RUSSIA: On the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death, some Russians say an edited version of Stalinism still reigns, writes Dan McLaughlin in Moscow
A lace collar peeks from the woman's simple black dress and shawl. Her white hair is scraped back into a bun, she grips a handkerchief in a yellowing hand, and dabs tears from her pale blue eyes as Georgi Malenkov takes to the dais above Red Square.
"We must say farewell to our teacher and leader," says the solemn Soviet official. "The greatest genius of mankind, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin." The old woman sways, crying, shaking her head. She doesn't even blink when two teenagers walk in front of the screen she is watching and discuss where to go shopping after they leave the museum in central Moscow. They barely glance at the archive footage of Malenkov, of millions of mourning Russians trudging through the city, of steam trains wailing smoke and grief up through the rafters of a station.
"No one was forced to go, and most people really felt part of a national sorrow," said Mr Sergei Kovalyov, remembering the funeral of Stalin, who died 50 years ago today. "But I wasn't one of them. Nor were the hundreds of thousands in the gulag - they were all glad he was dead."
Mr Kovalyov, a dissident comrade of Andrei Sakharov and survivor of the Soviet labour camps, welcomes the flurry of exhibitions, articles and documentaries marking the anniversary of Stalin's demise.
But as Russians study their blood-dark past, he says, they are ignoring the baleful shadow that Stalin still casts over their country, and across the Kremlin of President Vladimir Putin.
"It's not that Putin's a Stalinist, or that he's about to reintroduce prison camps or direct censorship. That would be too simplistic," Mr Kovalyov told The Irish Times this week. "But there is a less direct, more subtle and, therefore, extremely dangerous influence of Stalinism on Putin's drive towards what he calls 'guided democracy'.
"The most obvious aspect of it is a striving to control every aspect of political and social activity. Stalin controlled absolutely everything, and he did it in a very brutal way because that was possible back then. The Kremlin is bright enough to know that it's impossible to recreate the gulags or reintroduce direct political censorship - but it is also bright enough to know that it doesn't have to."
Mr Kovalyov (73) points to the closure over the last two years of several independent television channels and newspapers as a mark of Mr Putin's determination to control the media and its message, and of the Kremlin's willingness to exploit the fear that Stalin instilled in Russians, and which still afflicts them today. "We have not all forgotten a time when we knew what was possible to say and what was not, so there is no need for any media censor - the internal censor is stronger than it could ever be. What is important is that the journalist knows the line and not to cross it. And it is clear that most of our journalists know these things."
The owlish, bespectacled Mr Kovalyov fell under Soviet suspicion in the late 1960s, when he collected information about human rights abuses. He was sentenced to seven years in a prison camp and three years of internal exile in 1974 for distributing "anti-Soviet propaganda".
As perestroika swept the Soviet Union in 1989, his close friend Mr Sakharov asked him to run for parliament, where he still holds a seat and where his strong views see him variously reviled as a traitor and hailed as "Russia's conscience". Speaking from hospital, where a bad heart now regularly forces him to seek treatment, he says Stalin exploited and reinforced the darkest aspects of the Russian psyche.
"For a long time before Stalin, hypocrisy, suspicion, slavishness, deceit, xenophobia, all ruled over our country and his mass purges and repression simply underlined these parts of our national identity.
"The Stalin epoch meant fear of everyone and of every little thing. It meant living a double life, it meant double-think, as Orwell explained so well. Every Soviet citizen could contradict himself internally, to think one thing but say and do another.
"All the things we went through under Stalin - the purges, the gulag, collectivisation, famine - all hit at the same spot. They caused fear, and made people believe that no one could be trusted. Such traits afflict us still." But Mr Kovalyov feels less vitriolic towards the white-haired men and women who will weep today over Stalin's death, than towards Mr Putin, who has restored to Russia the Stalin-era national anthem and symbols, and who pursues a brutal war in Chechnya that Mr Kovalyov says the Kremlin reignited in 1999 to help him get elected.
"It is not the pensioners but the Kremlin that is today's main vehicle for an edited version of Stalinism," he said.
Thinking back 50 years to a day that is now being replayed on a television screen at a Moscow museum, Mr Kovalyov says curiosity drew him to Stalin's funeral.
"We climbed onto the roof of a Moscow University building to see the procession. We watched these huge columns of people file past for a while, then I went up to the veterinary school to collect a Great Dane dog that my friend had been given to do tests on. He was too good for that, and I was going to take him home."
Mr Kovalyov says he met a group of friends on his way to collect the animal, and they asked him to go with them to join the funeral procession.
"I told them I was going to collect this dog, and there was a very tense silence," Mr Kovalyov said, laughing gently. "'What's up?' I said. 'Surely a live dog is better than a dead lion.'"