Nikolai Svanidze’s paternal grandfather and namesake was a Communist official in Soviet Georgia – and a distant relative of Josef Stalin’s first wife.
But the kinship meant nothing to the Soviet dictator and his henchmen. Svanidze was arrested and beaten to death during an interrogation in 1937, at the height of what Russians call the Great Purge, when some 720,000 people died at the hands of Stalin’s secret police in less than 18 months.
Millions were jailed, executed, deported and displaced, including entire ethnic groups or social classes, during Stalin’s 1927-1953 rule, and millions more died of famines caused by his disastrous agriculture policies.
More than 60 years after Stalin’s own death, Svanidze’s grandson, a historian and television personality, witnesses the dictator’s return as an increasingly popular, and polarising, figure.
“I constantly see people who say ‘he purged my entire family, but I still respect him’,” Svanidze, whose documentaries on Russian history are among the few examples of television shows critical of Stalin, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s a Stockholm syndrome of some kind.”
During President Vladimir Putin’s rule, the choir of Stalin’s supporters has grown bigger, stronger and louder – while critics and scholars who document his totalitarian regime’s atrocities have lost access to Kremlin-controlled media and are now branded “foreign agents”.
Public figures, lawmakers, top officials and even clerics with Russia’s dominant Orthodox Church – that suffered countless losses at the hands of atheist communists – declare their support for Stalin along with tens of millions of ordinary Russians.
