Russian liberals voiced outrage at a “scandalous” restoration in which an inscription praising former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was returned to a Moscow metro station on Thursday.
The outcry came after officials unveiled a restored entry hall to Kurskaya metro station in central Moscow featuring all the details of the structure’s original 1950 appearance — including the slogan lauding Stalin.
“Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labor and great deeds,” says the inscription, which is taken from an early version of the Soviet national anthem.
Liberal politicians and human rights activists say the inscription glorifies a dictator responsible for the death and imprisonment of millions in the Soviet Union’s notorious gulag prison system.
“This is scandalous … Stalinism meant a monstrous genocide committed against the people of the USSR,” said Moscow city lawmaker Sergei Mitrokhin, a leader of the liberal Yabloko party.
Mitrokhin also linked the restoration to what he described as a sinister campaign by the current Russian government to improve Stalin’s image and downplay his crimes in a bid to boost patriotic feelings.
Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Russia approved a school history textbook that praised Stalin as an effective manager and brought back the Stalin-era national anthem, albeit with new words.
“The positive image of Stalin is being revived by state propaganda and in school books,” Mitrokhin said.
“We will demand that this shameful description be removed,” said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group and one of Russia’s best-known human rights activists.
Officials say they were merely being faithful to the original design of the metro — which is renowned for its artwork — and not trying to revive the Stalin personality cult.
Muscovites can now see “precisely the same entry hall that their fathers and grandfathers saw in 1950,” metro chief Dmitry Gayev said at the hall’s opening ceremony on Tuesday, quoted by the Vremya Novostei newspaper.
Gayev noted that the original entry hall featured a Stalin statue, but that it had disappeared and had not been restored.
The Stalin slogan had not been seen for nearly half a century, having been removed in the 1960s during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign and replaced with a slogan praising Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
Many of the grander stations in the Moscow metro were built in the 1930s and 1940s and contain artworks praising the Communist system, such as mosaics of Karl Marx and statues of burly proletarians and peasants.
Nowadays, few commuters rushing through the metro every day in capitalist Moscow pay attention to these artworks, although they are an object of fascination for Western tourists.
Some Russians praised the decision to restore the Stalin slogan, including Roy Medvedev, a well-known historian of the Soviet era.
“This station needed to be restored, and how else can you do it?” Medvedev said in an interview with Echo of Moscow radio, calling the decision “appropriate.”
“There are many such traces of Stalin in Moscow,” he said.
Coincidentally, the author of the controversial slogan, poet Sergei Mikhalkov, died on Thursday at age 96.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS