Title: Why so many Russians still love Stalin | The Week
Headings: Why so many Russians still love Stalin
Why so many Russians still love Stalin
To the bafflement of the world, Stalin is remembered quite fondly by millions upon millions of Russians

Content: In a recent poll conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 65 percent of Russians agreed that "Stalin was a cruel, inhuman tyrant, responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people." Yet in 2011, 45 percent of Russians also had a "generally positive" view of Stalin. A lot of that discrepancy has to do with World War II, or as the Russians call it, the Great Patriotic War. At a recent conference held by the Russian Orthodox Church, which was persecuted by Stalin's government, one speaker told an audience that "the nation must be grateful to Stalin for the 'sacred victory' over Nazi Germany," according to Reuters. Samuel Rachlin, whose Jewish family was exiled from Lithuania to Siberia by the Soviet government, recalls in The New York Times how some of his family's neighbors might have actually been grateful to Stalin, because Lithuania was later invaded by the Nazis. Sixty percent of Russians are in the "at least he's not Hitler" camp, agreeing with the statement that "for all Stalin's mistakes and misdeeds, the most important thing is that under his leadership the Soviet people won the Great Patriotic War." Some celebrate Stalin as one in a long line of strong Russian leaders, extending back from the Tsars to the inexplicably shirtless Vladimir Putin. Others have even more bizarre reasons for admiring him: A surprisingly large number of Russians even believe that Stalin had mystical powers. As recently as 2003, about 750,000 people voted for a party that aimed to continue what it said was Stalin's attempt to battle the ancient Egyptian priesthood of Ra, which supposedly runs the world from its base in Switzerland. [