'Citizens, eat more potatoes and keep the skins on.' Since Russians too must tighten their belts in the current economic crisis, the best option, according to a Russian government agency, is to look to the dietary wisdom of their 'wise ancestors'. Almost two decades since perestroika, Russians are increasingly encouraged to become more comfortable with the past: whether it is a potato-laden diet or even Joseph Stalin.
This month, Orlando Figes' book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, first published in 2007 and already translated into 22 languages, was denied publication in Russia.
The Whisperers draws on thousands of interviews conducted with survivors of the Stalinist regime by Figes and the Russian human rights organisation Memorial. Ordinary Russians recount the Stalin years, when, cowed by the Terror and the Gulag system, a whole society was transformed into whisperers.
The Russian language has two words for whisperer: one who whispers behind other people's backs and one who whispers out of fear of being heard. A Russian friend wrote that in the Stalin years Russians were a grey mass from which no one stood out.
The Whisperers, in its searing personal detail, makes Russians stand out and speak out, one by one, as victims of Stalin's terror. Reading the book becomes an act of memorial as the words of terrified people reverberate in the imagination: 'Farewell my loved ones, believe in justice ...'
The Whisperers is available in all the European languages of the ex-Soviet bloc, except for Russian.
The fate of the Russian language version of The Whisperers is, says Figes, evidence of a broader struggle for control of history publications and teaching in Russia. The Kremlin, he says, is working to rehabilitate Stalin, not to deny his crimes, but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country's glorious Soviet past.
Prime Minister Putin has a long standing conviction about Stalin's greatness. Putin believes that to dwell too much on Stalin's mistakes would be to burden Russians with paralysing guilt.
In a 2002 interview with the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, the interviewer delivered a broadside: 'What is Stalin's place in the history of Russia?'
He was met by the steely reply from the then president: 'That is a somewhat provocative question'.
The interviewer persisted: 'Was Stalin more like Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great?'
'More like Tamerlane,' replied Putin.
What are the implications of Putin's curious comparison between Stalin and