It was the site of one of the most infamous political executions in Stalin’s Russia. Stalin ordered 157 political prisoners, including the sister of his enemy Leon Trotsky, taken from their cells on September 11 1941 and shot in the woods outside the town.
But now, as nostalgia for Joseph Stalin swells in Russia and the 60th anniversary of the Soviet victory over the Nazis on May 9 approaches, Oryol has rekindled its affection for a man seen by many as the 20th century’s worst mass murderer.
The town council has written to President Vladimir Putin demanding his support for having Stalin’s ”honour” restored to the history books, his statues re-erected, and his name once more given to streets and squares.
Last week the Communist party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, said Russia ”should once again render honour to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilisation from the Nazi plague”.
He suggested a challenge to the Communist party’s 1956 resolution condemning the ”cult of personality” erected around Stalin.
Statues by the Moscow monumentalist Zurab Tsereteli featuring Stalin beside his wartime counterparts Roosevelt and Churchill are planned for the southern town of Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad, and Mirny in Siberia.
The rehabilitation of Stalin appears to have some popular backing. Last month a national poll by Romir Monitoring showed that 53% of Russians thought that on balance Stalin’s rule was ”positive”.
The nostalgia has spread to a generation too young to have experienced his rule.
”Stalin played an undoubted huge role in our victory and in rebuilding the economy of the USSR after the war”, said Vladimir Zagianov, aged 30, a member of Oryol’s Communist town council.
”Official figures are that 750 000 died [from political repression] in Stalin’s time,” he added, significantly reducing the figures offered by many historians.
”This was right and necessary in this period. These were enemies of the people and the state. It was not possible to investigate and try [them] all.”
In his office, flanked and echoed by the editor of the local paper and two officials, he said that ”human rights workers” funded from abroad wanted to destroy Stalin’s legacy.
”They are afraid of his rehabilitation and of Russia being a great country again. The USSR was the strongest, but in 10 years we will be like Sweden.”
Vera Dinisenko (52) who works in a cafe, said: ”It’s been a nightmare since [Stalin]. Now every six months prices go up. My parents say the benefits of Stalin were entirely material. He did not touch our relatives. Many disappeared, but you can’t blame Stalin alone.”
Oryol is only a few kilometres from the Kursk salient, the site of the biggest and bloodiest tank battle of the second world war.
Stalin’s propaganda image as the Soviet Man of Steel was cast in the popular imagination in mammoth battles like this, when the Red Army’s tank squadrons suffered horrific losses in charges against superior German armour.
But Oryol remains scarred by darker memories.
The 19th-century prison where Olga Kameneva, Trotsky’s sister, was held is still in use. Dmitri Krayukhin, a local human rights worker, waved his arm at the decrepit red brick building behind him, and sighed.
”It can’t have been a picnic in there, if you were related to Stalin’s worst enemy,” he said.
”She had no crime other than being Trotsky’s sister.”
That September night she and 156 others were driven to the woods, passing along a road then called Stalin Street, and shot for ”counter-revolutionary activities”.
Today several monuments mark Russian victims of the Nazis in the town centre but the ”Victims of Repression of the 30s, 40s and early 50s” — 50 000 families, according to the secret police archive — are remembered only by a small monument beside the woods on an outer road.
A fairground occupies the place where one of the town’s prison camps stood. – Guardian Unlimited Â