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From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
In our politically unstable modern world, the allure of retreating into memories – sometimes mirages – of bygone eras seems to have grown. Six historians explore how this tendency impacts our historical understanding
“The nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated” The first thing to remind ourselves is that our view of the past is definitely shaped. The way that we understand history is translated, constructed, created for us in multiple ways – the majority of which have very little to do with the actuality of what happened. We imagine and dream history across culture, making versions of it that comfort us and accord with our world views. Film, television, games, adverts, heritage spaces, novels – they all enable us to inhabit other times, to form our sense of memory, to consume the past. Nostalgia is simply one of the ways that we access these feelings of pastness. It is incredibly powerful because of its appeal to emotion beyond rationality. It is a way of connecting with the historical that ignores order and authority – and historians underestimate it at their peril. Nostalgia has become a keynote for contemporary collective memory. Global populist politics are shot through with a dangerous nostalgia for a claimed glory that has been seemingly squandered. This is not new, but it is newly dominant. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2WX7XXY-CMYK-12a5f8b-e1772530438298.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A poster for the TV show Stranger Things, showing four children on bikes on a long road with a yellow line down the middle. They are all looking towards a red, cloudy sky" title="The hit series Stranger Things is “a confection of an imagined 1980s”, says Jerome De Groot, enjoyed by an audience of whom many have “no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés” (Image by Alamy)" /> In the television series Mad Men (2007), Don Draper cynically uses the past to sell product, observing: “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” Memories of the past can be manipulated. The biggest English-language show worldwide in 2025 was Stranger Things, a confection of an imagined 1980s – Spielberg, Nike, Kate Bush and the Cold War melded to present a version of the decade. Yet the nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated. Much of the show’s target audience has no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés. The eighties it recollects is itself rooted in a view of 1950s US small-town life. The nostalgia at work here is culturally performative, sold as an expression of algorithmic power rather than actual choice. No one remembers in a neutral way; everyone’s version of the past is a translation enabled by culture. Nostalgia is delicate, but this fragility is a kind of pure experience – even if it is prone to commodification. Jerome De Groot is professor of literature and culture at Manchester University, and author of Double Helix History (Routledge, 2022) “Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters” Nostalgia seems to be everywhere – so much so that some people argue there’s something specific about the 21st century that prompts nostalgia. But it has been around, in one form or another, for centuries – and it has profoundly shaped our relationship with the past. The term ‘nostalgia’ was coined by a Swiss physician in the late 17th century. At the time, it was deemed a disease – a kind of pathological homesickness. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that it morphed into its more familiar form: a longing for a bygone time rather than a distant place. Since then, nostalgia has been our constant companion, becoming rife in popular culture, journalism and political commentary in the 20th century. The 1970s has even been dubbed the “second-hand seventies” for that reason. Psychologists have also studied nostalgia’s prevalence, arguing that it’s experienced by pretty much everyone, all of the time. Though some people might be more or less prone to the feeling, nostalgia is a core human experience with distinct evolutionary advantages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3259343webready-3771e14-e1772529840639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of children playing on a roundabout in a playground. Some adults stand to the right, watching over them. Behind them all are some large brick walls and a few high rise buildings" title="Children play on a roundabout in a London housing estate, 1973. Thanks to nostalgia in popular culture and media, that decade has been dubbed the “second-hand seventies”, notes Agnes Arnold-Forster (Image by Getty Images)" /> Broadly, nostalgia can be divided into two types: personal and historical. The first is the nostalgia you feel about your own life; the second is nostalgia for some period in the past that you haven’t yourself experienced or lived through. Read more | Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds It is the latter that poses the most problems. In political life, it is often lambasted as the emotional driver behind rightwing populist movements. Academic historians also take issue with this brand because it paints a sentimental and often inaccurate portrait of the past, and advocate detached, dispassionate and objective investigation. Yet not only is it impossible to quell nostalgia’s influence, that also shouldn’t be the goal. Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters. And history is not just an academic enterprise. It is a vibrant ecosystem of period dramas, battle re-enactments, museums, documentaries and genealogists. Nostalgia might not be the only thing that draws people to the past – but where would this ecosystem be without its seductive emotional force? Agnes Arnold-Forster is chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (Picador, 2024) “Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms” Nostalgia, as the old joke goes, isn’t what it used to be. Twenty years ago, the term was popularly associated with the embattled citizens of eastern Europe, who retreated from the shock of market capitalism into a cosy world of Trabants, Lenin statues and the evocative smell of communist-era pickle jars. Appropriately enough, it was the Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym who came up with the era’s most perceptive analysis of nostalgia. For her, the pull of a “restorative nostalgia” – a longing for a home or homeland that has never existed – was always at play in the nationalist fantasies of the right as much as it also shaped people’s memories of communism. Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms – MAGA, MEGA, ‘Take Back Control’ – but Boym’s warnings still ring loud and clear. Here, a look at recent history can be helpful. Nostalgia for a fantasy of imagined racial homogeneity is hardly a new force in British politics. Keir Starmer’s unconscious echoing of Enoch Powell’s noxious rhetoric (in 2025 the PM said Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers”, a phrase he later expressed regret for using) highlights how the spirit of Powell is animating contemporary political discourse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2233375765webready-490da1a-e1772529952548.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing twelve tall lampposts in a line, each with a single England flag on them, blowing in the wind" title="The English flag flies from lampposts in Sheerness, 2025. The way Britons express nostalgia has changed a great deal over the past 20 years, argues Benjamin Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> In my field, modern British history, a number of analysts have diagnosed ‘imperial nostalgia’ as an underlying cause of the Brexit-era lurch to the far right. I wonder if this is quite right. Though we might accept that some nationalists dream of resurrecting the British empire, most people’s feelings regarding our imperial past are probably messier and less coherent. Cultural theorist Paul Gilroy argued two decades ago that, rather than acknowledging the complexities of empire, the British instead retreated into “postcolonial melancholia”. Imperial pride was expressed just as colonial violence was denied. We need a cure for such morbid symptoms. Migrants – the enslaved, the indentured, the impoverished, more rarely the privileged – made empire and re-made Britain in turn. Clear vision is required to understand this past; rose-tinted lenses will only obscure our view. Benjamin Jones is author of The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England (Manchester UP, 2012) “German Democratic Republic nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one” When Boris Johnson visited socialist East Germany months before reunification in 1990, he was “amazed at how far behind West Germany” it was: a land “of strange little cars with two-stroke engines and fake coffee”. Most East Germans agreed, keen to swap those “strange little” Trabant cars for VWs, and to leave behind the dictatorship and its make-do economy. Today, things are changing. Cars made in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are seeing a revival. Restored Trabants fetch up to 7,000 Euros – close to the sum paid when new. Though half of owners are over 60, thousands are under 30, born long after the last Trabi left the factory. This fits into a wider trend of GDR nostalgia, or Ostalgie. In 2019 – 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell – a survey found that 10 per cent of East Germans wanted the GDR back. When the newspaper Nordkurier asked the same question recently, it was nearly a quarter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1555920290webready-0db3990-e1772530085287.