.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, is reviving Soviet-era practices of censorship and prison sentences to suppress dissent and present Russian society as united behind Putin and the war. Polls suggest it's working, too.
Amid regular drone attacks, airport closures and internet outages, a growing number of Russians express support for Putin and satisfaction with the economic and political situation in the country despite the war and international sanctions. Those who are opposed are largely keeping quiet.
"This is Putin's stability 2.0,' said Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center pollster, who drew parallels with the public mood around 2007, when rising oil prices boosted incomes and ushered in a period of optimism under Putin after the turmoil of the Soviet Union's collapse.
Levada's most recent surveys in June showed 70% of Russians believed the country is headed in the right direction with only 17% opposed. Putin's approval rating was 86%.
A sense of fear reaches into parts of the Russian elite, too, amid intensifying pressure from Putin's security services in a purge of corruption. The apparent suicide of Transport Minister Roman Starovoit on July 7, hours after he was dismissed by Putin, shocked many top officials, who worry they may be next to face scrutiny and threats of arrest, according to two people close to the government, asking not to be identified because the matter is sensitive.
Putin gave no explanation for removing Starovoit, who became transport minister in May last year after serving five years as governor of Russia's Kursk border region. But Russian media reported that he was about to be implicated in an embezzlement case linked to defense spending in the Kursk region following the surprise incursion by Ukrainian forces in August last year.
"Starovoit is a victim of purges and intra-elite repression,' which is gradually increasing in Russia, said Alexander Baunov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Berlin Center.
Still, Russian officials are embracing the legacy of Stalin, whose personality cult was dismantled by Soviet leaders in the 1960s. Putin signed an order April 29 renaming Volgograd's airport as Stalingrad in honor of the WWII battle in the southern Russian city, after the local governor said veterans including from the war in Ukraine had made the request.
"Their word is law for me,' the president replied.
North of Moscow, Vologda region Gov. Georgy Filimonov told a cheering crowd that Stalin was "one of the greatest figures in the history of our country,' as he unveiled a statue to him in December. "Yes, there were undoubtedly tragedies but there were also advances, there was a great victory, there were great achievements,' he said.
Russians named Stalin the "most outstanding' figure of all time in a Levada survey in April, with 42% choosing the Soviet leader, a figure that was just 12% in 1989. Putin ranked second with 31%, double the level in 2021 before he ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
"Stalin is now associated with order, not evil,' said Alexandra Arkhipova, an anthropologist and researcher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. "He's seen as a manager who built the country.'
While Putin's the longest serving Kremlin ruler since Stalin, Russia's hardly alone in taking ideological inspiration from deceased political forebears. President Xi Jinping has leaned on Mao Zedong's legacy to bolster his position as China's most powerful leader in decades.
Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the MMK Iron and Steel Works in Magnitogorsk on July 16. |
Getty Images / via Bloomberg
Russia's "foreign agent' law is one of many the Kremlin uses to suppress criticism. It now ensnares more than 1,000 organizations and individuals who must tag their work with a "foreign agent' label and risk prosecution for breaching stringent reporting rules on their activities.
Russia has also declared more than 200 foreign organizations including Yale University, Amnesty International, the British Council and the Elton John AIDS Foundation as "undesirable,' forcing them to cease activities in the country.
Laws against "extremism' and "discrediting' the Russian military target anything from peaceful political expression to posts on social media.
Playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and director Yevgenia Berkovich were convicted of "justifying terrorism' and sentenced to six years in 2024 for a play that explored the stories of Russian women lured by ISIS recruiters. The drama won two Golden Mask awards, Russia's most prestigious theater prize, two years earlier.
Nearly 3,000 people faced prosecution for political reasons last year and more than 1,400 were in prison, up 25% on 2023, according to a report by the OVD-Info monitoring group.
A Kremlin-affiliated department oversees ideological conformity in the cultural sphere. Artists who criticize the war are blacklisted, losing access to venues unless they publicly recant.
Books by writers who left Russia and opposed the war were initially sold wrapped in plain paper and hidden on inconspicuous shelves, only to disappear entirely once their authors were declared extremists.
Under pressure from security services, publishers have withdrawn and destroyed books deemed "unauthorized.' Criminal cases have been opened against staff at one of the country's largest publishers for "recruiting for extremist activities.' That can mean anything from anti-war literature to books that mention LGBTQ+ themes.
There's "a form of self-censorship,' said Moscow-based political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov. "Modern Russian authorities have gone further than Soviet ones. Back then, censorship was mostly preventive. Now, they jail people retroactively.'
Former Russian Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi argued for a return to Soviet-style censorship by "thousands of enlightened servants of the state,' in a July 1 article in the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper. "It would be much more honest to return to censorship,' he wrote.
The State Duma voted last week to fine people who search for "extremist' material online, aiming at consumers of information for the first time rather than producers. While Russia has already throttled access to many popular social media platforms, some lawmakers questioned how the new law could be implemented.
"It is proposed to punish thought crime,' said Alexei Kurinny, a Communist deputy. "We're implementing, it would seem, the most absurd versions of dystopia.'
The Stalin-era practice of informing has returned, too, as a growing number of Russians write denunciations accusing fellow citizens.
Nadezhda Buyanova, a 68-year-old Moscow pediatrician, was sentenced to five and a half years in November after a war widow complained that she'd criticized the assault on Ukraine. A saxophonist from Samara was jailed for six years in February for posts he wrote on Facebook, while a Russian who helped Ukrainian refugees was sentenced to 22 years for treason and aiding terrorism by a military court in Belgorod last month.
Russian courts have heard 694 criminal cases of treason and espionage involving 756 people since the war started, according to Kirill Porubets, an analyst with legal watchdog First Department.
Much of Russian society remains passive, Levada's Volkov noted. Restrictions are visible primarily to a small urban elite, and most people believe the crackdowns don't affect them, he said.
"The modern pattern of repression is random,' and people aren't targeted for belonging to a social group as they were under Stalinism, said Arkhipova, the anthropologist.
"Russia now has an information autocracy, not the totalitarian regime of Stalin,' she said.
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