Escaping the Long Shadow of Homo Sovieticus: Reassessing Stalin’s Popularity and Communist Legacies in Post-Soviet Russia Open Access

Of all the places where communist legacies are deemed to influence contemporary Russia, its effect on values, identity, and norms has received significant attention (Beissinger & Kotkin, 2014; Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2017; Libman & Obydenkova, 2021). In the current context of increased authoritarianism in Russia, Soviet-style practices and values appear to be resurgent and affect a number of socioeconomic and behavioral aspects, as various works on historical legacies claim (e.g., Lankina et al., 2016; Obydenkova & Libman, 2015). The rise in the popularity of Stalin, recorded in polling data and visible manifestations from memes to monuments, is taken by some as evidence of Soviet legacies impacting on contemporary Russian society. As the country reverts to an authoritarianism that resembles that of the Soviet Union, it is all too tempting to return to legacy arguments: the dead weight of the Soviet past has pulled Russia from the promised transition.

This article examines one of the most high-profile Soviet legacy arguments in circulation, which we term the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis. Taking its main idea from Andrei Zinoviev and developed by the work of Yuri Levada, this thesis views Russian society in distinctly negative terms: as not processing or commemorating the traumatic memory of repression in ways appropriate to wider global trends; as regressing to authoritarian norms. Worst of all, in 2019, new polling data from the Levada Center suggested Russians viewed Stalin more positively than at any time since 1991, leading then Levada director Lev Gudkov (2022) to argue a rehabilitation of Stalinism was well underway that will serve as a precursor to a full return to totalitarianism.

In this article, we build on the critique of Homo Sovieticus made by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (2019) and develop this by focusing on a more recent period of Levada Center polling (2018–22). We utilize alternative data on values and attitudes to offer different conclusions on the role of Stalin in contemporary Russian society. We offer two main lines of argument. First, building on previous findings on attitudes toward Stalin (Arkhipova, 2017; Khlevnyuk, 2018), we contest the notion that increasingly positive attitudes reflect a whitewashing of the Stalinist period. Instead, references to Stalin are often used to support critical comments on the limitations of Putin-era state-building and social welfare. Furthermore, we underline that Stalin’s period is not necessarily the most salient in Russian popular memory; for those taking a more antagonistic mode of memory, the Stalin period is only one of the many cycles in what we term the statist longue durée. This macro-vision of Russian history, which focuses heavily on order, stability, power, geopolitics, and the centralized state, is an important component of the new patriotism that emerged as part of the general shift away from the anomie of the 1990s toward a more positive group identity.

Second, examining the polling data of the trudnaia-pamiat’ project, we find strong evidence that a significant proportion of Russians reject heavily moralistic and politicized versions of memory on Stalin (cosmopolitan and antagonistic modes) and prefer the “agonistic” mode: the urge to keep peace, respect contrary viewpoints on the traumatic past, and de-politicize history. This interpretation rejects the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis, which argues Russians adopt such stances due to fear and conformity to authoritarian values. Thus, rather than re-Stalinization or the widespread growth of antagonistic memory mode, we find evidence that it is the agonistic mode than dominates in Russian society more broadly, which explains much of the ambivalence shown to Stalin and Stalinism.

With 30 years of post-Soviet transformation behind us, it appears “transition” has been replaced as the main paradigm of research into post-communism by a “new historicism” (Ekiert, 2015). However, Ekiert (2015, p. 334) also noted that to “empirically establish a precise causal relationship between well-specified elements of the past and present” should be seen as “a very limited, if not impossible, task” due to the complexity of political, economic, and social developments in various post-communist states. How then to proceed with the study of legacies? One attempt to solve this problem is to break the kind of legacy relationships into different types. Of the five legacy relationships discussed by Beissinger and Kotkin (2014, pp. 13–15), the one most appropriate for this article is cultural schemata—“embedded ways of thinking and behaving that originate from socialization experiences under the prior political order that endure beyond the rupture” (p. 15) This is, in other words, part of what Bourdieu (1990, p. 66) called a “feel for the game”—habitus—the internally absorbed and often subconscious ways of being, seeing, acting, and thinking that are critical to how people interpret reality. Yet, what empirical evidence is there for the effect of legacies on attitudes and values?

In a comprehensive examination of survey data from more than 50 countries between 1990 and 2009, political scientists Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker (2011) established an important correlation: the more time lived under communism, the less support there was for democracy and free markets and more support for state-provided welfare compared to those countries with no experience of communism. Pop-Eleches and Tucker (2017, p. 5) claimed to be able to separate attitudes formed under communism from those that came from living through the turmoil of post-communist transitions. On the other hand, Tim Frye (2021, pp. 29–30) pointed to a range of quantitative data supporting very different conclusions.¹ While there is conflicting evidence, the central problem remains that “differences in attitudes among citizens within a country are typically more diverse than those between citizens in different countries” (pp. 31–32). Different clusters of values exist in stratified segments of the population. None of these issues, however, seems to have affected the strong persistence of the Homo Sovieticus legacy argument, which, largely relying on polling data, makes the case that cultural schemata from the Soviet period continue to strongly influence attitudes and values in contemporary Russia.

