Tag Archives: Joseph Stalin

Paul Robinson shows how the attempt to create a "Putin is rehabilitating Stalin" meme is based on reaching and is clearly an exercise in propaganda.Robinson makes the point that celebrating Stalin as the victor in WWII and revering his leadership as Russia's savior from a dire future under the Reich does not imply condoning his other excesses.I would add that the US founding fathers are also celebrated and revered even though some of them, George Washington, for example, were slave-owners,...

Professor Cohen puts to bed the charge that Vladimir Putin is a Stalinist, a crypto-Stalinist, or is trying to rehabilitate Stalin.   I would compare the Russian attitudes — there is a wide range of it — to American attitudes and now raging controversies about people formerly regarded as American heroes over their connection with slavery. This is epitomized in the demand to remove stature of Confederate heroes and it is also reflected in the controversy over slave ownership by the...

At the opening ceremony, Mr Putin said: "An unequivocal and clear assessment of the repression will help to prevent it being repeated." "This terrible past must not be erased from our national memory and cannot be justified by anything." BBC NewsWall of Grief: Putin opens first Soviet victims memorialSee also Yesterday (30 October), Vladimir Putin attended the unveiling of the ‘Wall of Grief’, a monument erected in Moscow to the victims of communist repression. This is the third major such...

Much Western media and many observers of Russian politics are fond of playing up an ostensible revival of Stalin – his ‘rehabilitation’ as it were – under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule. This is not just inaccurate — as I have written in the past, the Putin era has seen numerous anti-Stalinist and non-Stalinist state-funded projects including mass audience films, television serials, museums and monuments — but it dangerously distorts our understanding of contemporary Russia....