He was a butcher of his own countrymen, a ruthless tyrant who sent millions to their deaths by way of famine, the gulag, or execution, and became known as one of the most atrocious rulers in history. So why is Josef Stalin still popular among modern-day Russians?

Media attention focused on this issue when last year a nationwide survey named Stalin the third-greatest Russian in history, even though Stalin was not Russian but an ethnic Georgian. The issue blew up again just several weeks ago, when the parliamentary arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) blamed both fascism and Stalinism for causing World War II. The Russian delegation stormed out of the meeting, and its head, Alexander Kozlovsky, called the OSCE’s decision an “insulting anti-Russian attack.” Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev questions those versions of history that cast doubt on supposedly decisive role of the Soviet Union in defeating fascism. In Stalin, the Russians have found a strange champion for their national ethos.

It is a disturbing national character indeed that dares to conjure Stalin as a beneficial leader. Much has been written about the Russian’s inherent respect for an autocratic ruler. An article in the UK paper The Independent of a year ago weighed whether Stalin’s stature would increase or decline in the future. The speculations that article makes are quite valid. What seems to be missing from the analysis, however, is a look into the evolving phenomenon of Russian nationalism, which Stalin embodied in its most horrible aspects. Russia has always been a collection of different ethnic minorities with their own national sentiments, and so forging a “national character” in the country has simultaneously been a tricky issue. Russia’s expansiveness, both geographically and ethnically, has made the population fearful of what might happen if their rulers were not forceful enough, in contrast to those in the West who fear what would happen if their own rulers upset the democratic checks on executive power.

The sanitizing of Stalin, therefore, has operated on the premise that what the Soviet dictator did was, given the demands placed upon any ruler in Russian history, ultimately rational. Stalin defeated the Nazi enemies and put the Soviet Union on the path to becoming a superpower; just as Stalin used force in the past to maintain order and cultivate respect for the country, so too does modern Russia need a strong ruler, as the argument goes.

This assertion is counterproductive for Russia’s own advancement as a responsible power. Stalin’s legacy stands as proof that Russian rulers have the tendency to use nationalism as cover for their blatantly destructive policies. Stalin not only divided up Eastern Europe as an ally of Hitler in 1939, but he decimated the ranks of the military so thoroughly that he was left barely prepared to counter the German invasion of 1941. Facing down an advancing Wehrmacht that was pummeling the Red Army in 1941-42, Stalin made the decision to bring back the emblems of the tsarist past as a last-ditch effort to unify the Russian population against the German invaders, and to legitimize his tyranny. A typical film produced during this time was Alexander Nevsky, showing in heroic fashion the exploits of a previous generation of Russian soldiers. The Soviet leader was reportedly fascinated with the tsars and their accomplishments, marveling that he was walking in the footsteps of Ivan the Terrible in the Kremlin. The Holodomor of 1932-33, was genocide of what may have been as many as 7 million Ukrainians, in which Stalin deliberately starved them. His deportations and executions of national minorities in Russia were notorious. In an infamous massacre at Katyn in 1940, he ordered thousands of Polish officers to be shot and buried in mass graves. When these graves were uncovered by the advancing Germans in 1943, he had the further audacity to take advantage of the high reputation the Soviets had at the time to turn blame for the crime on the German soldiers. The matter was not resolved until 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet officials had indeed carried out the heinous murders. But even Gorbachev, perhaps most of all Gorbachev, was still beholden to that Russian autocratic nationalism that had defined his predecessors: despite pushing for greater autonomy in the Soviet Socialist Republics, he ordered Russian Spetsnaz troops to murder Lithuanian independence demonstrators in Vilnius in 1991. If a Russian leader who sought to remove the image of the Soviet Union as an enemy of the West did not fully renounce the tradition of Russian autocracy that Stalin himself so ruthlessly exploited, is it any wonder that Stalin’s reputation has remained intact over the years?

The admiration that many Russians hold for Stalin is a wasteful use of nationalism. It marginalizes Russia while at the same time reinforcing the view of its statesmen that strong leaders are necessary, that they are the only means to keep the West at bay. The Kremlin would do well to stop interpreting criticisms of Stalin, or criticisms of the Soviet system itself, as synonymous with attacks on the Russian national character. The Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union victimized Russians as much as it did Ukrainians and Balts. The best example for the Russians to follow would be Germany, which has been thoroughly critical of its Nazi and Communist past, having declassified the documents of the East German State Security Service (Stasi) and prevented members of that intelligence organization from being part of the German bureaucracy. Surely Russia, even though it has most of its KGB documents locked up in secret archives and ex-KGB spies running the state, could also follow suit and invent a word in its lexicon to match the GermanVergangenheitsbewältigung (past-beating)? Too “anti-Russian” for the Kremlin’s tastes, it would seem.