Moscow: Communist party members have inaugurated a "Stalin Centre" in central Russia to rehabilitate the controversial leader's image and showcase his accomplishments, the facility's director told AFP on Tuesday.
"We have opened the centre to clear Stalin's name after decades of slander," said Georgy Kamnev, a local Communist lawmaker who heads the new Stalin Centre in Penza.
The two-storey centre in downtown Penza, a city of 500,000 located some 600 kilometres (370 miles) southeast of Moscow, was inaugurated on Monday to coincide with what would have been Stalin's 136th birthday.
The Communist Party -- which has been a marginal political actor since the collapse of the Soviet Union -- holds 15 percent of seats in Penza's regional legislature.
"Stalinism is the synonym of greatness, social protection, scientific and cultural progress and victory in the Second World War," Kamnev said, adding that the deaths of "innocent victims" during the Stalin era should not be repeated.
Mass repression under Stalin is estimated to have killed millions.
The centre's mandate is to provide scholarships to history students, organise conferences and round tables about Stalin's leadership and hand out posters and portraits of him in the city, Kamnev said.
"More and more Russians are starting to understand that thanks to Stalin, our country has always preserved its sovereignty and territorial integrity," Kamnev said.
Attitudes toward the controversial Soviet leader remain ambiguous as authorities have played down the horrors of the Stalinist era but allowed Stalin statues to reappear across the country.
Since President Vladimir Putin was reelected in 2012, Stalin's rating in opinion polls has improved dramatically.
The percentage of Russians who believe the Stalinist purges were "justified" has grown from 25 percent to 45 percent, according to the Moscow-based Levada Centre, an independent pollster.
Putin has backed a plan to put up a public monument in Moscow to the victims of Stalin's purges, calling the repression "one of the most bitter, difficult pages of Russian history."
Yet, under the Kremlin strongman, Russia has stressed his role in making the Soviet Union a superpower and discussion of Stalin's repressions has been sidelined.
Several dozen Communist party supporters gathered on Monday to lay wreaths on Stalin's grave outside the Kremlin's walls in honour of his birthday.
AFP
