Walk around any Russian city, from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Yekaterinburg and Kazan, and you will come across people wearing dark blue or red sweatshirts emblazoned with that unmistakable Soviet emblem — hammer, sickle and star. You will also see plenty of traditional fur hats — often topped with a red star — even though recent winters have been the warmest on record.
Step into a gift shop and you will find mugs featuring portraits of Lenin, Stalin or other sources of Soviet pride, such as the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Even the raspy-voiced singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky, whose biting lyrics got him censored by Soviet authorities in the 1960s and 1970s, makes an appearance on this tour of Russian nostalgia. His inclusion could not be more fitting: Promoting an idealized version of the past legitimizes a repressive present and future.
As a newspaper vendor in central Moscow recently told me, many Russians recall World War II as a moment when Russians showed great courage, view the immediate postwar period as a time of relative calm and remember the 1970s as an era of stability. These “memories,” he concluded, fuel their longing for a strong “Soviet-type” leader.
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