About 60-65 per cent of Russians had a positive view of him, the paper said, with many seeing him as a man who for decades staved off the weakness now besetting Russia. The paper gave no source for its figures, though it is clearly a party-approved epitaph of the generalissimo. A minority Stalin cult has long been in evidence. There are always fresh flowers on his grave by the Kremlin wall, while other dead Soviet leaders make do with officially supplied plastic blooms. At the memorial to his millions of victims, a rough stone dragged from the Arctic prison camp of Solovetsky island and which stands near the old KGB headquarters in the capital, few people seem to know what it commemorates.
Children clamber in ignorance over it.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation owes more to Stalin than to Lenin Stalinist sentiment is probably not a big vote-winner, but it provides a symbolic underpinning for the Communist Party, which has ditched much of its Marxist ideology in favour of Russian nationalism. But the Communist Party of the Russian Federation owes more to Stalin than to Lenin. It was Stalin who built up the strong state, who ditched Lenin's internationalism in favour of establishing a Eurasian superpower. That is what the modern party admires. As Stalin's prestige grows, so do attempts to reduce the number of his victims.