Russia marks 60th anniversary of Stalin's death

          
About 1,000 devotees of Josef Stalin laid flowers Tuesday at his tomb near the Kremlin wall to mark the 60th anniversary of his death, while experts and politicians pondered the reasons for the Soviet dictator's enduring popularity despite his purges that killed millions.
    
Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov led zealots who lined at to Stalin's tomb, praising him as a symbol of the nation's "great victories" and saying that Russia needs to rely on this "unique experience" to overcome its problems.
     
Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Communists and other hardliners credit him with leading the country to victory in World War II and turning it into a nuclear superpower, while critics condemn his repressions. Historians estimate that more than 800,000 people were executed during the purges that peaked during the Great Terror in the late 1930s, and millions more died of harsh labor and cruel treatment in the giant Gulag prison camp system.
     
Liberal Moskovskie Novosti's Tuesday cover featured "Stalin. Farewell" with the dictator's face scribbled over with childish graffiti. Staunch Communist daily Sovetskaya Rossiya ran a cover story on Stalin headlined "His time will come."
     
An opinion survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment found Stalin has remained widely admired in Russia and other ex-Soviet nations despite his repressions. Its authors noted that public attitudes to the dictator have improved during Russian President Vladimir Putin's 13-year rule as the Kremlin has found Stalin's image useful in its efforts to tighten control.
     
Opposition politicians have criticized the government for failing to clearly condemn Stalin's crimes.
     
In 1989, at the peak of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to liberalize the country and expose Stalinist crimes, only 12 percent of Russians polled described Stalin as one of the most prominent historical figures, while in the Carnegie poll last year, 42 percent of Russian respondents did so.
     
The poll revealed that the dictator also has continued to enjoy wide popularity in his native Georgia, where 45 percent of respondents expressed a positive view of him. Efforts to shed the nation's Soviet legacy by Georgia's pro-Western President Mikhail Saakashvili have failed to change public perceptions of Stalin.
     
Georgian communists, who flocked to Stalin's hometown of Gori for the anniversary, hope that the government of Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose bloc defeated Saakashvili's party in parliamentary elections last fall, will restore the Stalin monument torn down on Saakashvili's orders.
 
         
AP