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of several small, colourful cars parked together, in front of a large building with a central circular tower and pointed rooftops" title="Trabant cars in central Leipzig, East Germany in February 1990, shortly before that state’s reunification with West Germany. A resurgence in the brand’s popularity reflects nostalgia for the certainties of communist rule (Image by Getty Images)" /> GDR nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one. Ask them why, and most cite not socialist convictions but a feeling that life was simpler during the Cold War. The present, with its wars, economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, can feel frightening. So the small world of the GDR appears reassuringly predictable, irrespective of the Stasi’s omnipresence. The Trabi embodies this paradox: it’s a tiny, underpowered car but one that anyone can repair and on which families relied for decades. West Germans aren’t free from nostalgia. With the rise of the far right, unstable coalitions and economic pessimism, many reminisce about the postwar era and its political stability and economic miracle. West Germany was no dictatorship but it was staunchly conservative, initially limiting opportunities for women and social mobility. There is no moral equivalence, but Westalgie also views history through a soft filter. Read more | Life in East Germany: the cultural evolution behind the Iron Curtain In our uncertain times, the pull of Cold War nostalgia is seductive. Historians must stay the course of academic rigour and integrity, providing a much-needed lifeline of solid analysis until calmer days return. Katja Hoyer is a historian, journalist and visiting research fellow at King’s College, London. Her forthcoming book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (Allen Lane, May 2026) “The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film” As Agnes Arnold-Forster concludes in her recent historical work on this “dangerous emotion”, there are “many nostalgias”, not just one, so assessing whether it shapes our view of the past depends on context and specific detail. Of course, we should be concerned by nostalgia’s role as a social and political emotion – the contentious yearning for an idealised ‘lost’ place or past. Its potential for manipulation demands particular scrutiny in relation to histories, collective memory and public understandings of the present as well as the past. These are no idle fears in our present times. When it comes to period films, historical media genres and their audiences, I would question how much nostalgic pleasures and practices really tell us about the public’s relationship with British history. The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film or media text, regardless of its genre or intentions, and also to audiences. This issue was a core motivation for my 2011 empirical study Heritage Film Audiences. Even the (few) respondents who expressed acute nostalgia were self-reflective on the subject. “We would not really swap our comfortable modern lifestyle for those days,” wrote one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1319979896webready-5db6466-e1772530181978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a person's hands holding an old photo of a woman in a high necked dress holding a small child in a white dress. Behind the photo are several others strewn across a desk and an open laptop with a family tree on it" title="Popular factual television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? can act as a bulwark against idealised versions of the past, contends Claire Monk (Image by Getty Images)" /> The first two decades of the 21st century brought an unprecedented new wave of accessible public history, from free digitised resources (such as Old Bailey Online) via the rise of online family history to innovations in history television that engaged audiences with fact-based histories, primary sources and historical methods. The BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, launched in 2004, has now run for 22 seasons. Channel 4, particularly during the late Hamish Mykura’s tenure, excelled in innovations in primary-source-based historical drama and drama documentary. The series Georgian Underworld (2003) and City of Vice (2008), on the formation of the Bow Street Runners, were notable. However, the future of engaging public-history media for British audiences rests on institutional factors, not least the future of UK public-service broadcasting itself. Claire Monk is professor emerita of film and film culture at De Montfort University “In contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role” Nostalgia is neither inherently good nor bad. It helps us connect to the past, remembering friendships, experiences, places. It can help us work through regrets, offering insights that benefit us in the present. But nostalgia can produce sentimentality based on mischaracterisations of how things once were, painting the past in rose-tinted hues that bear little resemblance to historical reality. Either way, it produces very strong emotions. And in contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role. We are seeing a surge in far-right nationalism, not least in the UK. Nostalgia feeds into this, weaponising ‘great’ moments in the past. These are taken selectively from British imperial history, evoking, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it, “the fantasy of a late return to the flag, family values, national character, imperial glory and the spirit of Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-526776478webready-1b1f2a8-e1772530266615.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A 17th‑century coastal scene showing a large group of men, women, and children gathered on a shoreline as they prepare to board ships. Several sailing vessels wait offshore, with small rowboats ferrying passengers to them. People wear cloaks, bonnets, and wide‑brimmed hats typical of the period. Behind them, cliffs rise to a fortified stone building overlooking the harbour. The mood suggests a significant departure or migration" title="A coloured engraving shows Huguenot refugees landing at Dover after toleration of Protestantism ended in France in 1685. Contrary to a populist narrative invoking false nostalgia, “Britain was never a homogeneous nation”, notes Anamik Saha (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Benjamin Jones notes, Paul Gilroy described this turn as “postcolonial melancholia”. The issue is not only how nationalists refabricate moments from history for their own ends, but also how they bind them to strong feelings of nostalgia. Crucially, Gilroy highlighted the racial dimension of this longing for a Britain before postwar immigration from the former colonies, when life was supposedly simpler, more peaceful and more homogeneous. Read more | Catholics vs Huguenots: your guide to the French Wars of Religion Postcolonial melancholia relies on a wilful amnesia about the past. Historians show us that Britain was never a homogeneous nation free from internal conflict. It has experienced waves of immigration over many centuries, following a familiar pattern: immigrants are initially met with fear and distrust before becoming naturally absorbed into British life and identity. Yet this is buried in popular representations of British history. Historical precision now struggles against nationalistic nostalgia that paints Britain’s past in broad, brutal strokes, obscuring important histories for political ends. Good history can salve postcolonial melancholia, helping the nation face and work through the troubled elements of its past. Anamik Saha is professor of race and media at Leeds University, and author of Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
There aren’t many theme parks that place statues of Soviet leaders next to Snow White and her seven dwarfs, but you’ll find one in southern Lithuania. Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of one of Europe’s most bizarre – and controversial – tourist attractions
I am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun. But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground. Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1DSC1437-Lenin-Llamas-05-18c368a-e1772191107175.jpg" width="1506" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a white llama grazing on the grass alongside a tall stone marble statue of a bust of man. In the background is a lake, several trees and a brown llama laying on the ground" title="A llama grazes next to a bust of Vladimir Lenin at Grūtas Park, Lithuania. The unconventional visitor attraction, opened in 2001, is filled with relics of the former Soviet Union (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> A brutal past Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/42Y7B3TJ-ac517fe-e1772189389657.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photograph of several military trucks driving down a city street lined with bare trees and tall buildings. The open‑back trucks are filled with uniformed soldiers wearing helmets, seated closely together as the convoy moves forward" title="Soviet troops enter the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in June 1940. The country would be invaded by Nazi Germany a year later (Image by Alamy)" /> In 1945, the country was swallowed whole into the Soviet Union. Anyone who refused to accept the nation’s new Stalinist rulers was arrested, deported to Siberia, imprisoned or executed. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians resisted this new oppression. They took to the forests and fought pitched battles against the combined forces of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police but in the end the uprising was brutally crushed: according to the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags between 1945 and 1950, where between a third and a half of them died. Read more | Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution? The Soviets then embarked on a program of Russification throughout the country. Russian speakers began moving into Lithuanian territories in large numbers; their descendants still live there today. Lithuanian culture was thoroughly purged of its bourgeois influences, and replaced by Socialist literature, art and architecture. Statues of Soviet heroes began to spring up in every town square, along with victory monuments and memorials to the glory of the Red Army. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/5GettyImages-839288220-170ae8f-e1772189538619.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of a neatly arranged camp made up of small, identical buildings with pitched roofs and white picket fences. The buildings sit in rows on either side of a straight central path that leads to a decorative entrance structure with patterned columns. A few people walk along the paths or stand near the buildings. The surrounding landscape is flat and open, with only a few distant structures visible beyond the camp." title="A Soviet gulag in the Komi Republic, in what is now northwest Russia. Around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to such camps between 1945 and 1950 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Marx and mushrooms When the country finally regained its independence in 1990, almost all the monuments to Lenin and other Communist figures were torn down. Countless statues were decapitated, cut into pieces with blowtorches, or crushed into rubble. Some were even dynamited. In an attempt to save some of these sculptures for posterity, the new Lithuanian government decided to rescue some of them, with the vague idea that they might one day go on display in a museum somewhere. They invited institutions to bid for the right to display the statues, but unfortunately none of the nation’s museums was willing to take the project on without some kind of state funding. There was only one bid – from an entrepreneur named Viliumas Malinauskas – that did not ask for any government money at all. Malinauskas offered to pay all the transport, maintenance and restoration costs out of his own pocket. He was duly awarded the contract. This was where the controversy began. Because Malinauskas was not a historian, an art critic or a museum professional – or indeed anyone who had any background in this kind of work. In fact, he was a former wrestling champion who made his living as a mushroom farmer. He now has a multi-million-dollar business exporting his mushrooms all over the world. Some of his proposals for the sculpture park were quite bizarre. He wanted to build a special railway line, so that tourists from Vilnius could be brought here on cattle trucks, as if they were being deported to a Soviet-era gulag. He wanted to hire actors who would pretend to be soldiers, herding the tourists onto the trains. For the full gulag experience, Grūtas Park itself would be surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and the monuments would be displayed as if they were part of a Siberian prison camp. Unsurprisingly, critics began to call Malinauskas’s project a “Stalin theme park”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/6GettyImages-805141-514324c-e1772189666539.