Even the first time visitor to Moscow quickly learns to find her bearings by catching sight of Stalin’s Seven Sisters, those immense Baroque and Gothic structures rising high above the city’s skyline.

Among them, a guide will proudly count off the foreign ministry, the Moscow state university and Hotel Ukraina, while pointing somberly to the more nondescript House on the Embankment, where plaques have been put up to mark so many of his former favourites who he subsequently had killed.

But currently it is amidst Stalin’s architectural legacy underground that his place in the Russian mindset is being assessed.

The Kurskaya metro station, a deep-columned landmark, has just been fully reopened after a restoration, and among the reversions to the ’50s original (before Khrushchev enforced the de-Stalinisation Thaw) is an inscription from an old version of the Soviet anthem: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation; he inspired us to work and be heroic.”

The debate, then, has begun on whether Stalin is being rehabilitated. Politicians of the opposition have veered between liberal outrage and communist comment that the authorities are appropriating Stalin to win over older voters sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre and author of Getting Russia Right, reckons that Stalin has already been rehabilitated by the bulk of the people of Russia. His reference is to a widely tracked “Name of Russia” poll conducted by a TV channel in which Stalin was voted third, though, as Trenin notes, there is suspicion that the Soviet leader actually may have placed first. But the debate, he points out, is more nuanced than a simple contest between nostalgia for Stalin and rejection of him.

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