MOSCOW — The leader of Russia’s Communist Party defended his party’s use of Josef Stalin on election posters.

“Under Stalin, we lived 30 years without corruption. This is our history,” Gennady Zyuganov said in an interview on Friday.

As December  parliamentary elections approach, billboards in Russia’s Far East displayed the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem and the slogan “time to change the power,” along with a portrait of of Stalin, the Soviet leader who ruled with terror from 1922 to his death in 1953....