In Siberia's hinterlands, some would vote for Stalin

But Nadezhda Proskuryakova, a researcher at Ishim's local history museum for 11 years, has made it her business to try to debunk local views of Stalin as hero.

"We were born in a different country. We studied in a different country, and now we must live in different conditions," she says. Locals must wake up to the facts of Stalinist repression - including deep-pit mass graves in the countryside near here, Ms. Proskuryakova says.

Like many in Ishim, she was offended that the Stalin bust was unveiled on Oct. 29, the day before the annual Day of Mourning for Victims of Political Repression, when descendants of the dead gather by the mass graves.

But while Proskuryakova disagrees vehemently with the Stalinists, she says she plans to vote communist in the coming election.

Putin's leadership has been a disaster, she says, and the communists are the only party with the interests of the Russian people at heart.

"What's happening is a kind of genocide of the nation," Proskuryakova says. "Young people are getting drunk, and not getting educated. The culture of the nation is being destroyed. Everyone is shocked that the oligarchs got everything for free, and the money of our nation goes abroad."

Also distressed at both the country's direction and the nostalgia for Stalinist times, are the broadcasters of local Red Army radio, an independent and alternative station with an office in the basement of the former prison - just a couple of steps from Stalin's purported cell door.

"Everyone knows that under Stalin there was order, a strong country, a strong army, lower prices, jobs, free education - and the gulag," says Mikhail Zuykov, a program director. "We don't want this kind of order," adds Irina Logunova, commercial director of the station.

But in Russia's neglected provinces, today's crumbling infrastructure, unemployment, and increasing poverty contrast sharply with a rosy view of the past, when, for many, the USSR's grimmer aspects were offset by predictability, patriotism, and a greater sense of equality.

Today, says Mr. Zuykov: "The authorities are rich. People are poor. People have eyes. And people remember the 'good old times,' and remember them with hope."

The bust of Stalin was dug up by chance in 1999, in a local garden where it had been hidden after Krushchev put an end to the personality cult of Stalin.

"[Russians] worship people with authority, if they use that authority wisely," says Mary Chernjawski, an American who runs a Russian Orthodox convent in Ishim, and has lived here eight years. Members of her aristocratic family were forced to leave or killed during the Bolshevik revolution.

"Stalin was very different in the war from the Stalin [of the repressions] - he played on people's patriotism," she says. "The people who put up the statue are survivors of the war, and he means something different to them. Over time, Stalin's crimes are shunted to the background."

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