THE KINDER AND GENTLER STALIN…VLADIMIR PUTIN
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514278
Kinder, Gentler Stalin
Russia: The U.S. victory in the Cold War was once viewed as “the end of history.” It turned out freedom is not that easy, and ex-KGB operative Vladimir Putin now plans to have history repeat itself.
Former Russian president and current Prime Minister Putin, who after more than a decade in power has made Moscow less democratic and more imperialistic, smiled during a phony TV town hall program and said “don’t hold your breath” when asked if he would leave politics.
Even worse, Putin, suspected of ordering the radioactive poisoning of dissident writer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, now hails brutal Communist dictator Josef Stalin for making the former Soviet Union a superpower (thanks to stealing U.S. nuclear secrets). Guilty of the genocide of tens of millions over three decades of rule, “Uncle Joe” ranks between Mao and Hitler on history’s list of worst mass murderers.
Yet earlier this year the restoration of Moscow’s busy Kurskaya subway station included gilt-trimmed Stalin-praising slogans atop its neoclassical rotunda. Textbooks hailing Stalin’s management talents have been published. A Kremlin commission will investigate “historic falsification” regarding Soviet conduct in World War II. And Russia’s largest opposition party — the Communists — are throwing a birthday bash this month in memory of Stalin.
Putin is also selling himself as Ivan Sixpack, complaining about the disparity between rich and poor much like liberal Democrats here do — you know, those “populists” who spend trillions in middle-class taxpayers’ money to expand the government’s power over ordinary people.
“Some businessmen have no sense of social responsibility and just want to squeeze as much money out of people as they can,” Putin fumed before a studio audience of shills in words that could easily have been spoken by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It’s possible that Putin could end up far more powerful than Stalin. In 2004, he reunified Russia’s intelligence agencies, in effect restoring Moscow’s Cold War spy system. Consider the assessment of Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew and the late KGB archivist and defector to Britain Vasili Mitrokhin in their 2005 book “The World Was Going Our Way: the KGB and the Battle for the Third World”:
“No previous head of state in Russia, or perhaps anywhere else in the world, has ever surrounded himself with so many former intelligence officers. Putin also has more direct control of intelligence than any Russian leader since Stalin.”
Former KGB deputy head of foreign espionage Vadim Kirpichenko said in 2004 that while Stalin’s spy chiefs would usually only report what he wanted to hear, under Putin “Now, we tell it like it is.”
In addition to so many other dangers, will the free world be faced with a soft-spoken, media-savvy 21st century reincarnation of Uncle Joe?
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