The Stalin Bus
7 May 2010
The Stalin Bus.
Two days ago, members of the St. Petersburg Communist Party realized a long held wish, when a bus operated by the Network of Passenger Transports (SPP) rolled onto Nevsky Prospekt, sporting a ten-foot-tall image of Josef Stalin (see photo). The following two phrases appear on the side: “I would like to raise a toast to the health of the Soviet people and, foremost, to the Russian people!” (a quote from Stalin, dated May 24, 1945) and “Eternal glory to the victors!”
The same day the Stalin Bus appeared, somebody decided to smear white paint all over the Vozhd’s face, ears, and hair. A KPRF spokesman, Sergey Malinkovich, blamed Yabloko activists, to which local Yabloko leader Maxim Reznik responded by calling Malinkovich insane. As it turns out, two Yabloko activists were indeed responsible for the vandalism (see their video here). Yabloko has ruled out the further use of paint, but it does plan to stage a protest aboard the Stalin Bus sometime today. They’ll be carrying signs reading “The Doctor’s Plot,” The 1937 Terror,” and “The Tukhachevsky Affair.”
The Stalin Bus is the brainchild of one man, Viktor Loginov, who was awarded a medal today by the Petersburg city committee of the KRPF for his show of initiative. The advertisement will run for two weeks at the cost of 35 thousand rubles (1,145 USD). Apparently, he used social networking sites to raise the money collectively.
RFE/RL published an article on this story yesterday, asking why the government hasn’t cracked down on the bus company, which five years ago the City Committee on Transport apparently banned from carrying passengers. “Why has the city been unable to remove a bus line that lacks an official license?” author Fabian Burkhardt of RFE/RL asks. Burkhardt adds, “Political will to prohibit public portrayals of Stalin is still weak, and officials keep sending conflicting signals.” The ‘weak will’ to which he refers is likely the City of Moscow’s recent flirtation with including images of Stalin in the upcoming Victory Day celebrations, and the ‘conflicting signals’ is undoubtedly the much-repeated perception that Medvedev is trying to ‘undo’ the pro-Stalinism of Vladimir Putin. (See Gazeta.ru’s article today arguing exactly this point in response to Medvedev’s Stalin-themed interview with Izvestiia.)
I don’t know the specifics of the SPP bus company’s history, but I presume it’s not the only transportation operator in Russia with a bad safety track record. Anybody who’s risked his life in a marshrutka van is intimately familiar with the perils of wheeled-transit in Russia. If they’re indeed an illegal operation, I hope this publicity takes them off the streets. If only all the dangerous services in Russia would sponsor Stalinist advertisements, maybe RFE/RL could become an excellent consumer watchdog.
Forgetting the inherent dvusmyslennost’ of images of Stalin (a fascinating topic recently explored on Sean’s Russia Blog), the real irony in this story, to me anyway, is that RFE/RL is suddenly concerned with a lack of leadership and coordination from Russia’s political leadership. Burkhardt seems to find the ruling tandem’s comments on Stalinism to be ‘equivocal’ and ‘conflicting’ – the insinuation being that the federal government needs to dedicate itself to a single ideological line and purge itself of dissenting opinions. Perhaps they could even call it a ‘power vertical’?
Stalin + paint.
May 07, 2010 @ 12:12:08
AGT,
I don’t know why RFE/FL even bothers anymore. They habitually traffic in such rank and blatantly obvious double standards that I find it impossible not to laugh whenever I read them.
As you note, what they’re basically calling for is centralized ideological enforcement. Clearly, nothing could go wrong with that in Russia!
RFE/RL would save everyone a lot of time, and the American taxpayers a lot of money, if they just put up a website with the following banner: “Today, something happened in Russia, and, whatever it was, we strongly disagree with it!”
May 11, 2010 @ 14:47:17
Its coverage of Serbs and Serbia is comparatively worse.
http://www.rferl.org/content/Public_Opinion_On_Nazi_Collaborators_Gets_Revision_In_Balkans/2036823.html
One of numerous examples.
I suspect this has to do with the larger and more powerful tending to be better understood. (In this instance, “better understood” is relative in relation to the comparison given.)
May 07, 2010 @ 15:34:40
No, no, no. It’s a STALINWAGON.
May 07, 2010 @ 15:58:18
Does anyone but me find it ironic that Russian liberals want to engage in the same type of historical erasure that Stalin did?
May 11, 2010 @ 16:01:30
I’ve had some trouble understanding this myself. They openly accuse Putin of being a Stalinist, and seem to be somewhat divided on Medvedev. The Russian liberals are leaning against “he’s no better than Putin,” whereas the American neocons are still clinging to the possibility that he’s a Gorbachev 2.0, come to rescue Russia from authoritarianism for a second time. (Of course, I suppose some are saying the same thing about Obama, who fans abroad and opponents at home claim is trying to orchestrate the managed decline of the USA.)
