Stalin nearly named among greatest Russians

Its a strange world, and history can be re-written to suit the needs of the day...

Joseph Stalin came within a whisker of being voted the greatest Russian of all time yesterday in a marathon television contest that reached a dramatic climax after a six-month build-up.

The winner of the competition was Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-century prince who defeated German invaders and was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Grand Prince Nevsky garnered 524,575 votes, fewer than 1,000 ahead of Peter Stolypin, Tsar Nicholas II’s authoritarian Prime Minister, and 5,500 in front of Stalin.

The vote, which some commentators claimed had been rigged, went down to the wire, with presenters counting down the final seconds as viewers of the state-owned Rossiya channel voted by text message during the last programme. Among the other 11 finalists were the poet Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Lenin and Tsar Alexander II, who abolished serfdom.

The vote comes after a concerted campaign in Russia to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator, who has been lauded in recent times on state television for his role as a victorious leader in the Second World War while school history books have softened their criticism of his repressions. A factor in Stalin falling behind other contenders could have been his Georgian roots, as anti-Georgian sentiment in Russia reached new heights this summer after the brief war in the former Soviet republic.

Before the final vote Sergei Markov, a member of parliament for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, said a win for Stalin would be viewed by the country’s ruling class as an anti-establishment vote. “The most important issue for Russia’s ruling class, and the heads of the TV channel, is that they don’t want Stalin to win, because that would give the impression of authoritarianism,” Mr Markov said.

Vladimir Pribylovsky, a political analyst with the Panorama think-tank, went farther, questioning the result. Stalin’s narrow defeat clearly understated the real support for him in society, he claimed.

“The vote was an absolute falsification,” Mr Pribylovsky said. “Stalin, Lenin and Peter I: these are the most important figures in Russian history. Thirty to 40 per cent of Russians would support Stalin.”

Stolypin, a conservative politician who opposed liberal reforms and cracked down hard on the Bolsheviks, was assassinated by a socialist revolutionary in a Kiev theatre in 1912.

Some 50 million votes were cast on-line and by text message from all parts of the former Soviet Union, except Georgia. In the competition’s early stages in the summer, Stalin was the clear leader, but was closely followed by Nicholas II, whom the organisers admitted plugging to make the contest more interesting.

Mark Urnov, the dean of political studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, said the closeness of the outcome looked “really strange, yet it reflected the state of our public mind”. The vote supports two myths that Russians buy into, he said. “One is a great Tsarist Russia, and the other is a great Soviet Russia under Stalin.

“This vote is the result of eight years of brainwashing by the mass media,” Mr Urnov said. “This vote for authoritarianism would never have happened eight years ago.”

Vote winners

1 Alexander Nevsky 524,575
2 Peter Stolypin 523,766
3 Joseph Stalin 519,071
4 Alexander Pushkin 516,608
5 Tsar Peter the Great 448,857
6 Vladimir Lenin 424,283

Source: Times archive