Don't you remember the speech Putin gave the month after our community idiot was elected?
The speech was published in Pravda.
Putin warned America "not to go down the road to communism, as that was what destroyed Russia".
Who knows if he was a closet capitalist or a communist when he was the head of the KGB.
What matters is that he is now a God fearing capitalist now.
Putin was never head of the KGB. He was a colonel in the KGB.
I wish there were an online version of a biography of Putin I read in The Atlantic while waiting to see my physician a few years back. It was very interesting.
Evidently, in the last days of the Soviet Union, the KGB was a sort of miniature free society within the crumbling edifice of Communist totalitarianism. KGB men amongst themselves had a fair degree of freedom of speech, and there was criticism of the Party, criticism of the foundation of the Soviet Union. One of the most lively debates was about whether or not state atheism had not been a hideous mistake. The article didn’t say which side Putin was on.
But it did date his apparently fervent embrace of Holy Orthodoxy — not to his entry into politics, but to almost losing his family in a fire at the dacha. Obviously he is not a good Christian in the sense of getting anywhere close to living out all of Christ’s commandments (but who of us, a few exemplary monks and nuns aside, is in these latter days?) but he is plainly pious in a way that a lot of the old apparatchiks who turned up in cathedrals awkwardly crossing themselves when the old ladies did soon after the Soviet Union dissolved are not.
And his policies have certainly been more pro-Christian and pro-market not only than those of the old Soviet government, but of our current administration and most Western European “social democracies”.
Well, except for that whole state-controlled media & nationalizing of the oil industry thing.