The essence of the Homo Sovieticus legacy argument, that socialization under Soviet rule created a particular type of person, appears intuitively sensible. The Soviet regime did, after all, work extremely hard to instill socialist attitudes and beliefs into its citizens as well as hostility to Western alternatives. One of the most influential theories on how this operated came from Soviet sociologist Yuri Levada, who used the new freedoms of late perestroika Russia to complete a research project titled Simple Soviet Man (Prostoi Sovietskii Chelovek). Based on an impressively large sample of the population, with questionaries of 200–300 questions, Levada outlined the essence of the “Simple Soviet Man”: conformist, obedient, and able to live with little; atomized and isolated; unable to make independent choices and easy to mobilize into pro-regime activity; lacking a sense of individuality and falling into line with collective and hierarchical demands (Levada, 1993, pp. 13–21).

This was not the first time a research project offered the conclusion that a specific regressive personality type, emerging from socialization under particular conditions, played a vital negative role in society. Probably, the most notable among them is the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality by Frankfurt School member Theodor Adorno (1950/1993).² The key critiques of this project apply also to Levada’s Simple Soviet Man: (1) the analytical lens and questionnaires reflect the moral convictions of the researchers and lead to a strong confirmation bias; (2) little provision is made for measuring ambivalence in attitudes (it is either black or white); (3) there is an essentializing approach to personality in the expectation that a very large and diverse group of individuals experiencing the same socialization pressures will end up with the same personality (Sharafutdinova, 2019, p. 176). Thus, both studies resemble less rigorous and objective social science than impassioned political crusading (Hamlin, 1955) (one against anti-Semitism and authoritarianism, the other against Soviet totalitarianism). Levada emphasized that Soviet people were duplicitous, two-faced, and cunning in order to survive, both to oneself and others (Sharafutdinova, 2019, 179).³ In the zeitgeist of anti-Soviet sentiment in 1987–93, Levada’s work did not struggle to find a receptive audience. What is curious is the way a new generation of Levada Center researchers (or pollsters) and Russia-watchers have uncritically accepted and built upon Levada’s scientific outputs.

Taking over the Levada Center after Levada’s death in 2006, Lev Gudkov continued the Homo Sovieticus tradition, albeit with new terminology. With Putin’s second term signaling a shift back to more autocratic politics, Gudkov was quick to link this to the persistence and continuity of Homo Sovieticus values and norms in the population, which had now mutated to include other negative qualities like cynicism and aggression (Sharafutdinova, 2019, p. 189). In his books Abortive Modernization (2011) and Recurrent Totalitarianism (2022), Gudkov builds on Levada’s work, using 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s polling data to demonstrate the persistence of Homo Sovieticus, which is presented as the main obstacle to Russia’s modernization. It is for this reason we term the thesis persistent Homo Sovieticus. The lack of trust and tendency to violence in Soviet Man leads to the rejection of complex interrelations needed for modern society; the resultant lack of horizontal ties makes the rebuilding of an authoritarian power vertical a straightforward matter (Gudkov, 2011, pp. 370–371).

A version of the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis made its way into popular non-fiction. In the bestselling book The Future Is History, Masha Gessen (2017) claims the trauma of Soviet totalitarianism has robbed Russians of “intellectual tools of sensemaking” and “the ability to make sense of one’s life in the world” (p. 3). Joshua Yaffa repeatedly refers to Russian people with the term “wily man,” which was how Levada described the great mass of Russians: “at once resourceful and passive, untrusting and indifferent” (Yaffa, 2020, p. 6). It is no surprise to find that both Gessen and Yaffa interviewed Lev Gudkov, a key figure in the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis. With the start of Putin’s third term (2018), the thesis was given increased attention with a new focus on polling data on Joseph Stalin. Before examining the 2019 polling data, it is important to discuss the methods and data upon which the subsequent critique relies.

The data for this article come from two research projects. The first, taken from individual fieldwork conducted from 2014 to 2019, involved 120 semi-structured interviews in four Russian cities and their surrounding regions (Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk). Generic purposive sampling attempted to deliver as representative a cross-section of social background, education, and occupation as possible. Interviews were between one hour and 90 minutes in length and sought to probe four different aspects of the imagined nation: historical memory, defining Russianness (who belongs to the nation), attitudes to the political system, and Russia’s role in the world. The interviews were collected in major cities with over one million people (21% of the overall population). While the interview sample is not representative of all Russia, it offers what Geertz (1973) termed “thick descriptions” and show what is “remembered” and “forgotten” in collective memory, as well as the meanings that people ascribe to events and periods. A key advantage is that no questions about Stalin or the repressions were asked directly; all the responses flowed from wider discussions of Russia’s past and viewpoints on the best and worst periods of the 20th century.

The second research project, titled “Difficult Memory” (Trudnaia pamiat’),⁴ aims to characterize Russia’s situation through representative quantitative sampling. The data included a 2019 poll conducted via mobile telephone, using an all-Russian random sample; 1,610 respondents were interviewed. The poll attempted to interrogate how people deal with the difficult past of Stalin’s repressions. Four general questions were used as a theoretical basis for the poll: (1) Should a society pursue the truth about a difficult past or not? (2) Who should deal with a difficult past: the state or civil society? (3) Should the difficult past be dealt with using formal and/or legal mechanisms or not? (4) Should perpetrators be persecuted or not? To assess respondent attitudes, the survey used the method of dilemma: for each of the four questions two hypothetical stories were created (one pertaining to the level of society, one to the personal level). Each story was presented as a dilemma in which the respondent was asked to choose one side. Neither of the responses was obviously correct, so a choice was taken to indicate an attitude in one of the four foundational questions. All the interviews were recorded and some of the comments made by the respondents during the interviews were transcribed to give insights into motivation behind their responses.

