KPRF’s Repudiation of Khrushchev’s Denunciation of Stalin Shows Putin is Set to Be Even More Repressive and Aggressive, Arkhangelsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 15 – With its “unerring intuition,” the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has declared Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin “a mistake,” thus putting itself in line with Vladimir Putin’s current thinking and opening the way for the Kremlin leader to be even more repressive at home and aggressive abroad, Andrey Arkhangelsky says.  

            The Russian writer says that the KPRF’s action reflects the evolution of Putin’s thinking. Earlier, the Kremlin leader like his post-Stalin Soviet predecessors said he wanted to take the best from all eras of the Russian past; but now, he has narrowed the past from which he will select to that of Stalin and others like him (moscowtimes.ru/2025/07/15/bezoshibochnoe-chute-kprf-blagoslovlyaet-putinskii-rezhim-na-nasilie-a168832).

            In Putin’s system, Arkhangelsky says, “Stalinism is Soviet power and all else can be viewed as a deviation from it.” That is now clear, he continues, as “Putin is reviving the Soviet Union not just stylistically but in terms of its core values: The construction of communism is impossible without victory of revolution throughout the world.”

            And “in the same way, “Soviet power is impossible without total dictatorship and massive and permanent repression from within.  Otherwise,” the Russian commentator says, Putin believes that “nothing works, that compromises do not work” and must be rejected ab initio.

            “Power in the country belongs to the apparatus of the force structures, to the chekists,” Arkhangelsky continues. “They do not have any wish to restrain themselves and voluntarily share power with someone else. This is the logic of Stalinism,” not the compromise variants that succeeded it.

            For Russians, and the KPRF decision confirms that, “soon new purges and repressions will begin with the unmasking of enemies of the people, now already among their own and not among those who have moved abroad – and in this situation, there are today no hopes for a thaw or for changes within the country.”

            What is most striking about all this, the commentator says, is that “the people as a whole turned out to be ready for a new Stalinism” because of their “mass disappointment with and general fatigue from civilization.” Asa result, for Russians now, “catastrophe seems more accept able than any creative act.”

            “Everyone is simply fed up with everything,” he writes, “and people are ready to accept any apocalypse, and then come what may.”

            For the rest of the world, the KPRF move is “yet another signal that Putin will not stop.” He will behave as Stalin did in the pre-war years.  And even if Putin himself might decide to change, the logic of the Stalinism he has  accepted and is seeking to impose will push him in that direction.

            Russians and others need to recognize that “unfree people are satisfied with the unfreedom of others and in the ideal case, the unfreedom of all. The only good news today is that happily in the world at least so far there are not only such people” but others who value freedom and will fight for it.

In the least bad outcome, Arkhangelsky says, “a new round of ideological war awaits us;” “and in the 21st century the question of values - freedom or unfreedom - will again become just as central as it was in the last.