Rehabbing Stalin Historian Alexey Uvarov explains Russia’s creeping resurrection of the personality cult around the Soviet Union’s most notorious leader
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin appears to be making a comeback in wartime Russia. In early July, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) adopted a resolution declaring Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech a “mistake.” In the speech, the Soviet premier famously denounced the cult of personality surrounding Stalin and blamed his predecessor for orchestrating mass repressions. In the same resolution, KPRF said it would appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin to restore the Soviet-era name Stalingrad to the city of Volgograd.
KPRF’s declaration comes on the heels of other recent attempts to whitewash Stalin’s legacy, such as Putin officially renaming the Volgograd airport “Stalingrad” and authorities in Moscow restoring a life-sized wall sculpture of Stalin inside the subway system. Monuments to Stalin have mushroomed across Russia in recent years, with some even appearing not far from memorials to his victims. In an article for Meduza, historian Alexey Uvarov explains the fall of Stalin’s cult of personality in the Soviet Union and its creeping resurrection in modern-day Russia.
Denouncing Stalinism out of political necessity — but failing to foresee the consequences
Following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Soviet leadership began to gradually dismantle the Gulag system, granting amnesty to hundreds of thousands of prisoners and exiles, and reviewing the cases against victims of political repression. As prisoners went free and told their families stories of torture and executions, anxiety-filled letters from their relatives began piling up on Soviet officials’ desks. The country’s then-leader, Nikita Khrushchev, soon realized that if the Communist Party (CPSU) didn’t acknowledge the scale of the Stalinist terror, someone else would — and all the blame would fall on the current Soviet leadership.
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So, at the CPSU’s 20th Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev scheduled an additional closed session for the delegates where he delivered what would become known as his “secret speech.” Away from the prying eyes of foreigners and the press, Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality around Stalin. Drawing on data compiled by a special party commission, he blamed his predecessor for the mass executions of 1937–1938 (commonly referred to in English as the Great Terror) and accused him of replacing the Communist Party leadership with a personal dictatorship. Although the speech was emotional and at times imprecise, it marked the first time the country’s top leadership linked Stalin’s name to political terror.
Khrushchev’s report had a stunning effect. The text of the speech was secretly distributed among millions of Communist Party and Young Communist League (Komsomol) members. Across the country, people read it aloud, cried, and argued over it. In some places, such as Georgia in 1956, people even rallied in defense of Stalin’s memory. Once published abroad, the speech dealt a blow to the authority of Communist parties around the world. The Soviet Union’s Eastern Bloc allies panicked, and leaders like China’s Mao Zedong developed grudges against Khrushchev. Meanwhile, the Soviet propaganda machine failed to explain how such large-scale repressions could have happened in the “first country of socialism.”
Khrushchev hoped that exposing Stalin would revive “genuine Leninism” and strengthen faith in the possibility of socialism without terror. But by unleashing the spirit of doubt, he weakened the ideological unity of the USSR, provoked a wave of criticism of the regime, and split the international Communist movement — consequences the party was ultimately unable to reverse.
Five years after the Secret Speech, Khrushchev decided to deal yet another blow to Stalin’s legacy — and to his old rivals. At the CPSU’s 22nd Congress in October 1961, he again accused Stalin of repressions, while also blaming the terror on his predecessor’s closest allies: former top Soviet officials Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Georgy Malenkov. To emphasize the break with the old order, the delegates decided to remove Stalin’s body from public display in the Lenin Mausoleum. While the 22nd Congress was still ongoing, Stalin’s coffin was lowered into a grave near the Kremlin Wall and covered in concrete.
Meanwhile, a large-scale campaign to rename and demolish memorials to Stalin began across the USSR. The city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd, Stalinabad became Dushanbe, and Stalino — Donetsk. Granite and bronze statues of the former leader (or vozhd, as he was known in Russian) were torn down, blown up, or carted away.
However, this wave of de-Stalinization took place under entirely different circumstances. The USSR was quarreling with China, there was growing discontent inside the country due to food shortages and cuts to the army, and Khrushchev’s personal authority was waning. The First Secretary’s radical speeches had the support of a “liberal” minority, who hoped for a “return to Lenin.” But people who considered Stalin a symbol of a strong state still dominated the Party and Komsomol apparatus. Young career officials, such as KGB Chief Alexander Shelepin, openly admired Stalin’s harsh methods and moved to strengthen control over the intelligentsia and young people.
Unlike the shock of the Secret Speech in 1956, these de-Stalinization policies didn’t lead to social unrest but rather emphasized the split between the supporters of further reforms and inveterate Stalinists. The result was a fragile pause: the cult of personality had been officially condemned and monuments had disappeared, but millions of Soviet citizens still saw Stalin as a “victorious leader.” The struggle for “historical truth” would only intensify.
Harking back to the Vozhd’s ‘strong hand’ in the Era of Stagnation
After Khrushchev was removed from his post in 1964 and succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leadership carefully curtailed discussions about Stalinism. While the official condemnation of the cult of personality was not reversed, texts considered overly critical of Stalin no longer made it past Soviet censors. By the late 1960s, novels about the repressions of the 1930s — from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward to Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat — had no hope of publication in the USSR.
This change in policy cut short Soviet society’s reflection on the Great Terror. The authorities now spoke about the mistakes and human cost of Stalinism in hushed tones, while trumpeting the achievements of Stalin-era industrialization and victory in World War II. In this context, discussion about the Gulag and political repression moved underground.
Banned manuscripts and tape recordings were reproduced and distributed clandestinely, or published in the West and smuggled back into the USSR. (The former process became known as samizdat, while the latter was called tamizdat.) By the mid-1970s, this “second culture” — an underground scene that included everything from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to the music of singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky — had become the main custodian of the memory of the terror.
Meanwhile, the state continued to carry out political persecutions, albeit against hundreds of people rather than millions. The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial, the arrests of dissidents, and the use of punitive psychiatry were all reminders of where the party drew the line.
Under Yuri Andropov, who served as the Soviet Union’s leader from 1982 to 1984, there were even hints of re-Stalinization as the regime launched a campaign against “social parasites” (citizens who were officially unemployed) and removed references to the repressions from school textbooks. Under his successor, Konstantin Chernenko (1984–1985), there was even talk of renaming Volgograd to Stalingrad. But such attempts to use Stalin’s image as a reminder of the state’s “strong hand” exposed not only the weakness of the late nomenklatura but also their unwillingness to forge new symbols and meaning.
Commemorating Stalin’s victims during Glasnost
Under the USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, debates about Stalinist repressions transformed from discussions confined to dissident circles into front-page news. Thanks to his policy of Glasnost, literature that had circulated as samizdat for 20 years was published en masse in magazines. From 1987 to 1988, previously banned literary works were released one after another, including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, among others.
By 1988, the weekly magazine Ogonyok had collected hundreds of letters calling for the creation of a memorial to the victims of political repression. The country’s first such monument, the Solovetsky Stone, was unveiled on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square in October 1990 thanks to the founders of Memorial, a human rights group dedicated to preserving the memory of the repressed.
Weakened by the fast pace of Glasnost, the state followed society’s lead. In November 1989, the Supreme Soviet declared the mass deportations of the Stalin era “illegal repressive acts.” By 1990, more than 800,000 people had been officially rehabilitated.
Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Russia adopted legislation on the rehabilitation of “repressed peoples” and “victims of political repression.” The preamble to the latter law explicitly condemned the “years of terror and mass persecution.” It also pledged to restore the civil rights of those who suffered repressions between the October Revolution of 1917 and the USSR’s dissolution. These laws remain in force to this day.
Avoiding painful conversations in post-Soviet Russia
During the early post-Soviet years, the Russian authorities condemned Stalin’s terror clearly and consistently. Beginning in the mid-1990s, memorials to victims of political repression were established across the country, from the Mask of Sorrow in the far-eastern city of Magadan to the Levashovo Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg.
Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, used the topic of Stalinist repressions to bolster the legitimacy of the post-Soviet authorities. In a 1996 parliamentary address, he denounced the communist experiment as a “historical dead-end” and referred to mass repressions as “generic characteristics of a totalitarian regime.” He then renamed November 7 the Day of Accord and Reconciliation.
But after Vladimir Putin came to power, the official rhetoric changed. The Kremlin’s use of the imperial coat of arms, the tricolor flag, and the Soviet national anthem symbolized a desire to connect the different eras of Russia’s history without engaging in painful debates about guilt and responsibility.
