This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
A meat-processing factory in the town of Shelanger in Russia’s Mari El Republic says it will soon start producing sausages named after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Local communist newspaper Golos Pravdy (Voice of the Truth) said on June 3 that the factory will launch three new sausage brands — Stalin’s Testaments, Stalingrad, and Soviet.
The announcement said that “the new sausages’ names suggest that they will be delicious.” It did not say when the new products will be launched.
The Zvenigovsky meat-processing facility is owned by the first secretary of the Communist Party’s committee in Mari El, Ivan Kazankov, who owns 99 percent of the factory’s shares.
In 2015, a 3-meter high statue of Stalin was unveiled in front of the meat-processing facility in Shelanger.
Millions of people were executed, sent to gulag labor camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan, or starved to death in famines caused by forced collectivization during Stalin’s rule.
During World War II, entire ethnic groups in the Soviet Union were sent to Central Asia as collective punishment for what the Kremlin said was collaboration with Nazi Germany.