Today the Levada Center’s most prominent analysts, from Lev Gudkov (2019) to Denis Volkov (2017, 2019) and Alexei Levinson (2019), accept (or do not openly reject) the Homo Sovieticus thesis. From 2019 the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis has been supported by three main arguments: (1) the rise in positive attitudes to Stalin is connected to the top-down measures of the Kremlin,⁵ which encourages the cult of WWII victory to legitimate Putin and the system under him; (2) the bottom-up dynamic is found in unreformed Homo Sovieticus values of the Russian population,⁶ which leads to positive ratings for the president (longing for the strong hand), the FSB (justifying terror), and the army (militarization of society); (3) the top-down and bottom-up dynamics of this ensure modernization and democratization has ended in Russia; instead, political authoritarianism and economic stagnation are combined with great power/imperialist/Russian chauvinist fantasies that compensate for the lack of material progress.⁷ Thus, we arrive at the 21st-century incarnation of the Homo Sovieticus theory: the great mass of Russians, brutalized and atomized by Soviet rule, remain imprisoned in backward Soviet ways of thinking and behaving that condemn them to a life devoid of democracy, truth, and civil society, and full of authoritarianism, arbitrary rule, lying, corruption, and squalor.

Here it is important to note that changing attitudes to Stalin have been exhibited as central evidence for the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis. On the one hand, there is intuitive sense in the statement that “a society regressing toward Stalin cannot internalize democratic values and human rights, and without that, there can be no spiritual and material modernisation of Russia” (Mikhailov, 2020, p. 44). On the other hand, we do not agree that growing positive attitudes to Stalin and lack of strong negative feelings toward repressions and their perpetrators indicate the prevalence of authoritarian mindsets in the Russian population, the widespread survival of a Soviet “mentality” or re-Stalinization and the whitewashing of the Stalinist period among elites and masses.

The 2019 polls received quiet a lot of media attention, leading to the widescale reproduction of the Levada interpretation of the results (Dushakova, 2020). Polls about Stalin created massive interest and seemed to support the arguments of certain researchers based in the West (Sherlock, 2016; Khapaeva, 2016). They were, consequently, actively discussed by the sociological community in Russia. Greg Yudin, a sociologist and political philosopher working on the role of polls in maintaining political order, proposed one of the most coherent critiques.⁸ Our focus here is not on issues with the method, but on the interpretations presented by the Levada Center and its argument of the Homo Sovieticus legacy. Levada polling, conducted consistently since the fall of the USSR, focuses on two areas: (1) overall and specific views to Stalin as a figure in Russian history; (2) attitudes to the Stalinist repressions. The first set of polls we are studying focus on how people view Stalin in Russian history. We make two points here. First, we agree with the already existing methodological criticism of the polls, specifically, their wording, and, consequently, with the interpretation of these polls. Second, using the interview data, we show not only that Stalin’s period might not be the main point of historical reference for Russians but also that his so-called whitewashing relates more with the urge for a better present, both in terms of the domestic political order and the Russian state s place in global politics.

Returning to our critique of how to interpret the polling data, it appears that any non-negative emotions, assessments, and interpretations of Stalin are equated to love for him by Levada experts. For instance, in an open-question poll asking people to name the “most outstanding people of all times and peoples,” Stalin has been in the top three since 1999, sitting alongside Pushkin (34%) and Putin (34%) in the 2017 top three, with Lenin a close fourth (32%). What causes headlines is that Stalin made it to top place (38%). Why this should be of surprise is unclear. The adjective “outstanding” in Russian does not have an outright positive connotation: it is just the one who stands out most or is the most impactful. And Stalin’s status as a 20th-century icon, somewhere between Hollywood star and bad boy Al Capone figure, ensures he will score high compared to Peter the Great or Yuri Gagarin. This poll does not demonstrate that people characterize Stalin in the same ways they would view Pushkin, Putin, or Lenin; it is merely about being high profile and well known (Levada-Tsentr, 2017a). Similarly, most respondents who support opening a museum dedicated to Stalin do so on the simple grounds that one should know their country’s history (35%) (Levada-Tsentr, 2019a).

Similarly, the responses to the question of how people characterize Stalin’s role in the “life of our country” are interpreted by Levada analysts as a disturbing tendency to whitewash Stalin and profess love to him. The proportions on what role Stalin played show the following shifts from 2003 to 2019: entirely positive (no change: 18%), mainly positive (35% to 52%), mainly negative (21% to 14%), strongly negative (12% to 5%), unable to answer (14% to 11%). The lack of a box “equally positive and negative” is a major flaw of the poll. The next poll queries personal attitudes to Stalin, which generated the 2019 clickbait headline that 70% of Russians take an overall positive view of Stalin. Again, the devil is in the detail: the key changes in dynamics (2001–21) are not in strong positive stances (“admiration” and “sympathy” do not significantly change), but there is a rise in “respect” (27% to 45%) together with a fall in “disgust” (9% to 2%), “anger” (18% to 5%), and “fear” (16% to 4%). All the while the number of “indifferent” has more than doubled from 2001 (12% to 28%) (Levada-Tsentr, 2021).

