It's not like someone in Russia would dispute that Josef Stalin stands for a gruesome reign of violence. He was a controversial figure from the beginning among the leadership of his own party, the Bolsheviks, forerunners to the Communist Party. Even former Russian Communist leaders concede that the number of his victims is inconceivably high.
And yet the late Soviet dictator is the source of intense disagreements in modern day Russia. Admirers like writer Alexander Prokhanov extol Stalin's "mystical victory" at the end of World War II and the Soviet "red project" as epoch-making. The pro-Stalin camp regularly wins television debates with liberals warning of the dangers of Stalin nostalgia. Sixty years after his death, on March 5, 1953, the "man of steel" still inspires fascination among many Russians.
Lenin issued some of the earliest warnings against what Stalin was capable of. As he wrote in a letter to the party convention on December 24, 1922: "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution."
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