Stalin’s return to “his former place”:

Why does Putin’s Russia need Stalin?

Two developments in Russia in August increased Joseph Stalin’s visibility in the public sphere. In the city of Oryol, a bust of Stalin was erected on the newly created "Boulevard of the Victors" to mark the 83rd anniversary of the city’s liberation from Nazi occupation. In the final days of the month, meanwhile, a relief of Stalin that had been removed in 1961 from the façade of the former Higher Party School building in Volgograd-formerly Stalingrad and now occupied by the State Medical University-was reinstated in its original position after sixty-five years.

The front façade of the Volgograd State Medical University building. The relief depicting Stalin is on the far right.

The semi-official online outlet of the Communist Party of Turkey, soL Haber, reported these developments under the headline “Stalin yeniden Rusya’nın kamusal alanında: 65 yıl sonra eski yerine döndü” [in Turkish] ("Stalin reappears in Russia’s public sphere: Back in his former place after 65 years"). At first glance, the article appears to be a restrained account that merely reports two events. Yet its entire framing-from the headline and the way the report is structured to the subheading "Symbols removed through de-Stalinisation are returning" and its emphasis on Stalin’s role in the Second World War becoming increasingly visible-presents this return in a positive light, as the rectification of a historical injustice.

The relief depicting Stalin.

Yet the real question is not whether the relief of Stalin forms part of a building’s ‘original architectural integrity’. The real question is this: why does the Putin regime-which emerged from capitalist restoration, safeguards the wealth and power of the oligarchs, represses the working class and places Great Russian nationalism at the centre of state ideology-increasingly invoke Stalin? Who are the political and social forces bringing back statues, busts and reliefs of Stalin, and what are they seeking to achieve?

When these questions are not asked, Stalin’s return to the public sphere can be mistaken for the return of socialism, the October Revolution or the historic achievements of the Soviet working class. This is precisely the impression that soL Haber creates. Its report says not a single word about the class character of the Putin regime, the role Stalin plays in the contemporary Russian state’s historical narrative, or what the cult of Stalin represents in opposition to Lenin, Trotsky and the internationalist legacy of the October Revolution.

Not the Soviet Union, but the legacy of Tsarism

The Putin regime’s embrace of Stalin is not an expression of nostalgia for the Soviet Union or socialism. Present-day Russia is not the continuation of the Soviet Union in the form of a workers’ state; it is a capitalist state that emerged from those sections of the Soviet bureaucracy that carried out capitalist restoration, former cadres of the KGB and the state apparatus, and the oligarchs who seized vast fortunes through privatisation. Putin is the authoritarian bourgeois politician who presides over this order.

At the centre of Putin’s conception of history lies not the October Revolution, but the great-power legacy of the Tsarist state overthrown by that revolution. What he longs for is not public ownership of the means of production, workers’ power or a voluntary and equal union of peoples, but a strong, centralised and authoritarian Russian state whose dominion extends, as far as possible, to the borders of the former empire.

The bust of Stalin erected on the “Boulevard of the Victors”.

For this reason, Putin’s hostility towards Lenin is far more revealing than the respect he shows for Stalin. Putin has repeatedly accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of "creating" Ukraine, breaking up Russia’s historic territories and planting a "time bomb" beneath the Soviet state by granting the republics the right to secede. This is because Lenin’s approach to the national question was grounded in the right of oppressed nations to self-determination and an uncompromising struggle against Great Russian chauvinism. That the Soviet Union was not named after any nation and that its constituent republics were formally united on an equal footing were themselves products of this internationalist outlook.

Stalin, by contrast, systematically dismantled this legacy after Lenin’s death as the principal representative of the bureaucratic counter-revolution. Although the Soviet Union formally retained its federal structure, real power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the central bureaucratic apparatus; the guarantees extended to oppressed nations remained largely on paper, while Great Russian chauvinism once again gained strength. It is therefore hardly surprising that Putin dislikes Lenin and finds in Stalin a historical figure with whom he feels a much greater affinity. As Gerçek Gazetesi perceptively observed years ago, Putin "loves Stalin, not Lenin" (Putin “Lenin’i değil Stalin’i” seviyor.) [In Turkish].

Victory belonged not to Stalin, but to the peoples of the Soviet Union

One of the principal means by which Stalin is once again being glorified in present-day Russia is the presentation of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany as his personal achievement. The decision to place the new bust in Oryol among those of Soviet military commanders is itself part of this narrative.

Yet the victory over Nazism was, above all, the achievement of the Soviet working class and the peoples of the Soviet Union, who made enormous sacrifices. Without the millions of soldiers who fought at the front, the workers who laboured to exhaustion in the factories, the civilians who resisted amid siege and starvation, and the material achievements of the planned economy established through the October Revolution, this victory would not have been possible. To present the terrible price paid in a war that cost the Soviet Union some 27 million lives as a medal attesting to Stalin’s genius is to rob these people of their historical role.

Moreover, far from preparing the Soviet Union for war, the Stalinist bureaucracy drove the country to the brink of disaster through its policies. During the Great Terror of 1936-38, a substantial part of the Red Army’s command structure was purged. Stalin dismissed numerous warnings that Hitler was preparing to attack; when the Nazi armies invaded in June 1941, the Soviet Union suffered devastating defeats, and millions of people were killed or taken prisoner. The disastrous policies pursued by the Stalinist Comintern in Germany had likewise paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power by preventing the working class from waging a united struggle.

Thus, to glorify Stalin as the leader who defeated Nazism is not only to conceal the true sources of the victory but also to absolve the Stalinist bureaucracy of its responsibility for the catastrophe. The heroism of the Soviet peoples cannot be conflated with Stalin’s political record. To defend the former requires not the glorification of the latter but, on the contrary, the rescue of historical truth from Stalinist falsification.

