Appreciation for Stalin's efforts in WW2 persist in Russia. Carl:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/intern...t&position=

NY TIMES

May 4, 2005
LETTER FROM EUROPE
Still the Tyrant, Stalin Refuses to Be Wished Away
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

M0SCOW, May 3 - That old nostalgia for Stalin is surfacing again. It always
does around the May holidays. This delights a few die-hard Stalinists here
but dismays many more people.
The ambiguity is represented neatly in the person of Zurab Tsereteli, the
closest thing Russia has to an official artist. With the 60th anniversary
of the victory over Nazi Germany approaching, he cast a monumental bronze
statue of Stalin, along with Churchill and Roosevelt, at their 1945 summit
conference in Yalta. A monument to Stalin alone seemed a bit much, he
acknowledged. But for most other people so, too, is the one Mr. Tsereteli
created, depicting Stalin uncritically, in historical context.
The authorities in Yalta - now a part of Ukraine, a place that suffered
greatly under Stalin - declined Mr. Tsereteli's gift. So did Moscow after
a public furor that erupted when a city lawmaker suggested installing the
statue in the city's Victory Park.
The statue is now headed to Volgograd, the city better known by its
wartime name, Stalingrad, but even there officials took pains to emphasize
that it was not a tribute to Stalin per se, but rather to the leaders of
the Allied effort to defeat fascism.
The fuss over the statue underscores Russia's problem when it comes to
celebrating its past: the past involves some uncomfortable truths the
country and its leaders would rather not dwell on.
Part of the reluctance, no doubt, reflects President Vladimir V. Putin
himself, a former colonel of the K.G.B. who is unapologetic about his own
background in a security apparatus that at its worst terrorized Soviet
citizens. Perhaps a larger factor, echoed across the country, is a desire
to restore to Russia a sense of historic pride and greatness after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and an early round of soul-searching about
Soviet crimes that followed Russia's independence.
Even Stalin's newest sculptor - whose grandfather was arrested and
executed in the Great Terror in 1937 - sounds conflicted. "We should not
look at what happened in the past," he said at a news conference last week
in which he compared Stalin to other complicated historical figures, like
Napoleon. "We should take only the facts and look to the future."
Mr. Putin is hoping to strike the same balance.
Mr. Putin has invited some 50 heads of state, including President Bush, to
attend a military parade on May 9, the day Stalin's Soviet Union chose to
commemorate the end of what is known here as the Great Patriotic War, on
Red Square for what he called a celebration of "the joy of victory and
reconciliation."
The once unimaginable scene of a Kremlin leader standing beside an
American president and the leaders of Germany, Japan and Italy at what
used to be the annual demonstration of Soviet military might (large panels
will deftly cover Lenin's Tomb) certainly suggests a fundamental
geopolitical reconciliation.
But the government's grandiose plans - which include dozens of ceremonies,
concerts and other events - have also turned into a source of rancor,
reviving unsettled grievances at home and abroad and showing that Russia
remains conflicted about its Soviet past.
The presidents of Lithuania and Estonia - nations occupied by Soviet
troops in 1940 and reoccupied after the Soviets ousted the Nazis in 1944 -
pointedly refused Mr. Putin's invitation. They cited Victory Day as a day
that honored resumption of what would turn into 46 years of occupation,
prompting diplomatic and political sniping that has continued with
increasing nastiness.
The Baltic leaders, along with President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland,
have used the 60th anniversary to renew calls for Russia - as the
inheritor of much of the Soviet Union's legacy - to account for the darker
aspects of its past. Most notorious of all is the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,
the nonaggression treaty that the Soviet Union signed with Nazi Germany in
1939, leading to the Soviet occupation of part of Poland that year and the
Baltic states a year later.
After Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the pact vanished
from official history, and even now it rarely makes an appearance. In the
Soviet-like posters that have appeared across the country in honor of the
60th anniversary of Victory Day, the war lasted only from 1941 to 1945.
A renunciation of Molotov-Ribbentrop - or of the Soviet Union's domination
of Eastern Europe after the war - appears to be highly unlikely.
Mr. Putin hardly defends Stalin but for him, as for many others here, any
second-guessing of the Soviet victory in the war amounts to an effort to
rewrite history - to, as he put it, "diminish the part played by the
Soviet Union and the Soviet Red Army in the victory over Nazism."
The Soviet Union, to be sure, suffered enormously in the war. Officially,
27 million soldiers and citizens died. The victory is, arguably, its
greatest achievement, which is why May 9 remains a revered holiday, one
that touches almost every family.
An exhibition of contemporary art at the Krokin Gallery in Moscow includes
unvarnished works exploring the war's costs and honoring the ordinary
soldiers who suffered most. One includes an enlarged crumpled photograph
of the artist Aleksandr Ponomarev's grandfather, who died in Stalingrad.
The image is inscribed with Stalin's notorious order, "Not one step back."

"History has no subjunctive mood," the exhibition's curator, Aleksandr V.
Petrovichev, said. "They are not singing the song of Stalin's praise. They
are dealing with the topics of the time. Yes, there was Stalin. Yes, there
were those events. It is reality."
Still, for some here, the new Russia's historical memory remains
stubbornly selective, embracing the positive and ignoring the negative.
Yuri N. Afanasyev, a historian and honorary president of the Russian State
Humanities University, laments what he calls a restoration of official,
incomplete and dishonest history.
"An attempt is being made to vindicate the official history of Russia,"
Mr. Afanasyev, honorary president of the Russian State Humanities
University, said during a conference in Moscow last month. "This is the
same history of Stalin's time - falsified, biased, ideologized."
Erin E. Arvedlund contributed reporting for this article.


Renaissance guy