Tim Wall

A common argument about the legacy of Stalinism is that we should "let sleeping dogs lie", but the controversy has recently shown no sign of quieting down.

After the bizarre renaming of the Anti-Sovietskaya restaurant in northern Moscow, due to a World War II veterans' protest, and the subsequent hounding of liberal writer Alexander Podrabinek over his reaction, plus the restoration of pro-Stalin lyrics in the Moscow metro, Dmitry Medvedev felt compelled to make a stand on the issue. Yet while the president strongly condemned Josef Stalin's repression, beyond his words there remains little if any real accounting in society for the killing of millions of Soviet citizens during his purges.

There have, after all, been no Nuremberg-style trials, or even a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as was tried in South Africa after the end of Apartheid.

Even now, to find out what happened to the victims of Stalin's purges from the present-day Federal Security Service requires courage from relatives. Those who died, often "without any reason", deserve better than this.

Yet no psychological counselling for the victims of Stalinist repression is currently provided for, and the only help relatives are likely to get is from Memorial, an under-resourced NGO that faces more than occasional harassment for trying to unearth the truth about the past.

The political legacy of Stalinism still casts a huge shadow over the country, as was shown in the "Name of Russia" TV poll last year - where Stalin came in third, despite official distaste for his support. There is also a modern kind of echo in the yearning for a strong, authoritarian leadership - and the (comparatively modest) steps towards reviving a cult of personality.

One effect of this is to prevent any serious review of the country's powerful state security services, which remain largely unreformed, despite initial attempts in the early 1990s to hold them up to democratic scrutiny. Without any real examination of how Stalinist repression worked during his time in power and afterwards - under neo-Stalinists Krushchev, Brezhnev and even Gorbachev - it's easy to see how it's seen as "normal" today that many of the top posts in government and society are held by the siloviki.

The effects are felt in other areas too. The gulag system produced a distortion in the country's economy that persists to this day - witness the giant Norilsk Nickel enterprise, founded on slave labour. Even today, it's difficult for descendants of prisoners to leave such isolated places, due to the economic difficulties involved.

And the bureaucratic central planning, without any real democratic control by local people in their workplaces or communities, made the system highly inefficient. Given the choice, neither the capitalist free market nor democratic socialist planning would today build a giant car factory in the middle of the Eurasian landmass, rather than several smaller plants closer to transport hubs, the country's big cities or ports.

The biggest tragedy for Russia's future, however, may come from a failure to learn the historical lessons of how Stalin came to power, and why his policies were so disastrous.

Many Western historians since the Soviet collapse make no distinction between Stalin and his fellow Bolshevik leaders. Yet Stalin thought the differences between them big enough to have nearly all of them killed.

The ideas of the most principled of Stalin's critics, the Left Opposition, stood in complete contrast to those of Stalin: No forced collectivisation of agriculture, a democratic plan of production and internationalism, not the "Socialism in One Country" that eventually led to the isolation and complete stagnation of the economies of the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

While no one can say for certain what would have happened if other leaders had come to the fore instead of Stalin and the mediocrities that surrounded him, the idea that the Soviet Union would have degenerated into the grotesque police state it became by the mid-1930s under more principled leaders is preposterous.

A good part of the blame for the mass carnage in World War II can also be laid squarely at Stalin's door. His disastrous policy of ordering the German Communists to form alliances with the Nazi party in Germany (against the Socialists) allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933, while his massacre of the Soviet military command in 1937-38 and the subsequent pact with Hitler in 1939 left the Soviet people unprepared for the coming conflict.

Papering over such disastrous policies, and the repression used to enforce them, in the name of defending the Soviet people's sacrifices in World War II, is wrong. And to glorify or justify Stalinism today risks repeating the same mistakes - of bureaucracy and repression - all over again.