The appointment was made on the order of university President Gavriil Popov, Moscow’s first mayor and Luzhkov’s predecessor. “The Department of Major City Management didn’t used to have a dean, only someone fulfilling those duties.” said International University Press Secretary Yulia Mikhailova. “Therefore, when Yury Luzhkov turned out not to have a job, we gladly invited this unique specialist to work for us.” The ex-mayor is taking a symbolic salary of one ruble per month for the newly-formed position.

Luzhkov, who has continued to arrive every morning at the Moscow mayor’s office in order to collect his belongings, gave a short interview to Life News outside of International University on October 5. “I still haven’t seen any students,” he said, “but I’ve already congratulated the teachers on having a new department dean.”

“We have several departments,” Luzhkov elaborated. “The Department of Major City Management is a serious thing. There is no such specialty practically anywhere in the universities of our country. It’s important not only for Moscow, but for any major city. There need to be specialists who would understand what a major city is, would know its particularities: it’s economy, it’s society, it’s public and cultural life; who would be able to deal with its engineering systems – with everything that constitutes any city, not necessarily a major one.”

Luzhkov, who ran Moscow for 18 years before being fired after apparently attempting to stoke conflict between Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, has been widely accused of abusing his authority to give lucrative construction contracts to his billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina. He is also commonly lambasted for Moscow’s famously bad traffic and his destruction of many of the city’s treasured historical landmarks.

International University in Moscow was founded in 1991 by Popov and United States President George H. W. Bush as Russia’s first private university. It was originally intended to serve as a joint educational institution between the two countries, but today only a few dozen of the school’s approximately 3000 students hail from foreign countries, mostly the United States.

A source in the Moscow mayor’s office told Gazeta.ru that the department he is now heading was “Luzhkov’s brainchild,” financed through his personal efforts.

“Of course, it wasn’t money from the budget, but Yury Mikahilovich acted as a manager, got sponsors to sign up,” said the source, who added that it was possible that other civil servants currently losing their jobs from the mayor’s office in the whirlwind of Luzhkov’s firing would be able to find work at the university.

The posters, which will go on display throughout the capital in the month leading up to Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations, will take the form of informational stalls that picture Josef Stalin and include text detailing his role in orchestrating victory in the war.

Moscow’s department for publicity and design came up with the plan after pensioners and veterans’ organizations repeatedly requested that officials display pictures of Stalin as part of the wider set of decorations set up for anniversary celebrations.

It has been decades since Stalin’s image has been used publicly for the event.

Lev Ponomarev, a prominent activist and head of the organization For Human Rights, said that the decision to display the dictator offends the millions of people who died during the years of the Stalinist repressions.

“A public billboard with a glorification of Stalin is unacceptable. There will most definitely be protest demonstrations. And we will not only be participating in them, but instigating them,” Ponomarev said. “This is a step by city authorities that will evoke opposition throughout society. [Moscow Mayor Yury] Luzhkov is issuing a challenge to Muscovites, and this is a serious political step. Clearly, he wants to use this to escape discussion of the accusations of his corruption and the deterioration of social life in Moscow,” the activist added.

Former Soviet dissident and acclaimed rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva supported her colleague.

“Stalin was a criminal, and his regime, which killed millions of people, is utterly disgraceful to publicize,” she said. “It’s the same as glorifying Hitler in Germany. We will be protesting these decisions without fail.”

Alexeyeva added that the Soviet people have their soldiers, and not Stalin, to thank for victory in World War II.

Estimates of up to 30 million people died in the Soviet Union as a result of the Stalinist repressions and widespread famine in the 1930s and 40s, not counting the tens of millions who died as a result of World War II.

The protests echo similar concerns from war veterans and activists in the city of Volgograd last January, where a beverage company announced that Stalin’s portrait would be gracing soft drink labels in honor of the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad.

Russian society is largely fractured in its reconciliation of Stalin as a war hero and Stalin as a ruthless dictator. In 2007, then-President Vladimir Putin mandated a revised school history textbook that called Stalin “the most successful Soviet leader ever” and lauds his qualities as a “great organizer.” President Dmitri Medvedev condemned the dictator in a speech last October, but Putin spoke out in the leader’s defense several weeks later in a live telecast, arguing that the question of Stalin was a “subtle” one. A 2009 poll indicated that nearly a third of Russians would like to see a Stalin-like leader as their head of state. At the same time, this number is down from recent years – 42 percent favored a Stalin-like leader in 2005.