Veneration of Stalin in Caucasus is response to declining living standards

In North-Caucasian republics, certain residents are honouring Joseph Stalin, because they mistakenly associate him with the notion of "social justice", which they have despaired to obtain from the current authorities, historians have noted.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on April 29, a bust of Stalin was installed in the city of Dagestanskie Ogni, and on May 2, it was dismantled. The city head said that communists had installed the bust without permission of local authorities.

Makhach Musaev, the acting head of the Agency for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Dagestan, believes that the dismantling of the monument could have been influenced by both its unsanctioned installation and the public outrage.

Zurab Gadjiev, a researcher at the Research Institute of History, Anthropology and Ethnography of the Dagestani Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), has noted that there are nostalgic people for the USSR in Dagestan, mostly older ones who had not lived under Stalin.

He has also stated that in the Caucasus there is no and there will be no trend in support of Stalin, since the memory about repressions is very strong there.

Patimat Takhnaeva, a historian, has supported the opinion that Stalin's admirers are mostly people who need a "master".

Sergey Arutyunov, the head of the Division of Caucasian Nations at the RAS' Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, has linked the interest in Stalin with the shock of the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, when people were "humiliated" and, as compensation, some of them turned to the past, when the USSR was a great power.