Homage to History or a Return to Stalinism?

The park zone facing the palace has been chosen as the preliminary site for the monument, but the final decision on its location has yet to be approved. According to Volodymyr Kazarin, vice premier of the Crimean government, it will be the first monument to Joseph Stalin to be built in the post-Soviet space after the official denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality.

This immediately prompted lively debates in the Crimea. News of the monument reached Moscow and provoked an outcry in the Russian press, especially in Tatarstan and many autonomous republics of Russia, whose populations were subjected to Stalinist deportations. The initiative of the Crimean authorities has also sparked a number of objections. First, many representatives of the progressive intelligentsia and victimized peoples oppose the idea of building a monument to the tyrant, even if he is in the company of Roosevelt and Churchill, in the Crimea, which is believed to have been hardest hit by Stalinist crimes. Second, objections have been voiced against funding the monument from the Crimean budget, which does not have enough funds to restore justice after Stalin’s wrongdoings. In this connection the Crimean governmental press service has even circulated a special letter refuting “the misleading information published in the newspapers Poluostrov Krym and Nash Krym, which alleges that budget funds have been allocated for the construction of a monument to Stalin. The Ministers’ Council of the Crimea is authorized to state that no funds from Ukraine’s budget or those of the Autonomous Crimean Republic have been earmarked for this purpose. The decision to build such a monument can be made only at the level of the bilateral relationship between Ukraine and Russia.” This letter, however, raised many eyebrows. After all, no one is calling into question the fact that funding has not been earmarked for the monument. The question is: Will such funding be provided? For there have been countless cases when funding was provided even though it was never earmarked.

New details emerged later. First, it was reported that “the monument to the Big Three — Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt — will be built in Livadiya with money from Russian investors, and no allocations from the budgets of Ukraine or the Crimea were planned for this purpose.” Second, according to vice premier of the Crimean government Volodymyr Kazarin, the monument to the participants of the 1945 Yalta Conference will be three meters high and cast in bronze. Kazarin confirmed earlier reports that the monument would be created by the Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli.

The idea to erect a monument to Stalin has rekindled fears that it will not so much symbolize a tyrant as signal a return to Stalinism. Emine Avamilieva, head of the Inicium League of Crimean Tatar Jurists said, “I would call the initiative to erect a monument to Stalin a cynical and blasphemous act with respect to the people who fell victim to Stalinism. They constitute a majority in the multinational Crimea. It means humiliation of all those who were deported, persecuted, subjected to hunger, and terrorized by the system; all those who feared for their families and friends. I think we must simply find a different way, different setting, and different concept to commemorate this event.”

Yury Polkanov, chairman of the scholarly board of the Association of Crimean Karaites, said, “I have mixed feelings about this issue. On the one hand, I can’t see anything wrong with commemorating the personages associated with such a major historical event as the Yalta Conference. But, in my view, in no case should this be done with government money. Also, we must not allow this monument to set the pattern for the future replication of monuments to the ‘father of all peoples.’ On the other hand, I believe that the people who survived the horrors of Stalinism will react negatively to this initiative by the Crimean government, and especially so in the Crimea, given that hundreds of thousands of people here were subjected to deportations.”

“Without a doubt, Stalin significantly influenced the course of history in the twentieth century,” says Volodymyr Prytula of the Crimean Independent Center of Political Researchers and Journalists. “But this is not reason enough to build a monument in his honor. After all, the German corporal Schikelgruber [Hitler’s real name — Ed.] had an equally great influence on twentieth-century history. Some Germans might even say that it was the German Reichschancellor who curbed inflation, unemployment, and economic recession, even thought it was done by means of military industry. Therefore, a cynic might say that Hitler did much good for Germany, much like Stalin for the USSR. But this does not change the historical fact that Stalin and Hitler were the biggest criminals of the twentieth century, each of whom exterminated millions of people. This is their main historical significance. The fact that Churchill and Roosevelt shook hands with him does not mean that our people can forgive Stalin for his wrongdoings. In my opinion, the debates in our society and historical studies around the significance of the 1945 Yalta Conference are not over yet. The fact of the Yalta Conference deserves to be remembered, but not by erecting a monument to Stalin. Obviously, there are many other ways of doing this, which would be more humane and understanding of the historical memory of the victimized peoples. To find them, we must announce a competition instead of offering obviously unacceptable options, because this very fact contains its share of Stalinism, which is unacceptable in a democratic society.”