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A dictator's resurrection

DOUBLE AND TREBLE the guards lest he rise up from the grave, wrote the dissident poet, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, at the height of the de-Stalinisation drive launched by the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. It was an expression of a widespread fear that the old black days of Josef Stalin might return to stamp out the little freedoms that the Soviet people had begun to enjoy under his successor. When Khrushchev stunned the world with his denunciation of the dictator's stifling cult of personality and opened the gates to a flood of personal accounts of sufferings under him, hardly three years had gone by since the passing of Stalin, on March 5, 1953. Within a decade, Stalin's embalmed body was removed from the mausoleum next to Lenin in the Red Square even as the drive to expose the mass murders during his reign and his controversial legacy continued in fits and starts under successive leaders. The final denouement came under Mikhail Gorbachev and his twin policy of perestroika and glasnost, which led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, a half century after Stalin's death, it looks as if the guards at his grave have fled amid a growing longing among the younger generation for an iron-fisted leader to return and pull the country out of the morass. Russia appears still unable to break out of his spell.

A degree of nostalgia was always extant in post-Stalin Soviet Union, with the older generation never ceasing to long for the giant who led the communist nation to a remarkable victory in World War II and turned it into a superpower of unrivalled industrial strength. Of a piece with this was the recent attempt by septuagenarian war veterans to restore to Volgograd its post-war name of Stalingrad. This was explainable nostalgia for the glory days. What must baffle one however is the response of the younger generation, which has heard mostly only denunciation of Stalin and his brutal record as an autocrat. This is apparently the generation that has been worst affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The trappings of democracy that this has brought have done little to relieve the pain of loss of employment opportunities and generally the hope for the future.

The Putin Presidency's success in halting the slide after the chaotic decade under the flamboyant Boris Yeltsin has done little to stem the nation's desperation — and a consequent longing for the return to the old days. Perhaps, Mr. Putin's austere style and ways of governance, resulting from the rigours of his experience in the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, might themselves be inducing the nostalgia for "a leader like him". In some ways, Mr. Putin has shown himself ready to use Stalinist ways to bring order back while not straying from the democratic path. "The poor want a Stalin to make short shrift of the rich, their enemies, while the rich want a Stalin to keep the poor at bay," says a member of the much-respected Russian Academy of Sciences. Few will disagree with Saltan Dzarasov's comment that the resurrection of Stalin is the result of the failure of democratic reforms in Russia, reviving the debate over whether democracy must precede or follow development. Russia's experience offers no clear clue except that the path of democracy is full of unknown obstacles. As Mr. Putin strives to strike a balance, he must be aware that in present day Europe there can be no going back to the ruthless dictatorships of the last century. The current nostalgia for Stalin among the young Russians may mean two things. One, that he continues to provoke the widest of emotions, from fierce loyalty to bitter hatred, and two, that there is a time bomb ticking that the Russian leadership can ill afford to ignore. Posterity, haunted by Stalin, perplexed by the legacy of his rule yet still unable to master and transcend it, for the time being sought merely to cast him out of its memory, wrote Isaac Deutscher. Maybe the time of recall has come.

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