Randolph student's research in Russia playing out similarly in Stalin bust controversy

The day Kathleen Conti turned 6 months old, the Berlin Wall fell — her father bought her a broken piece as a memento.

“I remember looking at it when I was little,” said Conti, who is entering her senior year at Randolph College in Lynchburg. “It was always something that I grew up talking about.”

Now, with many calling on the National D-Day Memorial Foun-dation in Bedford to tear down a controversial bust of Joseph Stalin, Conti is closely watching the debate because of its direct link to an issue she researched in Russia.

The 21-year-old studied at Moscow University for the Humanities from August 2009 to January.

On Friday, she presented a summer research project at Randolph entitled “Memory as a Political Strategy: The Politics of Stalin Remembrance in Russia.” The research examines the Rus-sian Federation government’s use of collective memory literature to portray Stalin as a heroic figure in modern-day Russia.

Though it’s been two decades since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, her research ar-gues that current Russian Presi-dent Dmitri Medvedev and for-mer President Vladimir Putin have deemed it necessary to “selectively remember” some of the achievements of Stalin to bolster nationalism.

“The current administration has developed a pattern in recent years of splitting Stalin by simul-taneously acknowledging some of his crimes while also praising his great achievements,” her paper states. “Such a policy, whether unconscious or not, has created a situation in Russia that has garnered extreme responses on both sides of the political spectrum.”

Conti, who speaks Russian but is not yet fluent in the language, has a birthday that falls on Vic-tory Day, which marked the end of World War II in Russia. She said she encountered people in the country that fondly remem-ber Stalin, while others have told her of the atrocities they wit-nessed under his rule.

She said a metro station that she frequented was remodeled and displayed a line from the Soviet national anthem that an-gered many people because it honored Stalin.

“That sparked a lot of contro-versy because it happened during one of the elections,” Conti said.

Now that she sees the same controversy erupting in Bedford over the bust of Stalin at the D-Day Memorial, she notices how the emotions are similar.

She was one of about 100 people who attended an open forum in Bedford last Wednesday to debate the bust, which drew a mainly anti-Stalin crowd.

Conti, one of the few who didn’t bash the bust at the forum, said there’s no debating that Stalin was a mass murderer who should not be supported. She herself is not a sympathizer of Stalin, she said.

But now that the memorial foundation has placed the bust there, she said she doesn’t sup-port its removal because it’s part of a history that should not be ignored.

“The world has evil in it, and if you deny that, then people are just going to repeat it again,” she said. “It makes people think and evaluate and question their own view of history. Why tear it down?”

Conti said she doesn’t think the memorial is honoring the dictator. Many, however, have said they fear people would get the impression the memorial is honoring him since his image is on a pedestal, which can be viewed as a position of honor.

William McIntosh, the past president at the memorial who was serving when the bust was installed June 1, has said the artwork is not meant to honor the dictator but to recognize his historical role in the war.

Many in favor of keeping the bust may not be speaking their thoughts out of respect for veter-ans or from a desire to not ap-pear unpatriotic, Conti said.

“I don’t want any hasty deci-sions to be made because we have time to think it through logically,” she said of the future of the bust. “What’s wonderful about America is we have free-dom of speech and we can do things like this and debate it.”

Robin Reed, the foundation’s new president, said in a recent interview that history is “a messy business.” He said he is consider-ing various points of view on the subject but he has not yet made any decisions to remove the statue.

The Stalin piece, sculpted by Lynchburg College professor Richard Pumphrey, is part of a series recognizing the Allied leaders. Other statues include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles de Gaulle and Clement Atlee.