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in a blue suit and red patterned tie sits outdoors on a large stone bust of a bearded man. His hand rests on the top of the sculpture. Beside him is another stone bust of a different bearded figure. Both sculptures are set on the ground in a wooded area with tall evergreen trees in the background." title="Grūtas Park’s founder, Viliumas Malinauskas, poses for the camera in 2001. The former wrestler wanted to build a special railway line so that tourists could travel to the park as though they were being transported to a gulag (Image by Getty Images)" /> It did not take long for the complaints to come rolling in. Local politicians opposed the building of the park. National politicians opposed the building of the rail line. A petition was drawn up denouncing the whole idea of his sculpture park, which was signed by Catholic Church officials, national NGOs, prominent academics, art professors and over a million other people around the world. “This part of history is full of suffering,” said one member of parliament, Juozas Galdikas, in 2000. “It should not be used for show business.” Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island Perhaps the strongest voice of opposition came from former victims of the regime. More than 30 groups of former partisans and political prisoners banded together to protest about the sculptures going on display. They accused Malinauskas of trying to profit from their misery and described the statues as “monsters from a horror film”. Some of them even went on hunger strike. “Imagine yourself as a resident in a small village,” said one former independence fighter named Leonas Kerosierius, “and someone came and attacked your village, killed your brother and raped your daughter. Would you allow your neighbour to build a park for these executioners and rapists, or make money off these crimes?” MPs pushed for a vote in parliament to take back the statues and keep them in State hands, and their resolution was accepted by a majority. But their victory was short-lived, because it was overturned by the Constitutional Court: Malinauskas had won the government contract fair and square, and Parliament had no right to take it away from him simply on a matter of taste. The most they could do was to create a government watchdog to oversee the construction of the sculpture park. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/2GettyImages-870579120-2d552aa-e1772189931245.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of 5 stone busts of men in a line. Behind them is a forest of tall fir trees" title="A small portion of the park’s historic busts. From left to right: Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Vincas Mickevičius (Lithuanian communist leader) and Joseph Stalin (Image by Getty Images)" /> The whole controversy quickly became international news. Not only did it feature in newspapers throughout the Baltic countries, but also in other parts of Europe. It even made the newspapers in America, parts of Asia and Australia. “Miss the Soviet Era? Come to Stalin World” ran the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald. Snow White and Stalin Grūtas Park officially opened to the public in 2001 and immediately proved a hit with visitors from all over Lithuania and beyond. Even before the official opening it had already seen around 100,000 visitors. Since then, it has added to its collection and become quite a well-established tourist destination. People still occasionally call this place ‘Stalin World’, but there is actually only one full-size statue of Stalin in the whole park. I found him just beyond the zoo, peeping out between the trees like some fairytale troll. (The comparison to a fairytale is not made randomly: in a nearby glade, closer to the children’s playground, there is also a set of sculptures representing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here.) It is easy to see why so many people became upset when the creation of this park was first announced. Many dissidents had spent their whole lives struggling against the Soviet system. In 1991 they had torn down these icons of Soviet power with great joy: it must have been deeply painful to see them so lovingly restored and put back on their pedestals, regardless of the setting. The resurrection of Stalin’s statue was perhaps the most painful thing of all. This man had been responsible for tens of millions of deaths across eastern Europe, and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians. He had not been on public display for decades. (This particular statue had been taken down by the Communists themselves, back in 1960.) And yet here he was, standing in a sunny glade, waiting for tourists to come and take selfies with him. Read more | Cold War summits: how USA & USSR leaders worked to end the conflict Critics pointed to a worrying trend in contemporary Russia for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s memory, with brand new memorials to him being raised in many parts of Russia, particularly since the start of the current war with Ukraine. What if this trend were to spread to Lithuania and beyond? What if Grūtas Park, too, were to become a 21st-century shrine to this monstrous dictator? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/P1020458-Snow-White-7-dwarves-ad174d4-e1772190445583.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of dark wooden sculptures is arranged among tall pine trees in a sunlit forest. Most of the carved figures are seated or kneeling, some with helmets or rounded headgear, while one taller figure stands upright at the center. The sculptures are spaced evenly across the forest floor. In the background, there are a few simple buildings with wooden or metal siding, one marked with graffiti. Sunlight filters through the trees, casting long shadows across the ground." title="Sculptures depicting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can be found close to the park’s full-size Stalin statue. “The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here,” says Keith Lowe (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> The power of ridicule Had this statue, and all the others, been given to one of the other bidders for the monument park contract, perhaps there would have been less controversy. Europos Parkas, in Vilnius, wanted to exhibit the statues purely as works of art, alongside a whole variety of avant-garde creations by artists from all over the world. Here, perhaps, the aesthetic qualities of a Stalin statue might have been divorced from its political meaning. The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius also applied for the contract. It would have displayed the monuments in its main hall and courtyard. Had Stalin’s statue been placed here, it would have been seen alongside an extensive exhibition dedicated to his crimes. Many of those who protested against Grūtas Park wanted the museum to have won the bid precisely because it would have put the benign looking statues of figures like Stalin in a much, much grimmer context. But there is something about the way that Grūtas Park displays its statues that is enormously refreshing. Seeing Stalin with a squirrel on his head takes away some of the nightmarish power he continues to exercise over us from beyond the grave. When birds are nesting in Lenin’s fingers, and children are climbing over the guns that were once aimed at Lithuanian partisans, these symbols of state power no longer seem as frightening as they once did. This seems to be exactly what Viliumas Malinauskas is trying to achieve. In an interview with the Guardian shortly before the park opened, the proprietor was unapologetic about his peculiar approach to Lithuania’s troubled history. “People can come here and joke about the sculptures,” he said. “And that will mean Lithuania is no longer afraid of Communism.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/9P1020459-2-Playground-with-military-van-2d8059e-e1772190762404.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colorful playground structure sits in a sandy, wooded clearing. It includes a red‑and‑green climbing frame, a curved yellow slide, and a green cylindrical tunnel element. Tall pine trees surround the area, casting dappled light on the ground. In the background, partly hidden by trees and bushes, an old green vehicle—possibly a van or small truck—rests near the edge of the clearing." title="A children’s climbing frame is sited metres away from a disused military vehicle. Does such a juxtaposition make Lithuania’s troubled past seem less frightening? (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Grūtas Park is a bizarre mix of playground, zoo and atrocity museum. It trivialises the past in the most appalling ways, especially with its Disneyfied guard towers and barbed wire. Some of the museum displays in its barrack-style huts are more nostalgic than critical of the regime. And its commercial exploitation of Lithuania’s painful past is questionable to say the least: I managed to buy myself a Stalin mug and a Stalin keyring in the gift shop on my way out. In fact, there are so many things about Grūtas Park that could be considered offensive that I hardly know where to start; and yet somehow, through its sheer banality, it comes closer to freeing Lithuania from its history than any of the more serious and thoughtful monuments that have been so carefully produced in other parts of Europe. The magic ingredient is ridicule. I’m not sure how much this ridicule was ever intended by the park’s founder and owner, and how much is just a function of a ridiculous set-up. Nevertheless, it is there, and it is a powerful antidote to the atmosphere of fear that plagued this country for so many years. Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)
Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
The hammer and sickle is one of the modern world’s most recognisable symbols. It instantly evokes the former Soviet Union and communism. For some people around the globe, it remains a beacon of hope for a better tomorrow. But for others it is a painful reminder of totalitarian oppression and terror. What’s the history behind this revolutionary symbol?