Instead of a re-Stalinization headline, one could talk of a rise of indifference and the fading of strong negative emotions to Stalin. Over the course of the last two decades, the harsher and radical anti-Stalin discourse has lost its resonance, replaced with calmer emotions more in line, as we will see below, with an agonistic memory mode. This also is connected to the rise of a more positive version of Russian identity since 2000, the opposite of the anomie of the 1990s. Arguably the key change is in the doubling of respect (27% to 45%). Here it is worth underlining that respect is not a purely positive trait excluding the combination of negative assessments. After all, it is possible to respect someone you do not like, agree with, or hold as a role model. Many of us know what it is like to respect a parent for their successes in life and sacrifices made for the “good of the family,” while recalling the wrongs, errors, and abuses done by the same parent. “Respecting” such a parent (rather than erasing them from history as an abusive tyrant) does not mean you accept that parent’s methods or that you would use them on your own children.

Levada Center polling also covers more-specific attitudes toward Stalin. Unsurprisingly these data, which are inconclusive and show considerable ambiguity in public opinion, are rarely showcased in presentations of the persistent Homo Sovieticus thesis. A stable majority continue to agree Stalin was a “ruthless, inhuman tyrant who is guilty for the destruction of millions of innocent people.” At the same time, a majority continues supporting the notion Stalin was a “wise leader that brought prosperity and great power.” Interestingly, there has been a consistent polarization on the question of whether “Stalin was a great leader,” with most (42%) saying “in some ways yes, in some ways no.” Meanwhile, there has been a stable majority since 2008 (65%) supporting the statement “whatever Stalin’s mistakes or crimes, the main thing is he won the war.” Finally, there is a stable three-way split on the statement “Our people cannot get by without a leader like Stalin who can establish order” (25% each for partly agree, partly disagree, completely disagree) (Levada-Tsentr, 2016).

These splits highlight the complex and contradictory views on Stalin, which Lev Gudkov calls “moral dumbness (tupost’) and inability…to see the past” (Levada-Tsentr, 2019b). We do not agree with Gudkov’s essentialized and resentful assessments of Russian society. Our data sets, both quantitative and qualitative, suggest different interpretations and, consequently, undermine the Soviet legacy argument. As quantitative data rarely give insight into meanings behind the choices made, we turn to interview data to unpack the positive views on Stalin in vernacular terms (Morris & Garibyan, 2021).

Our interview data suggest that the Stalin period may not be the most significant historical reference for Russians. When asked an open-ended question about Russia’s best period over 1900–2010, non-Soviet periods were chosen most (the Stolypin period and Putin’s first two presidential terms). Those respondents choosing Soviet periods discussed the Brezhnev era more often than the Stalinist period. In the data set there were approximately as many respondents with “anti-Soviet” stances, such as choosing the Stalin period as the worst or viewing the collapse of the USSR in positive terms. It is in these two minority groups (pro- and anti-Soviet) that Stalin was mentioned most frequently, while the largest part of respondents did not mention Stalin at all in the interviews.

This leads us to the hypothesis (which needs to be tested in further research) that Stalin causes polarization among those with strong views on history but is not of primary importance or interest for the majority of citizens, who lack strong views on history. State memory policy toward Stalin suggests there is also an understanding that much of the Soviet period cannot be easily integrated into a “usable past,” as attempts to integrate (or exclude) them more blatantly into official memory should result in serious contestation and arguments, an undesirable outcome in the political use of memory from the point of view of the state.

Returning to the interview narratives on Stalin, there were narratives of respect and the high estimation of his role in the country’s history. We should reiterate that the segment of respondents who chose the Stalinist period of industrialization as Russia’s golden age was relatively small. For them the Stalinist period represented a “big step forward for the country” (Artem, 49, computer programmer, NN) when the “country was under construction and developing” (Olga, 55, factory worker, Avtozavodsk, NN). Interestingly, these positive representations of Stalinist development policies resonated in older respondents with clear family biographies of working-class backgrounds, families whose trajectories were largely positive under Stalin-era social mobility.

Some respondents (Ivan, 55, retired miner, SPB; Nikolay, 52, ex-policeman, retired, SPB) praised this era’s scientific achievements and infrastructure projects, progress that for them compares favorably with the current rent-dominated de-industrializing resource economy of Russia: “When they started building factories and railways across the country—one can analyse if the way it was built was good or bad but it remains a fact that it was built!” (Ivan, 55). In admiring Stalin-era development in contrast to the shortcomings of today (no running water or sanitation, for example, in one’s suburban “dacha” [neighborhood]), the concrete results are seen to justify the rough methods used:

One quote, often incorrectly attributed to Churchill, emerged on numerous occasions among those defending or justifying Stalin in the interviews: “Stalin found Russia with wooden ploughs but left her with Atomic bombs.” In fact this quote is from the historian Deutscher writing in his 1953 work Russia After Stalin.⁹ Its entrance to modern discourse can be traced back to Nina Andreeva’s famous anti-perestroika letter of 1988, “I Cannot Forgo My Principles,” that, among other things, sought to defend Stalin from his various liberal critics.¹⁰ Here it functions as a shorthand way of saying Stalin’s ultimate achievements outweighed the various “collateral damage” caused by his policies: “Even if there were some kind of crimes, well they weren’t just done by us, they are in many other countries too. If we look at the end result, then we can’t forget that Stalin found the country with ploughs and left her with nuclear rockets” (Artem, 49, computer programmer, NN).

