So much for "godless" Communism. The Telegraph reports:

The Soviet dictator, who was responsible for the deaths of around 15 million people during his 31-year reign of terror, is in second place in online voting for the Name of Russia competition.

Stalin last week surrendered a narrow lead to Nicholas II in the contest, which is based on the BBC's Great Britons series.

But with a result not expected until the end of the year, the country's Communists are convinced that Stalin will still emerge the victor.

While the poll, conducted by the state run Rossiya channel, has been criticised for allowing multiple voting, there is little doubt that Stalin has undergone a remarkable renaissance in recent years.

Opinion polls regularly name him Russia's greatest post-revolution leader after Vladimir Putin, the prime minister.

The wartime leader's resurgence owes much to the Kremlin, which under Mr Putin's presidency appeared to support a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, with television documentaries, films and books released in recent years eulogising him.

A newly published history text book, approved by the Kremlin for use in all schools, glossed over the more unappealing parts of Stalin's rule and ultimately concluded that he was the Soviet Union's most successful leader.

"Stalin is the most popular name in Russia," said Sergei Malinkovich, the Communist party leader who is driving the Stalin canonisation campaign.

"The people have forgiven him for the repressions, the collectivization, the elimination of cadres of the Red Army and other inevitable errors and tragedies of those cruel military and revolutionary times.

"Stalin has become the true national leader of Russia. He turned a backward country into an industrial giant."

Yet the idea of tuning Uncle Joe into Saint Joe has so far won little official backing from the Orthodox Church, which was one of Stalin's chief victims.

Seeking to establish atheism as the Soviet Union's official creed, Stalin destroyed thousands of churches and sent tens of thousands of priests to the gulags and their deaths.

Despite the church's reluctance, St Petersburg's Communists are convinced their vision will come to pass. They have already commissioned religious icons depicting Stalin with a halo round his head that have reportedly sold very well around the city.

"By the end of the 21st century, icons of St Josef Stalin will be in every Orthodox Church," Mr Malinkovich said.

Paul Goble reports:

Many were shocked when the Internet Project “The Name of Russia” showed that Russians saw Joseph Stalin playing that role, with some suggesting that this was equivalent to present-day Germans identifying Hitler in that way for their country or even Israelis deciding to name the German dictator as the symbol of their country.And others were disturbed when the organizers of this project suggested Stalin had come out on top because of a concerted campaign by a small number of web activists and when those carrying out this informal survey said that they had “taken measures” in response that had the effect of elevating Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, into first place. But now a prominent Moscow analyst suggests that the results of this project show something even more disturbing at least to him than the initial “victory” of Stalin. They indicate, Aleksei Roshchin said in an article posted online recently that Russians are increasingly obsessed with themselves rather than with the role they have played in the world.Arguing that even “without Stalin” in the top spot – and he is still among the leaders – Roshchin, who is an expert at the Moscow Center for Political Technologies, says the results of the project to date should disturb all those concerned about the future of Russia and its integration into the broader world.

The “top ten” candidates in the Name of Russia project are Stalin, Vysotsky, Lenin, Nicholas II, Yesenin, Ivan the Terrible, Sergii of Radonezh, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Aleksandr Nevsky. Of these, half were supreme rulers, one was a writer, three were poets, and one was a religious leader.“Not one (!),” Roshchin notes, “is a scholar and only one (!) is a figure of culture known to every cultured individual in the world. That is Chekhov, and he is in eighth place.” But “what does this mean?” the Moscow writer asks rhetorically. “It means that we ourselves, citizens of Russia, are convinced in the depth of our souls that humanity to a great extent does not need our Russia.” And consequently, “we ourselves select out of our 1,000-year history people who clearly are interesting only to us and to no one else.”No one will have a problem with Aleksandr Nevsky who “saved Rus’ from the crusaders” or even with Ivan the Terrble “who took Kazan,” Roshchin says. They are both in the tradition of the type of state figures Russians and many others admir. But what about the others on the list?Yesenin and Vysotsky were accomplished lyric poets who “beautifully expressed ‘the Russian soul” but who as a result are unknown beyond the borders of Russia.

