A new statue of Joseph Stalin has been unveiled in Moscow’s Taganskaya Metro station—a life-size sculpture showing the Soviet dictator standing confidently in Red Square, flanked by adoring Soviet citizens.
Described by authorities as a restoration of a monument originally erected in 1950 and “lost” during station renovations in the 1960s, the sculpture has sparked fierce debate.
But let us be clear: this is no innocent act of historical preservation. It is a calculated political message, and one that should alarm not just Russians, but the entire democratic world.
Joseph Stalin presided over one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century. His legacy is one of terror, repression, and mass murder. Tens of millions perished under his rule—not only in the gulags, but in the purges, forced collectivisation campaigns, political executions, and man-made famines that scarred the Soviet Union for generations.
Yet in 2025, the Russian state is choosing not to reckon with this legacy, but to rehabilitate it. The return of Stalin to Moscow’s public spaces is not a nostalgic nod to history—it is an endorsement of authoritarianism and imperialism, cloaked in stone and bronze.
This move comes as no surprise to those who have watched Vladimir Putin’s regime increasingly embrace the symbols and language of Soviet power. One of Putin’s own advisers recently made the extraordinary claim that the Soviet Union never legally ceased to exist due to a “procedural error” in its dissolution. Such a statement would be laughable were it not so telling. It reflects a dangerous worldview—one that seeks to undo the post-Cold War order and reassert Russian dominance over its former imperial possessions, starting with Ukraine.
And herein lies the real danger of this statue. It is not just a tribute to a long-dead tyrant. It is a signal to the Russian people—and to the world—that the values of Stalinism are alive and well in Putin’s Russia.
Let us remember exactly what Stalinism meant for Ukraine. In 1932–1933, Stalin orchestrated one of the most heinous crimes in modern history: the Holodomor, a politically engineered famine that killed an estimated four million Ukrainians.
Grain was requisitioned from starving villages, borders were sealed to prevent escape, and entire communities were left to perish. It was no accident. The famine was a deliberate act of genocide designed to break the spirit of the Ukrainian peasantry, destroy the Ukrainian language and identity, and quash any notion of national resistance to Moscow’s rule.
The goal was clear: to eradicate the Ukrainian nation as a cultural and political force. Stalin understood that control over territory was not enough—he needed to erase the very idea of Ukrainian-ness. In this, he succeeded to a horrifying degree.
Today, Vladimir Putin is pursuing a chillingly similar objective. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in 2022, has never been merely a geopolitical conflict over NATO expansion or European alignment. It is, at its core, an ideological war—an attempt to erase Ukraine as an independent nation with its own language, history, and identity.
The parallels with the Holodomor are not only historical—they are contemporary. Russian forces have deliberately targeted Ukrainian schools, museums, and churches. Ukrainian language and culture are suppressed in occupied territories. Entire towns have been razed, and historical sites bombed. Perhaps most shockingly, Ukrainian children have been forcibly deported to Russia and subjected to “re-education”—a grotesque echo of Stalinist policies aimed at breaking familial and cultural bonds.
We must call this what it is: cultural genocide. Putin, like Stalin before him, is using state violence and terror to try to destroy a people’s sense of who they are. And we in the West must understand that this is not a domestic Russian affair—it is a test of whether the values of democracy and sovereignty can survive in the 21st century.
What makes the situation even more distressing is that Ukraine has been here before—not only under Stalin, but under Adolf Hitler. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union brought with it the horrors of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of over 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews. Like Stalin, Hitler sought to cleanse the territory of what he viewed as undesirable populations, replacing them with an ideologically pure imperial order.
There is a direct line between the genocidal campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s and what we are witnessing today. The actors may have changed, the uniforms may be different, but the ideology—the belief that certain peoples have no right to exist—is the same.
And yet, while Germany has confronted its past with humility and remorse, erecting Holocaust memorials and embedding the lessons of history into its national consciousness, Russia has chosen a different path. It has dismantled memorials to Stalin’s victims, shut down institutions like the Perm Gulag Museum, harassed independent historians, and arrested those who speak out against the state’s mythologising of the past.
Now, with this statue of Stalin standing once again in Moscow’s underground, the Russian state is not just whitewashing a past crime—it is preparing the ground for new ones.
Monuments matter. They are not neutral relics of the past. They are declarations of what a society values, whom it reveres, and what it aspires to become. In re-erecting Stalin, Putin’s regime is declaring its allegiance to a worldview rooted in fear, repression, and empire.
This is why the West must respond—not only with sanctions and military aid, but with moral clarity. We must speak the truth about Stalin’s crimes, and about Putin’s continuation of them. We must call out the glorification of genocide, whether it comes in the form of a statue or a state broadcast.
Unlike Donald Trump, we must never appease. And we must support Ukraine—not just because it is under attack, but because it stands at the front line of a global struggle between democracy and tyranny.
The statue of Stalin in Taganskaya station is not just a hunk of stone. It is a symbol of what the Kremlin aspires to be. It is a warning to those who believed that the Cold War was over, that history had ended, or that tyranny was a thing of the past.
As someone who has spent a lifetime opposing communism in all its forms, I say this with the utmost gravity: We must not look away. We must not forget. And we must not allow Stalin’s heirs to succeed where he failed.
History is repeating itself—not as farce, but as tragedy. And unless we act, the next generation may find itself fighting the same battles that we thought our grandparents had won.
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PUTIN’S HOLLOW MAY 9TH PARADE: THE COVENIENTLY FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF SOVIET-NAZI COLLABORATION
The Soviet Union helped Nazi Germany start the Second World War — until Russia admits this truth, its war commemorations are propaganda, not remembrance. Just days before Hitler invaded Poland from the west, Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — a secret deal with the Führer to carve up Eastern Europe.
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