Stalin's Return

During his lifetime, statues and pictures of Joseph Stalin blossomed across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union and its satellites. But after his death in 1953, the old dictator's successors ruthlessly turned against him. In a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 denounced Stalin as an egomaniac who employed mass terror and torture. Stalin was then efficiently erased from public view, and the exterior vestiges of his rule--statues, pictures, street signs --came tumbling down. Only in his native Georgia did his statues and pictures remain in place. In 1961, as a final act of destalinization, his body was removed from Lenin's mausoleum and put in a simple grave near the Kremlin's wall,

Last week, in an unannounced move, a life-size bust of the dictator was installed atop his grave. Curious crowds flocked to Red Square to file past the first public display of Stalin in the Kremlin since 1961.

The bust represents another step in the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin. Following Khrushchev's speech, Stalin became a symbol for everything that was bad in the Soviet Union's past: the purges, labor camps, secret police. Now, Soviet officials explain, they seek only to come to terms with Stalin as a historical personage who, despite his shortcomings, played a crucial role in the country's recent past.

The present campaign has a somewhat cosmetic aspect. The bust, executed in gray marble by Stalin Prizewinner Nikolai V. Tomsky, softens Stalin's sharp features and makes him appear humane rather than harsh, wise rather than wily. The current spate of memoirs by World War II Soviet generals speak of Stalin as an efficient commander, sparing him the blame for Russia's poor state of preparedness, which resulted in its initial defeats.

Reworking Lenin. Perhaps the most telling is the treatment of Stalin in the recently published fourth edition of Lenin's biography, which is a sort of hagiography of Soviet Communism. Unlike the earlier biographies, the new edition omits the entire section on the rise of Stalin's cult of personality, the Soviet euphemism for his reign of terror. It glosses over his disputes with Lenin about economic and military policies. In addition, the present version strikes out Lenin's complaints that Stalin was coarse and rude. In fact, the only criticism of Stalin appears in Lenin's famous letter to the Twelfth Party Congress in 1925 in which he expressed doubts about whether Stalin would exercise his power with sufficient care if he was elected party leader.

Many Russians would feel less unsettled by the new portrayal of Stalin if the present regime of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin were not embarked upon a campaign of selective repression against intellectual dissidents. In the wake of arrests and harassment of outstanding writers, scientists and civil libertarians, some Russians fear, the more favorable official view of Stalin will lessen the pressures on the government to refrain from the harsh practices that so severely scarred his 27-year rule of Russia.

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