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In western Moscow, an anonymous driveway cuts through dense woods, past a green fence, into a clandestine facility. The fortifications seem fit to protect a state nuclear lab or the estate of a Russian tycoon, but these walls are guarding an unresolved past. Behind them is the dacha of Joseph Stalin, sealed off from the public, run by Russia’s equivalent to the secret service and all but untouched since the day the Soviet leader died in 1953 on the dining-room floor. Even the furniture has been left almost exactly as Stalin arranged it.
The secretive limbo that has enveloped the country home reflects a broader equivocation about Stalin’s legacy, which remains unresolved as Russia prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of Soviet victory over the Nazis on May 9.
Despite President Vladimir Putin’s embrace of the Soviet past and its symbols, the Kremlin has adopted a notably ambivalent approach to Stalin that highlights his crimes but leaves room for his lionization, particularly regarding victory in World War II.
“The issue is that Stalin is one of the few themes that, in contrast to many others, divides Putin’s base,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant and former Kremlin adviser. “It’s a delicate question that Putin prefers not to clarify so as not to force too difficult a choice, because with either variant, he narrows his support.”
The absence of a resolute condemnation has seemingly helped Stalin’s image. Only 20% of Russians said they viewed Stalin with dislike, fear or disgust in a March poll by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, down from 43% in 2001. Some 45% said that Stalin’s achievements justified the era’s casualties to at least some degree—up from 27% in 2008.
“The ethical argument regarding the historical role of Stalin—that there cannot be a positive leader who killed millions of his own compatriots, regardless of whether he won the war—that a priori position is being negated, it’s moving into the shadows,” says Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian television host and historian.
The Kremlin’s equivocal stance came through at an appearance by Mr. Putin at a youth camp last summer. He conceded that Stalin was a tyrant who built a cult of personality and sent people to labor camps, but he also offered implicit praise for rapid economic growth under the dictator and his wartime leadership.
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This divided impulse is nothing new. In 2007, Mr. Putin visited Butovo, the prison where Stalin executed thousands of innocents during the purges of the late 1930s, and vowed that the tragedy would never be forgotten. In 2010, then-President Dmitry Medvedev admitted that Stalin was responsible for the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet agents and broadly condemned the dictator’s crimes.
But Russian officials have offered endorsements of Stalin’s leadership too. Last autumn, at a meeting with Russian educators, Mr. Putin put a positive spin on Stalin’s decision to sign a nonaggression pact with the Nazis in 1939, suggesting that the treaty gave the Soviet Union time to modernize its army and prepare for war—an explanation disputed by historians. “What’s so wrong if the Soviet Union didn’t want to fight?” Mr. Putin said.
In February, in newly Russian-annexed Crimea, the head of Russia’s lower chamber of parliament provoked controversy by unveiling a bronze statue of Stalin alongside Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Yalta—despite Stalin’s ruthless deportation of the peninsula’s Crimean Tatars to Central Asia around that time.
The Kremlin’s ambivalent position has opened up space for avowed Stalin supporters, including many members of the Communist Party (the second-largest faction in Russia’s parliament), to promote the dictator’s legacy. Appearances of Stalin’s visage on billboards, signs or statues cause regular flare-ups, particularly ahead of Victory Day.
The rising acceptance of conciliatory feelings toward Stalin unnerves people like Jan Rachinsky, a board member of Memorial, the Russian human rights group. Over his three-decade rule, Stalin executed roughly 1.1 million people for political reasons, sent 4 million more to the Gulag and deported some 6.5 million, according to Mr. Rachinsky, who questioned whether Stalin’s personal role was decisive in winning the war.
“The installation of any memorial with the image of Stalin is blasphemous,” Memorial said in a statement this week. “Stalin’s crimes have no equivalent in national history.” The group said that his crimes were so vast that positive presentations of his image in public spaces should be prohibited by law.
Russian Communist Party leaders and other officials balked at the idea of a ban. “The initiative is a pathetic, nasty and desperate provocation by defeatists ahead of Victory Day,” Ivan Melnikov, the first vice speaker of the Russian Parliament and a Communist Party member, told the Interfax news agency. He called Memorial’s proposal “unconstitutional, anti-historical and antinational.”
What to do with Stalin’s residence in Moscow remains similarly unresolved. Known as Blizhnyaya Dacha (“nearby summer house”), the stately green mansion, about 6 miles from the Kremlin, functions as a secret preserve of Stalin’s everyday life. It houses his records, tea cups, telephones, chess table, desk and bed.
Stalin built and moved into the residence after his second wife committed suicide in 1932 and made the home his main living quarters from 1933 until his death, often hosting other world leaders there. The presents that Mao brought for Stalin, including a portrait of two gazing cats, still adorn the walls.
Stalin retreated to the dacha in a kind of panic not long after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Politburo members came to fetch Stalin days later; according to the Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin thought they had come to arrest him.
After Stalin’s death, Soviet authorities prepared to turn the residence into a museum, but Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign to dismantle Stalin’s personality cult quashed the idea. For the rest of the Soviet era, the home was a facility for the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It became Russian government property after the USSR’s collapse.
Moscow State University history professor Sergei Devyatov, Russia’s top expert on the residence and co-author of a book on its history, said that historians and select groups of Russian journalists have received tours over the years. The Wall Street Journal did not enter the home.
The Stalin era is still too raw to allow public access to the dacha, Mr. Devyatov said: “The only thing that can be done at the moment is to preserve it as it was.” The future of the home, he added, is “a question that shouldn’t be decided by our generation but by the next generation.”