March 5, 2003	Wednesday	Muharram 1, 1424

MOSCOW: He died half a century ago, but the world is still trying to defuse the time-bombs Soviet dictator Josef Stalin left behind.

Almost every Russian of pensionable age recalls where he was when news broke on March 5, 1953, that the Soviet Union’s “man of steel” had breathed his last.

His death ended nearly 30 years of iron-fisted rule, unparalleled in 20th century European history, marked by mass purges, arbitrary arrests by the secret police, executions and deportation.

“It meant for us that my father might be coming home,” said 64-year-old Olga Trifonova, referring to Roman Khiroshychenko who was later freed after eight years in the camps.

Later “de-Stalinization” drives only partly dismantled the myth of the moustachioed Georgian who enjoyed god-like status thanks to a huge personality cult whipped up by his henchmen.

Even today, many Russians of the older generation, marginalized in the new capitalist Russia and with rosy memories of a well-structured, if bleak, childhood, react ambivalently to mention of his name.

They argue that his role in leading Soviet forces to victory over Nazism and turning Russia into an industrial world power outweigh the terror he waged against the Soviet population.

“He was the greatest statesman not only of the 20th century but of all Russian history,” declared Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

But as the drama of Chechnya and unresolved conflicts elsewhere in the former Soviet Union show, history is still picking up the pieces.

Russia’s planners bump up against his legacy daily in their attempts to restructure industrial behemoths left over from a world of five-year plans and well-massaged production statistics.

His forced collectivization ripped the peasant heart out of Russia. Small wonder that President Vladimir Putin’s reformers find little rural tradition to tap into as they seek to turn the clock back to land ownership.

FATHER-FIGURE: Stalin was born Josef Dzhugashvili in Georgia in 1879 and trained briefly for the priesthood before joining underground revolutionary movements. He took over the communist leadership on the death of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in 1924.

In the years following, millions died in his mass purges and millions more in famine and the forced collectivization of farm lands. Arbitrary arrests and mass deportations of ethnic groups to distant reaches of the Soviet Union turned lives upside down.

Stalin surrounded himself with the immoral and the weak.

Hundreds of public monuments and busts of the dictator were destroyed after his successor Nikita Khrushchev launched the first tentative moves to “de-Stalinize” society.

But his mark is still plain to see on the streets of the old Soviet Union.

When it came to buildings, big was beautiful. Gargantuan structures still dominate the skyline of many Russian cities. The distinctive “wedding cake” skyscrapers make night-time Moscow look like Batman’s Gotham City to an outsider.

The wide multi-laned highways of today were built by Stalin when virtually no Soviet citizens had cars, but they were perfect channels for communist demonstrations. His mark can be seen too in the ornate Moscow metro stations, decorated with stone reliefs of epic communist moments.

But there is a more intangible legacy in Russia today.—Reuters