Putin is resurrecting Russia’s ‘iron rogues’

A year before Russia launched its brutal campaign to subjugate Ukraine, I visited a wintry Moscow. It was striking to see how far the capital had moved away from celebrating the cult of the old communist leadership that had dominated the then Soviet Union with an iron fist. The tomb of Lenin by the Kremlin was, of course, still doing good business with tourists. But the bust of Joseph Stalin, standing on guard outside his old boss’s gaudy vault, resembled a forgotten relic.

The sorry state of these statues was no accident. After the failed coup by Kremlin hardliners in August 1991, First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s power drained away. As a result, the USSR quickly disintegrated and Yeltsin’s rule as leader of the Russian Federation was established. One consequence of the defeat of the old order, mirrored across Eastern Europe, was the spontaneous act of demolishing cultural aspects of communist rule. Flags replaced, official insignia forcibly knocked off buildings, the names of well-known boulevards and streets changed, and the statues of major figures from the previous eighty years of one-party government defaced or removed. But now, under Vladimir Putin, the rogues are being resurrected.

This week, amid the daily news cycle of atrocities and high-stakes political intrigue, the unveiling of a statue in Putin’s capital caught the world’s attention. A statue of Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, whose Bolshevik nickname had been ‘Iron Felix’ was once again immortalised, but in bronze. With some fanfare from Russian state media, the statue was unveiled in front of the headquarters of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Formerly the KGB, this was, of course, the state organ used by Lenin, then Stalin, Khrushchev and all others in the communist era to maintain control at home and strike fear abroad. It’s current director Sergei Naryshkin, surrounded by senior officers, proclaimed at the ceremony for the statue’s unveiling that Dzerzhinsky’s face on the original and new statues is turned toward Poland and Baltic states ‘because the threat to Russia from the northwest remains.’ 

The original 15-tonne iron statue had been removed by crane on the order of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov following civil disturbances in July 1991. By November that year, the communist party was banned; the following January, Luzhkov then signed a decree establishing the Muzeon Park of the Arts, situated along the Moskva River, a twenty-minute walk from the Kremlin. In Lenin and Stalin’s time it had served as the All-Russia Agriculture and Industrial Craft Exhibition. This would now be the home for hundreds of communist icons, including many of Stalin, Lenin and the old head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky. I knew it as the Park of Fallen Heroes, and it is where I last looked upon Dzerzhinsky as an ice-cold wind blew into my face. I believed I was looking at a figure lost to history and no longer significant. How wrong I was.

Fast-forward to February 2023. Vladimir Putin’s entourage speeds through Volgograd amid a heavy security presence and monitored by state media. The war in Ukraine is about to have its first anniversary, Putin’s plans have unravelled, the west is supporting Ukraine and his army is taking a beating. Pragmatic, and with an eye to history, he is visiting the city all Russians venerate. This is where, against the odds, Stalin’s Red Army achieved what had been the unthinkable: destroying Hitler’s armies in the east.

Putin, like all Russians, has a deep-rooted connection to the battle and the Great Patriotic War. His elder brother died of starvation in Leningrad (St Petersburg) and his father was severely wounded there. Of all the Soviet cities commemorated after the war by Stalin as a ‘Hero City’ it was this one which Putin has regularly visited since he came to power, wrapping himself in a wave of national pride as he lays wreaths and meets veterans. For the eightieth anniversary in 2023 of the victory, the city renamed by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, changed its name back to Stalingrad. Banners of the fallen were draped across arterial roads and the press took photographs of a new unit raised in the city that would be shortly sent to the Ukrainian front, the ‘Stalingrad Brigade’.

While all of this was in play, city officials undertook a very different, but important ceremony just prior to the presidential visit. In front of the city’s famous Panorama Museum, overlooking the mighty Volga River, a bronze bust of Stalin was again back on show in the city originally named after him. When I was researching in the city archives in 2020, I was surprised at how little evidence there was of the great tyrant. No statues, no place names or buildings. It had been de-Stalinised. Well, as they say in a famous magical movie franchise, ‘he’s back!’. But it had been coming and this return mirrored Putin’s increased grip on power over two decades as his foes were jailed, exiled or eliminated. In 2019, two busts of Stalin were unveiled, one in Volgograd (but not in a prominent position), and the other in the country’s third-largest city Novosibirsk outside of the local communist party’s headquarters. 

Putin has encouraged a movement for change in rehabilitating Russia’s greatest dictator, at both national and local level, stretching across the vastness of his empire. This resurrection is supported with positive polling, celebrating Stalin’s heroic leadership in WWII, and his steeliness when steering the country through the first years of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was in its zenith. Amid the bloodshed and terror of the current war Putin’s regime is conducting in Ukraine, don’t be surprised if yet more mass murderers and rogues are brought back to life in iron and bronze on the streets of Moscow. 

Iain MacGregor is a publisher, historian and author. His latest book is The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII’s Greatest Battle (Constable)