Ivan grew up in Karaganda after his family was exiled there in the 1930s. His family did relatively well in the post-Soviet period, moving to St. Petersburg and working in the mineral-rich Russian north. Yet, from his point of view, Stalin “did great things” and “built the best things we have today in this country.” As was the case with Ivan, it is also noteworthy that some of the most vigorous defenders of Stalin in interviews actually had serious stories of repression in their own families. A university dormitory manager (58), who told of her grandfather who was denounced as a kulak and, despite twice giving away land, still disappeared into the gulags. In 1982 she received confirmation from the KGB on his fate while, through the decades, the family had remained silent. Despite the suffering this caused her parents, she insisted that she and her relatives never experienced “distrust toward Stalin (nedoveriia k Stalinu ne bylo).…Whatever wrong things occurred he saved the country.” These results align with the existing research on the museum representations of Stalin’s repressions. Even in the exhibitions specifically dedicated to the repressions, the theme of regional pride in the achievements of the camps system is often prominent (Flige, 2021; Gavrilova, 2021; Khlevnyuk, 2021). In other words, taking a less hostile position on Stalin appears to be connected to positive identity construction.

Another factor in the urge to remember Stalin’s achievements, real or imaginary, is rooted in the dissatisfaction in the current regime and disillusionment in the post-Soviet liberal reforms (Khlevnyuk, 2021; Khlevnyuk & Maximova, 2021). A history lecturer, Fedor (45), whose grandmother was repressed, retained respect for Stalin. In Fedor’s view, efforts to criminalize Stalinism were led by liberals with no interest in or love for Russia. Speaking with Fedor and discovering his attachment to the Sut’ Vremeni organization, it is worth outlining the role this defense of Stalin plays in deeper trends in Russian society, where conservatives, nationalists, and socialists fight to have their version of historical truth heard while often sharing a common disdain for the liberals. As longtime researcher of Russian civic society and popular attitudes Karine Clément (2018) notes, Russians are critical of the state and do not widely support authoritarianism. However, they are less interested in what she calls “abstract” rights and notions such as voting rights and more focused on delivering social and economic rights. A commonly shared notion is that Russian liberals took away social and economic rights in the 1990s that have yet to be returned.

A second line of argument in recalling Stalin positively was related to the memory of the Great Patriotic (or Second World) War. Respondents praised Stalin as a harsh and demanding leader who managed to bring the Russian people together to fight until the final victory. It was his achievement in unifying and mobilizing the Russian people that ensured the nation’s survival after the German invasion in 1941. This idea is often condensed into the myth that “the international situation forced us to mobilize society” and, therefore, Stalin’s policies resulted in “the successful resolution of our problems precisely in the conditions we found ourselves in.” Even though Stalinism was “a catastrophe, bringing the death of thousands of people, another serious blow for our country,” all the same this was “the best of all the evils we had to choose from then” (Viktor, 22, international relations student, NN).

Given the overheated war mythology in Russia (Gudkov, 2005; Malinova, 2015; Nelson, 2015), the fact that Stalin’s achievements are tied into this narrative is hardly surprising. Yet, we would underline that the interview data is a good example of vernacular politics that, based on everyday life and lived memory, is rather independent from elite or hegemonic culture and sustained by frustration over the current status quo and longing for more cohesive and caring society and economy (Morris & Garibyan, 2021 pp. 1503–1504). Indeed, fitting Stalin into the broader memory of the WWII victory or to critique the current state of affairs in Russia is only part of the explanation. For many, Stalin is also part of a broader macro-conception of history, what we call the statist longue durée.

A key finding in the interview data was the salience of a macro-vision longue durée view of Russia’s history for a wide range of respondents regardless of age or social background. This is cyclical and statist as it tells the story of Russian statehood across the centuries as one of rise and fall in response to foreign interventions and the strengths and weaknesses of Russia’s rulers (Blackburn, 2018). Crucially, Stalin’s profile in longue durée is not central; he is just one of the supporting cast. The statist longue durée can be viewed as an antagonistic memory project in direct opposition to the cosmopolitan (liberal) memory project. Unlike the liberal cosmopolitan project, the foundations of the statist longue durée are organically embedded deeper in Russian society itself, which has experienced a version of liberalism imported from without and accepted by elites during a period when most citizens experienced loss of security, disorientation, and hardship.

