Why is Russia erecting Stalin statues again

21 May 2025

How does a nation reckon with its history? One way to analyse that is through who it honours with statues. In early May alone, seven new monuments to Joseph Stalin were unveiled across Russia – more than at any time since the dictator's personality cult was dismantled in 1956. 

Their number has steadily grown since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and surged after the invasion of Ukraine, to now over 120 Stalin monuments nationwide. Just last week, a Stalin bas-relief appeared in the Moscow metro, replacing one that had been removed in 1966. Stalin's busts were even installed in the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory Day. Putin also personally ordered the airport in Volgograd to be renamed "Stalingrad".

What's behind Russia's return to Stalinism? In the early post-Soviet period, only five Stalin monuments remained standing in Russia (excluding those held in museums), and another five were built during the 1990s. Russian society viewed Stalin, who ruled from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, largely critically. 

After all, he imprisoned millions in labour camps or executed them on fabricated charges. Stalin's name was synonymous with state terror, political purges, and the vast Gulag prison system. The year "1937" – the peak year of the Great Terror – became shorthand for state violence at its most brutal. He engineered the Holodomor, the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians in the early 1930s. 

Under Putin, who is both an admirer of the Soviet Union and tsarist Russia, the tide began to turn. Before 2014, Russia averaged four new Stalin statues a year. After the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, that number nearly doubled. 

Now, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, state propaganda has openly rehabilitated Stalin. He's portrayed not as a tyrant, but as a victorious wartime leader who forged Soviet greatness. Polls show that Stalin's approval among Russians has risen sharply, reaching 60–70% in recent years, compared to much lower approval in the 1990s.

Much of this monument boom is driven by local officials, particularly members of the Communist Party. In Barnaul, a town in the West Siberian Plain, a Stalin centre organised interactive plays featuring the ghost of Stalin, while communists in Irkutsk have organised children's drawing competitions with portraits of Stalin. 

In Vologda, the regional governor, who still wears a Stalin-style tunic, has hung a portrait of him in his office. Not all memorials have been met with public appreciation. Earlier this year, a Stalin monument in the Moscow-region city of Zvenigorod was beheaded with a sledgehammer by a local man.

Since 2022, criticism of Stalin in Russia has increasingly been portrayed as pro-Western, anti-war, and unpatriotic. Independent historians and human rights groups documenting Stalin's crimes have been silenced or outlawed. After decades of post-Soviet condemnation, Russia appears to have come full circle, culminating in a new historical verdict declared by Putin himself at the end of 2022: "Lenin, Stalin, and Nicholas II made Russia a great world power."