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Winnipeg Free Press
5 days ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Why Ukraine's fight is ours, too
Opinion In the heart of Moscow, Stalin's shadow grows longer. A replica of a 1950s relief sculpture — The People's Gratitude to the Leader and Commander — now overlooks a major metro station. The scene: Joseph Stalin in military garb, surrounded by adoring citizens. To many in the West, it may resemble nostalgia. It isn't. As journalist Cathy Young writes in The Bulwark, 'The desecration of the memory of Stalinism's victims… is the obverse of the persecution of today's dissenters.' Efrem Lukatsky / The Associated Press Firefighters put out the fire after a Russian missile hit a residential building during Russia's combined missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 17. Vladimir Putin is reviving Stalin's legacy not as history but prophecy — recasting a brutal past to justify brutal acts today. The attack on Ukraine is more than a land grab; it's an ideological assault on truth, memory, and democracy itself. Across Russia, Stalin's image reappears in sculptures, textbooks, and state celebrations. Institutions that preserved memory — like the Gulag History Museum — are shuttered. Remembrance projects such as The Last Address are vandalized. Propaganda saturates the airwaves. According to the Levada Centre — Russia's most prominent independent polling organization, though operating under increasing state pressure — public 'respect' for Stalin has risen to 63 per cent. Yet the message is clearest not in monuments, but in missiles. Since 2022, Ukraine has endured Bucha's massacres, deportations of children, and relentless bombardment. And still, they fight — not just for survival, but for the future of open societies. Canada understands this. Across the political spectrum, every major party has backed Ukraine's right to self-determination. That unity reflects more than geopolitics — it reflects our national conscience. In June 2025, Canada extended its tariff-free import policy for Ukrainian goods, reinforcing economic solidarity alongside its military and humanitarian aid. The EU has provided over €30 billion (approximately C$47.9 billion) in support to Ukraine this year alone, while NATO has trained 75,000 Ukrainian soldiers and coordinated extensive military aid. On February 24, 2025 — the third anniversary of Russia's invasion — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: 'You can count on us … we stand by Ukraine from the very first day on and you can count on us also for the future.' Meanwhile, dissidents like Garry Kasparov warn that 'dictators test boundaries. When they see weakness, they push further.' And Masha Gessen has chronicled the rise of a regime fuelled by historical amnesia and 'state-sanctioned cruelty.' Dmitry Muratov, Nobel laureate and one of the last independent Russian journalists, describes a reintroduction of Stalinist punishments: sleep deprivation, freezing cells, electric shocks. With bitter irony, he predicts a new Russian holiday: Punisher Day. In May, Muratov — still active despite being branded a 'foreign agent'— called for the war's largest civilian prisoner exchange. Alongside this, the Tribunal for Putin initiative has documented more than 100,000 war crimes committed by Russian forces since 2022. The scale is staggering. And still, Ukraine resists. Russia's ideological collapse is also documented in Our Dear Friends in Moscow by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two acclaimed journalists now in exile in London. Their book traces how a liberal generation was slowly co-opted by the state. As they write, 'What we've experienced since 2011 is a series of actions and manoeuvres intended to detach Russia from the West.' The Kremlin's war isn't only external — it targets its own people. As former Navalny campaigner Denis Mikhailov notes in Byline Times, Russia has 'digitized and legalized the machinery of exile.' Opposition isn't just silenced — it's erased through surveillance, laws, and psychological pressure. Exile is no accident. It's state policy. Here in North America, such horrors may seem distant. But history doesn't need an accent to repeat itself. In the U.S., democratic norms are fraying, from book bans to political violence to mass deportations of undocumented migrants. Disinformation spreads, cynicism deepens, and polarization corrodes civic trust. Conspiracies no longer lurk — they mobilize. Complacency isn't passive — it's an accelerant. And self-righteousness? It doesn't protect democracies; it weakens them. As George Orwell warned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, 'Who controls the past controls the future.' If we fail to defend truth and memory — whether in Kyiv, Winnipeg, or Washington — we undermine democracy itself. Tuesdays A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world. The war in Ukraine isn't just about borders. It's about how democracies remember, reckon, and resist. If we fail Ukraine, we don't just fail a nation — we fail an idea. Ukraine reminds us that democracy is not inherited. It is defended — sometimes in trenches, sometimes in archives, and always in truth. Let us not forget. Let us not falter. Martin Zeilig is a Winnipeg writer and journalist.
