From sports to politics: forget the repression of the Stalinist system

It was Nikita Khrushchev who terminated the Stalinist type of parades and started a de-Stalinisation with his 1956 ‘secret speech’. It would hardly be surprising if Putin were to declare that ‘Stalin was right’ and that the de-Stalinisation policy implemented by Khrushchev was ‘unpatriotic’ as in modern-day Russia, Khrushchev has already been accused of ‘betraying Russia and handing Crimea to Ukraine’.

Putin’s actions go hand-in-hand with the resurrection of Stalin in contemporary Russian culture: museums, arts, cinema, TV-series as well as in the education system and school. Stalin began to reappear more prominently in the public space after Putin returned for his third term as president in 2012 and the common element has been the glorification of the USSR in the 1930s.

This resurrection on the 1930s is all the more remarkable as this particular period is also when the Stalinist system accelerated repression and persecution of imaginary ‘enemies of the people’. Think of the hunt for the ‘kulaks’ (self-ownership peasants) leading to man-made famine especially in Ukraine, or the political show trials and purges known as the Moscow processes, or the widespread repression or ordinary Soviet citizens which the NGO ‘Memorial’ later documented. No wonder the Russian authorities has tried to shut down Memorial since 2021 – see our accounts here and here – and is now broadening the scope for mass parades.

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