At any rate, their position on Stalin imagery and memory seems to be this: he was no better than Hitler, so things should be just the same in Germany as they are for Russia today. This, of course, forgets that Russia isn’t the successor state to the USSR, but is in fact a liberated nation. This forgets also that Stalin was an American ally during WWII.
I’ve heard more than once that “Stalin should remain in the museums, and that is remembrance enough.” Well, I think that point of view is perhaps not crazy or illogical, but it also seems to me the reasonable path only for a nation happily numbed by a seriously tweaked perception of history. It’s pooh-poohed as “backward looking” to want to discuss anything in America’s past that doesn’t include military victories or the creation of democracy. While I wouldn’t really want to commute on the Stalin Bus myself, I find it completely human and not at all hopeless that Russians today are fighting and arguing over the meaning of the past.
May 08, 2010 @ 21:36:43
Concerning Stalin, an overview noting a politically diverse Russia with an overall trend against him runs counter to a certain preferred imagery.
This article runs a bit different from the RFE/RL spin:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100508/ts_afp/russiastalinpoliticshistory
No mention of a suspect Russian TV poll placing Stalin third among Russian historical figures. A recent RFE/RL piece uncritically cited that poll without questioning its level of accuracy and noting that Stalin’s third place finish was at an under 12% in support of him. RFE/RL is by no means alone. Opendemocracy and others have done the same.
BTW, a Ukrainian TV poll put Bandera at second among Ukrainian historical figures. On the other hand, a more recent poll has him with 28% support, 53% disapproval, with the remainder in a fog. There’s reason to believe the 28% figure might be a bit high.
May 11, 2010 @ 15:42:32
Certainly historical figures like Stalin or Bandera mean very different things to different people. On a larger scale, this sort of thing (was the Golodomor genocide? how much credit does Stalin deserve for the WWII victory? etc.) is just modern-day manipulation of history. Demagogues cherry-pick from scholarship and archival records and rile up their supporters accordingly.
The truth about Stalin or Bandera or, hell, Lincoln would be more thought-provoking and nuanced than anything that could fit appropriately on a banner or a poster board.
This kind of social discourse is to intelligent debate what Twitter is to Shakespeare.
May 08, 2010 @ 22:13:41
In answer to another point that was made, Yabloko has ruled out the use of paint, while planning on a civil approach to expressing anti-Stalin sentiment.
This isn’t on par with seeking to erase someone along the lines of what happened during the Stalin era. (Like when school children were suddenly asked to remove pages from their text book about Mikhail Tukhachevsky. That process involved the teachers counting the heads of the students with the collected papers to ensure a clean sweep.)
Global Voices in English » Russia, Ukraine: WWII, Stalin, History, Politics
May 09, 2010 @ 20:42:14
[...] blog (here and here), Global Chaos (here and here), Foreign Notes, Ukrainiana, Sublime Oblivion, A Good Treaty, Robert [...]
May 10, 2010 @ 05:01:26
“members of the St. Petersburg Communist Party realized a long held wish”
People who are behind this action are by no means all members of any communist party, in fact, they hold a variety of political views (not liberal, naturally).
May 11, 2010 @ 15:34:45
Fair enough, but it’s still the Communists’ long held wish, no?
May 10, 2010 @ 07:16:39
“the real irony in this story, to me anyway, is that RFE/RL is suddenly concerned with a lack of leadership and coordination from Russia’s political leadership. Burkhardt seems to find the ruling tandem’s comments on Stalinism to be ‘equivocal’ and ‘conflicting’ – the insinuation being that the federal government needs to dedicate itself to a single ideological line and purge itself of dissenting opinions. Perhaps they could even call it a ‘power vertical’?”
Please. Back in the day, the US government were perfectly happy to see “FreeMarketDemocraticReform” implemented by Yeltsinian decree rather than have it chance the vagaries of the Russian legislative branch. For them, it was the ideal situation, where the USG got its way 100% and someone else had to accept the catastrophic consequences, and even now the USG simply do not comprehend why anyone is upset about the outcome of those ‘reforms”, and blamebad US-Russian relations all on that eeevul Putin.
May 10, 2010 @ 13:28:33
How do you say, “Pimp my ride” in Russian?
May 11, 2010 @ 00:40:47
“Тачка на прокачку” – it’s a TV show, the analogue of the American “Pimp my ride”. All I have seen is a parody of it, though.
Notes from the so-called Real World » Friday roundup: 2.1.13
Feb 02, 2013 @ 13:09:32
[...] there is the appearance on Nevsky Prospekt and elsewhere of city buses sporting 10-foot tall images of ol’ Uncle Joe, [...]