Boris Vishnevsky special for the Yabloko web-site, 19.09.2025

Photo: Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev on the Mausoleum tribune / Photo from akg-images, EAST NEWS

Vladimir Putin called on deputies to “depoliticise” Stalin’s role in victory in the Great Patriotic War [a term used in the former USSR, Russia and some post-Soviet states to describe the Eastern Front of World War II, fought primarily between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945]. The President said this at a meeting with leaders of the State Duma factions. “In general, everything connected with the Great Patriotic War, and with what role Stalin played in the Victory, needs to be kept in mind and we should try to depoliticise this,” Vladimir Putin explained. The President also added that one should not forget the “numerous problems connected with repressions” that existed during Stalin’s rule.

Yabloko Deputy Chairman Boris Vishnevsky notes that what President Vladimir Putin now calls “problems connected with repressions,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called differently in 2010:

“There can be no justification for these crimes; our country has given a clear political, legal and moral assessment of the atrocities of the totalitarian regime. And such an assessment is not subject to any revision.”

“I completely agree with this assessment. These were not ‘problems’. These were grave crimes as a result of which millions of Soviet citizens were shot, died in camps, were deprived of freedom for many years, deported, and stripped of rights and property. Such a scale of repressions against one’s own people has no analogues in the world.

If we speak about the Great Patriotic War, then it was won by the Soviet people, who bore enormous sacrifices: dozens of millions of people gave their lives for Victory, dozens of millions lost their health and were bereaved of their loved ones.”

Vishnevsky reminds us that Stalin’s role in the Victory has been assessed differently in various periods of the country’s history. The famous report by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 is significant in this regard.

The report marked the fact that Stalin ignored all warnings about Germany’s attack in 1941, and this “led to the fact that in the very first hours and days the enemy destroyed enormous quantities of aviation, artillery and other military equipment in our border areas, destroyed large numbers of our military personnel, disorganised troop command, and we found ourselves unable to bar his path into the depths of the country.”

The report also noted that “throughout 1937-1941, as a result of Stalin’s suspiciousness, numerous cadres of army commanders and political workers were destroyed on slanderous accusations. During these years, several layers of command personnel were repressed, starting literally from company and battalion level up to the highest army centres.”

It is impossible to “depoliticise” this, Boris Vishnevsky says: we are talking about actions by the head of state that had, like the mass repressions, colossal tragic consequences, and this must be remembered regardless of any merits. And it is completely inadmissible, considering this, to raise the question of perpetuating Stalin’s memory.

“Certainly, at this meeting none of the leaders of State Duma factions said a word about what needed to be said – about current political repressions, the growing number of political prisoners, continuous toughening of repressive laws, the impossibility of achieving justice in courts in ‘political’ cases, and the brutality of sentences in such cases, comparable to sentences for grave crimes against the person. And about the fact that all this increasingly resembles the times of Stalin’s repressions, when the principle ‘the organs do not make mistakes’ prevailed.

But there was no one to say this – in the current State Duma with its five loyal factions, and a complete absence of political opposition.”