Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler are remembered as the most terribly destructive leaders of the twentieth century. Both men perpetrated mass genocides, with the Nazi regime intentionally killing nearly twelve million civilians during World War II and Stalin’s regime killing about nine million people, most from within what would become the Soviet bloc. Following those leaders’ deaths, their countries’ new leaders distanced themselves from the legacies of both men. However, in the twenty-first century, Russia has begun to reverse that trend.

In Germany, Angela Merkel’s decision to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees is a clear refutation of Hitler’s legacy, though it may have been too drastic an action; public opinion is now against her. In Russia, by comparison, Vladimir Putin is following some of Stalin’s dictatorial practices, using propaganda to promote a cult of personality (and likely rigging elections) to retain power. After his party won a huge majority in a recent parliamentary election, Putin moved to consolidate the security, espionage, and counterintelligence agencies into a new Ministry of State Security. This hearkens back to the secret police force under Stalin and to the more recent KGB.

Joseph Stalin was born on December 18^th, 1878 in the country of Georgia, in the Russian Empire, as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. He later claimed to have been born on December 21^st, 1879 (why not), and used the alias Stalin, which means “man of steel”.

Stalin became acquainted with hardship and tyranny at a young age. He grew up as the only child in a poor family, and his father quickly became alcoholic and abusive. Additionally, his face was permanently scarred from small pox at age seven and his left arm was injured in an accident at age twelve; that injury would later exempt him from military service.

When Stalin’s mother enrolled him at a Greek Orthodox priesthood school at age fifteen, against his father’s wishes, his father went on a drunken rampage that included assaulting the police chief. He was subsequently expelled from the town and left his wife and son.

The next year, Stalin was awarded a scholarship to a seminary. He did quite well in his training to become a priest, converting to atheism within his first year. Importantly, he took a great interest in reading and discovered Karl Marx’s works on philosophy; after being expelled from the seminary, he became a political agitator and soon joined the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin.

Stalin had quite a talent for organizing people and advancing revolutionary interests through any means necessary. Between 1902 and 1913, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia multiple times for orchestrating bank robberies, kidnappings, and assassinations. Fortunately for him, he was good at escaping, and he rose through the Bolshevik ranks.

The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and the Soviet Union formed in 1922, with Lenin as its leader. Unfortunately, Lenin died just two years later, and Stalin outmaneuvered his political opponents to take control of the Communist Party and become dictator of the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s political goals were certainly ambitious; through a series five year plans, he intended to transform the Soviet Union from a nation of peasants into a major industrial power. However, he had no concern for the people’s welfare. When farmers resisted his drastic collectivization measures, he had them exiled or shot. Millions of those who complied died anyway in the resulting famine of 1932-33, especially those in Ukraine. Stalin even sought out to eliminate the entire class of “kulaks”, who were relatively wealthy peasants; he broadened their definition and then executed over 20,000 of them and sent many more to Gulags in 1930.

Stalin also promoted paranoia, encouraging citizens to spy on one another and expanding the secret police. He infamously orchestrated the Great Purge (also known as the Great Terror) in the late 1930s, executing hundreds of thousands of people in the military, the government, and other segments of society whom he felt a threat to Communism. This began with Stalin removing competition to his absolute power within the Party and expanded to the continued harassment and execution of anyone considered a threat to the government. Nearly a million people were murdered during this time, and a lesser version of this terror continued until Stalin’s death. Having reviewed this information, it is clear where the idea for 1984 came from.

Having consolidated power, Stalin promoted a “cult of personality”, using the media he controlled to portray him in a positive light and renaming cities for himself (i.e. Stalingrad). Prominent composers such as Shostakovich were forced to conform to Stalin’s tastes; last year, I read an account of Shostakovich turning “white as a sheet” while watching Stalin’s negative reaction to his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Shostakovich was forced to write a conciliatory 5^th Symphony subtitled “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism” to recover his livelihood; many of his friends were killed by Stalin for their own artistic transgressions.

Following World War II, Stalin increased tensions with the West and provoked the Korean War. He also expanded the reach of his secret police to the Soviet Union’s new bloc of influence; Churchill famously described this as an “Iron Curtain [descending] across the continent.”

Soviet Bloc in red

From 1946 until Stalin’s death in 1953, this intelligence force was known as the Ministry of State Security (MGB).

The MGB enforced strict conformity in the Eastern Bloc. Agents were everywhere and monitored all parts of Soviet life, testing citizens’ loyalty, censoring information, and arresting dissidents. Over 750,000 people were arrested during this time; in many cases, they were charged with “suspicion of espionage”, which essentially could not be disproven. Thousands of people were killed while the MGB was operating.

Following Stalin’s death, the MGB was merged into another department; soon after, the KGB was created to take over intelligence and security work. It was carefully controlled by senior Communist Party officials (again, to root out dissidents), divided into over a dozen directorates, and run as a military organization. The KGB soon boasted the largest intelligence program in the world and remained incredibly powerful until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, following its failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike the CIA, it directed most of its intelligence work inward, policing the Soviet Union’s own citizens; it is thought that millions of deaths can be attributed to KGB operations.

Vladimir Putin served as a KGB officer from 1975 until his resignation in 1991, on the second day of the coup attempt against Gorbachev. He rose from national obscurity to replace Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s president in 1999 and has been in power ever since, albeit as prime minister for four of those years. His recent annexation of Crimea and dispute with Ukraine demonstrates that his mindset is fundamentally different from Western leaders; rather than seeking to maintain peace, his primary goal seems to be expanding Russian territory and power, as Stalin did during negotiations during and after World War II.

On Monday, September 19^th, the Moscow-based newspaper “Kommersant” reported that Putin was planning to merge Russian security, espionage, and counter-intelligence in a new State Security Ministry, or MGB. The article in “Kommersant” asserted that Putin was essentially giving a single agency all the tasks of the Soviet KGB. This would include prosecuting government critics, which is especially reminiscent of the fear-laden KGB years. According to Vox, the new MGB will also have control over investigating corruption and economic crimes, which is Putin’s preferred method of intimidating political opponents; additionally, it will be accountable to him only.

This agency will make it easier for Russia to coordinate foreign espionage and will especially help Putin control the government’s actions. It also aligns with Putin’s recent formation of a national guard 400,000 men strong, apparently to quell unspecified internal protests. At the moment, it seems that Putin’s grasp of power will continue to tighten – unless this new KGB-esque agency becomes strong enough and has the motivation to threaten it.

In addition to creating an agency named for a manifestation of Stalin’s murderous secret police (the MGB), the Kremlin has been trying to improve Stalin’s reputation over the past several years. According to the German news organization Deutsche Welle, Stalin memorials are being constructed throughout the country and the image of his “iron fist” is being glorified by state-run media. And it is having an effect: fifty-four percent of Russians think Stalin had a positive influence on the Soviet Union and twenty-five percent think the purges/terrors were justified.

New Stalin statue in Crimea

To reiterate, Joseph Stalin’s policies were responsible for the deaths of at least nine million people, most of them within the Soviet Bloc. Apparently over half the Russian population has been convinced that industrialization was worth that cost – even with the Russian economy not being especially large or strong today. Amidst this swing in public opinion toward Stalinism, Putin is consolidating power in an agency similar to the fearsome KGB and named for the murderous MGB, forming a national guard for unclear purposes, and conducting increasingly aggressive foreign policy. The Cold War years are over, but Russia is looking ominous again.

We in the United States are (justly) concerned about voters’ support for Trump, but at least in our country Stalin’s poll numbers aren’t on the rise.