"The attempt once again to ascribe to Stalin, who not once was on the front, the main role in that victory is actually not extolling but denigrating the popular feat. Our great victory belongs to the people", poet and public figure, now professor at the university of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Yevtushenko said in the RIA Novosti interview.
The author of the well-known poem Stalin's Heirs, published after debunking the cult of Stalin personality in the mid-1950s, Yevtushenko sees as "historical illiteracy" the attempts at rehabilitating him in certain political circles.
"It is the triumph of historical illiteracy when, despite the mighty books of Solzhenitsyn and a huge number of irrefutable documents of Stalin's war on his own people, our self-proclaimed 'patriots' behave as if they are innocent of history", the poet said.
"Let those forces, who try to exonerate Stalin's crimes against own people, think, if they can, whether they are entitled to be called 'patriotic'", Yevtushenko noted.
"Our people defeated Nazism not thanks to Stalin but despite his crimes committed before the war, his lack of preparation and resolve in the beginning of the war", Yevtushenko believes.
