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Sitting in his front room at home in Moscow, surrounded by shelves of books on 20th-century history, Leonid Zhura recounts how life was better under Stalin. "It was a heroic epoch. It was the first time in human history that a society was founded on fair principles," he says, adding that Stalin did not commit any crimes.
Luke Harding on the fight for Stalin's reputation Link to this audio Zhura's views are not greatly unusual in today's Russia. What distinguishes the amateur historian from other Stalin fans is that he is going to court to prove his assertion that Stalin never killed anybody. And he claims to have an impeccable witness – Stalin's 73-year-old grandson.
At lunchtime tomorrow Yevgeny Dzhugashvili – the offspring of Stalin's ill-fated son Yakov, from the dictator's first marriage – is due to appear at Moscow's Basmanny court. Dzhugashvili lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. But at Zhura's invitation, he is flying to Moscow to take part in a libel action against Novaya Gazeta, Russia's leading liberal newspaper.
"He's retired and normally lives with his family in Georgia. But he's decided he wants to make a stand on this," said Zhura, 63, a former trade official.
Dzhugashvili is demanding $299,000 (£180,000) in damages from the paper after it said that his grandfather personally signed politburo orders to execute civilians. Author Anatoly Yablokov – who wrote the piece – says such a legal case would have been unthinkable until recently, but is now depressingly possible.
"There is a change in society's view of Stalin," Yablokov said last month at a preliminary court hearing. "We hear much more now about how much of an effective manager Stalin was, much more than in the 1990s, and much less about the repression."
According to Zhura, however, Stalin created a society superior to its capitalist rivals, not just in the field of scientific endeavour but also on the football pitch. "During a tour of Britain in November 1945, Moscow Dynamo FC thrashed Manchester United. We even beat your Arsenal," Zhura noted.
Zhura also insists that the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – under which Hitler and Stalin secretly carved up eastern Europe in August 1939 – was not the cause of the second world war. Instead, he blames another less well-known agreement, signed in the same month: the Anglo-Polish agreement between Britain and Warsaw.
(Under it Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary and Count Raczynski, Poland's ambassador in London, agreed that their countries would aid each other in the event of attack. Hitler invaded Poland six days later, with Stalin following suit 17 days later.)
Furthermore, Zhura also claims that the Nazis carried out the notorious massacre in Katyn in 1940 of Polish officers – a crime hushed up by Moscow for 50 years, but now acknowledged as the work of the Soviet NKVD. "This isn't how Stalin writes. It's a fake!" Zhura said yesterday, passing the Guardian a facsimile document approving the Katyn operation, with Stalin's signature.
According to Zhura, Stalin's associates were behind the Great Terror - the murderous purges of 1937-1938, during which tens of thousands of people, including most leading Bolsheviks, were summarily shot. He admits that Stalin created the gulag system, but says those imprisoned in it – including Alexander Solzhenitsyn – deserved their lot. "He was a criminal," he says of the writer.
"I accept there were some judicial mistakes. But every country has to defend itself from fifth columnists," he said. "Look at Britain. You arrested Oswald Mosley, Mrs Mosley and 20,000 British fascists. There was no investigation or due process. You interned them in your own concentration camps. You've forgotten that bit."
It would be easy, but wrong, to dismiss Zhura as an unrepresentative crackpot whose defence of Stalin says little about contemporary Russian opinion. But many Russians from all social classes appear to share his views, and to yearn for the days when Soviet Russia was a great power, ruled by a strong, if sometimes brutal, tsar-leader.
Last year Joseph Stalin came third in a nationwide poll to name Russia's greatest historical figure, amid widespread suspicions that he had actually beaten the official winner, the medieval warrior prince Alexander Nevsky. topped the "Everyone knows the figures were manipulated," Zhura said.
The libel hearing comes at a time when Russia, under its twin heads Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, has launched a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin. In school textbooks he is described not as a mass murderer, but a great, if flawed, leader who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward and agricultural Soviet Union.
The opposition historian Vladimir Ryzhkov points out that the Kremlin's revisionism is an attempt to justify its own authoritarian model, known as "sovereign democracy".
Some half a century after Stalin's death, the dictator continues not only to divide Russians but to spoil the country's relations with its former satellites.
Over the summer Russia has been involved in a bitter dispute with eastern Europe over the causes and origins of the second world war. This month, Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, dismissed the claim that the Soviet Union shared responsibilty for the conflict, together with Germany as an "absolute lie".
During a visit to Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, admitted the Nazi-Soviet pact had been immoral, but added that other powers – including Britain and France – had also struck deals with the Nazis.
For Zhura, however, one thing is indisputable. "Stalin was a kind, generous, and magnanimous man, a genius," he asserts. "Under Stalin people were confident of the future. If he killed millions of people why do so many people still love him?"
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili is the son of Yakov, one of Stalin's four
children produced by Stalin during a love life that included two
wives and many mistresses. Yakov's relationship with Stalin, above,
was little short of disastrous. The two didn't get on. He shot
himself because of Stalin's callousness towards him, but survived.
The Germans captured Yakov during the early stages of the second
world war, while he was serving with the Red Army. Hitler offered
to swap him for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered
at Stalingrad, but Stalin refused. Yakov – who had two children,
Yevgeny and Gallina – died in a German concentration camp
in 1943.He was probably shot, but may have run into an electric
fence. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili – Stalin's grandson – is
suing the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta after it claimed Stalin
personally ordered the execution of civilians. Now 73, Yevgeny
lives in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital a short drive from Gori,
Stalin's birthplace. During his career, Dzhugashvili served as
a colonel in the Soviet and Russian air force. He briefly toyed
with politics and in 1999 stood for Russia's state Duma as a representative
of a group of communist parties.
