Leonid Brezhnev Boris Yeltsin Vladimir Putin Wall of Grief Soviet Union duce Stalinism de-Stalinisation Russian
Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation process in Soviet society ended when he was replaced as leader by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964; the latter introduced a level of re-Stalinisation within the Soviet Union. In 1969 and again in 1979, plans were proposed for a full rehabilitation of Stalin's legacy but on both occasions were halted due to fears of damaging the USSR's public image. Gorbachev saw the total denunciation of Stalin as necessary for the regeneration of Soviet society. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the first president of the new Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, continued Gorbachev's denunciation of Stalin but added to it a denunciation of Lenin. His successor Vladimir Putin did not seek to rehabilitate Stalin but emphasised the celebration of Soviet achievements under Stalin's leadership rather than the Stalinist repressions. In October 2017, Putin opened the Wall of Grief memorial in Moscow, noting that the "terrible past" would neither be "justified by anything" nor "erased from the national memory." In a 2017 interview, Putin added that while "we should not forget the horrors of Stalinism", the excessive demonization of Stalin "is a means to attack [the] Soviet Union and Russia". In recent years, the government and general public of Russia has been accused of rehabilitating Stalin.
