Campaigners hope to restore destroyed Stalin monument

Описание: (19 Oct 2018) LEADIN
A full size monument to Stalin might soon appear in a small town in the middle of Russia.
Local activists are determined to restore it using fragments of the original found in a local pond.
STORYLINE
The watery resting place of Joseph Stalin's shattered statue, in the Russian town of Kusa.
But if one resident has his way, Kusa might once more have the monument to the former Soviet leader standing tall in public like it used to do 70 years ago.
Remains of the statue were found back in August as repair works to a local dam caused the water levels in the city's pond to shrink by three meters.
As a result, three fragments of the statue were found. It's thought they might have been in the water for some 50 years.
The statue's made of concrete, with some metal inside. It was originally painted white on the outside.
Stanislav Stafeev, from  "Essence of Time",  is keen to restore the statue to its former glory. The Essence of Time movement was founded in 2011. Its ideology is a mixture of Russian patriotism and communism.
The only missing part of the statue is Stalin's arm, but Stafeev believes it won't be a problem to restore it, as the rest of the parts are in good shape.
However, he's had to keep the statue under lock and key, worried that the local authorities might claim it.
"When all three parts were transferred to a private territory, local authorities began to claim them. In order to get them up, they invited the police department, invited the local newspaper "Life of the Region", started putting pressure on me through this newspaper, invited up deputies of the Regional Assembly, who began to express the opinion that I must pass these fragments to the city, that is, the confrontation began," he says.
The local authorities believe the Stalin statue belongs to the state, as Viktor Penyagin, Head of Kusa municipal region explains: "The citizen Stafeev took the initiative, I believe that he did it illegally, since everything that stood on the territory of the region, on the territory of the state, and there is a fact that it was put up by the state and belonged to the state before, although there are no documents on this, then later it should be used by the state too."
The statue is typical of the kind that that once stood in almost every Soviet city, during Stalin's reign of terror from 1924 until his death in 1953.
In 1956 Nikita Khruschev denounced the personality cult of Stalin, which led to the mass destruction of such statues.
Rostovtseva explains that most likely the Kusa monument was also destroyed under the cover of the night: "In the museum funds there are no documents confirming the dismantling, but presumably in the year between 1956 and 1958, when the monument was located at the shore in the city park, during night time the monument was dismantled and thrown into the city pond, into the ice hole."
The local authorities say they are now happy for the monument to be restored and possibly returned to the city park, where it would have originally stood.
It's a move that some locals aren't happy about.
Yevgeny Zubov, says "I am telling you straight away that my view is very negative about it, let it lie about there, and don't you even pull it out (of the pond)."
While Lina Mityusheva, disagrees: "It's history, and it is not a bad history. Some say, well, older generation say that there was discipline, young generation, of course, think completely differently about it now. I think it's worth it, I am for the restoration."

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