Here's Why These Russians Are Carrying Big Portraits Of Joseph Stalin Today

It's May Day, so leftists and laborers are protesting all around the world.

One noteworthy feature of the marches is the posters of former dictator Joseph Stalin being carried around in Russia.

Stalin died 60 years ago after a three-decade rule during which more than 6 million innocent people died, many in the Gulag network of labor camps.

Russians are largely ambivalent about the Kremlin Highlander, but many believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin has fueled a Stalin resurgence since he rose to power in 2000.

"Putin's spin doctors did not deny that Stalin's regime had conducted mass arrests and executions but tried to minimize these events ... while emphasizing as far as possible the merits of Stalin as a military commander and statesman who had modernized the country and turned it into one of the world's two superpowers," Lev Gudkov, director of independent Levada Center polling group, wrote in a March report.

According to Reuters, Gudkov conducted a poll last year revealing that while more than two-thirds of Russians agreed with the statement that "Stalin was a cruel, inhuman tyrant, responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people," 47 percent of respondents said Stalin was "a wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity."'

In February Gudkov conducted a poll in which 49 percent said Stalin played a positive role, while 32 percent said it was negative — roughly the opposite of a 1994 Survey.

Here what the Mig Greengard, an assistant to Chess master and political activist Garry Kasparov, told us about the phenomenon: