section_path: Legacy/In the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states
section_name: In the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states
paragraph_text: In the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states
  
  Shortly after his death, the Soviet Union went through a period of de-Stalinization. Malenkov denounced the Stalin personality cult, which was subsequently criticised in Pravda. In 1956, Khrushchev gave his "Secret Speech", titled " On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences ", to a closed session of the Party's 20th Congress. There, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for both his mass repression and his personality cult. He repeated these denunciations at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1962. In October 1961, Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, the location marked by a bust. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.
  
  Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation process ended when he was replaced as leader by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964; the latter introduced a level of re-Stalinisation within the Soviet Union. In 1969 and again in 1979, plans were proposed for a full rehabilitation of Stalin's legacy but on both occasions were halted due to fears of damaging the USSR's public image. Mikhail Gorbachev saw the total denunciation of Stalin as necessary for the regeneration of Soviet society. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin continued Gorbachev's denunciation of Stalin but added to it a denunciation of Lenin. His successor Vladimir Putin did not seek to rehabilitate Stalin but emphasised the celebration of Soviet achievements under Stalin's leadership rather than the Stalinist repressions. In October 2017, Putin opened the Wall of Grief memorial in Moscow, noting that the "terrible past" would neither be "justified by anything" nor "erased from the national memory". In a 2017 interview, Putin added that while "we should not forget the horrors of Stalinism", the excessive demonisation of Stalin "is a means to attack Soviet Union and Russia". In recent years, the government and general public of Russia has been accused of rehabilitating Stalin.
  
  In a 2021 poll, 70% of Russians indicated they had a mostly/very favourable view of Stalin.