WWII Commemoration and Stalin in North and South Ossetia11 min read
In recent years, much media coverage on Russian society has focused on the “revival” of Stalin’s cult of personality, particularly the proliferation of new Stalin monuments and the intensified use of WWII symbolism in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While these developments are real and significant, they risk obscuring the fact that in some ethnically non-Russian regions, Stalin’s cult of personality was not only revived but had already reached unprecedented levels well before the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, especially through the medium of the commemoration of the Soviet Victory in WWII. Amongst the Iranic-speaking Ossetians in the Republic of North Ossetia within the Russian Federation and the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia (also known as Samachablo and the Tskhinval/i Region) within the internationally recognized borders of Georgia, Soviet WWII victory narratives have, for over a decade, served as the principal legitimating framework through which Stalin’s image has been normalized, promoted, and subsequently integrated into officialized conceptions of the Ossetian national identity.
Stalin-related toponymic practice is an illustrative example. In early February 2026, on the 83rd anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, road signs in the Russian city of Volgograd were altered to display the name “Stalingrad.” Analogous developments had begun much earlier among the Ossetians in the Caucasus. As early as 2020, the de facto authorities of South Ossetia formally “reverted” the name of their capital, Tskhinval(i), to Stalinir(i) during Victory Day commemorations, despite the fact that WWII never reached this region and that Stalinir(i) was the city’s official name for only twenty-five years. This annual toponymic transformation, carried out under official auspices, marked a clear escalation from tacit permittance of Stalinist imagery to active institutional endorsement.
The scale of Stalin’s monumental presence in North and South Ossetia may best be appreciated statistically. Immediately before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were 73 documented Stalin monuments (including statues and busts) across the Russian Federation. Of these, 24 – approximately one third – were located in North Ossetia alone, a republic that accounted for only 0.466% of Russia’s total population according to the 2021 census (ethnic Ossetians across Russia comprised roughly 0.35% of the national population). Nevertheless, North Ossetia alone hosted nearly 33% of all Stalin monuments before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In per-capita terms, this amounted to approximately one Stalin statue per 28,000 residents in North Ossetia, compared to roughly one statue per three million people across Russia as a whole. Since February 2022, two additional Stalin monuments have been erected in North Ossetia, bringing the total to 26.
South Ossetia presents an even more striking picture. With a population between 35,000 (estimated) and 57,000 (official), approximately 90% of whom identify as ethnic Ossetians, South Ossetia is currently home to at least six Stalin statues. This yields a per-capita density roughly 300-400 times higher than the Russian average.
It is worth noting that not all of these monuments were erected by local authorities. In both North and South Ossetia, particularly in the mid-2010s, numerous Stalin statues were installed through private initiatives. At the turn of the 2020s, nonetheless, the promotion of Stalin’s cult of personality began receiving official endorsement in South Ossetia, as the de facto local authorities began not only unveiling new statues but also integrating Stalin’s name and image directly into state-sponsored WWII commemorations and unveiling Stalin monuments in state-owned compounds.
These developments marked the officialization of the long-standing popular belief in Stalin’s Ossetian lineage. Unsubstantiated and even absurd as it might be, this notion was not a recent invention. Owing to centuries of cultural entanglement between Georgians and Ossetians, evident in language, literature, religious traditions, and naming practices, many common Ossetian surnames derive from Georgian words. One such surname, Dzugaty (russified as Dzugaev), has long been popularly considered the Ossetian equivalent to Stalin’s birth name, Jughashvili (the root of this surname is widely believed to be an archaic Georgian word meaning “steel,” although some etymologists have objected this notion in recent years; the Ossetian word dzug, which forms the root of the surname Dzugaty, means “herd” or “flock”; another common Ossetian surname, Dzukaty, has also been frequently invoked in Ossetian discourse about Stalin’s origins). Stalin’s great-grandfather, Zaza Jughashvili, was reportedly born in a village now located within the de facto borders of South Ossetia, although there is no credible evidence that he was ethnically Ossetian.
