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.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS