There is a date that ought to be carved into the memory of anyone who cares about how nations come to terms with their own crimes: the twenty-fifth of February, 1956. On that day, at the close of the Twentieth Party Congress, a leader of the Soviet Union stood up and told the assembled delegates the truth — or at least a usable fraction of it — about the man whose portrait they had all worshipped. The hall listened in a silence that has been described, again and again, as deafening. When he finished, the session chair proposed that no discussion be opened and no questions be permitted. The reason was obvious: a discussion would have detonated. The report was approved, then quietly buried — distributed only inside party organizations, kept out of the open press. Even the act of telling the truth was conducted as a half-secret.
That half-measure has haunted Russia ever since, because the de-Stalinization it inaugurated was never actually finished. I want to argue something that should alarm anyone watching Russia today: not only was the job left incomplete, but the cult it was meant to dismantle has been deliberately rebuilt — slowly, then quickly, and now beyond anyone’s power to stop. Over the last thirty-five years there has been a genuine, state-assisted revival of Stalin, and the revival has reached a point where Stalinism has outrun the regime that summoned it back to life.
A Cult Rebuilt by Numbers
Start with the hard figure, because it is the kind of number that ends arguments. When pollsters at the Levada Center ask Russians, in an open-ended form, to name the greatest figure of all time — no list provided, no prompts, the respondent must write the name with their own hand — Stalin keeps rising to the top. In 1989, twelve percent of Russians named him the greatest. By 2025, that share had climbed to forty-two percent. A three-and-a-half-fold increase in a single generation.
The open-ended design matters enormously, and it is the part most people miss. This was not a survey where Stalin’s name sat conveniently on a menu beside Lenin, Pushkin, and Putin, waiting to be ticked. People had to summon him from memory, unprompted, and inscribe him themselves. That is not passive recognition; that is conviction. Forty-two percent of adult Russians works out to something on the order of forty million people who, asked to think of human greatness, think first of a man who industrialized mass murder.
And this conviction is not growing in spite of the state. It is growing with the state’s active help. This year a bas-relief of Stalin was unveiled in the Moscow Metro — a sculpture, in the city’s grandest public space, of the executioner restored to honor. The airport at Volgograd was renamed Stalingrad by decree, the change dressed up as a response to requests from veterans’ groups. The Communist Party has formally petitioned to return the heroic name Stalingrad to the city itself and its surrounding region. None of this is grassroots nostalgia bubbling up unbidden. It is policy, descending from above, normalizing the name in monuments, on maps, in the everyday vocabulary of the country.
How Putin Built His Own Successor
The engine of all this is the cult of victory. For at least two decades, the regime has poured everything into a single sacred story: the triumph over Nazism in the Second World War, with the war’s leader as its indispensable hero. You cannot worship the victory without, in the end, worshipping the man at the top of the state that won it. The myth of Stalin-as-vanquisher-of-fascism is the necessary by-product of a politics organized entirely around 1945. Putin needed that myth to give his own rule a borrowed grandeur, so he revived it — and in reviving the victory he revived its author.
Here is the part the architects of this cult did not foresee. Stalinism is no longer a tool obediently serving Putinism. It has overtaken it. The image I keep returning to is a cart that has begun to outrun the horse pulling it — a runaway cart on a downhill slope, where you can no longer tell who is leading whom and stopping is simply not an option. Putin meant to harness Stalin’s prestige to his own; instead he has manufactured a force that now runs ahead of him, dragging him along. The cult has its own momentum, its own constituency, its own demands, and they are not identical to the Kremlin’s.
This is why the revival cannot be switched off at will. A myth deliberately fed for twenty years does not obey a stop order. The regime taught tens of millions of people that the highest political virtue is total, ruthless, victorious mobilization under a strongman who flinches at nothing. Having taught that lesson so thoroughly, it cannot now object when the students apply it to the teacher.
The Only Platform Left for Criticizing Putin
And apply it they will — which brings me to the strangest and most important consequence. In Russia today, Stalinism has become the only ideological position from which Putin can be openly criticized.
