In May of this year the world was shocked by the Moscow City government decision to unveil a grand bas-relief of Stalin at the Taganskaya metro station in the heart of Moscow.

Widely seen as a murderous dictator on a par with Hitler by westerners, Stalin is a much more complicated figure for Russians. He is responsible for the Red Terror of the 30s where millions were shot or sent to the GULAG as well as the mass deportations that still fuel hatred of Russians today in countries like Estonia that were worst affected.

But for the average Russian he was also the man that industrialised the largely bucolic Russian economy, turned the Soviet Union into a nuclear-armed superpower and put Sputnik, the first ever satellite, into space. For these achievements, and others, regular Russians are willing to forgive Stalin a lot.

The Taganskaya monument has sparked a fresh debate over Stalin, who has ranked high amongst the most respected Russians in polls ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

There has been a wave of monument unveilings and the Communist Party (KPRF) has adopted a policy of trying to rehabilitate the former Soviet leader’s image. A study conducted by research centre Sidorin Lab, commissioned by Vedomosti, found that nearly all social media commentary on the recent Stalin monuments was either positive or at least neutral.

At 29 years, Stalin is the longest serving party chairman in Russian history, but with 25 years in office, Russian President Vladimir Putin is nipping at the record’s heels. Following the change in constitution in 2020 resetting the term count clock, Putin could remain president until 2036, for a total of 37 years, smashing Stalin’s record.

While Putin has said little about Stalin, he clearly benefits from the same strongman image and aura of defender of Russia’s sovereignty.

Between May 1 and July 31, researchers analysed more than 60,000 mentions of Stalin-related monuments on Russian social networks. Of these, 49% were positive and another 49% neutral, while just 2% expressed negative sentiment, Vedomosti reported.

The Taganskaya metro station relief generated the highest volume of comments, with more than 45,000 mentions. Monuments in Vologda and Ulan-Ude, inaugurated in December 2024 and May 2025 respectively, also attracted thousands of online comments.

According to the study, the Moscow bas-relief was seen as a symbol of Stalin’s ongoing rehabilitation. However, reactions to it were mostly cautious: 80% of mentions were neutral, 18% positive and only 2% negative. By contrast, the Vologda monument received 66% positive assessments and 33% neutral; just 1% were negative. The Ulan-Ude monument saw a similar breakdown, with 65% positive, 34% neutral, and 1% negative.

Stalin’s image is rooted in his wartime reputation in the Second World War (66%), where he delivered a victory over the Nazi’s in what the Russians call “the Great Patriotic War.” Towards the end, Allied and Russian troops raced towards Berlin for the honour of capturing the German capital. The Red Army arrived before the Allies and the city fell on May 2, 1945.

The war played a large role in buffing Stalin’s image as of all the allies, Russia and the Soviet Union lost the most. Just the Russian war dead is estimated at some 8.7mn with a horrifying circa 80% of men aged between 18 and 22 dying in the fighting. Of those born in 1923, only three out of ten survived the war. Every family in Russia lost someone. Today they are honoured as the “Immortal regiment” and Russians march in the May Day parade carrying photos of their grandparents who fell in the struggle against the Nazis. Thus, Stalin’s claim to have delivered victory in the Great Patriotic War carries special significance in the Russian psyche.

Putin’s public statements about Joseph Stalin have evolved over time. He has consistently recognised the brutality of Stalin’s repressions, but he has neither fully condemned nor fully rehabilitated Stalin. Instead Putin has played on Stalin’s legacy to extract the political gains he offers from his role in Soviet industrialisation and wartime leadership, while at the same time acknowledging Stalin’s crimes.

With Putin’s own popularity consistently over 80% since the war in Ukraine started, it is easy to imagine that Russians have a similar nuanced doublethink-style attitude to Putin. A poll by opposition outlet Meduza after the war started found that its middle class readers universally condemned the invasion of Ukraine. However, at the same time, they believed the Kremlin line that the conflict was actually an attack on Russia by Nato and once the war had started Russia better win it. Russian patriotism is currently at an all-time high.

After the war, contemporary political comparisons (20%) dominate the online discussions as Stalin’s struggle to modernize the country and defeat its external enemies are still relevant today and make up a similar narrative coming out of today’s Kremlin. Cultural and international contexts accounted for the remaining mentions, Vedomosti reported. In total, the broader Stalin discourse reached approximately 53mn people, across 2.9mn mentions.

The KPRF has played a central role in this narrative shift, as it struggles to remain relevant in the modern political context. In July, the party’s nineteenth Congress adopted a resolution to “restore the full historical justice” regarding Stalin and to formally denounce Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech,” which condemned Stalin’s repressions and strategic failures. “The text of the report contains falsified facts and false accusations against Stalin,” the resolution stated.

Under Yeltsin, the KPRF was a major force in domestic politics and dominated the Duma. But since taking over, Putin has successfully relegated the party to the irrelevance of becoming the so-called “systemic opposition” which nominally opposes Putin but in fact toes the Kremlin’s line on all major decisions.

Sidorin Lab also identified broader sentiment around Stalin’s legacy. A majority (85%) of users viewed his role in WWII positively. In contrast, Stalin-era repressions were largely discussed in neutral terms (86%), with 7% defending them as “a necessary measure in that historical period” and 7% expressing strong criticism. The painful topics of the repressions are marginalised, and the emphasis is shifted to the ‘effective manager’ of the war and industrialisation era, according to the experts at Sidorin Lab.

The Russian public space remains polarised, but since the start of the war in Ukraine, the survey found, “the voice of public actors who negatively assessed Stalin and emphasised the repressions became less audible.”