Anna Arutunyan

Special for USA TODAY

MOSCOW — While controversial statues of Confederate icons who fought for slavery come down in the United States, Russia is erecting new monuments to a once-disgraced Soviet Union dictator who killed millions: Josef Stalin.

This summer marked the 80th anniversary of the "Great Terror," a massive purge Stalin ordered against political opponents. Yet the milestone was barely noticed by Russians, who increasingly see Stalin as a national hero who defeated the Nazis in World War II as a valued U.S. ally rather than the brutal mass murderer reviled by historians.

Many here apparently don't know that on July 30, 1937, Stalin’s secret police launched a campaign that would see more than 1.5 million "anti-Soviet elements" arrested and nearly 700,000 of them killed, according to Soviet archives. Historians say that during Stalin’s three decades of rule, which ended with his death in 1953, an estimated 15 million to 30 million people were executed or died in labor camps or starved to death.

Although condemned for his brutality after his death, Stalin is now getting new respect from both an older generation nostalgic for the lost Soviet empire, which collapsed in 1991, and a younger generation of nationalistic Russians.

About 10 statues of Stalin have gone up around the country since 2012, said Pavel Gnilorybov, a historian who works with a group that tracks human rights abuses.

Some of the renewed admiration comes from President Vladimir Putin, who often laments the breakup of what had been the world's only other superpower besides the United States.

Putin condemned the “excessive demonization” of Stalin during an interview that aired this summer with Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone. Putin said attacks on Stalin amounted to "attacking the Soviet Union and Russia."

Stone's latest movie is on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was granted asylum in Russia to avoid arrest by U.S. authorities for disclosing classified information — illegal wiretaps by the NSA.

The former Soviet leader's creeping rehabilitation is evidenced by the assortment of Stalin magnets, mugs, T-shirts, statues and other paraphernalia sold by street vendors, and the red carnations often seen placed at his grave on Red Square.

Bookstores around the country sell volumes glorifying Stalin as a bulwark against fascism. Last month, prominent lawyer Henri Reznik resigned from the Moscow State Judicial Academy after it hung a plaque commemorating Stalin in its central hall. In May, a portrait of Stalin went up on the entrance to a Moscow subway station.

Public approval of Stalin reached a 16-year high this year, according to a poll by the Levada Center, a research group. It found that 46% of Russians felt “admiration,” “respect” or “sympathy” for the Soviet leader in February, up from 37% in March 2016. Another poll by Levada this year showed that 39% of Russians believed Stalin's mass repression was a crime, down from 51% in 2012.

“I’ve always had a positive view about Stalin, but it’s improved in recent years since I learned more about him,” said Alexei Filippov, 42, a retail sales manager. "There’s been a lot of books explaining the real reasons of the so-called repressions.”

“Repression is a made-up word. It was really a fight against crime," said Filippov, adding that Stalin "was our commander in chief. We owe the victory against Nazism to him.”

Ilya Rogotnev, 33, a university teacher and member of the pro-Stalin nationalist group Essence of Time, said the Russian government is finally "coming into sync with a collective opinion" about the former leader.

“For a long time, Stalin was not defended by anyone," Rogotnev said. "A lot of trash, lies and libel was dumped on him.”

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who came to power after Stalin, condemned his predecessor's personality cult in a closed-door speech at a Communist Party Congress in 1956. It took a half-century to change that view.

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“This is happening by the will of the government, which is ... struggling to find glorious pages in the country’s history and thus cannot accept the simple fact that the Soviet past was criminal,” said Nikita Petrov, a historian with the Memorial human rights organization that documents Stalin-era repressions.

He said the government is now targeting groups like his for uncovering past Soviet human rights crimes. Last year, the Memorial group was labeled a “foreign agent” under a law restricting foreign financing for non-governmental organizations.

In another case, Russia’s communications watchdog and de facto censor posted a warning about a textbook written by historian Andrei Suslov, following complaints by the nationalist group Essence of Time over negative accounts about the Soviet past.

“(The watchdog) cited their experts as saying the textbook was ‘harmful to children,’ which is pretty absurd,” Suslov said.

Teacher Rogotnev said he doesn’t justify Stalin's crackdown but thinks it should be examined in the context of his positive achievements: victory against Nazi Germany in World War II and the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union.

“The repressions really were huge and terrible, but they were also natural and inevitable within the context of the terrible 20th century,” he said.

“If you take Stalinist repressions separately, then sure, he could come out as a tyrant or a vampire," Rogotnev added. "But if you look at this figure in a bigger context, then you see that he is a function of the historical process and the political system in the Soviet Union.”