Is Stalin back?

[Milkaturtle]

Yesterday I watched an interesting movie called Stalin's Back (2009). The author of this movie was travelling across former SSRS (Stalin's hometown in Georgia, Moscow, Volgograd, Syberia..) in order to know what people think about Stalin these days. The truth was kinda schocking to me. People in Stalin's hometown were extremely glad when they saw a man who looked simmilar to Stalin, they wanted to shake his hand, said that they lived better when the communists were ruling the country and so on... Kids in school said that they think Stalin was a good person.

In Moscow the author found out that kids are learning from "positive history" textbooks in which there are barely no pages about Stalin's crimes against humanity, recessions, the great famine and so on...

As for me, this sounds like something from fantasy world, I don't think that people these days could seriously think that Stalin was a good person, a hero of nation who won against Hitler (though, yes, without help of Red Army, I doubt that US and UK would have defeated Hitler)...

So my question is: do really people still think that Stalin was a good person and is it really true about the 'positive history' textbooks in Russia?

[Emmi]

Of course some people think Stalin was a good person. If you begin to teach it at a young age or for many years, eventually people will just accept it as the truth, even though Stalin was a ******bag, jerk, dictator, murderer, etc.

I don't know if the "positive history" books are true, but when Stalin was dictator of the USSR (and if you study history and take the single-party states option you'll learn this if you study him) he tried very hard to convey himself as the "father of Russia." Stalin created a cult of personality around him as to where people thought he was a savior. Examples include having portraits commissioned of himself standing idyllically over a field or with children, rewriting history books to give himself a huge role in the 1917 November Russian Revolution (despite not taking a part), etc. Even peasants in the gulags would write letters to Stalin asking him to help them out, even though Stalin's NKVD and other related groups rounded up peasants and kulaks and sent them to the gulags themselves. So who knows, maybe in some little town in Georgia or in a rural area of Russia people still think this or perhaps some of these books survived.

Lol I still remember too much from history class.

Stalin paintings:

http://dimpost.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/roses_for_stalin_by_vladimirskij.jpg

http://www.lessing-photo.com/p3/401705/40170528.jpg

http://reo.trulynobleservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/joseph-stalin-propaganda-670.jpg

[Ezak]

This sounds like the cults that Hitler and to this day northkorea built up around themselves. Some history guys could fill in on the details on how cults like these forms and how it helps the leaders?

[Ann Vyshinsky]

I am from Russia, so I feel being competent enough to answer this question. 

 

There is a great variety of opinions in my country, especially concerning such controversial historical personalities and relatively recent historical events which affected almost every family in Russia. Therefore, there are both positive and negative views of Stalin... I have never seen the documentary, but judging from your description it does not represent a full picture because of either intentional or accidental selection bias. 

 

There are no propagandistic textbooks issued in Russia now, so I guess the problem is that the education system focuses on the exams performance rather than the understanding and lefts the students without any deep knowledge of history. The textbooks are of low quality, but they were probably not made with the intentions of brainwashing. Quite on the contrary, the government and some NGOs try to save the memory of the Great Terror, legally rehabilitate its victims and educate the newest generation.

 

The problem is that Stalin today is not as much as historical personality as he is a symbol, viewed as embodiment of order and therefore used by some politicians in order to pursue their own agendas, thus "inserted" in people's brains as the only real solution to the current problems (not of Russia only) such as bureaucracy (it does not really matter to them that the Stalinist state was a state of bureaucrats), corruption, economic crisis and etc. Perhaps that is why in that documentary people were so fascinated with the idea of Stalin coming back.

 

As for me, I am deeply in love with the Soviet legal history and want to pursue a career in academia, with criminal justice under Stalin as one of the main directions of my research. Thus, I reject both entirely positive and entirely negative approaches to Stalin's role and character and try to strive for the objective and balanced perspective. 

 

P.S. As for - 

 

 

(though, yes, without help of Red Army, I doubt that US and UK would have defeated Hitler)

In Soviet Russia we basically say it nearly otherwise!   In any case, Red Army's role was far from being a second-rate one.

Edited June 28, 2015 by Ann Vishinsky

[takeiteasy]

this film reminded me of a book "Look who's back" by Timur Vernes. It's a satirical novel in which Hitler wakes up in Germany in 2011 and he's given his own TV show. Also terrifying.