Interestingly, in intellectual circles the statist longue durée appeared only after the liberal longue durée, which emerged from Soviet dissident Alexander Yanov (Mjør, 2018, p. 1), who posited a cyclical view of Russian history with periods of political opening and closing. In the 1990s, Russian conservatives achieved their own reinterpretation. Particularly influential in this was the philosopher Alexander Panarin, who viewed Russia’s periods of smuta less in terms of a chronic crisis but due to the rising dominance of pro-Western elites who have no interest in protecting Russia as a state or a civilization (Mjør, 2018, p. 29). Panarin (2005) emphasized Russia’s civilizational distinctiveness and the need to counterbalance the West’s hegemonic urges to penetrate the Eurasian space.

In the illiberal intellectual circles of post-Soviet Russia, a more elaborate version of the statist longue durée entered circulation. The cycle starts with a strong Russia that is a threat to the ambitions of Western powers. Russia, as a Eurasian geopolitical project with a powerful military and strong centralized state, draws the attention of the West, who desires to weaken and preferably dismember the Russian state. Over the course of worsening relations and unable to defeat Russia in direct military conflict (Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler), the West looks for ways to stir internal strife and bring Russia down from within (Mjør, 2018, p. 235).

Throughout Russian history strong leaders have emerged who, energized by patriotism and a sense of history, have successfully dealt with internal enemies and reestablished the authority of a powerful centralized state, thus ensuring stability and unity (Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander III, Stalin, Brezhnev, Putin). The cycle, however, always continues as the West returns to the drawing board to look for new ways to bring Russia to her knees. It can be argued this kind of cyclical thinking is linked to the loss and trauma experienced in post-Soviet societies (Oushakine, 2009). There is an emphasis on conspiracies and hidden hands, a rejection of political ideologies and revolutions as the instruments of those with power and money. The belief in the power of hidden conspiracies is not a marginal trend in Russia: 29% believe in the reality of conspiracies involving post-Soviet leaders and 23% in conspiracies led by foreign powers.¹¹

The most elaborate example of Stalin as an actor in the statist cyclical was given in an interview with a prominent activist in the Anti-Maidan Movement, a now-defunct organization set up to combat Western-funded “color revolutions.” The activist emphasized the starting point as 1917 with Germany and other Western powers sending Lenin back into Russia to foment revolution. Here, according to this version, the ultimate goal was to put Trotsky in power, which would allow “Anglo-Saxon financial structures access to the territory of Russia, control mineral deposit sites, access the oil of Baku and the Urals, all the infrastructure that could be used for their economic purposes.” In this sense, a point made by many respondents, the October Revolution “was not a revolution as such; from the outset it was aimed at overthrowing the state (Gosperevorot) to install a controllable elite” (Maidan Organisation leader, Moscow).

Like any good drama, this depressing scenario is overturned with the unexpected arrival of Joseph Stalin, who “purged the elite of all those in the pay of Western finance, including Trotsky.…Suddenly a person [Stalin] appeared who ruined the whole project [of the West].” The activist recognizes the 1930s as an awful time when terrible things were done but also defended the “political decision that helped pull the country out of its agrarian condition and transform it into an industrial power.” Of course, this was “met by the German military machine that was armed by Morgans, Rothschilds, Rockefellers…to attack the USSR.” Luckily, “a great patriotic consolidation” occurred and “collectivisation and industrialisation, for all its ambiguous moral aspects, allowed the creation of an economic base to withstand this aggression” (Maidan Organisation leader, Moscow).

Thus, here Stalin is only part of the wider co-construction of Russian history in line with an antagonistic illiberal and statist worldview. This has involved the fusion of thinkers such as Akhiezer, Panarin, Danilevsky, Gumilev, and Huntington (Robinson, 2019; Lewis, 2020; Suslov, 2020) and the adoption of an illiberal cyclical view of history by new figures among Russia’s conservatives, nationalist-patriotic circles, and the so-called okhraniteli: virulent pro-regime politicians and commentators (Yablokov, 2018; Greene & Robertson, 2019; Libman & Obydenkova, 2021; Sharafutdinova, 2020). At the same time, the longue durée view of Russia’s trials, triumphs, and tragedies has a bottom-up dynamic, as ordinary people use it to interpret the current world order, the structure of their own society, and Russia’s current priorities. Here geopolitics, security, order, and stability are the key words and the figure of Stalin plays only a minor supporting role among a wider cast of actors.

Such a view of history allows people to express their own illiberalism or reject the West’s normative superiority, while escaping a substantive debate about Russia’s type of development (Western or non-Western) or how to interpret the trickier parts of the Soviet past (Blackburn, 2018). In a wider sense, this longue durée view supports other elements of pro-regime legitimation efforts, such as accepting the current status quo as the best of all evils (given what they think the West would like to impose) and the parallel rise of viewing Russia as a state-civilization striving to secure its position in the global order (Blackburn, 2021).