In recent years, the myth about Stalin’s Ossetian genesis has continued to mutate. Around 2023-2025, some South Ossetian local narratives began to associate Stalin’s alleged Ossetian ancestry with a sacred geography centered on the villages Geri (Dzher) and Jomaga (Dzomag). One recently disseminated account connects the young Soso’s survival from smallpox to Geri’s St. George Church (ts’minda giorgis eklesia/Uastyrdzhy dzuar), a medieval shrine associated with St. George in Georgian Orthodox traditions and its Ossetian reincarnation Uastyrdzhy. Stalin’s parents, Beso (Besarion) and Keke (Ketevan), were said to have brought their sick child and a sacrificial lamb to the sanctuary, where they entrusted him to the saint’s protection. In a 2024 interview, the Tskhinval/i-based philosophy professor and politician Dzugaty Qosta (Kosta Dzugaev) claimed that Stalin’s grandfather, Ivane Jughashvili (Dzugaty Iuane), had lived near Geri after moving from Jomaga, and even proposed commemorating the site with a banner on the road to the shrine to honor Stalin’s apocryphal connection to the village.
Stalin himself, who grew up in the city of Gori in the Georgian region of Shida Kartli, which has historically been home to a sizable Ossetian population, never self-identified as Ossetian or manifested any affinity with Ossetian culture. Even in the later stages of his life as the leader of the Soviet Union, notwithstanding his fervent espousal of Marxist-Leninist internationalism, he continued to identify strongly with Georgian culture, including the Georgian language, cuisine, wines, and literary canons, most notably the epic poem Vepkhist’q’aosani (The Knight in the Panther’s Skin), by the medieval poet Shota Rustaveli. Between his consolidation of power in the late 1920s and his demise in 1953, Stalin publicly performed Georgian polyphonic singing and frequently vacationed at various dachas across Soviet Georgia.
In the Soviet period, unofficial associations of Stalin with the Ossetians often functioned as mockery. The anti-Stalinist writer Anatolii Rybakov in his 1987 novel Children of the Arbat invoked Stalin’s purportedly Ossetian heritage. This characterization corresponded with the popular identification of Georgians as an ancient and cultured nation and the stigmatization of the Ossetians as backward and uncivilized. Well into the post-Soviet period, and especially in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, it was not uncommon to find in Ossetian online forums accusations against Stalin, framed explicitly as an ethnic Georgian, of giving South Ossetia to Georgia in the early 1920s.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the onset of the proxy war against Ukraine, the Kremlin markedly intensified the promotion of the Soviet victory in WWII as a national and neo-imperial myth. Post-Soviet socioeconomic instability had already fostered a considerable nostalgia for a strong centralized state, which Stalin had long symbolized in the public imagination across the Caucasus. State-sponsored WWII commemoration now permitted the elevation of Stalin’s image to a new pedestal, which recast him as the benefactor of the Soviet victory against Nazism. In the Ossetian context, Stalin’s mythologized role in the Soviet victory became the central justificatory framework for the rehabilitation and affirmation of claims of Ossetian kinship.
In South Ossetia, as official endorsement of Stalin’s cult of personality began around 2020, the belief in his Ossetian heritage shifted from grassroots lore into mainstream discourse. Stalin’s crimes were increasingly eclipsed or explicitly justified by arguments emphasizing his role in securing Soviet victory in WWII. In North Ossetia, where antagonism toward Georgians is less entrenched, official endorsement of the Stalin cult escalated later but no less saliently. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, North Ossetian authorities have not only participated in officially sanctioned unveilings of new Stalin monuments – often in the presence of officials, schoolchildren, and public institutions – but also eagerly entrenched claims of Stalin’s Ossetian origin through state-controlled research laboratories invoking DNA records. Stalin’s birthday likewise became an occasion for public celebration organized by local Communists at sites commemorating WWII veterans. In 2024, a newly unveiled bust in North Ossetia bore the inscription “To Dzugaty Soso from [his] grateful descendants” (an obvious genealogical falsehood).
