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KEN LIVINGSTONE has recently set the cat among the pigeons by suggesting that Joseph Stalin the Soviet dictator was not all bad. His crimes and aggressions much exaggerated. Ken is evidently at one with Anatoly Utkin, a former director of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the editor of a teachers‘ manual on modern Russian history, who went so far as to compare Joseph Stalin’s erudition to the tardy efforts of those in the West: “Can you tell me”, Utkin asked in 2008, “of any other leader, an American president, for example, who read 10,000 books?” Utkin was drawing attention to the fact that Stalin, when he wasn’t initialling lists of people to be shot, got through at least one book every day between 1924 and 1953.
Vladimir Putin is also backing the drift towards a revision of Stalin’s record with regard to both his victory over Hitler, and the industrialisation of the country during the nineteen thirties. Putin, despite much evidence to the contrary, favourably contrasts Joseph Stalin’s centralism to the dastardly ‘federalism’ of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, which he thinks explains the fragmentation of the Russian empire. It seems that Stalin, despite many errors and at times, excessive severity, ensured that Russian workers and peasants made the sacrifices necessary for the founding of modern industry and the consolidation of a great state.
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