In today’s Russia there is little demand in elites or masses to follow Germany’s post-1968 journey, which put a negation at the heart of state-curated culture and identity (“we are not Nazis”). Not only would such a direction be alien to Russia’s current political climate, it does not resonate with ordinary people’s view of the USSR. Such a path would entail shifting the memory focus from Soviet heroism to victimhood, and most likely revising the USSR’s status as one of the “good guys” in WWII. This brings us to polling on the repressions. Three points can be drawn from Levada polling that can be interpreted as showing reluctance to deal with the difficult past and even, partly, justifying state terror and, consequently, resisting de-Stalinization. First, a consistently large number of Russians (roughly 40–50%) say that they do not support discussions about repressions (Levada-Tsentr, 2017b). Second, there is a consistently high number of respondents who do not support searching for the repressions’ perpetrators: 68% in 2007 and 64% in 2012 (Levada-Tsentr, 2012). As Lev Gudkov (2022) would have it, these numbers show the “fear that such a rationalization may lead to the state’s discontent, and, consequently, to problems for those who speak out” (p. 134). Third, there is a rise in the number of those who say that the repressions were politically necessary and historically justifiable (from 9% to 26%) and, simultaneously, a drop in the number of those who say that there is no justifying the repressions (from 72% to 45%) (Levada-Tsentr, 2016). In other words, the de-Stalinization and, consequently, the elimination of the Homo Sovieticus, is, in this view, halted by (a) the perception of the state’s possible response to the de-Stalinization; (b) Russians’ urge to keep silent (“to push this out of their consciousness” (Gudkov, 2022, p. 134); and (c) justification of the repressions and their perpetrators.

The polling data produced by the project team of the trudnaia pamiat’ present a different outlook on Russians’ attitudes toward repressions. Indeed, if people are asked about an “active discussion” of the repressions, they are rather hesitant to support it, especially when it concerns private and family matters. In the hypothetical situation of a victim’s grandchildren learning that their friends’ grandfather wrote a denunciation on their grandfather, the majority of the respondents chose not to tell the friends. Respondents’ comments, indeed, indicate fear as the major motivation behind this decision; however, it is not fear of the state’s reaction. Respondents are uncomfortable they may provoke a conflict. However, disagreement with the necessity of an active discussion does not automatically mean supporting active silencing. The trudnaia-pamiat’ respondents were presented with a situation in which the information about the repressions could have been actively silenced. They were asked about a hypothetical local exhibition on the repressions and a possible decision to close it down to conceal personal information about the perpetrator and their family. The overwhelming majority of respondents (82%) disagreed with this decision. Respondents’ comments suggest that Russians feel that the truth should not be suppressed or silenced.

The fear of an active discussion may not be related to the fear of the state. A trudnaia- pamiat’ poll included two questions pertaining to the state’s role in dealing with the repressions’ memory. When asked whether the state can decide what is a falsification of history and what is not, the majority of respondents (55%) said that everyone should have the right to assess historical facts and only a third (36%) agreed that it should be only the domain of the state to decide. However, the poll shows a different result for the question about a hypothetical situation of a grandson wanting to put up a plaque for their persecuted grandfather who is in conflict with his neighbor who believes that only the state should have the right to decide whether this is done: 67% of respondents agreed with the neighbor. Yet, it might be wrong to interpret these results as a belief that the state should control the memory politics and as a fear of the state. During the second wave of polling in eight Russian regions, the question was slightly reformulated. Instead of asking whether a person can decide whether to put a plaque or not, the respondents were asked whether those who live in the house can decide. The number of those who thought that only the state can put up a plaque dropped on average to 55%. Respondents’ comments suggest that one of the motives behind these responses is a belief in the need of order and fear of possible “memory anarchy,” so to speak, when everyone can put up a plaque or a monument as everyone loves their relatives and may think of them as the heroes. Such an urge can be, once again, interpreted as a fear of possible conflicts.

In the same vein, the lack of interest in searching for the perpetrators can be interpreted as connected to fears around creating unnecessary divisions in the society. When asked about a hypothetical situation about a memorial at the mass shooting range and whether all the victims’ names, including those of former perpetrators, should be included, 64% responded positively. Again, transcribed comments suggest that people tend to fear possible conflicts, talk about forgiveness, and understanding the difficult times that even the perpetrators had to endure. Some respondents talked about the difficult times of such others by trying to put themselves in the “perpetrators’” shoes and understand the motives behind their actions (i.e., the perpetrators were told what to do by their superiors), which brings us to the framework of the agonistic memory mode.

The difference between our and Levada Center’s (and Lev Gudkov’s, in particular) interpretation of Russians’ attitudes toward Stalinism, can be accounted for not only by the difference in data but also by the underlying theoretical foundations. Lev Gudkov approaches poll results with a normative image in mind. This normative image takes root in the existing concepts of “dealing with the difficult past.” In memory studies, such concepts are best described by the notion of cosmopolitan memory (Levy & Sznaider, 2006). The cosmopolitanization of memory as described by Levy and Sznaider presupposes that the difficult pasts are “dealt with”: the victims are given voice, the perpetrators are condemned, and the story of a difficult past is commemorated as a lesson for the future generations that such horrors should “never again” repeat. The cosmopolitan mode has been used to shape various memory narratives, but the basic pattern was taken from the global interpretation of the Holocaust that was formed in Europe and the United States.

While this agenda was, indeed, largely accepted by the European Union and the Holocaust became one of the foundational memories, its universality is questionable at best (Assmann, 2013; Kucia, 2016). Moreover, the spread of the cosmopolitan memory, as Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (2016) claim, did not eliminate “antagonistic” national discourses but, in some cases, may have even strengthened them. The alternative framework of agonistic memory differs in its view of conflict as a necessary feature of democratic politics and does not seek to exclude communities and their viewpoints. The framework of cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic memories allows for a different interpretation of Russian polling data on the memories of Stalin and repressions. In recognizing the clash of the liberal “cosmopolitan” outlook versus the nation-centered patriotic “antagonistic” mode, we also recognize the existence of agonistic memory stances in the trudnaia-pamiat’ data.