What is the hammer and sickle? The symbol of the hammer and sickle is typically presented in a two-dimensional format, with the hammer crossed over the curved blade of the sickle (a tool traditionally used for harvesting crops, which has a curved metal blade often set on top of a wooden handle). A red star often – though not always – appears just above the tip of the sickle. The hammer represents the working class engaged in industrial production, who, according to Marxist theory, are destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class under capitalism. The sickle denotes the peasantry, the toilers of the land. Though the symbol denotes solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers, the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, whose works were foundational to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, had dismissed the peasantry as a vestige, leftover by the epoch that had preceded capitalism: feudalism. Marx regarded peasants as an instinctively conservative class that would likely prove hostile to a workers’ revolution. The adoption of a visual expression of unity between worker and peasant shows the Bolsheviks’ adaption of Marxism to their homeland’s specific circumstances, referencing the socio-economic reality of Russia, which was still a predominantly agrarian society with little industrial development, at the time of the October Revolution in 1917. When did the hammer and sickle first appear? In early 1918, Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the regime’s Commissariat for Education (known as ‘Narkompros’) – launched a competition for artists and designers to create an official seal for the nascent Soviet state. The entries were a diverse assortment that spanned everything from striking avant-garde forms, classical imagery such as overflowing cornucopias, and even a double-headed eagle shorn of its feathers and regalia (the double-headed eagle had been adopted centuries before by the Russian tsars to symbolise their link to ancient Rome via the Byzantine empire; the regal title ‘tsar’ meaning ‘Caesar’). Read more | The last days of the Romanovs: could George V have saved the family? The winning entry (by an unknown artist, though it has sometimes been attributed to one Alexander Nikolaevich Leo) featured a crossed hammer and sickle, sheaves of wheat, a rising sun and a vertical sword. However, this was just weeks after Soviet Russia had negotiated its withdrawal from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin, determined to maintain the regime’s peace-making credentials, vetoed the inclusion of a sword in April 1918. While the government debated the state seal, artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin created the template of a crossed hammer and sickle that would later become famous throughout the world. Read more | Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower Kamzolkin’s stark design was originally produced for a poster celebrating 1918’s May Day festivities in Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye district. On 10 July 1918, the Soviet republic formally adopted its constitution, which officially proclaimed that: “the coat of arms of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic consists of a red background on which a golden sickle and a hammer are placed (crosswise, handles downward) in sun-rays and surrounded by a wreath.” Beneath this design was a slogan in Russian Cyrillic that paraphrased the last sentence of The Communist Manifesto and affirmed the Bolsheviks’ commitment to a global socialist revolution: “Workers of the world, unite!” What other symbols did the Bolsheviks use? Among the rejected entries for the state seal was an illustration by graphic artist Sergey Chekhonin, of a peasant woman holding a sickle and spade, facing a male worker holding a sledgehammer and a caduceus. These gender roles – the countryside as feminine and nurturing and the city as masculine and assertive, endured in Soviet inconography. Some of these symbols also showed links to the classical pantheon. The caduceus is a staff wielded by the Greek god Hermes (also the Roman god Mercury). As well as a divine messenger, Hermes was the patron of commerce. His caduceus and other paraphernalia, such as his winged helmet, often appeared on the banners of trade unions across Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Also, the sickle is associated with Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture. Lenin and his comrades understood the power of symbols and revolutionary heraldry. Further classical imagery appeared on the frontispiece to the first Soviet constitution, which featured fasces (a bundle of wooden rods with an axe) behind the hammer and sickle. Fasces exemplified authority in ancient Rome and were revived during the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century. How is the hammer and sickle used today? Just over a year after the October Revolution, leading Bolsheviks formed the Communist International, better known as the ‘Comintern’. This global body aimed to promote the cause of worldwide proletarian revolution through kindred communist parties in every nation on the planet. The hammer and sickle quickly became the symbol for world communism. It adorned the Soviet flag until the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, undergoing slight modifications to its design over the decades. To this day it remains the symbol of many communist parties, including governing ones in the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam. On the podcast | Professor Lea Ypi reflects on living through the fall of communism in Albania Across present-day Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, the symbol remains ubiquitous on buildings and monuments. Aeroflot, Russia’s de facto national airline, has retained the winged hammer and sickle logo designed by artist Alexander Rodchenko. Is the hammer and sickle used in former Soviet states? In 2010, several states in eastern Europe that had once been within Moscow’s orbit called upon the European Union to ban the hammer and sickle as a symbol of totalitarianism and crimes against humanity. This was ultimately unsuccessful and was left up to the respective member states to determine their own approach. Following the escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has moved to obliterate traces of the country’s Soviet past. In August 2023, the Soviet coat of arms on the shield of the Mother Ukraine statue was replaced with the country’s tryzub (‘trident’) emblem. How else has the hammer and sickle been used? Given its striking imagery, the hammer and sickle has also found an audience beyond its explicitly political context. During a holiday to Italy, pop artist Andy Warhol was inspired to create a series featuring the tools in 1976 after being confronted with ubiquitous graffiti of the symbol while touring Italian towns. George Orwell’s 1945 fable of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, in which animals revolt against their human farmer, features the so-called ‘Hoof and Horn’ flag in an apparent parody of the Soviet banner. By coincidence, and in a non-communist rendering, the Republic of Austria’s coat of arms consists of an eagle grasping a hammer and sickle in its claws. What symbols did the Bolsheviks use prior to the hammer and sickle? Before the hammer and sickle there was another Bolshevik emblem – the plough and hammer, set within a red star. As the American journalist John Reed conveyed in the title of his eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in autumn 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, the October Revolution was a seismic event. As the ancient double-headed eagle of Russia’s tsarist past came crashing down amid the aftershocks, the country’s radical new leaders turned to face the future. Unlike its European neighbours, Russia had retained an autocratic monarchy into the 20th century. Having only abolished serfdom in 1861, the vast empire was still largely defined by a feudal social order where illiterate peasants made up most of the population. Generations of them had been raised to revere religious icons and the tsar as a ‘little father’ to his people, a living intercessor between their everyday lives and the divine. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware of the authority that visual motifs and symbols commanded in the land. They set about cultivating a new revolutionary culture soon after the October Revolution. Tsarist flags and iconography were outlawed, while statues of emperors were toppled on a wave of iconoclasm that swept through the major cities. Yet before the hammer and sickle emerged, the new regime’s earliest symbol arose amid the Russian Civil War that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster On 19 April 1918, soldiers of Soviet Russia’s Red Army were bestowed with a breast badge that depicted a plough crossed over a hammer, contained within a red star. Although its designer remains a mystery, the plough’s association with agriculture functioned as a precursor to the sickle, symbolising the peasantry in union with the industrial working class, embodied in the hammer. As for the red star, its origins as a socialist symbol are also unclear. Five-pointed red stars had first appeared on the uniforms of tsarist officers during the early 19th century. Its martial use was a nod to the Roman god of war, Mars. Similarly, its adoption by the Red Army evoked this meaning. However, it may also have been a salute to the 1908 novel, Red Star by Russian writer, Alexander Bogdanov, a work of science fiction that imagined a communist utopia on the red planet, Mars. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now Why is red associated with communism? The Bolsheviks considered themselves the heirs to the European revolutionary tradition. To that end, in 1918, they adopted the red flag and renamed themselves the Communist Party as a homage to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Prior to that brief insurrection – which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had highlighted as a glimpse of the workers’ revolution they envisioned – the red flag had been adopted by radical republicans on the left during the 1848 revolution in France. The use of red by the Soviet state also tapped into centuries of Russian tradition. In the Russian language, krasnyi (‘red’) is related to the word krasivyi, meaning ‘beautiful’. Red corners were (and remain to this day) features of Orthodox Christian homes where residents displayed their holy icons. Similarly, Moscow’s Red Square became the focal point for all national celebrations in the decades that followed the October Revolution.
Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower
Stalin is widely regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history. From his childhood in the Caucasus to his career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Robert Service explores his life and explains why he was constantly underestimated by his contemporaries
Josef Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union, one of the principal architects of the postwar order and among the most ruthless tyrants to have ever lived. Undoubtedly, he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Robert Service explains how the young Stalin had been seduced by revolutionary ideals of the age and ultimately joined the network of Marxists operating both inside and outside the territories ruled over by the tsar. As a Bolshevik, he played a key role during the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen. During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power. Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945. By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors. Where and when was Stalin born? Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time. However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about most of his background”, says Service, choosing to indulge an aura of mystery. When did Josef Stalin pick the name ‘Stalin’ – and what does it mean? During his initial foray into radical politics, Stalin, like other revolutionaries, adopted a series of nicknames. One of his earliest ones was ‘Koba’, inspired by the bandit protagonist in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel, The Patricide. ‘Stalin’, meaning ‘man of steel’, was a revolutionary nom de guerre he adopted in 1912. It spoke to his desire to be considered formidable, as well as being, says Service, “a Russian name, not a Georgian one”. That was important because “he was increasingly identifying with the wider Russian revolutionary movement”. Read more | Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century What was Stalin’s childhood like? Stalin’s upbringing was rough, “involving fist fights in the streets and little gangs of boys,” says Service. Nevertheless, he was a precocious child and an adept student. This convinced his mother that he should enrol at the Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) Theological Seminary and train to become an Orthodox priest in 1894. How did Josef Stalin become a revolutionary? It was via Georgian nationalism that Stalin first embraced radical politics. His teachers at the Tiflis found him to be increasingly rebellious and he quit the seminary before he could qualify as a priest. “He was a rebel and he turned from faith in God to faith in revolution,” says Service. At the turn of the 20th century, while employed at the Meteorological Observatory, Stalin began to immerse himself in key Marxist texts and the Caucasus’s revolutionary scene. His activities soon attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. “Georgian Marxists were notorious for blackmailing and intimidating industrialists in the Georgian capital,” says Service. “He got involved in all of this and [therefore] wasn’t quite as clean-handed a Marxist as other young revolutionaries were in Russia itself. He had a reputation for combining being a Marxist with being something of a Georgian patriot, and he was definitely someone who was involved with gangsters”. When did Stalin meet Lenin? Stalin met Vladimir Lenin in 1905 during the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist organisation, in Tampere, Finland (then part of the Russian empire). This occurred four years after Stalin had joined the party. In 1903, the party had split along ideological differences, into Mensheviks (the ‘minority’) led by Julius Martov, and Bolsheviks (the ‘majority’) headed by Lenin. Both factions would later form breakaway parties during 1912. Over the following years, Stalin’s revolutionary activities would lead to him being arrested and exiled to the far-flung reaches of the tsarist realm several times. What role did Josef Stalin play during the Russian Revolution of 1917? Stalin, like many Bolsheviks, was living in exile (in his case Siberia rather than abroad) when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The collapse of the Russian monarchy followed. Though nobody knew it at the time, this February Revolution was just one of two major convulsions that would take place that year. Émigrés and internally exiled radicals (meaning those detained in Russia’s bleak hinterlands) flocked to major cities like Moscow and the then-capital, Petrograd (now called St Petersburg). Stalin was among them. Read more | Books interview with Robert Service: "Nicholas II brought the Russian Revolution upon his own head" Upon his arrival, Stalin “barged into the leadership that already existed in a small kernel of men and women in the capital,” says Service. “He basically took over the central Bolshevik party apparatus until Lenin [who had been living in Switzerland alongside other revolutionaries] returned in April 1917. “When difficult jobs had to be done throughout that year, whether it was running the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, or helping to set strategy in the central committee of the party, Stalin was there. He wasn’t a man who ‘missed the revolution’, as his enemies always later claimed”. Later that year, after the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution, Lenin made Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. This post gave him responsibility over the new regime’s governance of the non-Russian peoples living within the wreckage of the former tsarist empire. What was Stalin’s relationship with Lenin like? Their working relationship following the October Revolution was relatively fruitful, though not without some disagreements. “Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing,” says Service. “Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership”. By the 1920s, Lenin’s health – and his ability to engage in statecraft – was increasingly debilitated after a series of strokes. This would leave him largely bedridden until the end of his life in January 1924. Before Lenin's death, he recognised that both Leon Trotsky – architect of the Red Army and a convert to Bolshevism from the Menshevik faction – and Stalin, were emerging as likely successors to his leadership. “Lenin found that the man [Stalin] that he had promoted to high party office had ideas of his own. Now, he had always had ideas of his own, but Lenin had been able to control him, moderate him when he thought necessary,” says Service. By late 1922, the two men fell out over the position of Georgia within the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This vast new multinational polity, spanning northern Eurasia, fused the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) on 30 December. According to Service, Lenin “decided that if Stalin ever got into a position where he might be his successor, that would be a disaster for the party as a whole, and for the revolution itself”. Therefore, Lenin dictated a so-called ‘testament’ that urged party comrades to remove Stalin from the post of party General Secretary. Its contents shocked Stalin and it was subsequently suppressed from wider circulation. How did Stalin come to preside over the Soviet Union? Following Lenin’s death, the factions within the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party hardened. Trotsky rallied party officials against what was perceived to be the creeping bureaucratisation of Soviet politics, which became synonymous with Stalin himself. As well as Trotsky, a contingent of leading Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin also looked down on Stalin, says Service, because they thought he was an “ignorant provincial”. One contemporary, Nikolai Sukhanov, famously dismissed Stalin as “a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace”. Stalin, for his part, played up to this image. While the others pushed for worldwide revolution, Stalin struck a much more cautious tone. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster Service says that “this appealed to numbers of Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War who were war weary and shared Stalin’s zeal to make the revolution a success at home first before turning their eyes towards Europe”. By the late 1920s, Stalin had outflanked his rivals within the Communist Party by forging and betraying alliances with key party figures and playing each group off against the other. Eventually, his greatest adversary, Trotsky, was ousted from the Soviet government and first subjected to internal exile, before banishment overseas. Stalin’s rise to power also hinged on his canny self-appointment as ‘high priest’ of the emerging cult of Leninism after the Bolshevik founder’s death. Although Stalin’s eventual mastery of the Soviet Union was contingent on this policy of ‘socialism in one country’, Service maintains that Stalin really did believe in spreading the revolution once the USSR was in a strong enough domestic position to coordinate such an offensive. What is Stalinism? Stalin’s dictatorship would lead to the emergence of his own cult of personality, as well as a new ideology: Stalinism. This new phenomenon, says Service, was “a brutal extension of Leninism” and he acknowledges that “for some people this is controversial… they think that Leninism and Stalinism are totally different things. I don’t.” Service affirms that Stalinism consolidated Leninism’s commitment to a one-party state premised on state terror and the ultimate objective of communism’s victory throughout the world. It is synonymous with the dictator’s ubiquitous presence in official propaganda, the system of state surveillance, detention and mass murder, as well as the demonisation of ‘Trotskyite’ subversion. As a totalitarian ideology, it permeated every facet of life within the Soviet Union, from literature and painting to architecture and the naming of cities, prompting Tsaritsyn to be renamed Stalingrad (today it is Volgograd). What was the Five-Year Plan – and how did it lead to the