http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=117714&d=1&m=1&y=2009
Thursday 1 January 2009 (05 Muharram 1430)
Stalin's place in Russian history
1 January 2009 Editorial
Russian TV viewers this week did not after all vote for Josef Stalin as
the greatest-ever of their countrymen but it was a close call. That honor went
to the mediaeval warrior Alexander Nevsky while Stalin was eased into third
place by the reforming 19th Century Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. For some
weeks, as the list was narrowed down from the original 500 candidates, the
former dictator was clearly in the lead. Indeed so desperate did the show's
producers become that they were actually begging viewers not to vote for Stalin.
It may well be the real vote was indeed actually for Stalin, but in the
Russian media a quiet word from the authorities generally produces any desired
result these days. Nevsky, immortalized in the 1942 film by Sergei Eisenstein,
triumphed. Stolypin certainly seems an odd second choice. Reformer he may have
been, but he was tough on early revolutionaries who did not recant. Until
recently, Russian school history books used to refer to the hangman's noose as
"Stolypin's neckties".
From the point of view of the Kremlin, Stalin's third place is a
satisfactory compromise between rejecting his bloody legacy outright and
recognizing he was nevertheless the strongman who led the Soviet Union to
victory against the Nazis in 1945 and left the Kremlin in imperial control of
large swathes of Eastern Europe.
When he was still president, in 2007 Vladimir Putin made the significant
gesture of honoring the victims of Stalin's terror at a memorial service
broadcast throughout the country. The estimates vary but at least 20 million
people were butchered by the NKVD during Stalin's purges or transported to the
gulag where they were starved or worked to death. It is hard to imagine how
such a monster dead for little more than half a century could ever hold a place
in his people's affections. That he does offers an insight into the Russian
mind.
To many it does not seem perverse to recognize Stalin's achievement in
moving on the Bolshevik revolution that Lenin started and establishing as a
political and military superpower with a vast, if not always entirely
efficient, industrial base behind it. That so many people were slaughtered,
often on the vaguest suspicion of being against the regime, is not something in
which many ordinary decent Russians take pride. But they take the view that if
Stalin thought it necessary, cruel and often wrong though the killings may have
been, they were acceptable in the wider scheme, first of a Russian defense
against a resolute German invader and secondly as part of the Russian
renaissance. Totalitarian Stalin's state may have been, but everyone had a roof
over their head, schooling for their children, health care and some sort of
job. That had hardly been true before the 1917 revolution.
Putin, now prime minister, would probably like to see himself as the same
sort of strong leader as Stalin but without the savagery. Had Stalin won this
major TV vote, it would have been an international embarrassment. Coming third
recognizes his nationalistic legacy, which Putin would never reject.
