What about the Monument?: Public Opinion and Contentious Politics in Stalin's Homeland.

STALIN, Joseph, 1879-1953; PUTIN, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952-; MONUMENTS; ATTITUDE (Psychology); DATA analysis; FRUSTRATION; PRACTICAL politics

The article uses mixed methods to explore the politics of memory surrounding the Stalin monument in Gori, Georgia, which was removed by the government in 2010. We employ bivariate and multivariate statistics to analyze people's preferences in Georgia concerning the monument's fate using socio-demographic, socio-economic, spatial, and political variables, identifying six factors as offering explanatory power: gender, age, place, socialization, education, and attitudes toward Vladimir Putin. We identify three main narratives in the qualitative data analysis: the desire to continue displaying the monument somewhere; the futility of monument battles; and the appeal to democratic principles in deciding these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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