Stalin Memorials in Russia
Just how many are there and why are they getting more?
Putin’s Russia invites itself again and again to be compared to the Soviet Union. Silencing and imprisoning of opposition figures, obligatory military-patriotic education, aggressive propaganda, mobilization, denouncing, foreign agents, and hostility towards the West find their parallels in what was once the fanatic experiment to create socialism in one country.
Russian society views some of its historical personalities in a very different light than most of the rest of the world. Gorbachev, hailed abroad for his attempts to open up the Soviet Union, is remembered in Russia largely for the economic downturn his policies brought. Joseph Stalin was responsible for some of the worst mass murders in history, and has transformed the early Soviet Union from (arguably) an internationalist project into (certainly) a repressive, totalitarian empire. Today, the West regards him, rightly, as a universally evil figure.
Russians tend to emphasize his accomplishments during WW2 and during the period of collectivization and industrialization of the country. In a 2021 state opinion poll, almost 40% of respondents picked Stalin as “the most outstanding person of all times and nations”, and only 11% of respondents in Russia dislike, fear, or hate him, compared to almost 40% in Ukraine.
National LARP-ing
Just over a week ago, news came out that seemed to back up this characterization. Ahead of Putin’s visit to the victory/memorial complex in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), the city unveiled a new bust of Stalin in the city center. For the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the road signs at the city’s entrances were changed to its former name. A simultaneous state-run survey asked citizens whether they supported keeping the old name (two thirds didn’t).
What was striking though was that not too many people appeared to be bothered with erecting a monument to one of the worst mass murderers in history.
While reading David Satter’s insightful book It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, it became clearer to me why such a memorial is even possible: unlike post-war Germany, Russian society never properly went through the process of coming to terms with its history and fully acknowledging and judging the crimes committed by its governments.
This made my wonder – is this Stalin bust in Volgograd something unique? Before starting my research, I was aware of only two other Stalin monuments: his grave (a bust) at one of the Kremlin walls on the Red Square, and his former dacha (summer house) on the Black Sea coast near Sochi (it’s filled with memorabilia and even a creepy wax figure).
Are there any others?
Methodology
To gather the data, I used the QuickOSM plugin in QGIS to submit a number of queries to the Overpass API. These queries check the Openstreetmap database for any buildings, monuments, streets, and natural features inside Russia (and Crimea) that have to do with Stalin (i.e., whether the name tag contains the string Сталин or сталин).
I then went through the results manually and verified them in Openstreetmap, Google Maps, and Yandex Maps to make sure they are not false positives. Places that refer to Stalingrad (i.e., the city or the WW2 battle) have been excluded. I have also excluded memorials that commemorate victims of Stalin repression – it would be very insightful to gather data on how many there are in Russia though, but that is a project for another time. A few other locations carry the name of Stalin, such as Stalin skyscrapers, or a few monuments to the Stalinets tractor. Those have also been excluded from the data. I have also manually removed duplicates, i.e., data points that actually point to the same statue.
Stuff Named After Stalin
We are left with 142 unique features in Russia and Crimea carrying Stalin’s name. Of this,
84 are streets (most commonly just “Stalin street”)
13 are museums (usually a repurposed house in which Stalin lived for a while)
15 are place names (i.e., of rivers, ponds, villages, etc.)
and 30 are bona fide memorials (usually statues or busts)
You can play with the data here.
Streets named after Stalin are mainly clustered in the North Ossetia and Dagestan regions, but can also be found near Moscow and in the Urals. The high concentration of places named after Stalin in the Caucasus can be explained by Stalin’s ancestry: he was born in Gori, a town that is located in modern-day Georgia, near the capital Tbilisi. In the Caucasus we also find two of Stalin’s dachas, which are now museums. Grozny features the “Stalin Pond”, the area near Vladikavkaz several busts (Digora, Verkniy Fiagdon) and even a painting on a rock near Tsey, and an even larger one near Dzivgis.
In Crimea, which Openstreetmap considers de facto Russian but disputed territory, we can find a monument commemorating the Yalta Conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in February 1945.
The Yalta Conference was held in the Yusupov Palace in Koreiz, a town near Livadia and Yalta. This Tsarist palace was Stalin’s favorite dacha and as such was retrofitted with a bunker. Formerly owned by the Ukrainian president, the palace now belongs to Putin.
