Putin has Made Victory Day ‘the Birthday of the Russian Nation,’ Sokolov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 5 – Stalin’s current high standing with the Russian people reflects Vladimir Putin’s efforts to make Victory Day into “the birthday of the Russian nation,” something that inevitably entails boosting the assessment of the dictator because of his role as the leader of the USSR in that conflict, Nikita Sokolov says.

            The liberal historian argues that “the current Rusisan government cannot recognize that contemporary Russia was born on August 20, 1991. It doesn’t want to trace itself back to t hose events, although present-day Russia undoubtedly arose then with the destruction of the communist regime and the defeat of the putsch” (svoboda.org/a/31394907.html).

            Because the Putin regime wasn’t able to accept that fact, it dreamed up the idea that Russians are “a nation which was born in victory;” and it has pushed that idea via its enormous propaganda machine for 15 years. Not surprisingly, many Russians including the young, have been taken in.

            The current regime “cannot offer any attractive project of the Russia. It doesn’t have one! And therefore, the only thing it can offer is a great past which is always our great future.” But far fewer Russians really accept its vision of the past or of Stalin that are willing to tell pollsters what the regime wants to hear.

            “I am certain that the majority of Russian citizens aren’t insane,” Sokolov says; “they aren’t enemies to the world or to Europe, but up to now, sociology hasn’t found a way to show that.

            Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center is one of the sociologists who has studied the rise of Stalin in the estimation of Russians and the Russian young. He says that in the late 1990s when he began to monitor these evaluations, most condemned Stalin as a tyrant while younger ones viewed him as a figure from the distant past who would soon be of interest only to historians.

            “But with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin,” he continues, “the situaiton began to change and a quiet re-Stalinization began. Why silent? [Because] neither Putin nor his entourage ever exclaimed about Stalin in a single consistent way.” They remained critics of much that he did, but their stress on his victory and his role in building up Soviet power boosted his standing.

            Twenty-five years ago, most young Russians were negative or indifferent about Stalin, “but beginning in 201, propaganda of imperial values and state patriotism intensified. Stalin began to rise” in their estimation and by 2012, “he occupied a place in the list Russians offered of the greatest people of all times and peoples.”

            The main psychological mechanism behind this shift was a sense of powerless and a desire for someone who had the power to take decisive action. Thus, support for Stalin is also a kind of criticism of the current regime for its ability to satisfy the desire of Russians for order and justice, Gudkov concludes.

            But that this has happened, he suggests, shows “the moral degradation of society” which is so far unable to rationalize either its past or present political system.