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Stalin's Admirers Celebrate 125th Birthday NewsMax WiresTBILISI, Georgia -- Dozens of residents of Josef Stalin's hometown celebrated the 125th anniversary of his birth Tuesday, singing, dancing and drinking champagne toasts to the late Soviet dictator. People cried and kissed a 6-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Stalin and laid wreaths at the base of a monument in the small town of Gori, 50 miles west of the capital, Tbilisi, paying honor to the man who oversaw years of brutal purges and remarkable industrialization of an agricultural society. Story Continues Below "Not a few difficulties we lived through. We stood up to the Germans in the war. We built a great state," said Kote Kavtaradze, a 78-year-old World War II veteran, as others waved Soviet hammer-and-sickle flags nearby. "And what do we have now? I can't even feed myself on my pension." He said it was about $6 a month. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili came to the Gori celebration to mark the birthday of his grandfather -- whose real name was Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. "People remember how everything used to be. There was work," Dzhugashvili told reporters. Considered a brutal tyrant for political purges in which more than 10 million are believed to have died and for forced collectivization that wiped out the peasantry, Stalin continues to be admired in the former Soviet Union -- even by many non-Communists -- for leading the country to victory in World War II and pulling it into the industrial age. He died in 1953. In Russia, hundreds of people laid flowers and a wreath at granite bust of Stalin just off of Red Square, along the Kremlin's walls. "In the years after the war, Stalin managed to mobilize the economy and resurrected 1,700 towns, to rid the country of rationing and turn the country into nuclear power that for 50 years was a reliable shield," Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said. Boris Gryzlov, speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament, said Stalin should be remembered for his accomplishments. "As a leader of the country, Stalin did much," Gryzlov said. But "what I think to be his extremes in his domestic policy, they certainly did not do much for his image." Russia NTV television said a poll of 1,600 Russians taken by the respected Levada Center showed that only 31 percent consider Stalin to be a cruel tyrant, while 21 percent think he was a wise leader. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. The poll also found 16 percent thought that "our people will never be able to do without a leader like Stalin."
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