(21 Dec 2018) Communists and admirers of the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin gathered in Moscow on Friday to mark the anniversary of his birthday.
Carrying red Communist flags, they moved along Moscow's Red Square to place wreaths and flowers at his tomb.
Stalin was born in Georgia on 18 December, 1878, but later changed the day of his birth to 21 December, 1881.
He died in 1953.
Three years later, then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality.
In 1961, his body was removed from its place next to Vladimir Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum and buried at a nearby location, alongside the Kremlin wall.
Russians have a mixed attitude towards the former Soviet dictator, celebrating him for leading the country to victory in World War II and for transforming the country from a peasant economy into a nuclear superpower.
But the transformation didn't come without cost - his forced collectivisation of agriculture cost (m) millions of lives, while (m) millions more alleged dissidents were sent to slave labour camps in the Great Terror of the 1930s.
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