Russian leader rejects Stalin cult

“In no sense can one say that Stalinism is returning to our everyday life,’’ Medvedev said in an interview published in the newspaper Izvestia yesterday. “That’s absolutely impossible. That’s the current state ideology and my view as the president.’’

Medvedev has been consistently critical of Josef Stalin since he took power in 2008, unlike his predecessor and mentor, Vladimir Putin, who has often been equivocal in statements on the Soviet dictator. In April, Medvedev ordered the declassification of files showing that Stalin ordered the killing of thousands of Poles in the Katyn forest in 1940.

“Creeping re-Stalinization was developing during Putin’s presidency, and both Medvedev and Putin realized this was a problem not just in domestic politics, but also for foreign policy,’’ Sergei Lukashevsky, director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow, said by telephone.

The issue of Stalin’s legacy is being widely discussed in the Russian media as the nation prepares to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Allies’ victory in World War II tomorrow. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union lost 26.6 million people in the war, including about 8.7 million soldiers, according to new Defense Ministry data released this week.

Medvedev said Soviet losses might have been smaller if not for Stalin’s repression of the military leadership and “the hypothesis that Hitler wouldn’t attack our country.’’

Attempts to revive the Stalin cult have been made across the country, including a city bus in St. Petersburg with an advertisement featuring Stalin’s portrait on one side, Interfax reported.

While Russia’s leaders have fought for years against distortions of the Soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany, they have struggled to take a clear position on the internal history of the Soviet period.

“This is big news,’’ said Nikita Petrov, a historian of the Soviet secret police at Memorial, an organization devoted to human rights and revealing the truth about the Soviet past. “I’m surprised to hear that a state ideology exists’’ based on preventing the return of Stalinism, he said by telephone.

Medvedev proposed opening up archives related to World War II and making documents available online. “Enough time has passed, 65 years, and the people should know the whole truth about the war,’’ he said.

Petrov said hundreds of thousands of documents remain to be disclosed. “Even the information about what documents are classified is often also classified, so researchers don’t know what to ask for,’’ he said.