Stalin and remembrance

On October 30th, 1961, the Soviet Party Congress voted unanimously that Joseph Stalin’s embalmed body should be removed from inside Lenin’s tomb in the Kremlin, and buried nearby with a plain marker. It was a continuation of the de-Stalinization process begun in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev gave his secret speech to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. In that speech, Khrushchev had denounced the late Soviet leader for his wide-scale repression and personality cult.

Revered as a godlike figure in his day, Stalin was in fact a thug and mass murderer. Historian still dispute how many millions he killed, but all agree that it was many millions. The historian Timothy Snyder has used Soviet archives, opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the figure was 9 million, including 6 million he personally ordered killed. His estimate is lower than that of other historians who have used demographic and census figures to suggest that the archive records are incomplete and underestimate the true death toll by a considerable amount.

Of those executed or deliberately starved to death in the socialist republics over whose union Stalin presided, some put the figure as high as 20 million. This figure includes the known atrocities committed outside of Russia itself, such as the murder of 22,000 Polish officers in the woods at Katyn in Poland.

It is a coincidence that the same day of the year, October 30th, is also the official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression under communist rule in the USSR. It was officially declared as such in 1991, and is marked by solemn memorials every year. The date is an official public holiday in the Russian Federation, when people can contemplate the crimes that the socialist regimes perpetrated.

People gather at the Solovetsky Stone, a monument commemorating the victims. It features a stone from the Solovki concentration camp, now installed in front of the old KGB headquarters and prison at the Lubyanka Square in Moscow. Although he was himself a KGB officer in his younger days, President Putin has appeared alongside the Patriarch and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church to pay respect and homage to the victims. Sometimes people recite the names of some of those who died.

The scale and brutality of the socialist empire of Eastern and Central Europe staggers the memory and the imagination. But it happened, and it ruthlessly destroyed the lives of millions in support of its poisonous ideology.

So that today’s generation, many of whom are oblivious to its sheer wickedness, might be made aware of what it did, work is in progress for museums to be established in Washington DC and in London, to record and to present some of its horrors. Gulag victims who survived, and relatives of those who did not, have recorded memories that bring home the stark reality of its evil. The museums will provide a timely reminder of the crimes that the Soviet system perpetrated. It is to be hoped that school parties will tour them, as some visit the Nazi death camps, to remind today’s young people of the horrors that a perverted ideology can and did unleash.