Stalin's Ghost

Over the objections of many Russians, posters bearing Stalin’s image were approved by Moscow’s city government for display during celebrations marking Victory Day in Russia on Sunday. The issue was debated in the weeks leading up to the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, and, in the end, the anti-Stalinists won. Only a few such posters were on display, and they were hardly prominent.

This latest battle over how to remember The Great Patriotic War is part of an ongoing struggle for Russia’s post-Soviet identity. Since 2007, a widely used high school history textbook for teachers, developed by the Kremlin, has openly praised Stalin’s wartime leadership and condemned Allied behavior as perfidious. And in 2009 the Kremlin created a history commission dominated by the security services to counter foreign and domestic arguments that the Soviet Union shared responsibility with Nazi Germany for starting the war.

Western scholars and commentators have used such facts to argue that Russia has clearly failed the “Stalin test” — that the brutal dictator (and the Soviet era as a whole) has enjoyed a gradual rehabilitation under Vladimir Putin.

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