The fact that Stalin’s portraits as a Marshall of Victory
finally have not emerged in the Moscow streets is a great
achievement of our civil society.
The YABLOKO party took an active part in the campaign. In
our first statement we said that there is no place for Stalin’s
portraits in the V-Day decoration of Moscow streets and squares.
However, placement of the materials of totalitarian propaganda
(that have already been printed) in the Moscow museums and
public centres makes us to return to this issue once again.
There should be no lies and calling placing of placards picturing
Joseph Stalin as the architect of the Victory a "public
awareness action". These published at the expense of
the Moscow budget, i.e. Moscow tax payers, propaganda materials
present a perverse Stalinist version of history. However,
the victory was accomplished by the people and was paid for
by people’s blood and millions of victims. These lives were
given for the country and the people who lived in it, for
the future generations, including our generation, rather than
for Joseph Stalin and his executional system.
The disaster of 1941 proves this too well. The Stalinist-Bolsheviks’
system did not manage either to prevent the war or to prepare
to Hitler’s attack for decades of its undivided rule. Only
a self-sacrificing fight which the nations of our country
led to defend their Fatherland managed to stop and then to
reverse the fascists' invasion.
Joseph Jugashvili’s key motives were preservation of his
own life and his power, rather than to preservation of the
nations of the USSR that had already suffered from Stalin’s
collectivization and mass-scale reprisals. This fear made
him not only to resist fascists but also pay senseless victims
at the expense of different nations of the USSR, the Russian
people first of all.
And that is why a new upsurge of the toughest reprisals took
place after the war. These reprisals were targeted against
the victorious nation, as the system was frightened by its
strength and courage. Trying to take all the credit to himself
the Stalin’s system purposefully diminished the heroism of
the people, lowered the losses by several times and punished
all the attempts to speak about the price of the victory and
the tragedy of the people. Even a dramatic song we know so
well today “Enemies burnt his home…” was prohibited in Stalin’s
period.
Placards with Stalin – "Generalissimo of the Victory"
– present an open and cynical propaganda of that version of
history which did not allow to sing about the tragedy of the
winners and where all the prisoners of war were considered
traitors and any attempts to doubt Stalin’s role as the Architect
of the Victory were banned.
We think that our duty before the victims of the war and
the living Winners is to fight against such attempts.
We are certain that an open clear and formal attitude to
such actions conducted by bureaucrats is a duty of the present
state and its head.
We are calling President of the Russian Federation to finally
give a tough formal assessment of the Stalin’s system and
the attempts to associate it with the Great Victory, this
should be done in his address to the nation, rather than in
his Internet blog or an interview.
However, we shall continue our struggle against rehabilitation
of Stalinism and we shall make it.
Sergei Mitrokhin,
Chair of the YABLOKO party
See also:
Overcoming Stalin's
Legacy
| 