World: Stalin's Return

During his lifetime, statues and pictures of Joseph Stalin blossomed across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union and its satellites. But after his death in 1953, the old dictator's successors ruthlessly turned against him. In a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 denounced Stalin as an egomaniac who employed mass terror and torture. Stalin was then efficiently erased from public view, and the exterior vestiges of his rule—statues, pictures, street signs —came tumbling down. Only in his native Georgia did his statues and pictures remain in...