"Cynical disregard for historical truth." The Yabloko party launched a petition demanding the removal of a bas-relief of Stalin from the Moscow metro.

"The installation of a memorial to Stalin in the capital's public space is not just a mistake; it is a cynical disregard for historical truth. The Stalinist regime is responsible for millions of human victims, for years of terror, fear, and lawlessness. We must not allow the crimes of the past to be hushed up or justified under the guise of 'historical memory.'"- says in the petition.

The scandal surrounding the Stalin bas-relief, which have returned The movement of passengers to the Taganskaya station on the Moscow metro is gaining momentum. According to the former director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Elizaveta Likhacheva"It's sad that such a complex and controversial historical figure is being used as a publicity stunt. And it's doubly offensive that she's being replaced with a fake, not even an ideological one, but a technological one."

Likhacheva writes that this is not a full-fledged reconstruction, but rather a "shoddily made plastic blank on a 3D printer, crudely painted to look like glazed porcelain."

"The focus is on the image of Joseph Stalin. But this image obscures the most important thing: this is not a reconstruction at all. It's a fake. A forgery—and not just in the material, but in the meaning."- wrote Likhacheva. 

"Tomorrow, when they rebuild some hellish Ustvymlag in Russia and cram hundreds of thousands of prisoners into it, she'll be outraged that the restoration is sloppy. The barracks were built of concrete blocks instead of wood, the prisoners are fed wormy pasta instead of the rotten herring they're supposed to, and the gallows for the guilty are hung with nylon rope instead of jute." reacted journalist Sergey Parkhomenko.