25 percent of Russians consider Stalin’s repressions “historically justified,....................... Yeah, like Hitler’s. s/ Who did they poll, the children of the NKVD who’s parents, unlike the nazis, escaped prosecution. The best thing that occurred in Russia was the death of Stalin, he apparently was on the verge of eliminating Jews like Hitler did. Had he done that, what would the world have done to stop it? I don’t see a fleet of B-47’s dropping A bombs, and the UN action most likely would have been a reprimand? Russian politics at the time is like ours today, too many dirty hands, covering for each other’s criminal activities. At least we aren’t at the point of Lubyanka or the mines of Kolyma and the others. (Not yet, anyway.)
What's also depressing is hearing about the Gulag memory activists who've grown so disillusioned and exhausted of fighting the system (to have the camps properly remembered) -- they end up giving up and saying things like "well...maybe the camps really weren't that bad."
Inna Gribanova, now in her 70s, had now come to think that tales of the horrors of the Gulag were overblown. Sure, conditions had been terrible—but most of the people in the camps, she now believed, were real criminals. The execution figures published by official archives in the late nineteen-eighties—documents that showed that during the Great Terror thousands of people were executed every day—were probably exaggerations. She also told me that she had voted for Putin: she’d had enough of always being in the minority. - The New Yorker
And finally, some Russian historians are at the point where they don't see any solution to tackling the entrenched historical revisionism that lays the foundation of modern Russian identity: that the Soviet Union "saved Western civilization" (and the world) by defeating Nazism/fascism...
Farfetched as it sounds, according to Irina Pavlova, only a visible display of acknowledgment of Soviet Union's crimes against humanity akin to that of a Second Nuremberg tribunal would suffice.
What must happen, she argues, is that the Nuremburg tribunal must be reconstituted to render judgment on the other totalitarian system of the 20th century, Soviet communism.
“Only by depriving present-day Stalinism of its foundation can one hope for a normal relationship with Russia in a globalized world.”
Just to be clear everyone: Lenin's body is STILL unburied and on open display in Red Square. Streets continue to bear his name. Statues of him everywhere...and Stalin's image/busts are not an uncommon sight in Russia either. Some have only been erected recently.