Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 19.04.2019 

According to public opinion polls, the attitude of over 50 per cent of Russians to Joseph Stalin is somewhat positive. This is not surprising.  Stalin’s methods of governing based on fear and lies were maintained under Leonid Brezhnev and country leaders after him. Mikhail Gorbachev abolished this practice. But then, not yet overcome, Bolshevism with its “goal justifies the means” and indifference to the life, dignity and destiny of man, formed the basis of the reforms of the 1990s, which gave rise to the mafia state. And in the 2000s, capitalism with a Stalinist face emerged on the basis of this “market Bolshevism”: lawlessness, authoritarian rule, contingent property law, dullness in power, and corruption, which was deliberately laid in the foundation of all relations in the country, so that to serve as a universal charge for arrest for anyone at any time (just like “anti-Soviet activities of the enemies of the people and spying for world imperialism” in [Joseph Stalin’s] 1930s).

The present government feels as a successor to the Bolsheviks. Their power is based on the historical ideology centred around Stalin, and they do not want to have other notions of the history of the past hundred years. The rejection of the European way of development, the Patriarchate, which with the exception of a few members of the clergy, as a rule, support the state in in everything, propaganda of war, “the country besieged by enemies”, quarrels and wars with its neighbours – all this represents the very same Stalinism which has always been there.  There are no mass-scale reprisals yet [as in Stalin’s period], but all the prerequisites are there. Reprisals can be launched under the slogan of fight against corruption or against disrespect for the authorities, or against terrorism… Something can always be made up in the conditions of lawlessness. Judging by public opinion the polls, the atmosphere in the country is suitable for that. I wrote about this in the article “The Great Terror and Modern Bolshevism”. I spoke of the urgent need for de-Stalinization during the presidential campaign a year ago. This must be repeated again and again. #MakeYourVoiceLouder.

Putin is leading the country along “path that do not exist,” and Stalinsm is one of the darkest deadends in this way.

Source