re-Stalinization

Formation of the term

Re-Stalinization names an analytical category for the Soviet political system of the 1960s and 1970s: the partial reversal of the de-Stalinization line adopted after Stalin's death. After Khrushchev in February 1956 denounced the cult of personality and blamed Stalin for the mass executions of 1937-1938, party and state bodies reviewed the cases of repression victims and released prisoners from the Gulag. Re-Stalinization emerged as a reaction against that line.

The Brezhnev period (1964-1982)

After Khrushchev's removal in October 1964, Stalin's controversies were de-emphasized. Russian-language accounts place 're-Stalinization', the process of quietly rehabilitating Stalin, within the wider ideological retreat from the Thaw. The signal came at a Kremlin ceremonial meeting on 8 May 1965, when Brezhnev named Stalin for the first time after years of silence and the hall applauded. In late 1969, ahead of Stalin's 90th birthday, Suslov organized a rehabilitation campaign and came close to success, but sharp protests from the intelligentsia, including its elite, forced Brezhnev to abandon it. Stalin was largely recalled for his wartime leadership, publication on repression was censored, and Stalinist symbols reappeared. The political sociologist Viktor Zaslavsky characterized the period as a 'neo-Stalinist compromise' without a personality cult.

Perestroika and after

Re-Stalinization was suspended after Gorbachev took power in March 1985 and introduced glasnost. Yet Gorbachev himself admitted in 2000 that the inheritance received from Stalinism and neo-Stalinism was not easy to give up.

Under Putin from the 2000s, an extensive state-backed programme of re-Stalinization unfolded through mass media, cinema, academia, educational institutions, military propaganda and historiography. In 2014 the Duma passed a controversial 'memory law' criminalizing discussion of Stalin-era atrocities or comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism and inserted it into the Criminal Code. In 2007 Putin promoted a teachers' manual portraying Stalin as a cruel yet successful leader and personally endorsed the revival of the Stalin cult, presenting him as a visionary who saved the world from fascism. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation has installed hundreds of monuments to Stalin with the government's approval since the 2000s and holds annual ceremonies at his grave in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Levada Center polling shows Stalin's popularity rising after 2015, with 70% of Russians in 2021 reporting a mostly or very favourable view.

Points of dispute

Narrowly, re-Stalinization means the quiet rehabilitation of Stalin's image; broadly, it means the suppression of critical discussion of Stalin-era repression. Scholars define the phenomenon differently. The historian Roy Medvedev included the rehabilitation of the Stalin cult, identification with the Stalinist political system, nostalgia for the Stalin period, and attempts to restore the terror politics characteristic of that period. Gorbachev described a moderated Stalinist regime without large-scale purges, but with persecution of political opponents and total control of political life. The political scientist Thomas Sherlock argued in 2016 that the Kremlin had pulled back somewhat and extended support to critical assessments of the Soviet past, including Stalinism. Re-Stalinization should therefore be read as a process whose intensity varied by period and institution, not as a single policy.