Joseph Stalin will soon have a life-size statue of his own in northwestern Russia, with the local governor saying the Soviet-era dictator will be commemorated for his “great achievements.”
“The decision was prompted by requests from the public. There was a demand,” Georgy Filimonov, governor of the Vologda region, announced in a Telegram message on Friday. The monument is nearly complete and will be installed at the Vologda Exile Museum where Stalin lived briefly in exile as a political prisoner from December 1911 to February 1912, Filimonov wrote.
Stalin reigned over the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953, presiding over a regime characterized by political repression, ethnic cleansing, famine, and disease. Tens of millions of Russians died as a result of Stalin’s policies, though death-toll estimates vary widely. Three years after his death, Stalin’s legacy was denounced by his second successor Nikita Khrushchev.
Filimonov, however, paints Stalin’s crimes against humanity as an “ambiguous interpretation” and hails him as a leader with “great achievements.” The governor says Russian citizens should know their country’s history and “honor and be proud of it.”
“Our history is a single and indivisible chain of interconnected, interlocking links of the historical process, each of which has shaped the strength, spirit and will of our great nation,” he said.
The Russian statesman also announced plans to unveil a statue for Ivan the Terrible, who killed tens of thousands of people as the infamous tsar of Russia during the 16th century.
“The installation of a monument to Ivan Vasilyevich is more than logical in Vologda,” Filimonov added, “because the figure of Ivan the Terrible is inextricably linked with Vologda and the history of our region.”
Russia legitimized Stalin’s crimes by removing at least two monuments honoring the memory of his victims from Russian-controlled Ukrainian territories in July. One monument was dedicated to the victims of Stalin’s Great Purge, and the other was dedicated to the victims of the Holodomor — the Soviet-made famine that killed between 3.5 and 7 million people from 1932 to 1933.
Without praising the Soviet dictator’s totalitarian rule, Russian president Vladimir Putin has said historical criticism of Stalin was being used to attack Russia.
“It seems to me that the excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways, one of the paths of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia,” Putin said in a 2017 Showtime interview with American filmmaker Oliver Stone. “To show that today’s Russia bears some birthmarks of Stalinism. We all bear some birthmarks, so what?”