Holodomor? In 1928, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan – a colossal effort to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and bring agriculture under state control and central planning. This latter aspect, known as Collectivisation, marked a definitive break with the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1921. The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy. Adopted in March 1921, the NEP marked a tactical retreat from the Bolsheviks’ socialist measures. It held sway for much of the ensuing decade and reintroduced limited private ownership and commerce under the supervision of the Soviet state to bolster the economy. Always envisaged as a temporary measure, Service points out that by the late 1920s, the regime believed that the NEP had enabled “too many nationalists, street traders and priests” to gain influence within Soviet society. Part of the Five-Year Plan entailed individual private farms being consolidated into larger units under the supposed collective ownership of peasants known as a ‘kolkhoz’. Similarly, ‘sovkhoz’ were farms under the direct control of the state. This also enabled Stalin to bring the class struggle (fundamental to Bolshevik ideology) to the countryside, as the previous better-off peasants – known as ‘kulaks’ – were pilloried for exploiting the poorer peasants and thus became the subject of intense persecution, including deportation from the village and, in many cases, execution. In Ukraine, collectivisation led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants – a famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian). Although the policy also led to famine conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, “the Ukrainians felt, with some reason, that they were being punished for being Ukrainians, as well as for being peasants,” says Service. Why did Stalin launch the Great Terror? The Great Terror (or Great Purge) began in 1936 and ran until 1938. It was a period marked by high profile show trials of the leading cadre of Bolsheviks that had been active during and since the October Revolution. The suspects were accused of conniving with Trotsky to sabotage the Soviet state and murder Stalin. As Service explains, the Great Terror’s “main purpose was to annihilate any kind of opposition, real or potential”. Confessions were typically extracted under torture and the guilty were subsequently executed as ‘enemies of the people’ or sentenced to long periods of servitude in labour camps. The wave of terror later spread to the Red Army and members of the intelligentsia – the educated group of Soviet society. Stalin was a deeply suspicious individual by nature. He was also aware that the violent methods inflicted on the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans, had made some of his comrades within the Communist Party deeply uneasy. In December 1934, one of Stalin’s most loyal comrades in the regime, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. His murder was blamed on a Trotskyite plot whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Stalin himself. Some historians have suggested, however, that Kirov’s murder was ordered by Stalin who had come to regard him as a potential rival. Kirov’s demise also provided Stalin with the pretext to point the finger at alleged traitors within the state apparatus. Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode. “He thought that he could replace them with a new young elite that he would train to fulfil the industrial, agricultural, commercial and political tasks of the new Soviet state”, says Service. Furthermore, Service explains that the Great Terror was a reflection of “the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country… and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient, and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world as offering a vision of the communist future”. The latter half of the 1930s became “a very gruelling period, a tormenting period in which nearly all the close associates of Lenin were exterminated… Trotsky was the last” – he was assassinated in exile in 1940. But the Great Terror was not solely reserved for the party’s upper echelons. Wherever you were in the party, you stood a high chance of being arrested and thrown into a labour camp, or shot after being beaten up, tortured and forced to sign a confession. At its height, an estimated 2.5 million people languished in the Soviet Union’s extensive penal system – the notorious ‘Gulag archipelago’. Gulag is the Russian abbreviation for the Main Administration of Correctional-Labour Camps. This supplied a constant stream of slave labour to the state’s industrial and economic drive. How many people perished under Stalin’s rule? The precise number of people who were killed during Stalin’s rule is difficult to ascertain with any precision, but Stalin is acknowledged as one of the most brutal leaders in history. “It’s in the tens of millions,” says Service. “It’s a staggering number of people, and it’s not just those who were executed or thrown into the Gulag. There are also people who died as a result of the catastrophic effects of the economic and social policies that he unleashed from the end of the 1920s onwards”. Why did Stalin sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler? In summer 1939, Stalin shocked communists around the world by signing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The years leading up to that point had seen Stalin increasingly perturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazism, and its overtly anti-Bolshevik agenda, was of acute concern to the Soviet Union’s security. Stalin had aided and abetted the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), who were fighting a military rebellion backed by Europe’s fascist powers. When it became apparent that the Spanish Republic was doomed, he estimated that his best chance of avoiding trouble with Hitler lay in diverting Hitler’s focus westwards to the capitalist states. Read more | Hitler and Stalin’s utopian dreams A key part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact entailed the two powers invading and dividing Poland between them. Just over two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, triggering the Second World War, the Soviet Union began annexing eastern Poland on 17 September 1939. As Red Army forces surged into the occupied territory, they began targeting leading Polish intellectuals, army officers and other luminaries. “Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, [had] concocted a plan to round them all up,” explains Service. This led to the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, during which approximately 22,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia were systematically murdered. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves inside the Katyn forest. How did the Second World War impact Stalin? When Hitler ultimately acted on his ideological conviction of attacking the Soviet Union, and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin was stunned. “He would not take advice in 1941 that Hitler really did mean to launch an invasion,” says Service, “He thought that he was being misled either by Western powers who sought to involve him in their war against Hitler, or there were just saboteurs inside the Soviet Union against the communist leadership. He got it catastrophically wrong”. After initial paralysis and the loss of vast swathes of territory, the Soviet elite persuaded Stalin to lead the fightback. He was forced to forge an alliance with his sworn capitalist enemies – notably the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans Appeals to Russian nationalism suffused wartime propaganda, while many of the Soviet Union’s great cities – from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to Kyiv and Stalingrad endured staggering hardship at the hands of Nazi aggression. The Nazis’ discovery of the mass graves within the Katyn forest in April 1943 was used by Hitler to try and drive a wedge between the Allies. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, and the atrocity was later covered up and blamed on the Nazis themselves (a line that Moscow stuck to until 1990) once the Red Army had wrested back control of the area. Although the Soviet Union had lost over 27 million lives since 1941 and was among the most battered powers to have fought Nazi Germany, on 9 May 1945, it proclaimed victory over the Third Reich, with much of Eastern and Central Europe now under Stalin’s control. What role did Stalin play during the Cold War? The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two new superpowers that would hold sway over the world for the next four decades. Initially, Stalin hoped that the wartime alliance would somehow endure. According to Service, Stalin anticipated that the Soviet Union “would be allowed to more or less do as it wanted in Eastern Europe without interference from the Western powers, and he hoped that he might get economic assistance from America in the short term, even though he expected there to be trouble with the United States in the longer term”. However, by the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan – the US aid package designed to revive Europe’s post-war economies – was quickly perceived by Stalin as a threat to the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe. “From that point on, there was a clash between the US and the USSR [but] both sides wanted to avoid a hot war,” says Service. “Stalin then put his foot down on the throat of all the existing half-freedoms in Eastern Europe and fully communised those countries in a brutal period of trials, arrests and the suppression of rival political parties across half of the European mainland”. How did Stalin die? In the early hours of 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke while staying in one of his dachas (a countryside retreat) in Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. His staff, who were too frightened to disturb him, eventually found Stalin unconscious, lying on the floor. High-ranking members of the Soviet government such as Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov, flocked to the dacha. “They decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him,” says Service. The rationale behind this was that, if by some miracle, he recovered, then none of them could have been accused of having held a gun to his head or of having plunged a knife into his back. Despite this, rumours that the dictator was poisoned persist today. Stalin dwindled over the next few days before succumbing on 5 March 1953, aged 74. His death triggered a surge of grief within the Soviet Union. “As much as many millions of people hated him, perhaps the same people also somehow thought that something had been pulled out of their lives, too,” explains Service. He was embalmed and displayed alongside Lenin’s preserved body in the mausoleum on Red Square. In 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the Soviet Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin’s murderous excesses and cult of personality, led to de-Stalinisation. Finally, in 1961, Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum and buried in a grave along the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Read more | A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends
