By Spiegel Online

Children hold their red neckerchiefs, the visible symbols of the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth league in the USSR, in Moscow’s Red Square on 16, 2010. Many Communist leaders in contemporary Russia overlook the mass killings ordered by Josef Stalin during his rule.

It’s not like someone in Russia would dispute that Josef Stalin stands for a gruesome reign of violence. He was a controversial figure from the beginning among the leadership of his own party, the Bolsheviks, forerunners to the Communist Party. Even former Russian Communist leaders concede that the number of his victims is inconceivably high.

And yet the late Soviet dictator is the source of intense disagreements in modern day Russia. Admirers like writer Alexander Prokhanov extol Stalin’s “mystical victory” at the end of World War II and the Soviet “red project” as epoch-making. The pro-Stalin camp regularly wins television debates with liberals warning of the dangers of Stalin nostalgia. Sixty years after his death, on March 5, 1953, the “man of steel” still inspires fascination among many Russians.

Lenin issued some of the earliest warnings against what Stalin was capable of. As he wrote in a letter to the party convention on December 24, 1922: “Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.”

The Great Purges

Back then, Stalin had not yet achieved unfettered power over the five-year-old Soviet state. World War I and the Russian Civil War had shaken the land, and the all-powerful Communists were split into rival factions. One man from a well-to-do Jewish family made a name for himself as a brilliant orator: Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, who called himself Leon Trotsky. Lenin, apparently a connoisseur of human nature, warned against him, too. Trotsky had a “too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs.”

It was this judgment that made Stalin’s rise to power possible. Almost no one, not even Lenin, had imagined that Stalin would have Trotsky expelled from the party and sent into exile. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin could no longer be stopped. He quickly isolated Trotsky supporters, the “Trotskyites,” repeatedly warning of their dictatorial ideas, like the widely hated concept of the “militarization of labor.”

In Moscow in the 1920s, Stalin distinguished himself with vows to establish democracy. His consolidated his power through the party apparatus, in which he promoted mostly young Russians. The party that Lenin had left behind was chaotic, ruled by political adventure-seekers who had virtually no connection to the lives of average Russians. In contrast, the class of state administrators and regional rulers were greedy and corrupt. Neither group was capable of building a state, and Stalin seized the opportunity. In the latter half of the 1930s, he used the Moscow show trials to sentence hundreds of thousands to death and millions to imprisonment camps, where countless died.

Read the rest via Sixty Years After Death Josef Stalin Still Revered by Some Russians – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

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