Moving on to Volgograd, it becomes essential to filter out results related to the Battle of Stalingrad, of which there are literally hundreds in this city. We can, however, find a statue in the village of Pyatimorsk, and more importantly a museum dedicated to the life of Stalin, right next to the Motherland Calls statue.
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In addition to the bust of Zhukov (which was there before), the city now also features the faces of Stalin and Vasilevsky (Minister of War in the post-WW2 period).
Just about 120m away from the new shining Stalin bust is located one of the few memorials dedicated to the victims of political repression (1917 - 1956).
This sick irony must have been lost on the people making the decisions.
Finally, we come to the capital. When I first saw Stalin’s grave on the Red Square in Moscow, it struck me as odd that there were fresh flowers at its base. You can visit the Necropolis, a series of graves of famous Soviet leaders (Kalinin, Frunze, Andropov, and Brezhnev, amongst others) after passing solemnly through Lenin’s Mausoleum, where he is still presented in a glass coffin, 99 years after his death. This is where also Stalin’s body had been on display until 1961, the height of Krushchev’’s de-Stalinization period.
The grave is, however, not the only place in Moscow dedicated to the dictator. Apart from the Stalin Skyscrapers (an easily recognizable type of Stalinist architecture, as seen in the building of the Moscow State University), we can also find the grave of Stalin’s family, two statues in the Muzeon Park near the Tretyakov Gallery, and three museums.
In other regions of Russia, we can find a few curious things named after Stalin.
Near Pskov and Vyborg are remnants of the Stalin Line, a series of fortifications and tank traps similar to the Maginot Line in France. Some of the bunkers and trenches now belong to museums.
When Moscow was threatened by Nazi forces, Soviet leadership prepared to evacuate the government to Kuibyshev further east, now Samara. This is where one can today still visit Stalin’s Bunker.
In Tver Oblast one can find the village of Stalino. The city of Oryol named one of its central squares in his honor – according to Openstreetmap, that is. If we believe Google Maps, then it’s the “Square of Fairy Tales”, and if we go by Yandex Maps and 2GIS, it’s the “Industrial Square”.
East of Voronezh lies Stalin Pond (just like near Grozny in the south, see above), and south west of Moscow flows the river Stalinka.
South east of of Yekaterinburg can be found the village Stalinets, which is apparently uninhabited, as so many villages in rural Russia.
In the very far North above the Arctic Circle, in Chukotka, a rock formation reminded people so much of Stalin’s profile that it was named after him.
If you are taking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, you will just miss the Stalin Tunnel shortly before your final destination, which leads to the other side of the Golden Horn Bay. Another Stalin Tunnel connects the Sakhalin Island near Japan to the mainland.
Finally, there are a few more busts and other memorials spread around the country, such as in Novosibirsk, two in Amga near Yakutsk, in Arkhangelsk, in Kusa near Chelyabinsk, in Vyritsa near St. Petersburg, on the bank of the Ob’ river near Tomsk, and one in Mirny (near-ish Yakutsk). The second largest open-pit diamond mine is located inside the city and looks absolutely incredible.
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Learning From History
What can we learn from this surprising amount of places named after Stalin, even 70 years after his death?
For one, it is evidence of the failure to re-evaluate the historical figure using contemporary moral principles. Guilt for political repression, mass murder, and genocide is still not placed on government figures and institutions, but is instead frequently relativized as a necessary sacrifice, or not talked about at all. Over 40% of young adults feel they know “little or nothing” about Stalin-era political repression, but only 11% are this unsure about events of WW2.
It also serves as a reminder of the power of habit and inertia, of nostalgia for a past with more prospects and less humiliation, and the recurring theme of the perceived necessity of a strong state to prevent Russia from falling apart. Putin’s insistence on stability and strength today echoes the nationalism of Tsarist and Soviet leaders in the past. This is further illustrated by the reluctance to finally remove Lenin from his mausoleum and to get rid of the thousands of Lenin statues on practically every single main square in Russia.
Hopefully one day Russia will be a free, peaceful, and prosperous country that respects and enforces international law and inviolable human rights. ⬢
