Kadyrov finds way to free Russia of ‘Stalin’s spirit’

“As for Stalin’s remains, we should express our goodwill and hand them over to Georgia so that he can be buried in his home country. Georgia was a part of the Soviet Union that Stalin headed, and it would be logical and just if Georgia gets an opportunity to bury him. And millions of Russian residents would breathe freely knowing that Stalin’s spirit has left Russia,” Ramzan Kadyrov said in an interview with Interfax.

The Chechen leader also reiterated his position that Vladimir Lenin’s body should be taken out of its Red Square Mausoleum and buried. He added that this is just his personal opinion and he was not seeking to insult anyone’s feelings.

In the same interview, Kadyrov noted that he would consider it fair if Russian authorities decided to honor the memory of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev by installing a monument or by giving his name to some site of national importance.

“It is possible that Khrushchev has had some negative pages in his biography – I have never got any interest in this. Some people told me that his memory should not be honored in Chechnya … I strongly disagree with this. He has made a tremendous contribution to the restoration of justice in regard of the Chechen and Ingush peoples,” he said.

“I personally am confident that Russia must remember Khrushchev’s name and in some form on the federal level it must make a decision to erect a monument to him or to give his name to some site that is of national importance,” Kadyrov told reporters.

Over 500,000 ethnic Chechens and Ingush were forcefully resettled from their native lands in the Caucasus Mountains to the Soviet republics of Central Asia in 1944. In 1957, the order of resettlement was canceled by Khrushchev as part of the general reversal of Stalin’s harsh policies, known as the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’. By 1961, most of the resettled people had returned to the Caucasus.