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Snuffed out democracies and poisoned toothpaste: how the Cold War wreaked havoc in post-colonial Africa
The years following the Second World War saw European empires lose their grasp on Africa. Lawrence James explores the efforts of the United States and Soviet Union to secure influence across the post-colonial continent
Soon after dawn on 5 November 1956, British paratroopers drifted down on the El Gamil airfield near Port Said in northern Egypt. Simultaneously, French troops landed at Raswa and Port Fuad just to the south and east. The invasion of Port Said, and the operation to capture the Suez Canal, was launched. The following day, a huge sea and air assault, supporting landings of British tanks and marines, succeeded in taking the port. By midnight, British and French troops had secured the canal zone – and sparked fury from the United States and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers had been wooing Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser – first the US, which offered then withdrew financial support for the construction of an Aswan dam, then the Soviet Union, which sold Egypt large quantities of arms. The action by Britain and France, following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July, was ostensibly launched to halt fighting between Egypt and Israel, which had invaded the Sinai Peninsula a week earlier. In truth, though, it marked a turning point – the end of direct actions by western powers in Africa, replaced by conflicts that spread across the continent as the west and the Soviet Union tussled for influence in newly or soon-to-be independent African nations: a proxy Cold War described as a “second scramble for Africa”. The years following the end of the Second World War saw both the start of the Cold War between the west and the eastern bloc, and the break-up of empires as colonies across Africa and Asia strove for independence. Africans were losers in the Cold War. The big players never fought each other head-on, but instead sponsored wars between their clients in Africa (and, indeed, in Asia) so that large swathes of the continent became war zones in which predominately locally recruited soldiers did the fighting. Liberation movements across southern Africa were sustained by the Soviet Union and Cuba, which sent large contingents of troops to support independence fighters. Nato also armed two colonial powers, France and Portugal, in their struggles against nationalist insurgents in Algeria, Angola and Mozambique. Millions died in these proxy wars throughout Africa; food production and distribution were disrupted, and regional famines followed. How significant was the Suez Crisis? The 1956 Suez Crisis is widely remembered as a critical event in post-war British history, which helped bring to an end the era of Britain as a global empire and superpower. Dr Andrew Jones explains how significant Suez really was, and why it continues to resonate in British popular memory... Cold War losers Cold War conflicts played havoc with African politics. They skewed the complex processes of decolonisation, and snuffed out many of the fledgling democracies that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. US and Soviet intelligence agencies played kingmakers, financing and overseeing coups to install biddable rulers. Both powers tended to suborn corruptible local strongmen with military backgrounds and authoritarian instincts. It did not matter to the superpowers whether or not these dictators had any ideological commitment to communism or capitalist democracy, though many paid lip service to one of these ideologies when convenient. Cynical pragmatism prevailed in Washington and Moscow when selecting African clients. Underlying this common policy was the cynical maxim – reputedly uttered by US president Franklin D Roosevelt about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García, but equally applicable to any of the rivals’ chosen African despots – “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” This was the line taken by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1955 when he extended patronage to Nasser. Moscow’s doctrinal purists had dismissed Nasser as a radical nationalist in the mould of those military strongmen who held sway across South America. But Nasser was an ideal ally in Khrushchev’s new policy of challenging the west in Africa. From 1955, the Soviet Union poured modern warplanes and weaponry into Egypt, which Nasser deployed in clashes with Israel. Moscow’s propagandists portrayed Nasser as a champion of oppressed peoples in their worldwide struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Washington followed suit. By 1959 the US state department was convinced that ‘democratic’ Africa was fragile and prepared to embrace authoritarian but reliable alternatives. The United States therefore welcomed the rule of General Ibrahim Abboud, who had in November 1958 seized power in recently independent Sudan, bordering Egypt to the south. Abboud declared himself an enemy of communism and of the Soviet-supported Nasser. The pattern was set for the next 30 years of proxy rivalry in Africa. Exploiting decolonisation Both the Soviet Union and the United States were quick to exploit the myriad difficulties that accompanied decolonisation in Africa. The Second World War had given enormous impetus to the embryonic nationalist movements in British and French colonies. Both powers had called on their African subjects to fight for them, and the response had been impressive: more than one million Africans fought in Europe, north Africa and the far east, and were repeatedly told that they were risking their lives for freedom and democracy. Many returned home full of new ideas, and began to question the old imperial order. In Kenya’s villages, for example, young demobbed soldiers expressed their new confidence by scoffing at their chiefs and tribal elders. Elsewhere, this spilled over into anger. Krim Belkacem, who served in the French army and was later a partisan leader and a minister in the provisional Algerian government before independence, spoke for many veterans when he declared: “My brother returned from Europe with medals and frostbitten feet! There, everyone was equal! Why not here?” Empires had always proclaimed intended reciprocity. Britain and France, in particular, had taken pride in the belief that their rule was benevolent and progressive, and that – at some unspecified date in the future – their colonies would achieve independence. After 1945, the pace of change quickened. In 1947 self-government was granted to India by Britain’s Labour government, which was also committed (as were the Conservatives) to self-determination for African colonies. That change was, they suggested, to be achieved over 40 or so years; impatient African nationalist politicians accused them of procrastination. The Soviets exploited such reactions, offering sympathy and friendship, and accusing the imperialists of slyly seeking to retain their power to exploit their subjects. France, too, prevaricated. In 1948 President Vincent Auriol reminded Algerians that their country “was never a state; you were rescued from slavery as well as tribes fighting each other. Without France, what would you be or do?” This was the view of many French people, and of many of the 700,000 European settlers (colons) in Algeria who enjoyed the advantages of French citizenship. In 1954 the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front) began an uprising that triggered an eight-year partisan war of attrition in which more than a million died, most of them Arabs. France persuaded a sceptical Washington that it was fighting communist-backed insurgents in Algeria; the result was that Sikorsky helicopters, manufactured in the United States and intended for Nato service, were used to hunt down Algerian guerrillas. The point was not lost on Soviet propagandists. Spirit of nationalism At this point, the United States was in a quandary. Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal were valuable Nato allies – but, if they persisted in resisting African nationalist movements or delaying independence, they were offering the Soviet Union a propaganda bonus. As US president Dwight D Eisenhower explained to Winston Churchill in 1954: “We are falsely pictured as the exploiters of people, the Soviets as their champions.” It would be foolhardy, he warned, to ignore the “fierce and growing spirit of nationalism” spreading across Africa and Asia. Moreover – and this was a growing source of anxiety for Washington – Britain and France no longer enjoyed their former prestige in Africa, and their efforts to cling on there imperilled American interests. Neither Britain nor France would acknowledge their weaknesses. Rather, in 1956, they attempted to recover their old influence by their joint invasion of Egypt. This coup de main misfired. Afterwards, US secretary of state John Foster Dulles concluded that it was now imperative for America “to fill the vacuum of power which the British filled for a century”. The following year, when Vice-President Richard Nixon returned from an African tour he reported that “French patronage and influence in north Africa are decreasing at an alarming rate”. The Soviet Union, too, hoped to fill that power vacuum, posing as the patron and armourer of colonial liberation movements. America did likewise. Both tended to favour ambitious local military men who possessed hard power on the ground. The officer and non-commissioned officer corps of former colonial armies became a praetorian guard of newly independent states, and palace revolutions propelled to power such figures as army commander Idi Amin in Uganda in a 1971 west-backed coup, and Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Soviets’ choice in Ethiopia, who effectively took power in 1974. Winning influence in Africa Britain was anxious that power in Africa was handed to dependable politicians. MI5 monitored nationalist movements, and trembled whenever it believed these movements might be penetrated by Soviet agents. During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, for example, MI5 investigated possible Soviet involvement but, when questioned, bewildered tribesmen asked: “What does a Russian look like?” and “Can Russians speak Swahili?” Clearly, the KGB was making little headway in east Africa. One way by which the Soviets could win friends in the continent, as well as spread the Marxist-Leninist gospel among its future leaders, was to offer scholarships for Africans to study at universities in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Some students were shocked by conditions in Moscow, which was summed up by one African visitor as having “no cars, no cafes, no good clothes or good food”. Others were appalled by everyday racism: one was asked by Russians whether Africans lived in houses. Seducing the elected rulers of newly independent states proved the most effective policy for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Such leaders had come to power at the head of disciplined parties, practised the arts of messianic leadership, and fostered popular optimism. But could they deliver a golden age for their followers? Their backers assured them that they could. In the early 1960s the KGB cultivated Kwame Nkrumah, charismatic first prime minister then president of independent Ghana, only to discover (by breaking Ghanaian wireless codes) that he and his cronies were squirrelling away Soviet subsidies. The CIA wrote off Nkrumah as “a vain opportunist and playboy”, and in 1966 were believed to have been involved in a coup that toppled him from power. He went into exile, followed by 1,000 of his Soviet advisors. His corruption, like that of so many others of his kind, weakened economies and stifled growth. The United States offered Africa’s new rulers what they needed to keep power: modern security systems. It has been reported that between 1963 and 1969 the United States Agency for International Development spent US$3.3m delivering radios and small arms to African police forces and instructing them in strike-breaking, riot control and investigating sedition. The one-party states that replaced colonial administrations were handed the apparatus of domestic coercion. By 1969 President Julius Nyerere, a self-declared ‘African socialist’, had accepted equipment worth over US$640,000 from the US for his police force, all of whom were members of the ruling Tanganyika African National Union Party. But he also accepted Soviet weaponry for his army. This was prudent: at this stage there was no knowing who would win the Cold War. What brought a thaw in the Cold War? As the Second World War's uneasy alliances unravelled, a new world emerged: of east vs west and of global conflicts as the superpowers vied for influence. From dark days to moments of hope, David Reynolds traces the Cold War from 1961 to 1991 “A second scramble for Africa” As Soviet and American patronage (and arms) spread across the continent, Nyerere warned that “a second scramble for Africa by Russia and its satellites” was under way. He was responding to events in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC) in 1960 following the withdrawal of the Belgians, who had enriched themselves on their colony’s mineral resources and neglected the welfare of their subjects: on independence day, 30 June 1960, the Congo had perhaps just 200 African graduates. Within a week, the country dissolved into anarchy after the army mutinied. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba threatened the nationalisation of foreign businesses, and looked to the Soviet Union for assistance. Soviet and Warsaw Pact aircraft, arms and ‘advisors’ were flown in to prop up his government. United Nations (UN) secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld feared the imminent ‘communisation’ of the Congo, despite the despatch of UN peacekeepers. There was alarm in Washington, where CIA director Allen Dulles suspected that Lumumba was “a Castro or worse”, and the CIA moved in, supplied with dollars and a hitman instructed to assassinate Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. The money secured the loyalty of Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (who later renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko), a ruthless, ambitious and venal chancer whom the CIA believed to be “childish” and easily led. He moved in America’s direction, used its cash to pay his soldiers, deployed them to expel the Soviets and detained Lumumba, who was murdered soon afterwards. The upshot was that the country’s resources remained an asset of the west, and the DRC endured five years of civil war. Welcomed by President John F Kennedy in 1963, Mobutu was America’s man. Following a coup in 1965, he stayed in power until 1997 and amassed a personal fortune estimated at several billion US dollars by siphoning off the nation’s wealth. Cold War priorities dictated events in southern Africa, too. The United States treated Angola and Mozambique as strategic assets, arming the 200,000 Portuguese conscripts who fought a long-running war against local nationalist insurgents with an imported arsenal including napalm and defoliants. The conflicts in both countries ended in 1974 with Portugal throwing in the towel. In Angola a war of succession followed, with three rival nationalist parties fighting for power. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (its Portuguese name abbreviated to MPLA), led by Agostinho Neto who became the newly independent nation’s first president, was backed by the Soviet Union – which, in return, was allowed to establish a naval base at the country’s capital, Luanda. The United States threw its weight behind the rival party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), in co-operation with South Africa. Substantial and decisive support came from Fidel Castro as part of what he saw as Cuba’s mission to engage in the global “conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against imperialism”. By 1975, some 36,000 Cuban reservists with artillery, tanks and missile systems were serving in Angola, while Cuban doctors, teachers and technicians replaced their Portuguese counterparts who had returned home. Castro’s commitment to Angola was integral to a strategy that would extend the struggle for independence to neighbouring South West Africa (later Namibia) and Rhodesia (today, Zimbabwe). Inevitably, South Africa was drawn into the conflict, because Cubans were using Angolan bases to train guerrilla units. Some were destined for Rhodesia, where the white minority were defending themselves against nationalist partisans, some of whom enjoyed Soviet patronage. Under American and British pressure, Rhodesia consented to black majority rule in 1979. End of Africa’s Cold War By 1980, then, South Africa – ruled by what Castro called a “Fascist-Racist” regime – stood alone against the forces of African nationalism. For 40 years, the apartheid regime had presented itself as a bastion against communism – a stance that had secured it a steady flow of western arms. The Soviet Union and Cuba provided weapons and training camps for African National Congress guerrillas fighting black oppression by the apartheid government. South Africa was also, as US President Ronald Reagan remarked in 1981, “essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have”. In the event, Reagan did not need to commit his country to support South Africa’s last stand; events inside the Soviet Union were now dictating the outcome of the Cold War in Africa. By the mid-1980s, the communist powerhouse was facing an economic crisis, losing a war in Afghanistan and overstretched in Africa. One Kremlin official, Anatoly Adamishin, spoke for many others when he asked: “Why, with all our problems, did we have to get involved [in Africa]?… We could not afford it.” Angola alone owed the Soviet Union US$5bn, which it could not repay. In 1977 the Soviets attempted to unseat Neto, whom they now distrusted. Afterwards he made oblique approaches towards the US. It was left to the last leader of a communist Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to disengage from Africa. In 1988 he salvaged what he could in an agreement with the United States, by which all Soviet and Cuban forces would withdraw from the continent, and South Africa pulled out of Namibia, which was granted independence in 1990. Castro growled about “betrayal”, but acquiesced. The Cold War in Africa had ended. The United States had won on points. But Africa was left, traumatised, to pick up the pieces and face the problems created by the corrupt dictatorships that were the Cold War’s lasting legacy. Want to read more about the history of African history? Here are some of our most popular articles... The big question: Is Africa a prisoner of its past? Nelson Mandela: “a symbol of the struggle against racism” Africa’s medieval golden age Lawrence James is a historian and author of Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) This content first appeared in issue 3 of BBC World Histories magazine