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"The common thread running through all of them is an attack on the rights of citizens. For goodness sake, you shouldn't be afraid of your own people. What people want and expect their president to do is to restore an open, direct dialogue with them. He shouldn't take offence at this. He should concentrate on trying to drag Russia out of the difficult situation that she is in."

"I've criticised him a lot in public. He sometimes loses his temper. Once he said that 'Gorbachev's tongue should be cut short'. I get the feeling he's very tense and worried. Not everything is going well. I think he should change his style and make adjustments to the regime."
"Putin's entourage is the right one for him. He selected it and it works the way he wants it to. Even the inner circle, those by his side, there are so many thieves and corrupt officials there. If things don't change, Russia will continue to drift like a piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean."
"I'm often accused of of giving away Central and Eastern Europe. But who did I give it to? I gave Poland, for example, back to the Poles. Who else does it belong to?"
Former Soviet Russian President Mikhail Gorbachov BBC Interview

Once fairly close to Vladimir Putin, Mr. Gorbachov sits back now in his elderly years with no regrets for introducing perestroika into the vocabulary of the West, criticism of Joseph Stalin as a murderous tyrant, and moving close to the values of the West, while overseeing the gradual disintegration of the Soviet Union. Now he looks at the new Russia and expresses his concern over the corruption that has overtaken government, the repression of political opponents, the reintroduction of Stalinist values.

What the government and Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov and other ideological zealots recall and emphasize is the credit due Stalin for leading mother Russia to victory in the Second World War, then following up with turning the country into a nuclear superpower. Gone is any mention of the almost million people executed during the Great Terror purges in the late 1930s, the millions more who died in the gulag prison camps.

The mass starvation that assailed Ukraine and southern Russia, the deportation of ethnic minorities are mere blips in the history of a great man who unified Russia and its satellites and reigned stalwartly over a system of collectivization that never quite stood the test of time. But did inspire emulation in countries as diverse as North Korea, Cuba, China and even Egypt's flirtation with this promising new ideology, not all that far removed from fascism, but the other end of the spectrum.

"Those repressions touched every city, town and village. We can never forget this", stated Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the presidential human rights council. But admiration for Stalin has seen a renaissance, aided in no small part by Vladimir Putin's continued statements and efforts in rehabilitating the great dictator's reputation, emphasizing the iron will that maintained a close grip on hegemonic eastern Europe communism.

President Putin has drawn personally from Soviet history and statism. In his thirteen years in power in Russia, he has managed to overturn any advances toward democracy that edged its way into the Russian body politic. He has seen to it that history textbooks stressing Stalin's role as an "effective manager" of the 1930s industrialization campaign have been re-written to reflect another version of the past that looks kindly upon Stalinism.

Mr. Gorbachev's efforts in the late 1980s to liberalize the country, to expose Stalin's crimes against humanity, the repression of human rights, the poverty of the political ideology he espoused, the countless victims of his grand experiments in human nature and its rigid control are forgotten. At that time 12% bare minority of Russians thought of Stalin as one of Russia's most prominent historical figures. Fast forward to the present day, 42% of Russians feel confident that Stalin represents one of the country's most proudly prominent figures of history.

On the 60th anniversary of Stalin's death, native Georgians continue to have entertain warm feelings about the tyrant. There are hopes among his Georgian admirers that the current Georgian government of Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili will agree to restore the monument to Stalin destroyed by the previous government of Georgia. Vladimir Putin would approve and hail it as a just and fitting memorial to a great leader.

"Russian society is living through a period of crisis of historical consciousness and, in my view, the only remedy for this ailment is creating an archive describing" the Stalin era, according to Andrei Sorokin, director of the Russian Archive of Socio-Political History. Russians love their heroes; they admire their strongmen, and have confidence in their ability to restore pride in their countrymen; Stalin did it.

Now Vladimir Putin, overturning any advances former President (now Prime Minister) Dmitri Medvedev managed to insert into Russian politics, is placing his image as hero/strongman before his own admirers.

Labels: Culture, Heritage, Human Rights, Political Realities, Russia

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, March 07, 2013