Stalin was not the continuation of the October Revolution, but its negation

The way soL Haber portrays the return of Stalin’s relief to the "empty space" beside Marx, Engels and Lenin-almost as the restoration of a natural historical unity-encapsulates the Stalinist conception of history. In this narrative, an unbroken line runs from Marx through Engels and Lenin to Stalin. Stalin is presented as Lenin’s legitimate successor, and his regime as the natural development of the October Revolution.

In reality, however, Stalin’s rise represented not the continuation of the programme of Lenin and the October Revolution, but its bureaucratic negation. The October Revolution had taken place as the opening act of the world socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks’ perspective was not to build a self-sufficient socialist society within the national borders of a backward, war-ravaged country, but to link the Russian Revolution with workers’ revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries. Stalin’s theory of "socialism in one country", developed from 1924 onwards, became the ideological expression of this break with the internationalist programme.

This break was not confined to the realm of theoretical debate. To preserve its own privileges, the bureaucracy usurped the political power of the working class; abolished party and soviet democracy; crushed the Left Opposition; and, through the Moscow Trials of 1936-38 and the Great Terror, physically eliminated the vast majority of the Bolshevik generation that had made the October Revolution. As Trotsky rightly observed, the establishment of the Stalinist regime required not the continuation of the Bolshevik Party but its destruction.

For this reason, placing Stalin back alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin is not merely a matter of returning a relief to its "original position". It is to reproduce in stone and metal the historical falsification perpetrated by the Stalinist bureaucracy over decades. It is to portray the executioner and his victims, revolution and bureaucratic counter-revolution, internationalism and Great Russian nationalism as parts of a single, unbroken tradition.

The Stalin Putin’s regime needs

It cannot be said that the Putin administration openly embraces Stalin’s legacy in its entirety. On the one hand, the regime glorifies the Tsarist past, the Orthodox Church and certain White Army figures; on the other, it draws on Soviet-era symbols of great-power status, military victory and state authority. These elements, seemingly contradictory at first glance, are brought together within a single nationalist narrative to serve the needs of the Russian ruling class.

Putin with his childhood friend Arkady Rotenberg, one of Russia’s wealthiest men.

In this selective historical narrative, the October Revolution is stripped of its character as a rupture. Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and the present-day Russian Federation are presented as successive incarnations of a powerful Russian state. The revolutionary rupture embodied by Lenin-working-class internationalism and the rights of oppressed nations-is made a target of attack because it disrupts this continuity. Stalin, by contrast, can be made to fit this narrative insofar as he suppressed the international socialist content of the October Revolution, exalted state authority and revived Russian nationalism.

The relentless hostility towards Trotsky must be understood in the same context. Putin’s Russia targets Trotsky not only by repeating the old Stalinist falsehoods, but also by portraying him as a cosmopolitan figure who sacrificed "Russia’s interests" for the sake of revolution. For, despite all the falsifications, Trotsky represents the October Revolution’s perspective of world socialist revolution and the socialist opposition to the Stalinist bureaucracy. What the Russian oligarchy fears today is not merely that Stalin’s crimes should become known; it is that workers and young people might learn that Stalinism was not the inevitable outcome of socialism and that a Marxist and internationalist struggle was waged against it.

Stalin’s return is therefore not an innocent act of commemoration. Amid deepening social inequality, war, economic pressures and conflict with imperialist powers, the Putin regime is seeking to rally the working class behind the state on the basis of nationalism. It wants to harness the powerful popular memory of the war against Nazism to the objectives of the present-day Russian state, while turning Stalin into a symbol of a strong state, military victory and ruthless discipline.

The class reality that soL fails to see

The article published by soL Haber strips away this entire political context. As a result, the question of why the capitalist Russian state is putting Stalin back into circulation gives way to a tacit sense of satisfaction at seeing a symbol removed during the Khrushchev-era "de-Stalinisation" finally returned to its "former place".

This stance is consistent with the broader political orientation of Stalinist circles in Turkey towards Putin’s Russia. These circles frequently portray Russia’s confrontation with the United States and NATO as though it were a progressive or anti-imperialist struggle, divorcing it from its class content while relegating the reactionary character of Russian capitalism and the oligarchic regime to the background. The renewed glorification of Stalin feeds the same illusion: when a strong state, defiance of the West, military victory and Soviet symbols are brought together, they create the appearance of socialism.

Yet a state’s confrontation with US imperialism does not make it socialist or progressive. The means of production in Russia are controlled by oligarchs and capitalist corporations; the working class is entirely excluded from political power. The Putin administration champions not the social programme of the October Revolution, but the great-power nationalism that the revolution swept away. It uses Stalin as a symbol not of nationalisation, workers’ democracy or world revolution, but of centralised state authority, national unity and military power.

Stalin’s "return to his former place", whether in the form of a relief or a bust, is therefore not the return of socialism. On the contrary, it is a renewed falsification of the legacy of the October Revolution to suit the needs of the present-day capitalist Russian state. The task of genuine socialists is not to applaud this spurious historical continuity, but to distinguish clearly between the heroic struggle of the Soviet peoples against Nazism and the cult of Stalin, between the October Revolution and the bureaucratic counter-revolution, and between socialism and Putin’s oligarchic capitalism.

Lev Trotsky addressing Red Army soldiers during the Russian Civil War.

Stalin’s relief may have returned to its former place. But history cannot be made to fit the frame that the Stalinists and Russian oligarchs seek to impose upon it. The real political void beside Marx, Engels and Lenin is filled not by Stalin, but by the revolutionary Marxists he sent into exile, imprisoned and murdered-above all, Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The legacy that must be rediscovered today is not that of a strong state and Great Russian nationalism, but the internationalist and socialist legacy of the October Revolution.