--- Stalin's posthumous popularity is probably at its greatest peak since the early Khrushchev era. It reached a nadir around 1989, after the various disclosures about the terror and purges that were made under Gorbachev.
I think the reasons for the resurgence in popularity have to do with two things. 1) In the 1990s, the Russian pro-Yeltsin media engaged in an orgy of Communist-bashing 24/7. This has caused a backlash, especially since Yeltsin was/is so hated. 2) The Yeltsin era was Russia's biggest economic crash; the Stalin era was Russia's biggest economic boom. I think that caused a lot of people to rethink their opinions.
Having a high opinion of Stalin tends to correlate with lack of education, poverty, location (i.e. rural residents are more likely to think highly of him) and, most importantly, AGE. Polls say that 75% of the population under 27 think Stalin's brutality was inexcusable, as opposed to 52% of people over 60. (This does not contradict that about 50% of people under 30 say that Stalin either was very good for the country or on balance good for the country, as it is consistent to hold both that Stalin's brutality was inexcusable and that the USSR was a better place in 1955 than in 1924.) It is going to be Victory Day in a few days, a.k.a. National We Wiped the Floor with Hitler Day, and I bet you that, of the WWII veterans who will be marching, 70-80% appraise Stalin highly.
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It is not at all settled that the popularity of Stalin in Russia is entirely or even substantially built on prejudice and superstition, or that it was all coerced.
--- His popularity then and today are related but separate issues. I think it not surprising that people who had believed for centuries that the ruler of Russia is something akin to a demigod would project that idea onto the General Secretary, especially if he encouraged it. (What was it that Stalin told his mother when she asked him what he had become? "Remember the tsar? Well, I am something like a tsar.") I think this was behind both the Stalin Cult, embalming Lenin and the rather pathetic personality cult that they attempted to build up around Brezhnev.
Russian culture is very superstitious _today_ (astrological forecasts are broadcast along with the morning news). I can imagine what it was like several decades ago, before widespead education... At one point the Bolsheviks organized a modern art exhibition in Moscow and brought in peasants from the countryside to get a look at Malevich, etc. The peasants thought they were seeing the work of Satan (literally). I suspect that the Bolsheviks never really understood the peasantry very well...
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