A statue of Josef Stalin in Moscow. |
This year, the Russia TV channel began the “Name of Russia” project where people vote on the most notable personalities of Russian history. The 13th century prince Alexander Nevsky eventually won, although the contest generated controversy around the prominent placement of Joseph Stalin in the ratings.
Victor Yasmann is an analyst for Radio Free Europe’s Russian Service and writes about the contest organizers’ political motivations and Russia’s perception of its own history.
Russia Again Demonstrates Its Past Is Unpredictable
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once said that it doesn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes. This axiom of the “father of nations” would seem perfectly applicable to the “Name of Russia” project, which was created in order to determine the most outstanding personalities of Russian history. It all began when the project’s sponsor, the Rossia state television channel, asked Internet users to choose from a list of 500 nominees the 12 names that most fully symbolize the country.
Similar projects have already been carried out in 22 countries around the world, and in none of them did the selection process produce any particular conflicts. That is because these countries have come to terms with their pasts. Therefore, the British — as might have been expected — voted for Winston Churchill, the Americans selected Ronald Reagan, South Africans endorsed Nelson Mandela, and Germans picked Conrad Adenauer. The German case is interesting because the competition organizers there published a list of ineligible people that included all the leaders of the Nazi regime.
In Russia — the country with an unpredictable past — everything was different. The project organizers clearly manipulated the voting in such a way that the competition and its results were undermined.
By the middle of the summer, Stalin was leading in the voting, a fact that produced consternation among the organizers and their masters in the Kremlin. But the fact was that Stalin was the choice of this forward-leaning audience of Internet users, none of whom, of course, lived under the dictator.
And this fact surprised no one. In the great cultural counterrevolution that has been going on in Russia over the last decade or more, Stalin’s name was long ago rehabilitated and has even become a fundamental element of the current system’s ideology of national revanche. All you have to do is walk into any bookstore to see whole shelves of books devoted to the father of nations, approximately three-quarters of which are paeans to the dictator. Around the same time, a new history textbook by Aleksandr Filippov and others appeared that called Stalin “an effective manager” and whitewashed the Great Terror as “a rational tool for the development of the country.”
To read more, visit the original post.
The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user chill under a Creative Commons license.
