No longer allowed to criticize Stalin: It is Russophobia

Ria Novosti  

Russians are no longer allowed to criticize Stalin: "Russophobia" 

Of: 

Joachim Kerpner  

Published: Less than 3 hours ago  

NEWS  

It is now Russophobic to criticize Stalin, according to Russian state propaganda. 

- Stalin will help us to win, writes the news agency Ria Novosti. 

At the same time, the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Hungarian Revolt in 1956 were deleted from general history education.  

On the 70th anniversary of the death of the Soviet communist dictator Josef Stalins in March 1953, the state-run Russian news agency Ria Novosti published an artikel in which his importance to the world was greatly inflated:  

- Two images of Stalin stand against each other: we see him as the victor, the creator of a strong and just great power and a new world order - the West sees him as a tyrant against his own people and an oppressor of half the people of Europe. The fate of not only Russia, but the future of Europe and the rest of the world depends on which image of Stalin wins, the article says.  

Indeed, Ria Novosti believes that Khrushchev was right to condemn Stalin's repression in 1956, which cost the lives of millions of citizens. But under Mikhail Gorbachev, criticism of Stalin went too far, according to Ria Novosti: 

- Then he was made a "second Hitler". It is difficult to exaggerate how much the anti-Stalin campaign contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the article says.  

Ria Novosti believes that Stalin has been "rehabilitated from below" and that a majority of the Russian people now consider him to be the most popular historical figure. 

The title of Ria Novosti's article reads: "Not just history - Stalin has become a weapon in the struggle between Russia and the West" Photo: Ria Novosti 

60 percent positive for Stalin  

This is confirmed by the Russian, independent opinion institute Levada, which in its surveys concluded that over 60 percent of Russians are positive about Stalin. But according to sociologist Lev Gudkov, Levada's head of research, the numbers do not show how popular the person Joseph Stalin is, but rather how popular the myth of Stalin is. And it is a myth created by the political propaganda under Putin, he states in a comment to the site Rtvi.

In Ria Novosti's article, the people's positive image of Stalin is taken as a profit so that he will no longer be exposed to criticism: 

- It would not only be imprudent, but also dangerous, indeed practically pure suicide, to fight against his popular popularity, because then one involuntarily supports the black myth about Stalin - a myth that is no longer anti-Soviet, but Russophobic, and aimed at division of Russia and the country's defeat. Stalin must work for Russia, help us to win - he himself would have wanted that too, writes Ria Novosti.  

Joseph Stalin. Photo: Ap  

"Stalin's influence is growing"  

The Russian historian Yuri Pivovarov tells the exiled Russian newspaper The Insider that Ria Novosti's article was written on the orders of or received the go-ahead from the Kremlin. He claims that Vladimir Putin's regime today is neo-Stalinist: 

- Stalin's influence is growing all the time. According to Ria Novosti, criticism of Stalin leads to the death of the nation, just like in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, says Pivovarov.  

Vladimir Putin has said several times that the collapse of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century". 

History is being rewritten in Russia in other ways as well. Recently, a 106-page document came out from the Russian Ministry of Education with guidelines for the general history education that all of the country's university students should receive. It does not contain a line about the Hungarian Revolt in 1956, nothing about the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 and nothing about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, notes the newspaper Holod. 

The document does not apply to the more extensive teaching that history students receive at Russian universities.  

Since the war against Ukraine began, the human rights organization Memorial, which documented the abuses in Stalin's Gulag camps, has also been banned. 

Vladimir Putin. Photo: Gavriil Grigorov / AP