Stalin: One degree of separation between Russia and Tamil Nadu!

The world remembers Adolf Hitler as a German, though he was born in Austria.  And we think of Beethoven as an Austrian, when he was a German by birth.  And we think that Stalin was one of the worst Russians ever, despite the fact that he was from Georgia. Not Jimmy Carter's Georgia but that other one!

It is now sixty years since Stalin's death, which has triggered a bunch of commentaries.  In a NY Times op-ed, the author, "a Danish journalist based in Washington, was born in Siberia, where his family lived in exile for 16 years," notes:

In 1941, my parents and two siblings were among thousands of Lithuanian citizens deported to the remotest regions of Siberia. After two years, more than 40 percent of the deportees had perished.
Still, the exile offered my parents a better chance of survival than the alternative. Shortly after they were deported the Nazis crossed into Lithuania and all the Jewish families in their town perished. So, paradoxically, my family could say: “Thank you, comrade Stalin for deporting us."

Why would any sane person want to remember Stalin as anything but prominent poster in the lineup of historical monsters?  

Although Russians know more about Stalin’s crimes than they did ever before, many politicians and historians want to pull him out of the shadows and celebrate him for his role in the industrialization of the young Soviet state and the victory over Nazi Germany.
Communists have collected 100,000 signatures on a petition to give Volgograd back the name Stalingrad; others are seeking a referendum to this end. If there is a Metro station in Paris called Stalingrad, they argue, why should the name be banned in Russia?

Are you thinking what I am thinking? Paris has a Metro station called Stalingrad? 

The Russians--that is right, the Russians, and not the Georgians--who so badly want to resurrect Stalin's image have so conveniently forgotten the millions killed by Stalin and banished by him to Gulags?  What the hell is wrong with people!

Caption at the source:
A communist supporter holds a portrait of Stalin as she marks the 60th anniversary
of his death near Red square, Moscow, March 5, 2013.

Not all the Gulag prisoners are dead and gone either for that dark chapter of Russian history to be airbrushed off:

 VORKUTA, Russia -- Anna Krikun can barely read the yellowing papers that show she was sentenced as a young woman to hard labor in one of Stalin's cruelest Gulag camps.
At 90, her eyesight is fading. But she remembers everything as if it happened yesterday. She recalls the name of the investigator who tortured her with a sleep-deprivation technique known as the "conveyor" until she confessed to betraying the motherland and agitating against the Soviet Union.
It was 1946, the throes of the Stalinist terror, and Krikun was sent to Vorkuta - a labor camp-cum-city built from nothing on an icebound wasteland by political prisoners from 1931 to 1957.
Today, the city is still a byword for the suffering of the ill-equipped labor brigades that were effectively sent to their death as Stalin used his enemies - both real and imagined -- to tap into vast natural resources in the uninhabited Far North.
And yet here, in this inhospitable outpost, Krikun has remained all these years. 

Reading about the Gulags in Solzhenitsyn's writings was a transformative experience for me, who had until then surrounded himself with readings and people who were uber-sympathetic towards anything Communist.  It is simply bizarre that instead of tossing out forever the ghost of Stalin, more than a few in Russia continue to venerate him. Years ago, I watched quite a funny, satirical, Australian movie about Stalin's son.  I wonder if that movie was banned, and continues to be banned in Putin's Russia.

So, what is the connection with Tamil Nadu?  Stalin is the name of one of the most prominent--notorious--politicians there.  Yes, it was politically fashionable those days to name kids after such Communist "heroes":

The leader of the Dravidian movement Periyar E.V.Ramaswamy was greatly fascinated by the communist ideals after his visit to the Soviet Union. It soon caught on in Tamil Nadu and people started naming their children after the great leaders of the Soviet Union. The most popular were Lenin and Stalin and the communism wave even led to children, being named after Moscow and Russia. Consequently, the leader of the DMK party Dr.Kalaignar bestowed the name Stalin

I suppose this is also one of those only-in-India stories; there aren't very many places on this planet where middle-aged men named Stalin can not only proudly walk around but even contest in democratic elections!

Caption at the source:
DMK leader M.K. Stalin being arrested during a protest
against Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Chennai on Tuesday. Photo: M. Vedhan 

This Stalin from Tamil Nadu was born on March 1, 1953.  The original Stalin died on March 5, 1953.  What a devotion to a mass killer it must have been in order to name a kid after that dying monster in a land far, far away :(

Oh those Tamils, er, Russians!