Novaya Gazeta had dissed Stalin in an article about archival material demonstrating the dictator's involvement in the slaughter of large number of Soviet citizens. That involvement is an established, well-documented fact, reflected in scholarly literature in the East and West over several decades regarding execution and death by imprisonment or relocation of communist party rivals, clergy, intellectuals, aristocrats, engineers, Russian peasants, overseas true believers and ethnic minorities ... in all, millions of people who were unfortunate enough to inhabit (or be conquered by) the soviet carceral state. Catherine Merridale's Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Viking, 2001), Adam Hochschild's The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Viking, 1994) and Orlando Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Metropolitan, 2007) note that the soviet past continues to haunt - and poison - the 'new' Russia. The destruction of civil society under Lenin and Stalin is arguably their most lasting legacy, one that will take generations to fade.
As one might expect from enthusiasts for the rehabilitation of the dictator's memory - and for a 'rectification' of the history in works such as Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope (Collins, 1970), Robert Conquest's The great terror: Stalin's purge of the thirties (Macmillan, 1968) and Kolyma: the Arctic death camps (Macmillan, 1978) or Anne Applebaum's Gulag (Pengui,n 2003) - his great-grandson Jacob Dzhugashvili reportedly informed journalists that Stalin was "greatly misunderstood" and "never broke any Soviet law". Critics are people who are "working against Russia to make it weaker".
Representatives of the Dzhugashvili family disclaimed Stalin's responsibility for the Katyn Massacre ("a document incriminating the Soviet Union and Stalin himself for the 1940 massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and priests at the Katyn forest in western Russia was a fake"). We'll just have to erase our memories of the Soviet Union's acknowledgement that Stalin's agents carried out that murder or the pre-Putin publication of archival material about the nature of the GULAG.
The New York Times, in reporting a speedbump in revival of the Stalin cult, quotes Arseny Roginsky of public memory and justice group Memorial as saying
People in power must bear some responsibility. They want to create a heroic image of Russia steeped in glorious victories, while forgetting the painful or shameful episodes. And archivists, historians, begin to reflect that trend. This national-patriotic formation of an idea of Russia as a 'Great Power' is a great hindrance to our work with history, at all levels. It's a trend that began before Putin, but under him it became incomparably stronger. And the rehabilitation of Stalin as a strong and pragmatic leader is part of it. ...
There is a certain type of person now – what used to be called a member of the intelligentsia – who is disaffected with party politics, who sees little use in running to protest meetings but who sees Stalin popping up all over the place and finds it annoying. This sort of person wants to make some positive contribution to society, so supports us. That's how Memorial became a symbolic point of consolidation for these new intellectuals. And that's what the Kremlin doesn't like. That we human rights campaigners climbed out of our little cage and starting making a noise.
