After Stalin's death in 1953, and his atrocities became somewhat public, his image went out of favour and Stalingrad (formerly Tsaritsyn) was renamed Volgograd in 1961. The extent of Stalin's killing spree is not known exactly, but since the fall of the Soviet Union scholars have generally agreed on these sets of numbers:
This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, some 390,000 deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility.
In honour of this great occasion, Volgograd is being renamed Stalingrad again, temporarily. And to honour the great man's legacy, men are wearing uniforms of the NKVD (the brown ones seen above), Stalin’s brutal secret police responsible for mass purges and executions. Murderers.
Kafka and George Orwell could not have made this up.
Source: Reuters
A new bust of Soviet leader Josef Stalin has been unveiled in Volgograd ahead of Wednesday's 80th anniversary of the Red Army's defeat of Nazi invaders in the bloodiest battle of World War Two.
The bust is flanked by two others - Soviet commanders Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilyevsky - beside the Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad - Volgograd's name from 1925 to 1961, the local news outlet V1.RU reported on Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to visit Volgograd on Wednesday for anniversary celebrations at Mamayev Kurgan, the hilltop war memorial whose 85-metre (279-foot) statue of Mother Russia dominates the city.
...
Despite Stalin's record of presiding over a famine that killed millions in Ukraine and political repression that killed hundreds of thousands, Putin has sought to rehabilitate him as the leader who not only fought off Hitler's Nazis but also turned the Soviet Union into a significant world power.
I imagine Putin admires Stalin's record of killing Ukrainians as well. Stalin's forced collectivization of Ukraine's valuable farm land did not go over well and the Ukrainians resisted. In return, Stalin starved the entire country. via History.com
The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.
