GRIFFITHS: Fast cars, cash and casinos – modern Russia doesn’t look like a nation struggling with the ghosts of its communist past. This is a society where money rules, which makes it all the more bizarre to discover that having discarded the dreams of a worker’s paradise years ago, Russians are still deeply divided over the legacy of Joseph Stalin.

ALEXEI SIDOROV: For me he’s the figure who played the greatest role in the 20th century. A figure for which he undoubtedly should be highly praised.

JOE GLAZER: Stalin to my opinion, and I keep quiet about it, shouldn’t be remembered at all. Not a word.

GRIFFITHS: Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years. Under his reign millions perished, executed by the secret police, killed in famines or sent to die in labour camps. Yet Comrade Stalin was also head of the Red Army when it defeated the Nazis.

Nowadays there is fresh interest in Stalin. You can buy DVDs and plenty of new released books about the man. In some of them he’s painted as a tyrant, in others as a hero, but this isn’t just an argument about history. It’s also about politics in Russia today.

Stalin has always had his diehard fans among older Russians who grew up when the world respected the power of the Soviet Union.

ELDERLY RUSSIAN LADY: He is the man who created our country. How can you not love him? I know that he was just, honest, and as you know when Stalin died we were all crying.

GRIFFITHS: The difference now is some of their grandchildren agree. Young Russians who were still kids when communism collapsed, like Alexei Sidorov.

ALEXEI SIDOROV: There is still a demand for the man who ruled the very first State where the working people received the right to run the country.

GRIFFITHS: For his admirers, Stalin is above all the successful war leader. He led the country to victory in the great patriotic war, World War II and claims his place alongside the Red Army’s other heroes. To twenty-three year old Alexei Sidorov and his friends, Stalin is the ultimate leader.

ALEXEI SIDOROV: The most important thing is that he managed to unite the people in the hardest time – the time of war – and became the true people’s leader.

OLEG: Today’s Russian leaders must understand that if not for Stalin we might not have won the Great Patriotic War.

GRIFFITHS: For the first time in decades, new statues of Stalin are going up and that’s angered as many Russians as it’s pleased. Marking time at the back of a Moscow art gallery is one depicting Stalin’s meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt near the end of the war. Sculptor Zurab Tsereteli is trying to find a home for his new masterpiece. It’s been rejected by two cities and he can’t understand why his little piece of history is so controversial.

ZURAB TSERETELI: If I wanted to do it without Stalin then I would have left his place empty and called it “Waiting for Stalin”. How could it be otherwise? Fact if fact.

GRIFFITHS: His own grandfather was shot in one of Stalin’s purges in 1937. Zurab Tsereteli says it’s about time Russians accepted their history.

ZURAB TSERETELI: There was a time when no-one dare mention Napoleon’s name. Now you cannot live without Napoleon. I always drink Napoleon Cognac. It’s fantastic.

GRIFFITHS: Boris Yefimov remembers Stalin very well. He’s one hundred and four and was Stalin’s cartoonist of choice, a satirist who lampooned the great man’s enemies. He didn’t dare draw his boss at the time but he clearly recalls his image and personality.

BORIS YEFIMOV: He had traits of a despot, the traits of a dictator. At the same time, he could behave like an ordinary man.

GRIFFITHS: But Boris Yefimov mostly remembers fear, especially the day he got a phone call from the man himself.

BORIS YEFIMOV: I stood up holding the receiver. Then there was hmmm… hmmm… and then … Yesterday Comrade Zhdanov spoke with you about a satirical cartoon. You understand what I’m talking about? I say yes, I understand Comrade Stalin.

GRIFFITHS: Yefimov survived the conversation to draw thousands of cartoons for Stalin. Other artists and intellectuals were sent to the gulags or shot, including his own brother.

BORIS YEFIMOV: I cannot but appreciate that Stalin spared me, since as a rule, brothers, wives and parents of the arrested people were also repressed.

GRIFFITHS: Most people here have a tale to tell about the repressions. In a small town just outside Moscow lives an ordinary man with an extraordinary story. This is Joe Glazer as a sixteen year old in 1932, the year his idealistic communist father decided to make the fateful voyage from South Africa to the Soviet Union.

JOE GLAZER: He decided to come out to this country because he got wind of Stalin wanting to bring engineers to help them develop their country.

