Russia / Stalinism

Crisis-Stricken Russians Nostalgic for Stalin
By Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp
Spiegel Online, May 6, 2010
"[...] On May 9, Russia celebrates the 65th anniversary of victory in what it calls the Great Patriotic War. Some 90,000 soldiers will march across Red Square in a parade, the likes of which Moscow hasn't seen in a long time. The country's military will participate with its latest missiles and 150 aircraft, as will soldiers representing Russia's former allies in World War II, the Americans, the British and the French. Josef Stalin will also take part, and not just in the memory of the three old people in Maloye Pizhalino. There has been a bitter dispute in Moscow for weeks over whether the city should be allowed to display images of the generalissimo to mark this anniversary and, if so, in which locations. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov had announced his intention to have posters of Stalin mounted in front of the Bolshoi Theater, at Gorky Park and Victory Park, and at the sites where the people's militias congregated during the war. A display of this magnitude hasn't happened since 1961, when Stalin's embalmed remains were taken from the mausoleum on Red Square and buried in a simple grave near the Kremlin wall. It was the same year Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev began his drive to remove his predecessor's influence from the public sphere, by changing the names of cities and places that had been named after Stalin. [...]"