Centers to commemorate Soviet Union leader Josef Stalin have been established in Russia.
According to the Telegraph, a leading newspaper in the United Kingdom (UK), two Stalin centers were established in Russia this year.
The first opened in July in the city of Bor in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in the Volga Federal District and the second in December in Barnaul, the capital of Altai Krai in the Siberian Federal District.
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“Stalin’s economy, politics and culture gave the whole world a development impetus,” Sergey Matasov, the Barnaul head of the Russian Communists (RK) party, said at the opening of the center on December 16.
RK was founded in 2012 as a left-wing alternative to the country’s main opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (RFKP). According to the Telegraph, the Stalinist party is using a Kremlin-determined opposition to split the RFKP’s vote.
The museums contain photographs, speeches, busts and trinkets of Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.
“Before this battle, Stalin united all Soviet countries,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said last year in a speech three days before ordering war on February 24, 2022, referring to the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany in 1941-1945.
Putin said Stalin had led the country well militarily in the war, but criticized his domestic policies as “dictatorial”.
Stephen Hall, who studies Russian politics at the University of Bath in the UK, recalled Putin’s characterization of the war in Ukraine as a “fight against neo-Nazism”:
They say they fought against the Nazis in Ukraine, like a 2.0 version of the Great Patriotic War. So Stalin being the man who defeated Nazism gives the regime a good image.
According to the US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE)20 there are 110 Stalin monuments in Russia. 37 of them were built after Putin was elected prime minister in 1999.
Opposition Russian oligarch Leonid Nevzlin wrote on the website of RFE’s Russian service in 2020, “Stalin is our everyday reality. The Putin regime has an ossified relationship with Stalin, Stalinists, Stalinism.”
Nevzlin fled Russia and settled in Israel after the 2003 investigation into Yukos, the oil company in which he was a partner.
