Russian TV viewers this week did not after all vote for Josef Stalin as the greatest-ever of their countrymen but it was a close call. That honor went to the mediaeval warrior Alexander Nevsky while Stalin was eased into third place by the reforming 19th Century Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. For some weeks, as the list was narrowed down from the original 500 candidates, the former dictator was clearly in the lead. Indeed so desperate did the show’s producers become that they were actually begging viewers not to vote for Stalin.
It may well be the real vote was indeed actually for Stalin, but in the Russian media a quiet word from the authorities generally produces any desired result these days. Nevsky, immortalized in the 1942 film by Sergei Eisenstein, triumphed. Stolypin certainly seems an odd second choice. Reformer he may have been, but he was tough on early revolutionaries who did not recant. Until recently, Russian school history books used to refer to the hangman’s noose as “Stolypin’s neckties”.
From the point of view of the Kremlin, Stalin’s third place is a satisfactory compromise between rejecting his bloody legacy outright and recognizing he was nevertheless the strongman who led the Soviet Union to victory against the Nazis in 1945 and left the Kremlin in imperial control of large swathes of Eastern Europe.
When he was still president, in 2007 Vladimir Putin made the significant gesture of honoring the victims of Stalin’s terror at a memorial service broadcast throughout the country. The estimates vary but at least 20 million people were butchered by the NKVD during Stalin’s purges or transported to the gulag where they were starved or worked to death. It is hard to imagine how such a monster dead for little more than half a century could ever hold a place in his people’s affections. That he does offers an insight into the Russian mind.
To many it does not seem perverse to recognize Stalin’s achievement in moving on the Bolshevik revolution that Lenin started and establishing as a political and military superpower with a vast, if not always entirely efficient, industrial base behind it. That so many people were slaughtered, often on the vaguest suspicion of being against the regime, is not something in which many ordinary decent Russians take pride. But they take the view that if Stalin thought it necessary, cruel and often wrong though the killings may have been, they were acceptable in the wider scheme, first of a Russian defense against a resolute German invader and secondly as part of the Russian renaissance. Totalitarian Stalin’s state may have been, but everyone had a roof over their head, schooling for their children, health care and some sort of job. That had hardly been true before the 1917 revolution.
Putin, now prime minister, would probably like to see himself as the same sort of strong leader as Stalin but without the savagery. Had Stalin won this major TV vote, it would have been an international embarrassment. Coming third recognizes his nationalistic legacy, which Putin would never reject.