Boston Globe
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Stalin's image returns to Moscow's subway, honoring a brutal history
Among those admiring the work on a recent visit was Liliya A. Medvedeva, who said she was 'very happy that our leader got restored.' Advertisement 'We won the war thanks to him,' said Medvedeva, a pensioner born in 1950, adding that she was grateful that Stalin didn't send her father to the Gulag even though he was taken prisoner during World War II — something that was equated with treason at the time. 'Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.' In a country where criticizing government action can be dangerous, it is unclear how many people disagree with Medvedeva's positive view, but some are dismayed, even enraged, by what they see as revisionist whitewashing of history. Advertisement Vladimir, a 25-year-old history student who refused to give his last name for fear of retribution, said he came to watch the crowd drawn by Stalin, whom he called 'a bloody tyrant.' 'It is hard for me to express my own opinion,' he said. 'But no other monument would draw as much attention.' Stalin was responsible for mass purges, including the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, when more than 700,000 people were executed, including military leaders, intellectuals, members of ethnic minorities, landowning peasants, and others. Under his leadership, entire ethnic groups, like Crimean Tatars, were expelled from their homelands. His policies contributed to mass famine across the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. But nostalgia for the Soviet era is strong, especially among older generations traumatized by the painful transition to capitalism, reinforcing memories of Stalin as a strongman who imposed order on a sprawling country and led it to victory against Nazi Germany. His admirers see purges, famines, and mass deportations as 'excesses' for which overzealous local officials were mostly responsible. Since Vladimir Putin took power more than 25 years ago, at least 108 monuments to Stalin have been erected across Russia, and the pace has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said Ivan Zheyanov, a historian and journalist who has kept track of the statues. One was installed this year in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, currently occupied by Russia's forces. But none of them have the visibility of the new sculpture in the subway, passed daily by legions of Muscovites changing between the main circle line and the purple line. Advertisement For years the Kremlin tried to maintain something of a balance, taking note of Stalin's repressions while opposing the liberal intelligentsia whose main ideological tenets included anti-Stalinism. Putin has repeatedly condemned Stalin over the years, and recognized that terrible crimes were committed under his rule. He has visited the sites of mass graves and convened human rights activists and historians to discuss Stalinism. In 2001, Moscow City Hall founded the Gulag History Museum, which vividly showcased how a system of mass labor camps led to as many as 2 million deaths. But for several years, something entirely different has been happening in parallel. The Memorial, the most prominent Russian civil rights organization founded by dissidents during late Soviet times, was declared a foreign agent in 2014. At the end of 2021, Moscow City Court ordered it to disband. In 2017, Putin told filmmaker Oliver Stone that 'excessive demonization of Stalin has been one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia.' After a series of lengthy trials, Yuri A. Dmitriev, an amateur historian who discovered graves of Stalin's victims in a remote pine forest in northern Russia, was sentenced in 2021 to 15 years in prison. Dmitriev had been found guilty of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter, charges his family and friends dismissed as fabricated. The Gulag History Museum was shut down in 2024 citing fire regulations and has not reopened. Roman Romanov, its longtime director, was removed from his post and the museum's exhibits are being redone under a new leadership. This April, the government renamed Volgograd's airport for Stalingrad, as the city was called from 1925 to 1961, honoring both the colossal battle fought there in World War II and the ruler it had been named for. Advertisement 'The creeping re-Stalinization of the country is dangerous not only for society, as it justifies the largest government atrocities in the country's history, but also for the state,' said Lev Shlosberg, a Russian opposition politician and member of the liberal Yabloko party that started a petition to dismantle the monument in the Moscow metro. 'Sooner or later, repression consumes the government itself.'