Think about what is and is not permitted. You cannot attack Putin for being a fascist, for launching the war, for crushing what remained of free speech — say any of that aloud and you go to prison. The dissatisfaction with the authorities is real but it lives underground, unspoken, latent. There is exactly one direction from which open criticism of the leader is tolerated, even on the major state television channels, and it is the Stalinist direction. They do not name Putin and condemn him; they express a generalized discontent with the authorities for falling short. And what they accuse the authorities of falling short of is Stalin.
From the Stalinist standpoint, the indictment writes itself. Putin is not Stalin enough. He has not ordered full mobilization, has not summoned the whole country to its feet in the old style, has not dropped nuclear weapons on Ukraine or Europe or America, has not pursued total war to the total end. He is, by this measure, soft — hesitant, half-hearted, insufficiently merciless. This is a line of attack in high demand, and it is the only one the regime cannot easily jail people for, because it comes draped in the regime’s own iconography. It is criticism from the maximalist flank, and as the war grinds on it will only grow louder and angrier. The regime has built the one weapon that can be turned against it and handed it to the most radical part of its own base.
The Red-Brown Synthesis
All of this is consolidating into a single political identity, and it deserves a precise name: red-brown. Stalinism, the Communist Party, and Putin’s outright fascism are no longer three distinct currents. They are merging.
Watch what the Communist Party has just done. At its congress it adopted a resolution formally declaring that 1956 report on the cult of personality to be erroneous and politically biased — claiming it falsified facts and slandered Stalin. This is not an antiquarian quarrel about a seventy-year-old speech. It is a calculated political-technological move. The party has read the same polling everyone else has read; it knows that something like forty million Russians revere Stalin, and it is planting its flag on exactly that ground. With Zhirinovsky dead and his party fading into irrelevance under a successor who registers more as a comic figure than a leader, there is an opening to become the country’s second party, the principal opposition — and the Communists intend to seize it by making open Stalinism their banner.
There is a bitter irony in who holds this potential. The man positioned to ride this wave is the same cautious, power-shy figure who effectively won in 1996 and then fled from his own victory, who has clung to the party chairmanship for over three decades precisely by never daring to actually take power. The electoral potential is enormous; the hands holding it are timid. But the potential does not evaporate because its current custodian is a coward. It waits.
What we are watching, then, is the whole apparatus of Russian power sliding toward a red-brown alignment in which the distinctions that once separated nationalist Stalinism from the Communist Party from the Kremlin’s fascism dissolve into one identity with a mass constituency behind it. The Communist Party was never an internationalist project in the spirit of Marx or Lenin; for a long time now its leadership has been Stalinist and nationalist first, communist a distant second. That makes the fusion natural rather than forced.
History Folding Back on Itself
The deepest reason none of this should surprise us is that it has happened before. De-Stalinization was never carried through. The cult began creeping back under Brezhnev, when open admirers of Stalin sat comfortably in university faculties and denounced the 1956 report as a betrayal — and they did so without much fear. The thaw was followed by a long, quiet rehabilitation. What is happening now is not an aberration; it is the resumption of an unfinished process, accelerated and lifted to the level of the state.
The break with the Soviet past, when it finally seemed to come in 1991, was cosmetic. The streets kept the names of executioners. The monuments stayed standing. The people at the commanding heights remained, in spirit and often in person, the same — formed by the same system, nursing the same dream of a restored greatness, governed in the end by a man from the security services who has called the collapse of the USSR the greatest catastrophe of the age. With those phantom pains never treated, the relapse was only a matter of time. Look at who holds power, and the bas-relief in the Metro explains itself.
I do not think this cult will ever quite attach itself to Putin personally; he is too small a figure to fill the coat. The old defense of the dictator — “yes, there was a cult, but there was also a personality” — is grotesque even applied to Stalin, but it is simply absurd applied to Putin, who keeps trying to climb into Stalin’s boots and keeps sinking out of sight, nothing visible above the leather but the top of his bald head. The cult is not really about him. It never was. It is about a model of total, victorious, merciless power that the regime resurrected for its own convenience and can no longer control.
That is the danger, and it is worth stating plainly. A society that refused to finish telling the truth about its worst crime has spent thirty-five years rebuilding the altar to the criminal — and the figure on the altar has now stepped down and begun to walk on his own. The cart is loose on the hill. The people who set it rolling are no longer driving.