Russia's biggest television stations Rossiya has been conducting a nationwide poll for much of this year.
From an original list of 500 candidates now there are just 12 names left from which viewers can select their all-time hero.
(...)
More than 3.5 million people have already voted and Stalin - born an ethnic Georgian - has been riding high for many months.
(...)
Many in Russia do still revere Stalin for his role during World War II when the Soviet Union defeated the forces of Nazi Germany.
But now there is a much broader campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and it seems to be coming from the highest levels of government.
The primary evidence comes in the form of a new manual for history teachers in the country's schools, which says Stalin acted "entirely rationally".
Stalin's profile on the poll's website does not shy away from his crimes
"[The initiative] came from the very top," says the editor of the manual, historian Alexander Danilov.
"I believe it was the idea of former president, now prime minister, Vladimir Putin.
"It fits completely with the political course we have had for the last eight years, which is dedicated to the unity of society."
But the campaign goes further than reinterpreting history for schoolchildren. It is also physical.
Earlier this month, riot police raided the St Petersburg office of one of Russia's best-known human rights organisations, Memorial.
Claiming a possible link with an "extremist" article published in a local newspaper, the police took away 12 computer hard-drives containing the entire digital archive of the atrocities committed under Stalin.
Memorial's St Petersburg office specialises in researching the crimes committed by the Soviet regime.
"It's a huge blow to our organisation," says Irina Flige, the office director.
"This was 20 years' work. We'd been making a universally accessible database with hundreds of thousands of names.
"Maybe this was a warning to scare us?"
Irina Flige believes they were targeted because they are now on the wrong side of a new ideological divide.
(...)
It seems Russians are to be proud of their history, not ashamed, and so those investigating and cataloguing the atrocities of the past are no longer welcome.
"The official line now is that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country," says Irina Flige.
"And if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims."
The outrage at what has happened to the Memorial archive spreads beyond Russia's borders.
The British historian Orlando Figes worked with Memorial when he was researching his latest book The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin's Russia.
(...)
"What we have now [in Russia] effectively is the KGB in power," he adds.
"Opposition forces and awkward historians reminding the Russian population of what the KGB did 50 years ago is inconvenient for these people."
So it seems whoever is voted the country's greatest citizen on Sunday, it is Joseph Stalin who is the biggest winner this year as he is rehabilitated in Russia's brave new world.
That to me create a link to a couple of old Spengler's essays. From AsianTimes:
Putin has the requisite tough-mindedness, with only one important deficiency: he is a nasty piece of work. His youth movement, Nashi (Ours) should frighten anyone who knows the political history of the 20th century. Then again, nobody's perfect. Russia is no country for nice men. But Putin's personal nastiness is beside the point. (...) No Russian leader could survive without doing more or less what Putin has done.
While his predecessor Boris Yeltsin led Russia into bankruptcy and chaos, Putin restored Russia's economy and global stature on the strength of one insight: the Russian people were the problem. After centuries of Tsarist brutality and three generations of communist terror, the Russian people had become a passive rabble incapable of defending their interests. Yeltsin allowed a locust-swarm to steal what remained of the Russian economy.
By harsh and extra-legal means, Putin reclaimed Russia's economy for the state".
Also from AsianTimes:
"Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is people.
(...)
The United Nations publishes population projections for Russia up to 2050, and I have extended these to 2100. If the UN demographers are correct, Russia's adult population will fall from about 90 million today to only 20 million by the end of the century. Russia is the only country where abortions are more numerous than live births, a devastating gauge of national despair.
Under Putin, the Russian government introduced an ambitious natalist program to encourage Russian women to have children. As he warned in his 2006 state of the union address, "You know that our country's population is declining by an average of almost 700,000 people a year. We have raised this issue on many occasions but have for the most part done very little to address it ... First, we need to lower the death rate. Second, we need an effective migration policy. And third, we need to increase the birth rate."
Russia's birth rate has risen slightly during the past several years, perhaps in response to Putin's natalism, but demographers observe that the number of Russian women of childbearing age is about to fall off a cliff. No matter how much the birth rate improves, the sharp fall in the number of prospective mothers will depress the number of births. UN forecasts show the number of Russians aged 20-29 falling from 25 million today to only 10 million by 2040.
(...)
Part of Russia's response is to encourage migration of Russians left outside the borders of the federation after the collapse of communism in 1991. An estimated 6.5 million Russians from the former Soviet Union now work in Russia as undocumented aliens, and a new law will regularize their status. Only 20,000 Russian "compatriots" living abroad, however, have applied for immigration to the federation under a new law designed to draw Russians back. (that is the all thing!)
That leaves the 9.5 million citizens of Belarus, a relic of the Soviet era that persists in a semi-formal union with the Russian Federation, as well as the Russians of the Western Ukraine and Kazakhstan. More than 15 million ethnic Russians reside in those three countries, and they represent a critical strategic resource.
Even with migration and annexation of former Russian territory that was lost in the fracture of the USSR, however, Russia will not win its end-game against demographic decline and the relative growth of Muslim populations. The key to Russian survival is Russification, that is, the imposition of Russian culture and Russian law on ethnicities at the periphery of the federation. That might sound harsh, but that has been Russian nature from its origins.
Russia is not an ethnicity but an empire, the outcome of hundreds of years of Russification. That Russification has been brutal is an understatement, but it is what created Russia out of the ethnic morass around the Volga river basin. One of the best accounts of Russia's character comes from Eugene Rosenstock-Huessey (Franz Rosenzweig's cousin and sometime collaborator) in his 1938 book Out of Revolution. Russia's territory tripled between the 16th and 18th centuries, he observes, and the agency of its expansion was a unique Russian type. The Russian peasant, Rosenstock-Huessey observed, "was no stable freeholder of the Western type but much more a nomad, a pedlar, a craftsman and a soldier. His capacity for expansion was tremendous."
In 1581 Asiatic Russia was opened. Russian expansion, extending even in the eighteenth century as far as the Russian River in Northern California, was by no means Czaristic only. The "Moujik", the Russian peasant, because he is not a "Bauer" or a "farmer", or a "laborer", but a "Moujik", wanders and stays, ready to migrate again eventually year after year.
Personally I found Spengler view of History too Top-down to be realistic.
But when I see this video I find myself thinking that he may be unto something:
The video is about Nashi, a government funded Russian youth movement (Here's the youtube link)
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