Devotees of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose brutal purges killed
millions of innocent citizens and made his name a byword for
totalitarian terror, flocked to the Kremlin to praise him for making his
country a world power Tuesday, while experts and politicians puzzled
and despaired over his enduring popularity. Communist Party chief
Gennady Zyuganov led some 1,000 zealots who laid carnations at Stalin's
grave by the Kremlin wall in Moscow, praising him as a symbol of the
nation's "great victories" and saying that Russia needs to rely on this
"unique experience" to overcome its problems.
Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.
Communists and other hardliners credit him with leading the country to
victory in World War II and turning it into a nuclear superpower, while
critics condemn his repressions. Historians estimate that more than
800,000 people were executed during the purges that peaked during the
Great Terror in the late 1930s, and millions more died of harsh labor
and cruel treatment in the giant Gulag prison camp system, mass
starvation in Ukraine and southern Russia and deportations of ethnic
minorities.
Putin, whose professed ideology draws heavily from Soviet statism, has
made efforts to give Stalin a more positive historical evaluation.
School history textbooks have been released stressing Stalin's role as
an "effective manager" of the 1930s Soviet industrialization campaign,
though historians express far greater skepticism about his supposed
economic achievements.
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