GRIFFITHS: Within a few years his father was arrested. To this day he doesn’t know exactly what happened to him. In 1949 it was Joe Glazer’s turn.

JOE GLAZER: I didn’t believe it at first that people were being arrested and only when I was arrested myself did I believe that people are being arrested. Those years you daren’t speak anything against the Soviet Union.

GRIFFITHS: You were released?

JOE GLAZER: Yeah.

GRIFFITHS: Nearly fifty years after his release from the Karaganda labour camp, Joe Glazer still carries the scars of Stalin’s reign of terror.

JOE GLAZER: Even now you know I think twice before speaking with people whom I don’t know about my life in Karaganda.

GRIFFITHS: Even now?

JOE GLAZER: Even now. Scared stiff. Yeah.

GRIFFITHS: There are people today who seem to think that Russia could use a leader like Stalin. What do you think of that?

JOE GLAZER: What do I think of it? Fools. That’s all.

GRIFFITHS: There are those who are trying to preserve the memory of Stalin’s victims. Human rights group Memorial is still helping people find out what happened to loved ones half a century after Stalin died and in their museum are reminders of just how powerful the climate of fear was at the time. A lot of victims refused to believe that Stalin was to blame.

GRIGORY SHVEDOV: Well is also good symbol of Stalin which was a special photo album of main leaders of Soviet Union.

GRIFFITHS: And who would have owned that?

GRIGORY SHVEDOV: Well we don’t know personally but that was really a popular thing that even in Gulag, people were believing that this is a mistake, Stalin is a hero, they’re innocent and this is just a tragic mistake.

GRIFFITHS: File upon file of tragic mistakes. Official soviet records show more than six hundred thousand executions and nearly three million sent to camps. Many believe the real numbers are much higher.

GRIGORY SHVEDOV: People don’t want to remember these dark things. People don’t want to remember millions of deaths. People don’t want to remember a country which became a huge concentration camp.

GRIFFITHS: That’s certainly not the same Stalin Alexei Sidorov knows and loves. He says Stalin’s opponents exaggerate the figures.

ALEXEI SIDOROV: First of all, we have to look through the archives, the statistics, and not invent figures which are offered liberally by amateurs which belong in the Guinness Book of Records.

GRIFFITHS: Along with this passionate argument about the two Stalin’s, is another related debate about the man who currently occupies the Kremlin. This nostalgia for the past has produced an odd argument about the Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has plenty of critics who say he’s too authoritarian, a modern day Stalin with too much power but at the other extreme are the Stalin admirers who say Putin is too weak and that he’ll never measure up to the Soviet dictator.

It’s true that Vladimir Putin has cracked down on the media and some big businesses. He’s also encouraged Russians to love their country, a call to patriotism often based on the Red Army’s victory.

GRIGORY SHVEDOV: People need a hero and the Russian Government, Government of Putin want to have Stalin like a symbol of hero, a symbol of a person who won the war, not Russian people but Stalin.

GRIFFITHS: For young Russians like Alexei Sidorov who grew up in the lawless 90s when there seemed to be no rules anywhere, Putin is no match for the ruthless grandmaster.

ALEXEI SIDOROV: If comparing them seriously it really is a comparison between the Lilliputian and the giant – and very often the opposition press brands him as Lilli-Putin.

GRIFFITHS: Human rights group Memorial believes it’s already lost this battle over history.

GRIGORY SHVEDOV: Russian public consciousness is fully supportive to renaming streets with Stalin’s brand, renaming towns, naming their parks with Stalin and some other Soviet symbol names so I think this victory is already in the Kremlin.

GRIFFITHS: It seems strange to think that the way people remember Stalin can really shape politics in Russia today. Despite losing his brother in the purges, Boris Yefimov still argues that Russia needs a strongman in charge.

BORIS YEFIMOV: We need a person like Stalin, in the sense of his energy – a resolute man, but not so cruel. It should somehow be balanced. It’s not necessary to have those executions and prisons.

JOE GLAZER: Millions of people were put away and starved and killed and died in camps. It was just terrible and now people just want to have these statues put up once more again. For what reason? That he destroyed us all for no reason at all.

GRIFFITHS: As a young boy, Joe Glazer travelled to the Soviet Union full of hope, now as a Gulag survivor he thinks that rehabilitating Stalin is madness. For this witness to history at least, the past would be better left where it belongs.