During his first presidential term, Putin tried to distance himself from the repressions. In 2007, while visiting the former Butovo firing range, a site used for mass executions and burials during the Great Terror, he emphasized that “such tragedies must not be repeated.” Though there were some attempts to portray the Stalin era in a positive light, backlash from academics and civil society prompted the Kremlin to roll back such policies quickly.
Dmitry Medvedev was somewhat more critical during his presidency. In an October 2009 address, he stated that no state goals can justify repressions and that “nothing can be valued above human life.” At his initiative, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was added to the school curriculum that same year, and the Presidential Human Rights Council drafted a federal program for memorialization. However, this wasn’t followed by any systemic changes. And with Putin’s return to power, the authorities began gradually winding back existing measures.
In August 2015, while serving as prime minister, Medvedev signed the State Policy Act on Commemorating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression. The document outlined plans for museums, archives, and educational programs, but did not include a dedicated budget. In many ways, it remained nothing more than a declaration. The most notable measure of the state’s memory policy at this stage was the construction of the Wall of Grief monument in Moscow, which was unveiled by Putin and Russian Orthodox Church head Patriarch Kirill in October 2017.
Annexing Crimea and bringing Stalin back into the fold
Stalin’s return to official memory policy in Russia is closely associated with the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. In February 2015, to honor the 70th anniversary of the 1945 Yalta Conference, the Russian authorities unveiled a monument in Crimea depicting Stalin alongside British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Notably, the sculpture itself was created back in 2005, but the Ukrainian authorities refused to install it in Yalta due to Stalin’s role in the Holodomor famine and the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
Since 2015, monuments to Stalin have sprung up across Russia — from North Ossetia, the Sakha Republic, and Bashkortostan to the country’s center, including the Vladimir, Tambov, Tver, Lipetsk, and Yaroslavl regions. Built at the initiative of local Communist Party (KPRF) branches, veterans’ organizations, or individual residents, these memorials usually take the form of busts rather than full-body sculptures. The unveilings are typically timed to coincide with May 9, the holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.
In December 2017, the centennial of the Soviet secret police’s founding, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov offered a restrained justification for the agency’s repressions, saying in an interview that the Cheka’s actions should be viewed in a “specific historical context” shaped by external threats and domestic instability. Bortnikov went on to say that despite certain “excesses,” the Soviet secret police handled many cases backed by evidence and successfully thwarted the “subversive activities of a broad counter-revolutionary terrorist underground.”
That same year, Putin told filmmaker Oliver Stone that the “excessive demonization” of Stalin is “one means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia.” The former Soviet leader himself was a “complex figure,” Putin added.
For a long time, the work of civic initiatives aimed at commemorating and offering a critical assessment of the Soviet past — such as Memorial and the Last Address project, a group that installed commemorative plaques on the former homes of victims of the Great Terror — managed to restrain re-Stalinization in Russia. However, by the mid-2010s, the state began to pressure these organizations systematically. Having previously declared Memorial’s human rights center and international historical society “foreign agents,” Russian courts ordered their closure in 2021.
That said, attempts to build new monuments to Stalin continue to face resistance in certain regions. In February 2025, for example, Kaliningrad Mayor Elena Dyatlova refused to allow the local KPRF branch to erect a monument to Stalin, citing a lack of public consensus around his legacy. A similar situation is ongoing in Volgograd, where prosecutors are seeking the demolition of a controversial Stalin statue that was originally unveiled with the support of Governor Georgy Filimonov.
KPRF’s recent resolution declaring Khrushchev’s Secret Speech a “mistake” reflects the trend towards “creeping re-Stalinization” in Russian memory politics. However, it remains a rather marginal development. Neither Putin nor his administration has made any official statements condemning de-Stalinization.
However, it’s worth remembering that KPRF is not just another political party; it’s the ideological successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As such, its rhetoric and symbolic gestures continue to influence how Russian society perceives its history. Even if KPRF’s decision to condemn de-Stalinization has little influence on state policy for now, it still speaks to a profound shift in the collective memory of Soviet-era repressions.
Alexey Uvarov
Translation by Eilish Hart