As former Soviet dictator returns to prominence, Daniil Turovsky speaks to founder of Penza’s new facility about human rights, the Gulag and Steve Jobs

The communists of Penza organised a small rally to celebrate the opening of a new culture centre dedicated to Joseph Stalin last week. About 30 people took part, laying carnations at a gold-painted bust of the former dictator at the entrance to the centre.

They drank Georgian wine and listened to a speech by local Communist party leader, Georgy Kamnev, about the aims of the new facility: not to operate as a museum but rather to provide a space for studying the Stalinist experience and adapting it to modern realities.

Penza’s communists declared 2016 to be the Year of Stalin throughout the region, and promised to hold Stalinist events every month – literary evenings, round table discussions and tours of the Stalinist architecture of Penza. Visits for schoolchildren have been announced, as have Stalinist scholarships for students who will write about Stalin for communist journals.

It was Kamnev’s idea to open the centre. He is about 30, a deputy in the regional parliament, and owns a legal firm. He even has his own chauffeur.

Kamnev joined Russia’s communist party during his first year of university, and a few years ago was elected to serve as the first secretary of the Penza regional committee.

He says the decision to create a Stalin centre was in no way influenced by a new Yeltsin centre in Yekaterinburg, which opened a month ago. “It was just a coincidence – it wasn’t a kind of response,” he says.

On 21 December, when the Communists commemorated Stalin’s birthday, Valery Rashkin and Sergey Obukhov – two party deputies in the Duma –expressed support for a large Stalin centre. They appealed for eight billion rubles to be allocated in the federal budget to its construction, so as to “glorify a difficult, contradictory, but heroic epoch for our country”.

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That day the Russian Communist party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, also gave a speech about Stalin. “A Stalinist spring began. Those times demanded him,” he declared. “All government figures who wish Russia well should imbibe the genius of Stalin […] I hope that in 2016, Putin will draw the right conclusions.”

The Penza Stalin centre has managed without state funding, collecting contributions from party supporters throughout the region. It does not have any museum exhibits or archival documents (there are more than 30,000 at the Yeltsin centre). One of the shelves holds recently published biographies and stacks of newspapers.

Photographs of Stalin at various ages hang from the walls of three hallways. There’s also a collage: Stalin holds a glass of champagne, with the caption Happy New Year! Another poster reads, “Life has become better, comrades. Life has become happier.” That’s where the exhibition ends.

Kamenev takes me on a tour of the centre. “Why is Stalin gaining relevance?” he asks rhetorically. “He is the answer to all problems. And he’d resolve today’s problems very effectively.

“How would he resolve corruption? How would he resolve the question of [Anatoly] Serdyukov and [Yevgeniya] Vasilyeva [former defence minister and a businesswoman said to be his lover, both accused of fraud and corruption]? He’d have had them shot.”

On the table in the conference hall stands a large, framed portrait of Stalin.

“[The new centre] suggests an agenda: Soviet, Stalinist culture – at the head of which stood a hero,” Kamnev adds.

In those years, the state was always more important than the individual, I suggest. Kamnev shakes his head and retorts that the state existed for simple people –millions of children could have fun and relax for free and workers could travel to a sanatorium.

I ask him about the Soviet forced labour camps. “There is a famous book by Anne Applebaum, Gulag, for which she won a Pulitzer prize,” I say. “And in the foreword she recounts why she decided to write the book.

“She turned up in Prague at the beginning of the 1990s, and strolled along a famous bridge in the old town. She met an organ-grinder and salesmen with various tourist trinkets, and then she stopped at a stall selling Soviet memorabilia – all these fur hats with stars and figures of Stalin.

“She was surprised that all this was being bought by tourists. She then thought that if this had been Nazi memorabilia, nobody would have touched it. Tourists simply didn’t associate Soviet symbolism with the crimes of the Soviet regime. It was then that she decided to write the book.

Some things which were then morally permissible are now impermissible Georgy Kamnev

“How do you justify to yourself the existence of the camps? How are they connected with a state for the people?”

Kamnev says there was nothing reprehensible about Stalin’s actions: “The historical conditions have to be taken into account. Some things which were then morally permissible are now impermissible. After all, human rights didn’t appear all of a sudden – it was a long process.

“There were times when Tsar Peter decapitated his enemies in the [city] square, and it was considered normal. It was the same under Stalin. Human rights as we understand them now were not observed. At that time, repressions were the norm. There was nothing reprehensible about them.”

I ask: “Was it normal to kill people? To send them away where they would freeze to death?”

“The state had the right to do so, and to suppress its people. That was its right.”

“If the leader of a state used the same methods, should we hold him up as an example, as you do?”

“But that’s not all he did. There were a lot of good things.”

I tell him what some Russians have written about the centre on social media. One of the comments reads: “It would be a good thing if the basement of this centre could become a one of the torture chambers usual for those times, where the admirers of this moustachioed monster could experience all the delights of the regime they so praise.”

He replies: “We don’t have a basement, so they needn’t worry. But let me tell you my suggestion: There’s a story that, in the middle of the 1990s, one Penza ball-bearing plant didn’t pay annual wages to its workers. And a few people hanged themselves. Because for them the 1990s were the end of everything. Nobody knew what to do or where to find money, despite the fact that they all worked.

“So if we’re going to talk about symbolism, then we can put a room in the Yeltsin centre dedicated to symbolising this complete hopelessness. That is to say, a monument to ‘freedom’ – in quotes, of course – a human figure with a noose around his neck.”

I read another quote: “Somewhere, [businessman and inventor] Elon Musk is launching his SpaceX rocket while over here, a Stalin centre has been opened.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A gold-painted bust of Joseph Stalin in Penza Photograph: Daniil Turovsky/Meduza

Kamnev laughs. “Under Stalin we had the most advanced state in the world, in scientific terms,” he says. “And for many people, the idea of releasing a computer in our country now seems an improbable fiction.”

I try again. “I think the guy meant that some look into the future, while some look back to the terrors of the past.”

“I’m not a huge fan, but I do pay close attention to Musk’s business.”

“He does nearly everything without support from the state.”

“Yes.”

“While under Stalin, such private initiative would have been impossible.”

“Back then, everything had to be brought together with an iron grip,” Kamnev says. “The economy was mobilised. Therefore, the means were available. The security services should also be mentioned. Today, everything has become worse.

“Earlier, there was no corruption in the security services. We need to strengthen our national defense, look inward – into the country – and not focus on foreign affairs. I was recently in China, where they told me, with a smirk, about North Korea. They can’t even feed their own people there, but they constantly wave their rockets at the US. In that sense, we’re similar to North Korea.”

I say I don’t understand what, in his opinion, should be taken from Stalin’s ideas and applied to the present day. It is the image of the man of the future, he responds – the image of the hero and the innovator. “We need Stalin, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Just without the repressions,” he says.

As I leave, workers are hanging new year’s decorations near the bust of Stalin, while a small crowd gathers. “I came here to pay my respects, but I’d also like to visit Yekaterinburg and the Yeltsin centre there, just to spit on Yeltsin,” says one man. A woman nearby nods. “That’s right,” she says. “I can’t say anything bad.” And the Gulag? “What was the Gulag? Such things will always happen in Russia. Back then, at least the pensions were good.”