Activists who held a firework display in the Ural region to celebrate the anniversary of Stalin’s death yesterday said the date should be a national holiday.
Scores of people gathered to watch the ten-minute display from an embankment in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-biggest city.
“The day of his death should become a national holiday of liberation,” one of the political activists behind the 67th anniversary show said. “The number of victims would have been far greater [if he hadn’t died].”
The organisers insisted on remaining anonymous for fear of retribution. Although an estimated 20 million people were killed during Stalin’s Great Terror from 1936 to 1938, the Soviet leader’s reputation has soared since President Putin came to power in 2000. Busts and portraits of Stalin, once
