Putin's Russian image change: Action man to Mr Ordinary

President Putin joined a march on Red Square, holding a picture of his father in uniform

As viewers watched Russian state TV coverage of Victory Day on 9 May, their eyes will have been drawn to one face in particular among the crowds carrying photographs of family members who took part in the struggle against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

Among the massed ranks, a portrait of his late father held out in front of him, was President Vladimir Putin.

This surprise appearance amid crowds in Moscow honouring ordinary people who served in World War Two seems to be part of a change of image for the Russian president - portraying him more as a down-to-Earth man of the people, rather than the all-action hero TV viewers have become used to seeing.

For over 30 seconds, TV commentators made no reference to his surprise appearance. But then anchor Vladimir Solovyev supplied the meaning of what was undoubtedly a carefully choreographed media event.

Why?" said Mr Solovyev. "Because this is an amazing event at which politics moves into the background. It is a day when all are equal."

As the president paused for a short interview surrounded by his security entourage, an old man button-holed him to ask about the benefits he was due as someone affected by the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.

The cameras quickly moved away. But Solovyev continued in the same lyrical vein. "Victory Day - everyone is equal. People just come up to the president of the Russian Federation and talk to him."

KGB Putin thinks the COLLAPSE of the Soviet communist empire was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe' of the 20th century

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hoover.org/research/putins-russia-stalin-lite
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts — in Russia and the West — have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..." (continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

The Kremlin’s Troll Army: Moscow is financing legions of pro-Russia Internet commenters

A June article by Max Seddon of BuzzFeed reported the Kremlin was spending millions of dollars to pay English-speaking Russians to promote President Vladimir Putin and his policies in U.S. media like Fox News broadcasting and The Huffington Post and Politico news sites. Trolls are reportedly expected to manage multiple fake accounts and post on news articles 50 times a day, often with sentiments as simplistic as “Putin makes Obama look stupid and weak!”

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-kremlins-troll-army/375932/
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Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America

http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america

Above: Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov signs the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact while German Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop and Soviet leader Stalin look on under a portrait of Lenin, August 23, 1939. News of the Pact stunned the world and paved the way for the beginning of World War Two with Hitler assured the Germans would not have to fight a war on two fronts.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/pact.htm
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"...at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Communists suddenly transformed the 'Anti-Nazi League' into the "Hollywood Peace Forum," calling for American neutrality and using the slogan 'Let's Skip the Next War.'..."
--Ronald Radosh, from his book, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With the Left
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4251

it makes me cringe to compare this creature with the current, illegitimate occupant of our White House.

The Kremlin’s Troll Army: Moscow is financing legions of pro-Russia Internet commenters

A June article by Max Seddon of BuzzFeed reported the Kremlin was spending millions of dollars to pay English-speaking Russians to promote President Vladimir Putin and his policies in U.S. media like Fox News broadcasting and The Huffington Post and Politico news sites. Trolls are reportedly expected to manage multiple fake accounts and post on news articles 50 times a day, often with sentiments as simplistic as “Putin makes Obama look stupid and weak!”

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-kremlins-troll-army/375932/

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