Remembering Stalin

Pilar Bonet reports on an historical conference about Joseph Stalin that was just held in Moscow (El Kremlin maquilla a Stalin El País 09.12.2008. It's not actually clear from her article, though, who sponsored the conference.

The focus of Bonet's article is this warning from the participants:

Nos inquieta la amplia difusión de recetas para el renacimiento de Rusia por la vía de una modernización autoritaria o incluso la dictadura y la propaganda de una violencia justificada desde el punto de vista histórico con muchos millones de víctimas y purgas sociales.

[We are disturbed by the increased difusion of formulas for the rebirth in Russia of the view of an authoritarian modernization or including dictatorship and the propaganda of violence justified from the historical point of view with many millions of victims and social purges.]

Maybe that loses something from the translation from a Russian (?) original to Spanish to my English translation. But the way it's written, it doesn't quite make sense. I think a more likely if less literal translation would be, "We are disturbed at the increasing frequency with which we see formulas used to describe the Stalin era which justify from an historical point of view the authoritarian modernization of Russia or even the Stalin dictatorship and the propaganda of violence it utilized."


This controversial painting in the Orthodox Church of Saint Princess Olga of Strelnain near St. Petersburg is based on a story that Stalin came secretly to consult St. Olga to ask if the Germans would take Moscow in 1941. El Mundo blogger Daniel Utrilla calls it "the most iconoclastic icon every painted".

The rest of the article does explain that there has been a tendency in official treatments of history to give Stalin a more positive evaluation. Bonet quotes Lev Gudkov, the director of an "analytical center" called Levada, as saying that in the 1990s, only 12% of Russians had a postive view of Stalin but not 50% do.

The article is really pretty vague. In fact, it's more than a bit sloppy. Bonet provides this one-sentence summary of Stalin's career: "Stalin provocó millones de víctimas con la industrialización forzada, pero con él la URSS venció al nazismo y se transformó en una potencia nuclear." (Stalin provoked millions of victims with forced industrialization, but with him the USSR defeated Nazism and transformed itself into a nuclear power.)

Not a very helpful summary to anyone who doesn't know much about the period. It is pretty much unquestioned that Stalin's rule victimized many people unnecessarily with massive political purges, executions and imprisonment in forced labor camps under inhumane conditions. More controversial is the question of whether Stalin deliberately imposed conditions of starvation on sections of the population during the collectivization of agriculture, or whether the resulting famine was a disastrous but unforeseen result of the policy.

It's also a bit strange to say the USSR defeated "Nazism" without any more context. The USSR in the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it was and is known in Russia, defeated a massive invasion by Nazi Germany and its allies. And the end of Nazism in Germany was a result of the United Nations' joint war in Europe. But "defeated Nazism" is a little too much of a shorthand phrase to describe that.

Another recent article reports Stalin planned to destroy Moscow if the Nazis moved in by Adrian Blomfield Daily Telegraph 12/05/08. It sounds like there are some interesting new documents on the subject now available in the public record. But the idea that the Soviets during the "Great Patriotic War" would have destroyed many of the facilities of Moscow if they had been forced to withdraw from it isn't a surprise. The Soviets dismantled factories and moved them deeper into Russia in front of the German advance. And when they didn't have time to do that, they practiced a scorched-earth policy toward facilities that could have been militarily useful to the Germans.

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