The officially endorsed entrenchment of the Stalin cult, nonetheless, has not gone uncontested among Ossetians. In 2024, an Ossetian student was expelled from a prestigious Moscow university after denouncing Stalin’s crimes in an argument with an ethnic Russian professor, which the student further escalated on social media following his expulsion. In South Ossetia, several newly erected Stalin statues have repeatedly been vandalized and subsequently restored. In October 2025, a North Ossetian Instagram page with nearly 200 thousand followers (nearly one third of the republic’s total population) publicly challenged the claim of Stalin’s Ossetian identity, noting that Stalin himself did not appear to have considered himself Ossetian, that his father did not speak Ossetian, and that Stalin did not associate himself with the Ossetians in a private remark made during WWII. Citing Red Army general Ivan Tyulenev’s memoir of a meeting with Stalin during the 1942-44 Battle of the Caucasus, the post emphasized Stalin’s remark that he “knew the Ossetians well” as a proud people capable of defending the homeland, a formulation that praised Ossetians while separating them from Stalin’s self-identification.
Before Stalin’s image came to dominate Ossetian WWII commemoration, local memory practices in North Ossetia prominently centered on Issa Pliev, a Soviet general of Ossetian origin whom the Soviet press often compared to the mythological narts (giants endowed with supernatural powers with roots in pagan and Christian traditions) from Ossetian folklore. In honor of his role as a cavalry commander, a statue of Pliev mounted on a galloping horse continues to dominate the skyline in the center of Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia. The subsequent rise of Stalin in the Ossetian memorial landscape did not merely supplement this model but eclipse it, transforming the discourse on the Ossetians’ role in the Soviet WWII victory from an auxiliary to a central and decisive one.
Such eagerness to revise Stalin’s ethno-genealogical origins may have stemmed from the Ossetians’ contentious relations with their Vaynakh neighbors in the North Caucasus and Georgian neighbors on the other side of the mountain range. Unlike in neighbouring Ingushetia and Chechnya, where popular memories of WWII are shaped by the tragic deportation of these regions’ titular populations in 1944, WWII commemoration in North Ossetia largely converges with the official Kremlin talking points, which unambiguously establishes a nexus between the Soviet Red Army’s contribution to the victory over fascism and Putin’s Russia’s purported righteousness in waging wars against adversaries arbitrarily labeled as fascists and Nazis. By highlighting the valor of Ossetian servicepeople, particularly in the battles fought for the defense of the city of Vladikavkaz, the authorities and activists of North Ossetia aim to reaffirm not only the region’s loyalty to Moscow but also North Ossetia’s dominion of Vladikavkaz and the surrounding region. Before WWII, the city of Vladikavkaz briefly served as the capital of both the Ossetian and the Ingush ethno-national territorial entities in the North Caucasus. The eastern half of the Prigorodny District, which had been home to an Ingush-majority population, was allocated by Soviet authorities to North Ossetia following the deportation of the Ingush. More than three decades after the Kremlin-backed Ossetian victory over Ingushetia in a brief yet violent war over the eastern Prigorodny District, hostility between the Ossetians and the Ingush remains intense and frequently erupts into low-scale inter-communal violence. While Islamic radicalization ran amok in Ingushetia, North Ossetia is a bastion of support for the Kremlin in the North Caucasus, as is evident in the high North Ossetian casualties in the ongoing war against Ukraine (by May 2026, despite the republic’s much smaller population, more inhabitants of North Ossetia have been confirmed dead in combat in the war than the neighboring republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria; in addition, the death toll of South Ossetian mercenaries is nearly equal to that of their more notorious North Korean counterparts). During the Five-Day War in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia under the pretext of protection for Russian passport holders in South Ossetia, Russia’s then-president Dmitry Medvedev repeatedly reiterated Russia’s historical support for the Ossetians in high-profile statements, however questionable the claim.
Laying claim to Stalin’s apocryphal Ossetian roots through WWII commemoration, therefore, not only highlights the militant ethos in Ossetian traditions but also strengthens the emotional bond between the Ossetians and their Kremlin patrons, whom the Ossetians are reliant on for security in the volatile North Caucasus, where North Ossetia is the only non-Muslim republic. In addition, in the self-proclaimed South Ossetia, the distortion of Stalin’s ethnic origins also sends a sinister message to Georgia, where there is a widely observed tendency among ethnic Ossetians to conceal their ethnic identity and assimilate into Georgian society due to Georgia’s ongoing conflict with Russian-backed Ossetian separatists. Nevertheless, these factors should be best understood not as direct causes, but as conditions that rendered Stalin’s role in WWII an effective weapon in regional memory politics, implicitly contradicting the Kremlin’s projection of Stalin as a unifying figure.