That then there is Lenin, whose activities “showed to the entire world HOW ONE SHOULD NOT PROCEED. But Roshchin inquires, is that something which Russians should be proud of?Given these others, it is thus perhaps not surprising that Stalin received so many votes as “the name of Russia.” Instead, this poll shows clearly “in what direction one should be working if we would like sometime to return to the civilized world:” Russians should focus less on those who have worked only for Russia and more on those who have made a broader contribution.Russia does not lack such people, Roshchin says, and he points to figures like Mendeleyev, Lomonosov, Cherkhov, Kandinskiy, Tolstoy, Landay, Kapitsa, Basov and Popov. If Russians would only display a little more confidence in themselves, he continues, they would see that they are “indeed a GREAT nation.” But until Russians understand that, he concludes with regret, they will continue to vote for Stalin, who symbolizes as it were the sad reality that Russians view themselves and their nation as “good for nothing” and boastfully by voting for people like the dictator Stalin their “lack of faith in themselves.”

On the red banner is written: "Glory to Stalin the Great!"

A couple of years ago I was in the Battle of Stalingrad Museum in the city now known as Volgograd.

On the wall of museum director Boris Usik’s office hung two paintings, one a delicate watercolour of the late Queen Mother, the other a heroic depiction of Josef Stalin in oils.

Seeing the old tyrant hung so prominently in a state official’s office was unnerving at the time. While the odd statue of Stalin had been restored in a couple of village squares, the man who subjected Russia to 31 years of terror had largely disappeared from public view.

Yet over the past couple of years it has once again become cool to revere Stalin, and so it was not much of a surprise to learn that the dictator responsible for perhaps 20 million deaths was leading early voting in a nationwide poll to decide the country’s greatest historical figure.

Even during his lifetime, Stalin enjoyed more public support in Russia than many in the West realise. After all, those who opposed him were dispatched to the gulags or their deaths. Others were terrified into silence.

But then, as now, a sizeable chunk of the population either swallowed the propaganda or genuinely believed that Stalin had reinvigorated a moribund nation, turning in to a great power while simultaneously saving Europe from Hitler.

For old Communists like Mr Usik, Stalin’s name is synonymous with stability in a country that has not had much of it of late. What has struck me, however, is Stalin’s cross-generational appeal. I’ve even heard bright young students praise his disastrous agricultural collectivization policies. Most Russians, even his supporters, acknowledge that Stalin had an awful lot of blood on his hands.

But they argue that it was a period in history when Russia needed a tough man at the top. And they argue that there is much more on the positive side of Stalin’s ledger, particularly in the Great Patriotic War.

While the Soviet Union’s role is often minimized in the West, many Russians are unaware of the role played by Britain and the United States in defeating Hitler. They believe the Second World War only began in 1941 and maintain that Russia fought alone for three years until Britain and the United States reluctantly joined the war during the D-Day landings of 1944.

Yet the fact that Stalin’s popularity has also grown in recent years – something attested to in opinion polls – is undoubtedly partly to do with an unofficial state campaign to rehabilitate his image.

A series of television documentaries, films and books released in recent years have proved little less than eulogies. Then the Kremlin began to attack the publishing industry for being beholden to Western grants.

Television news programmes, whose content is dictated by the State, regularly reported that the history text books used in schools had been distorted by the West to skew the representation of Russia’s Communist past.

So a new history guidebook for teachers was published last year which glossed over Stalin’s crimes and ultimately declared him Russia’s greatest leader of the 20th century.

Despite earlier denials that anything of the sort was planned, the work was republished as a children’s text book and while it has not become a mandatory set text most schools know they risk trouble if they try to teach from anything else.

Why is the Kremlin so intent on rehabilitating Stalin? Garry Kasparov, the former chess giant and opposition leader, reckons that by hamming up Stalin’s greatness, Russians will be more inclined to forgive the government’s march towards authoritarianism.

