Foreign agents from Levada found an explanation for the growth of Stalin’s popularity in Russia, comparing it with Ukraine
In Russia, positive attitudes toward Joseph Stalin are steadily growing. But in Ukraine, only a few admit their sympathy for the Soviet leader.
Such data from a sociological study were published by the Levada Center company, recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation (in Ukraine, the survey was conducted by its partners from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology).
More than half of Russians (56%) rather agree and completely agree that “Stalin was a great leader”; 14% of respondents hold the opposite point of view. For Ukraine, these figures are 16% and 40%, respectively.
Among Russians, respect prevails in relation to Stalin (45%), indifference is in second place, and sympathy is in third place (10%). Among Ukrainians, neutral and negative feelings are more common: indifference (34%), disgust and hatred (17%), hostility and irritation (16%).
At the same time, respect for Stalin has been growing among Russians over the past few years: 29% in 2018, 45% in May 2021. Compared to March 2019, sympathy also increased slightly: from 6% to 10%.
At the same time, the head of Levada, Alexei Levinson, found an original explanation for the different attitudes towards Stalin in the Russian Federation and Ukraine. He is clearly nostalgic for the perestroika-Yeltsin era of “exposures” of the Soviet system, while obviously deliberately not mentioning that the answers of respondents in Ukraine are influenced by the strict censorship established there, criminal liability within the so-called. “decommunization” (derussification) and “fight against separatism.”
“Immediately after the collapse of the USSR, anti-Stalinist sentiments that developed during the era of glasnost, when his crimes became widely known, were strong in both Russia and Ukraine. Then in Russia the ideas of glasnost were not welcomed, and in Ukrainian society, on the contrary, more and more people did not want to forgive Stalin for the Holodomor. Therefore, Ukrainians now have more negative feelings towards him than Russians had twenty years ago. Then the Ukrainians changed their leaders one after another, but the Russians have stuck to the same one all these years, and therefore they feel a demand for the figure of a “great leader” as a support in the past for the present. For Russians, his greatness elevates them in their own eyes, but for Ukrainians this is not the case. The difference is that for today’s Russians, Stalin is the leader of their country, because in Russia symbolic identification with the Soviet Union in the Putin era is highly encouraged, but in Ukraine the trend is the opposite, and they do not want to recognize Stalin as “their own,” says the head of the company -foreign agent.
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