The Levada interpretation of the data suggests reveals an implicit expectation that Russians should use the same Holocaust memory pattern when answering questions on Stalin. In other words, they expect Russians to unconditionally support active discussions of Stalin’s repressions and condemnation of the perpetrators, specifically Stalin. Yet, analyzing the trudnaia-pamiat’ data shows that Russians are more supportive of the so-called agonistic mode. They believe that “nature of conflict and violence depend on social circumstances, context and agency” and in “learning from the memories/perspectives of victims, perpetrators and third-party witnesses” (Bull & Hansen, 2016, p. 401). Their goal in dealing with the memory is to create a non-antagonistic approach that fits different communities and perspectives and maintains peace in the society.

This article has highlighted the key weaknesses in the Levada Center account of social reality that strongly undermine their communist legacy argument: (1) overreliance on polling data that fail to account for the likely ambivalence toward not only to Stalin but to certain values as well (it is too often presented as a “for” or “against” proposition); (2) insufficient use of interviews and focus groups ensures a blindness as to how Stalin connects to daily lives/values of people on the micro-level; (3) the lack of aggregated data to show correlations between values linked to communist legacies and attitudes to Stalin; equating attitudes to Stalin with communist-style attitudes to state-society-authority-power is a jump in logic that is not supported with evidence; (4) talking about mass consciousness and psychology in an essentializing manner that fails to differentiate different parts of Russian society.

Based on our combined analysis of two separate research projects, we conclude with two main points. First, there is the issue of Stalin and broader identity change in Russia. The chaos of the USSR’s collapse brought with it not only material hardship but also Durkheimian anomie: the disintegration of a hierarchy of moral values and guidance of how to live. The normlessness of the 1990s has ended and was replaced by a more positive and widely shared view of Russian identity than existed previously. In contrast to the gloomy view of Russia’s liberals (and some observers abroad), for many this is a positive process involving increased trust in President, Duma, Police, Army, Church as well as a new positive Russian identity. This process does not involve either the complete vilification of Stalin or his wider reincorporation into public memory spaces as a hero of Russia. In other words, Stalin is not that important to the post-Soviet “patriotic” consolidation in Putin-era Russia.

Second, the Levada Center interprets its polls on Stalin against a backdrop of an idealized vision of “Western” cosmopolitan memory. It sees the “normal” Russia as a society that has condemned (possibly in a Nuremberg-like manner) Stalin’s terror, prosecuted the perpetrators, commemorated the victims, and moved on with a lesson of “never again.” As the data it produces do not fit into this picture, the Levada Center comes to the conclusion that Russia is wholly opposed to this cosmopolitan mode of memory. According to Bull and Hansen, however, the non-cosmopolitan memory mode is either antagonistic or agonistic. While the attitudes and values embodied in the statist longue durée approach are an antagonistic mode rejecting Western and liberal visions, Russians’ attitudes toward Stalin’s repressions are best described as an agonistic mode of memory. Survey data from the trudnaia-pamiat’ project show a common reluctance to discuss much of the Stalinist past and a preference for a “de-politicized” version. In fact, it is likely that this was the basic equilibrium in the late Soviet period: no desire for Stalin’s rehabilitation and no readiness to unpack the Stalinist repressions in all their gruesome detail leaves Russian society in a holding pattern, not one of “re-Stalinization.”

This leads us to the conclusion that Stalin’s importance and centrality to Russia’s collective memory and politics of memory is overplayed and exaggerated. Stalin and Stalinism are not the central and predominant concerns in Russian society; Putin’s recent interventions on the memory of World War II (2020)¹² or the historic creation of Ukraine (2021)¹³ say very little about Stalin. The Kremlin’s legitimation of its operation in Ukraine focuses on issues such as security, sovereignty, and the protection of Russian-speakers against Ukrainian nationalists—points very much harmonic to the statist longue durée outlined above.

None of this, however, will stop certain ideologically-driven observers from claiming totalitarianism and Stalinism, inherited from the Soviet past, are the key drivers of Russian behavior. This article has argued against making a legacy argument such as Homo Sovieticus based on correlation from a large-n nationally representative sample alone; the study of values and attitudes clearly needs an access point to the micro-level. Future research should interrogate the rather counterintuitive notion that the significance of Stalin in terms of values and attitudes is not primarily related to any general support for growing authoritarianism but is related to factors specific to certain value clusters and particular contexts. More work is also needed to ascertain where antagonistic and agonistic memory mode switching occurs, including the social setting, the actors involved, and the historical period in question. Suffice to say, in the coming years it will be much harder to conduct such research in Russia. In contrast, poorly substantiated, one-sided, and ideological interpretations of social reality in Russia will surely not be in short supply.

The work for this article was financed by NAWA (the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange) as part of the Ulam Programme under the proposal number: PPN/ULM/2020/1/00081. Research for this article was also supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 949918) for the project “Conspiratorial Memory: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe.”

Published online: May 15, 2023