Post by Bozur on May 6, 2005 21:50:56 GMT -5
LETTER FROM EUROPE
Still the Tyrant, Stalin Refuses to Be Wished Away
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: May 4, 2005
MOSCOW, 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.
Still the Tyrant, Stalin Refuses to Be Wished Away
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: May 4, 2005
MOSCOW, 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.