In this year alone, Russia has seen the appearance of a new Stalin museum in Tver Region and a monument to the 'Big Three' (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) in Crimea in memory of the participants of 1945 Yalta conference. Statues to the Generalissimo have been unveiled across the entire country—in Lipetsk, Mari El, North Ossetia, Stavropol, Vladimir and in the Kuban region.
In Yekaterinburg, the designer of the city's new sculpture of Stalin also designed a monument to the Tsar's family, executed by the Bolsheviks in the very same city. In Luhansk—capital of a self-declared republic in south-eastern Ukraine—promises have been made to erect a statue of Stalin by the end of December. Although, in the words of local activists, its placement 'depends on many external political factors'.
Recently, United Russia's youth wing, the Young Guard, held a fashion show in which models decorated themselves with immense medals on their chests. A procession in full regalia was later held in Ramenskoye, a town just outside of Moscow, where children led Germans prisoners through the streets. The 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War has given carte-blanche to present the 'era of Stalin', as the American writer Anna Louisa Strong called it, in a more positive light.
