Stalin Lives

A Statue for Stalin?

Long live Joseph Stalin.

That's not what Joe Stalin says.

I mean, Stalin lived too long.

What do you think Stalin did to Trotsky?

They weren't leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, or Roosevelt.

So, why is Stalin seen as relatively more acceptable than Hitler?

In the extensive annals of eavesdropping, all of this is something new. Not even Stalin wiretapped the dead.

But it would be a mistake to see this public recognition of Stalin as a real yearning for every aspect of the system he created. Instead, acknowledging Stalin is a way for Russians to recall a time of great deeds and perhaps even greater sacrifices.

In the United States, there is a bust of Stalin at the National D Day Memorial in Virginia. In New York, I recently dined at a Russian restaurant that featured Soviet paraphernalia, waitresses in Soviet uniforms, and a painting of Soviet leaders in which Stalin was prominent.

Maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs, but Stalin was a paranoid man, even more than my father.

When Stalin signed the Molotov Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, it gave him an opportunity to invade Poland.

But it is still obvious that the entire party knew who Stalin was. When they entrusted him with responsibility for convening the constituent assembly, the Bolsheviks knew what they wanted to do with the constituent assembly, because they knew Stalin as a person who would not stop at anything.

2.5 The author apos s mother and grandmother were released in August 1953, following an amnesty decreed after the death of Stalin.

Bolshevism, like capitalism, was internationalist, at least in theory. (Joseph Stalin was actually a Soviet nationalist who also denounced Jews as rootless cosmopolitans.)

In 1961, the mummy of Stalin was observed striding out of the Mausoleum in Red Square. Lenin's corpse remains there, but his departure is expected.

But the proposals ran into outright opposition from Joseph Stalin, who would accept no limit to the Soviet Union s ability to develop its own nuclear weapons.

Will Putin, like Stalin, unleash his own great terror, and murderously pursue supposed adversaries? Or will Nemtsov's death finally move complacent and obedient Russians to action?

To paraphrase Stalin The intentional killing of one person is murder, but that of a hundred, a thousand, or a million is merely a grim statistic.

PRINCETON Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators who committed murder on a vast scale. But, while it is impossible to imagine a Hitler statue in Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany, statues of Stalin have been restored in towns across Georgia (his birthplace), and another is to be erected in Moscow as part of a commemoration of all Soviet leaders.

These were publicly reported and discussed on TV and radio. Stalin s body was removed from Red Square, Stalin monuments were destroyed, and cities restored their original Soviet names.

The Katyn massacre was a direct result, with Stalin ordering the mass murder of Poland s elite in order to decapitate Polish society and thus make it more pliable.

Asked about Moscow s plans for a statue of Stalin, he pointed to Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentarian side in the seventeenth century English Civil War, and asked What s the real difference between Cromwell and Stalin? He then answered his own question None whatsoever, and went on to describe Cromwell as a cunning fellow who played a very ambiguous role in Britain s history.

Putin s own game of prime ministerial musical chairs does not reflect a desire to secure for himself a quiet position behind the scenes while someone else rules, for he knows all too well that the path from the Kremlin leads only to inner exile and the grave. Stalin replaced the dying Lenin, Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Brezhnev banished Khrushchev to his dacha, and Gorbachev buried Chernenko.

Because the Polish leaders refused to exonerate the Russians, Stalin accused the Poles of collaborating with the Germans in trying to shift the blame for Nazi crimes onto Russians.

Both ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians view the tenth century feudal state known as Kyiv Rus very favorably. Moreover, both groups share the seventeenth century Cossack warrior Bohdan Khmelnytskyi as their most popular historical figure, and both revile Stalin due to the famines caused by his forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1930's (whereas most ethnic Russians in Russia view Stalin as the heroic state savior of WWII).

This led some, like Sartre, to defend Stalin and the Gulag others, like André Malraux, formed part of Charles de Gaulle s government and still others, somewhat later, became unconditional defenders of Israel and its policies.

Stalin, Franco, Tito, Mao all were mostly alike in their means and methods. How they passed from the scene, however, was often very different, and these differences can shape societies for years and decades to come.

Joseph Stalin once dismissed the relevance of soft power by asking, How many troops does the Pope have? Today, many self styled realists dismiss the United Nations as powerless, and argue that it can be ignored.

At other times, like Stalin, he believes that Russia s power requires a strong hand what he calls his dictatorship of law. The problem, as Khodorkovsky s conviction demonstrated, is that dictatorship usually seems to be trumping law.

On March 9, 1953, from the Gulf of Finland to the Bering Sea, everything stood still likewise in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin. In Beijing, Mao Zedong himself bowed low before an immense effigy of Joseph Stalin.

In response to the claim that Nagorno Karabakh had never formed part of Azerbaijan but had been forcibly annexed by Stalin, he stated that Karabakh had always been part of historical Azerbaijan and had been populated by Azerbaijanis.

From NATO enlargement to the grant of independence to Kosovo, we have deliberately ignored your sensitivities and your interests. Let s sit down together like Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta and redesign a twenty first century map of Europe.

Initially, Khrushchev didn t plan to keep his denunciation of Stalin a secret. Five days after the Congress, his speech was sent to all the leaders of the socialist countries and read at local party meetings across the Soviet Union.

Various studies show that tall men are often favored, and that corporate CEOs are taller than average. But some of the most powerful leaders in history, such as Napoleon, Stalin, and Deng Xiaoping were little over five feet tall.

But many people in the political elite and military circles were enraged by Khrushchev s revelations. This incited many attempts to rehabilitate Stalin, especially during the 20 years of Leonid Brezhnev s rule, which we now call the period of stagnation.

Russia was a concern for Japan even before President Vladimir Putin unleashed his armed forces on Ukraine. The Kremlin has maintained Russia s illegal occupation of Japanese islands our Northern Territories seized by Stalin after Japan s surrender in the Pacific War.

China today is a contradiction. The tensions between its increasingly open economy and its still closed political system and institutions (established during the Stalin era in the 1950's) make China the most conflicted nation of consequence in the world today.

It remains true that Stalin led his country to victory in war, and to a position of global power that it had not held before and from which it has since fallen. Hitler, by contrast, left his country shattered, occupied, and divided.

People identify with their country and look up to those who led it when it was at its most powerful. That may explain why Muscovites are more willing to accept a statue of Stalin than Berliners would be to have one of Hitler.

Of course, history is replete with examples of autocrats perverting justice Stalin had his Moscow Trials, and Hitler had his People s Court. But the authority of those dictators did not rest primarily on the rule of law that of their modern counterparts does.

During the twentieth century, we witnessed the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides, and even though the twenty first century is only seven years old, we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur and the daily horrors of Iraq.

Nazi propaganda blamed Jews for everything Germany s defeat in World War I, universal moral values that prevented the Aryan race from exerting its superiority, and both communism and capitalism. Ukrainians were accused of being Polish spies, kulaks, Trotskyites, and whatever else Stalin could invent.

If one imagines a deviant group in some society gaining access to biological or nuclear materials, it is possible terrorists could destroy millions of lives. To kill so many people in the 20th century, a Hitler or Stalin required the apparatus of a totalitarian government.