After all, as the old dictum states, he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.

Paul Goble exposes the fundamental insanity of Russia's Stalin-loving masses:

Many commentators in Moscow and the West explain the rising popularity of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in Russian society as a reflection of the continuing importance of paternalistic values there and to present this phenomenon as a single unified whole that threatens the future of the country. But in an analysis posted online this week, Aleksandr Sobkov not only dismisses the “paternalist” explanation but argues that various groups in Russia today have constructed mutually exclusive myths about him that almost certainly preclude the formation of a unified pro-Stalin front in the future.

And because that is so, the Moscow commentator suggests, those who are disturbed by Stalin’s renewed popularity would do well to focus on these various parts rather than on a whole – one that is just a mythical as the images of Stalin each of these groups now has created. Paternalism, he argues, is an entirely inadequate explanation for the current upsurge in popular approbation for Stalin. That concept denies to the individual and indeed to society as a whole “any independent status” and makes everything that happens the result of the will and actions of the government. Moreover, as traditionally understood, paternalism involves regimes “that put themselves above such criteria as justice which ‘simple people’ think about” and that “the government exists in order to do great deeds and not in order to do something for the little people.”

“To deny the presence of survivals of paternalistic consciousness in contemporary Russia is, of course, wrong,” he says, but “to exaggerate the strength or rootedness of these survivals of the past is a mistake as well” because “Russian society a long time ago ceased to be traditional” and its members have their own interests. Consequently, he continues, one must look at how various groups in the population view any particular individual or event like Stalin and Stalinism. If one does that, it becomes clear that “each group has its own Stalin, one very much mythologized and quite far from the historical Stalin” and from the images of him other groups have. In each case, the group “selects and absolutizes one side of the activity of Stalin in correspondence with its own value orientations” and ignores everything else about him that does not fit into that framework. The Moscow analysts give three examples of groups with very different reasons for backing Stalin.

First of all who may be called “the extreme left” are those on “the extreme left” for whom Stalin is still “’the proletarian revolutionary,’ the continuer of Lenin’s work, the defender of the disposed, a fighter against social inequality, who was leading humanity to a society free from oppression.” But in supporting Stalin for that, members of this group “do not notice that he created a cruelly hierarchical system” in which those above ruled arbitrarily and often viciously over those below and in which no one was ever able to feel secure. And such supporters also ignore the human cost of Stalin’s successes.

The second group of contemporary “Stalinists,” he continues, includes “the Russian great power patriots, supporters of the black hundreds and fascists. For them, Stalin saved Russia from the destructive activities of “’Judeo-Bolshevism’” and restored the Russian Empire. According to members of this group, Stalin’s repressions were not errors or crimes but rather “’a mobilization technology’” that promoted “a severe asceticism and spirit of self-sacrifice” in the population. And his continuing purges were thus “the best means of running a society for all times.” They ignore Stalin’s rhetoric about equality and human progress, dismissing it as a kind of “opium for the people,” because members of this group do not believe in “freedom, equality and brotherhood.” For them, there is only “a will to power, to domination, to putting down everyone else. An eternal boot on the face of the enemy.”

The third group is in some ways the most interesting and the most frightening, he suggests. Made up of those who made their way in the difficult years of transition from communism, they too have “found their own Stalin,” a figure whom they view as “simply ‘an effective manager’” who was able to run a highly complicated state at a difficult time. This is “the Stalin of the football fans. A completely bourgeois Stalin, and any party worker, who had to be shot because he did not catch the latest change in the general line of the party was simply someone who had proved unsuccessful like some old crone found in the metro.”

These are the basic views of the three most significant Stalinist groups within the population, Sobkov argues, but he then inquires: what about Russian officials in the Kremlin? What kind of mythologized Stalin do they have in mind when they talk about the Soviet leader and the system he created? On the one hand, Putin and his entourage are committed advocates of many of the ideas of the great power patriots. They believe in the primacy of the state as a historical actor, and they thus do not want to dwell on things like Stalin’s crimes that would raise questions about their general approach. But on the other hand, Sobkov insists, they aren’t yet prepared to so control the discussion of the past that only one version of Stalin will be available. Instead, they propose that any discussions of him or other leaders not feature “an excess of emotional moral assessments.”

