Joseph Stalin came within a whisker of being voted the greatest Russian of all time yesterday in a marathon television contest that reached a dramatic climax after a six-month build-up.

The winner of the competition — modelled broadly on the BBC’s Great Britons series in 2002 which was won by Winston Churchill – was Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-century prince who defeated German invaders and was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Grand Prince Nevsky garnered 524,575 votes, fewer than 1,000 ahead of Peter Stolypin, Tsar Nicholas II’s authoritarian Prime Minister, and 5,500 in front of Stalin.

The vote, which some commentators claimed had been rigged, went down to the wire, with presenters counting down the final seconds as viewers of the state-owned Rossiya channel voted by text message during the last programme. Among the other 11 finalists were the poet Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Lenin and Tsar Alexander II, who abolished serfdom.

The vote comes after a concerted campaign in Russia to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator, who has been lauded in recent times on state television for his role as a victorious leader in the Second World War while school history books have softened their criticism of his repressions. A factor in Stalin falling behind other contenders could have been his Georgian roots, as anti-Georgian sentiment in Russia reached new heights this summer after the brief war in the former Soviet republic.

The Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, has avoided direct comments rehabilitating Stalin, but state media have played down the deaths of millions of Russians under his rule, insisting it was unavoidable given the circumstances of rapid industrialisation and the threat of foreign invasions.

Under Mr Putin, authorities have cracked down on human rights groups that have tracked Stalin’s repressions. Earlier this month the St Petersburg offices of the Memorial group were raided and computer hard drives were confiscated. They contained 20 years’ work documenting victims of Stalin’s Terror and political persecution.

But although a win for Stalin would have provided a rationale for present-day crackdowns on political opposition, it would also have sent out a dangerous signal at a time of economic crisis, analysts said.

Before the final vote Sergei Markov, a member of parliament for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, said a win for Stalin would be viewed by the country’s ruling class as an anti-establishment vote. “The most important issue for Russia’s ruling class, and the heads of the TV channel, is that they don’t want Stalin to win, because that would give the impression of authoritarianism,” Mr Markov said.

Vladimir Pribylovsky, a political analyst with the Panorama think-tank, went farther, questioning the result. Stalin’s narrow defeat clearly understated the real support for him in society, he claimed.

“The vote was an absolute falsification,” Mr Pribylovsky said. “Stalin, Lenin and Peter I: these are the most important figures in Russian history. Thirty to 40 per cent of Russians would support Stalin.”

Neither Mr Putin nor President Medvedev has openly declared support for any of the contenders, but a close friend of Mr Putin’s, the Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov, delivered the closing argument for Stolypin on Saturday, giving a strong hint that he enjoyed Mr Putin’s backing. “Putin’s preferred figure is Stolypin,” Mr Markov said, but added that Mr Putin could not openly support any candidate, in case he lost.

Stolypin, a conservative politician who opposed liberal reforms and cracked down hard on the Bolsheviks, was assassinated by a socialist revolutionary in a Kiev theatre in 1912.

Some 50 million votes were cast on-line and by text message from all parts of the former Soviet Union, except Georgia. In the competition’s early stages in the summer, Stalin was the clear leader, but was closely followed by Nicholas II, whom the organisers admitted plugging to make the contest more interesting.

The result reflected “the big role of the state in all periods” of Russian history, Mr Markov said, adding: “A lot depends on who is the leader.”

Mark Urnov, the dean of political studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, said the closeness of the outcome looked “really strange, yet it reflected the state of our public mind”. The vote supports two myths that Russians buy into, he said. “One is a great Tsarist Russia, and the other is a great Soviet Russia under Stalin.

“This vote is the result of eight years of brainwashing by the mass media,” Mr Urnov said. “This vote for authoritarianism would never have happened eight years ago.”

Vote winners

1 Alexander Nevsky 524,575
2 Peter Stolypin 523,766
3 Joseph Stalin 519,071
4 Alexander Pushkin 516,608
5 Tsar Peter the Great 448,857
6 Vladimir Lenin 424,283

Stalin's achievements

- Stalin defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad in 1943, sweeping them out of Eastern Europe well before the Allies’ D-Day breakthrough

- He cemented the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower, gaining a permanent seat on the UN Security Council

- Stalin’s agricultural collectivisation alone led to the deaths of 14.5 million people

- His Great Purge, which ran from 1936 to 1939, led to the deaths of 600,000 people

- Of these, 81 out of the 103 generals and admirals in the armed forces were executed

- About 20 million people were sent to penal camps during his time in power

Source: Times archive

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