portrait of Stalin bother you? then do not visit Russia certainly has a lot of images of Stalin. image of Stalin is not disturbing. purely shows his way to leading his team. harsh and unforgiving. Not nice you want to ban the club for an image that you do not like.
It's not that I
personally don't like him or his politics, but the fact that there are friends and families of tens of millions wrongfully killed and imprisoned in gulags who should not have to endure the sight of the monster, not here anyway. If you look closely, I am not singling out any single man, social group, nationality, or ideology. Stalin is not the only bloodthirsty tyrant whose imagery and likeness have no place in GKO - they come from all geographic, political, and ideological backgrounds (did you even look at the list?). I also never said people should be banned for using these, but they
should be required to change them.
"His way of leading his team"
so he wants to kill or imprison all his opponents? LOL I guess that would make victory really easy.
There is no forgiveness for Stalin's actions, and "harsh" barely begins to describe them. Even his Soviet predecessors denounced him - Khrushchev for his "cult of personality and its consequences" (
source) while Gorbachev said that he committed "enormous and unforgivable" crimes (
source). More recently, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev denounced the efforts of people seeking to rehabilitate Stalin's image, saying that "the mass extermination during the Stalin era cannot be justified" (
source). He wasn't even a good Communist, institutionalizing what both Marxists and Trotskyists called "state capitalism" over real socialism (
source)
Sure, there are those who romanticize Stalin as competent leaders, but that is because the nation has never fully dealt with the crimes of Stalinism. Instead, the complexities of life in a fragmented modern society that can boast of no momentous achievements -- no more superpower status, no new Sputniks -- have made some Russians nostalgic for the "strong state" they once inhabited. It's a cycle that will keep on repeating itself until Russia finally and fully confronts its past.
