“Do you think Stalin can be rehabilitated?” I asked an officer of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB) not long ago in Moscow. He looked at me with genuine astonishment and said, “No. That would be like rehabilitating Hitler.” This FSB officer is researching a book on the history of the Great Terror for Yale University Press for which he has privileged access to Presidential archives, KGB archives, and the so-called Personal Archive of Josef Stalin that has recently been transferred to the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. And yet wherever one looks, whether on boxes of chocolates to be found in Sheremetyevo Airport’s duty free shops, matchbook covers dedicated to “Political Placards of the [sic] Stalin’s Epoch,” the mastheads of nationalistic newspapers, the recent reversion to the name Stalingrad for the city of Volgograd, statues in the Park of Monuments in Moscow, in the endless stream of books published monthly to be found in all bookshops, the reintroduction of the old Soviet national anthem, or the textbook of Soviet history approved by Vladimir Putin, it is clear that Josef Stalin, though removed from the Lenin mausoleum, is returning to the central place in the Russian national consciousness.

Had he ever really left? Perhaps the question is not posed correctly, for the image of Stalin, while synonymous with cruelty beyond human understanding, is also synonymous with great power—a power both feared and revered, hated