Putin and Stalin: Revising the past

chicagotribune.com ^ | September 2, 2007 | Steve Chapman

[Tailgunner Joe]

President Vladimir Putin, when he is not busy restoring autocracy to a country that has known little else, has taken on the task of refreshing Russian history with a novel perspective—his own. He is on record lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." It was worse, apparently, than World War I, worse than World War II—worse, even, than the creation of the Soviet Union.

Last year, the president informed a group of history teachers that Russia "has nothing to be ashamed of" and that it was their job to make students "proud of their motherland." His government has tried to help by commissioning guidelines and books that present a more balanced picture of Joseph Stalin, described in one approved volume as "the most successful Soviet leader ever."

That sentiment could be taken as ironic—on the order of praising a slag heap as the most picturesque of its genre. In fact, Putin really wants to commend a dictator who, if he was not the most savage and destructive criminal of the 20th Century, certainly ranks in the top three, with Hitler and Mao. The efforts at rehabilitation may be working. One poll found that 54 percent of young Russians think Stalin was "a wise leader."

To reach that conclusion, you have to excuse or forget the biggest events of Stalin's quarter-century rule, which left vast piles of corpses. His first notable "achievement" was trying to raise agricultural output by forcing millions of peasant farmers into collective farms—while wiping out supposedly prosperous farmers whom he condemned as vicious class enemies. In what a Marxist scholar later called "probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens," hordes of peasants were killed or sent to Siberia.

[piytar]

Putin is EVIL, pure and simple.

Expect more fawning praise of him from the MSM and left as he accelerates into full-blown dictator mode...

[CRBDeuce]

While a little too socialist for my taste, the current issue of the brit rag, “The Economist”(8/25-31/07) is devoted to Putin & cronies who are as ubiquitous in Russian government as Klintonista lawyers were in atty gen’l’s state offices in the USA. Worthy of a read at your local liberry.