Should Posters of Stalin Have Decorated the Streets of Moscow?

A revisionist wave, however, reached the point of changing the name of the city in which the most important and heroic battle was locked against Nazism: Stalingrad, still in the 1960s, was renamed Volgograd. In the course of capitalist restoration in the 1990s, the last symbols and tributes were also eliminated. But pressure from veterans and other social strata on the administration of Moscow, in these last months seems to reveal the relative failure of fighting Stalin by methods formerly classified as ... Stalinist.

It is not the case to oppose the violation of historical truth with a naive and equally false image about the man who ruled the first socialist state for 30 years. It would be as absurd to accept that the counterpoint to the personality worship could be to villainize a leader of that scope.

Stalin was an actor in an era of extreme polarization. His period of leadership was burdened with being almost constantly at war, civil or external, when violence was an inalienable instrument of all political forces, which were played in the battles of life or death, victory or annihilation. In the course of his strategy to modernize the country, defeating the former ruling classes, to consolidate internal hegemony and break the siege mounted by the capitalist governments, many crimes were committed and innocent victims, including proven Bolshevik leaders lost their lives and honour.

Stalin represented the design of a revolutionary dictatorship, with its undeniable achievements and deformations. His greatest legacy, however, according to the unsuspecting Trotskyist historian, Isaac Deutscher, was to have inherited a country that lived in the era of the wooden plow and have it delivered to future generations, in less than thirty years as an atomic power. His autocratic system of government, which was not always the same either, went through liberalizing attempts, and was also built the painful way to generate and control the resources that allowed the most rapid and large expansion of social rights which bears notice.

This article, anyway, does not lend itself to a balance of what was the trajectory of the controversial Soviet leader. The issue is to restore historical fact, just that. If to any leader in particular humanity should owe the liquidation of Nazism, this man answers to the name of Yosef Stalin. To him fell, despite mistakes and bloody crimes, the command of the army and the country that broke the backbone of Hitler's troops.

*Breno Altman is a journalist and director of the site Opera Mundi.

Translated from the Portuguese version by:

Lisa KARPOVA

PRAVDA.Ru