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.
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