In short, Putin and his entourage have a foot in each camp and are not willing to plump for only one of them. But because that could open the way for a rapprochement of these three groups and create the broad-based Stalinist camp that does not now exist, this approach could in the end threaten Russia’s future far more than any one of them.

Maybe it's "sex sells" in the West, but in Russia Stalin sells.

Zaxi blog carries a report from Newsru.com (Russian language) that reveals a new frozen ravioli has appeared on Russian store shelves recently. Called "Tender as Stalin," the product's slogan is: "Life's gotten better, life's gotten happier!" Appearing in day-glo Soviet red packaging, it comes from the Iceberg Pasta Company in Nizhny Novgorod, whose motto is: "Faithfulness to the finest traditions." Older Russians will recognize the slogan as being a remark made by the dictator Josef Stalin on November 17, 1935 at at political meeting, commenting on the abolition of ration cards for bread, flour and cereal grains. In 1938, the phrase was developed into a popular song of the same name.

Our readers will recall that a few months ago state-owned Russian TV propaganda campaign "Russia Today" used Stalin as its pitchman as well.

We've opined many times on this blog that Russia is showing itself to be a barbaric, uncivilized banana republic, totally detached from any vague conception of reality. But now Der Spiegel reports that they've sunk to an all-time low.

Moscow's international broadcaster, Russia Today, is raising eyebrows with a new ad campaign showing the former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's less-known softer side.

There are probably better ways of promoting a country's image abroad than running an ad campaign in English-language newspapers peddling the softer side of a man whose repressive policies led to the deaths of millions. Under the slogan "proud to be different," Russian state propaganda channel Russia Today (RT) has recently been running full-page ads featuring Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in a general's uniform, armed with a quill in hand. "Stalin wrote romantic poetry," the ad states. "Did you know that?"

It's about as subtle a message as a scenario in which German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle were to advertise with Hitler and the question: "Did you know that Adolf Hilter also painted?"

RT, which has about 700 employees and whose signal can be received in about 100 countries, went on the air in April 2005 and broadcasts in English and Arabic.

Its creator, Michail Lessin, the 49-year-old former press minister and current media advisor to President Vladimir Putin, wanted to establish a news channel that would counter CNN and BBC -- with a Moscow spin.

"It's been a long time since I was scared by the word propaganda," Lessin says. "We need to promote Russia internationally. Otherwise, we'd just look like roaring bears on the prowl."

The station's editor in chief, Margarita Simonjan, 27, adds: "We knew that the Stalin theme would be ambivalent in the eyes of many," she says. "But it fulfilled its purpose wonderfully. The number of visitors to our Web site has doubled."

Paul Goble reports:

Russians in Barnaul who revere the memory of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hope to dig up a memorial to him that was buried during Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign a half century ago and restore it to a place of honor in their Siberian city of 600,000. But as the Russian Agency for National News reported [last week], their project faces a number of hurdles. First of all, they have so far collected only 5,000 rubles (about 200 US dollars) for this project, far less than they will need to exhume the statue and put it back up. Second, local officials appear anything but enthusiastic about this effort. On the one hand, the city’s cultural commission told this project’s supporters, Barnaul has already filled its most public space with monuments. And putting a statue of Stalin there would “destroy the architectural arrangements.” On the other, they noted, it might be possible to put the statue somewhere else, perhaps through the creation of “an alley of historical memory” where the city could commemorate “various people who had left their mark in the history of the country.” But they pointed out that they do not yet know whether Stalin would make that list. And third – and this couldin fact put a stop to this effort – the advocates of digging up the Stalin statue do not know precisely where it is buried. As a result, the Stalin enthusiasts are currently digging or planning to dig in several places around the city in the hopes that Stalin will once again turn up.