Russia unveiled several new signs this spring of Joseph Stalin’s re-incorporation into the country’s collective memory. Yet the same period saw Kazakhstan, Russia’s neighbor to the south, take a different tack. The two societies, both components of the Soviet Union for most of the 20^th century, are now on different trajectories in terms of state-sanctioned historical memory. 

Amid festivities surrounding the May 9 World War 2 Victory Day holiday, Russian officials worked to place Joseph Stalin back into Russian public consciousness.  In late April, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree changing the name of Volgograd’s Airport to Stalingrad Airport. This year’s Victory Day celebrations were replete with imagery evocative of Stalin’s rule, including 1940s-era Soviet military uniforms and flags in Moscow.  A new bust of Stalin was also unveiled in the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol where local memories of the former Soviet leader’s rule include the millions of Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor famine and the mass deportations and purges, as well as the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture. In late May, Russian officials displayed a newly built monument to Stalin in Moscow’s metro. 

This kind of cultural re-Stalinization is not an entirely new phenomenon. Local busts and statues of Stalin have popped up throughout the Russian federation for years, oftentimes financed by local communities who want the image of a strong war-time leader to take up public space. The city of Vologograd – once Stalingrad – now annually re-adopts its Stalin-era name temporarily for public holidays, including May 9, with some political elites now advocating for the change to be made permanent. As Russia has become more authoritarian, militaristic, and expansionist, so too has Stalin re-entered the cannon of official state-memory. In 2024, Russian officials rescinded the 1990s-era legal exonerations of the victims of Stalin’s repressions. 

In Kazakhstan, however, there is a different story. The sole monument to Stalin was torn down in 2015, after its locally financed refurbishment attracted anger from other residents who saw the dictator as a colonial tyrant. The celebration of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany remains a major public event, but it is controlled by state authorities, who have worked in the past to limit Soviet-nostalgic or Russian-chauvinist imagery.

Instead, Kazakhstan marks an additional holiday on May 31, the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repressions and Famine, commemorating those who suffered under Soviet-era purges and the Kazakhs who starved to death during a Soviet-imposed mass famine in the early 1930s. This past May 31, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev delivered a speech from a former Gulag prison, now converted into a memorial site, in which he stated that, "There can be no justification for the inhumane and fundamentally flawed state policies of that period. We must never allow such tragedies to repeat themselves.” 

Over 1.5 million Kazakhs died in the early 1930s as Bolshevik efforts to destroy the traditional nomadic Kazakh way of life and build a new economy around collectivized agriculture triggered famine across Soviet Kazakhstan. As a percentage of the population, this famine killed more than the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, now broadly memorialized in Ukraine as an intentional genocide. In addition, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan hosted 11 Gulag prison camps and was a major destination for politically or ethnically motivated deportations during Stalin’s reign.

Since independence, Kazakhstan’s authorities have had a complicated relationship with Stalin and the ways in which his brutality scarred the country’s society. While a 1992 government commission declared the Stalin-era famine as a genocide, discussions about the mass hunger of the early 1930s have rarely been done openly by political elites, with Kazakh authorities likely wary of tensions such open discussion could trigger with Russia or within Kazakhstan’s multi-ethnic society. A monument to the famine was not erected until 2012, and textbooks in Kazakhstan regularly gloss over or downplay the starvation. Within those few official discussions of the famine that do exist, blame is rarely explicitly leveled at Stalin or Moscow. Pro-Stalin attitudes have remained notably high, with 42% of Kazakh respondents reporting a positive view in a 2018 poll.

At the same time, Kazakhstan has seen subtle, but notable, efforts at restricting Stalinist or Soviet nostalgia in recent years. Tokayev’s recent speech at the Gulag-turned-museum speaks to this, but this year Almaty also banned “Immortal Regiment” style marches on May 9, a style of commemoration that incorporates Soviet and pro-Russian imagery. Official Kazakh government websites refer to “Stalinist terror” and Tokayev spoke out against Soviet monuments in 2023, saying that they include “those who were directly involved in mass repressions.” 

Culturally as well, post-colonial interpretations of Kazakhstan’s history have grown in recent years, a narrative that often underscores Russian or Soviet crimes against Kazakhstan. In 2021, the first-ever major film on the 1930s famine was released, The Crying Steppe, which dramatizes and even over-estimates deaths of the period. Kazakhstan's opposition has increasingly taken on the issue of famine commemoration and anti-Russian attitudes writ large, accusing the Tokayev regime of acquiescing to Russian-pressure.

Stalin’s comeback in Russia is not being replicated in Kazakhstan. While it would not be appropriate to describe Kazakhstan going through the same kind of de-Sovietization which has taken place in Ukraine in the last decade, it is nevertheless on a different path from Russia’s rehabilitation of the Soviet leader. The coming years will determine the extent to which Kazakhstan embraces a more confrontational, post-colonial interpretation of its past or mostly maintains the balancing act with Russia it has largely carried out since independence.