Stalin For Time

Russia’s mustachioed, murderous despot is more popular than ever, thanks to Putin.

- Alexander Nazaryan

IN THE Soviet Union of my youth, Josef Stalin was invisible. His predecessor in the Kremlin, Vladimir Lenin, was everywhere, from the pins on our school uniforms to the statues or busts that seemed to adorn every public space. In those statues, his arm was always raised, palm outstretched, exhorting us toward the glorious socialist future. My native city had decided that Lenin superseded Peter the Apostle in world historical import, so St. Petersburg became Leningrad. Stalin once had his own city—Stalingrad, the site of a ferocious World War II battle—but after the mustachioed despot’s myriad sins were exposed, the city reverted to Volgograd in 1961.

Stalin’s fall from grace was the doing of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who’d denounced him in a secret 1956 speech, railing against Stalin’s “glaring violations of revolutionary legality” and, more ominously, his practice of “physical annihilation,” perhaps a reference to the people killed in his purges and terrors, as many as 30 million.

Activist and journalist Masha Gessen, who grew up in Moscow during the 1970s, says, “I learned absolutely nothing in school [about Stalin]. Nothing. It’s like he didn’t exist. The whole Stalin era had just disappeared.”

And now it’s back. Earlier this summer, Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, visited the city of Samara, in southern Russia. There, on the banks of Volga River, sits the bunker constructed for Stalin in 1942, when it looked as if the Soviet Union could fall to the Wehrmacht’s eastward advance. The bunker’s existence was not revealed until 1991; today, it is a prime example of Soviet kitsch, in all its terrifying glory. “Loved the red strobe lights/alarms that went off to recreate the feeling of an emergency as you go into the bunker,” wrote one user on TripAdvisor.