The Russian president shares a part of Stalin’s determination to liquidate the nationality and independence of Ukraine at any cost. Then there is Ukraine, a country that was brutally repressed by Stalin and now attacked by Putin. The security organisation founded by Lenin, the Cheka, shaped and micromanaged by Stalin, and known by a succession of dreary acronyms – OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB, FSB – was divided by Yeltsin but never disassembled.Ī former KGB lieutenant colonel, Putin is a proud Chekist. Despite its democratic façade, the Russian executive remained an autocracy in which presidents – similar to early tsars – chose their own successors as both Boris Yeltsin and Putin have done.

This is no surprise because the modern Russian state that Stalin forged in the early 1920s was never dismantled in the democratic turbulence of the 1990s. Putin’s repression at home increasingly resembles Stalinist tyranny – in its cult of fear, rallying of patriotic displays, crushing of protests, brazen lies and total control of media – although without the mass deportations and mass shootings. Stalin’s influence is imprinted everywhere in the state structure of Russia he remains omnipresent. Stalin was a Marxist Putin is a 21st-century tyrant, who, while co-opting elements of Romanov and Soviet imperialism, is a populist and nationalist, a practitioner of 21st-century identity politics who deploys both old-fashioned military heavy metal and the new hi-tech weaponry of social media. One day, hopefully, Russia will be governed by someone who admires neither. Most Russian leaders have aspired to emulate the achievements of the two pre-eminent modern rulers, Peter the Great and Stalin, both revolutionary tsars, both brutal killers.

It doesn’t, but any ruler of the Russian state faces some of the same issues as earlier Romanov tsars and Communist general secretaries. Karl Marx joked that “history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy then as farce”. As one of his ministers told me, Putin would ask the visitor to open the book and they would look together at whatever marginalia Stalin had written: sometimes it was a grim laugh: “xa-xa-xa!” sometimes a snort of disdain: “green steam!” at others it was just a word: “teacher” was written on the biography of Ivan the Terrible.Īcross the world today, people are asking if Putin is a new Stalin. Half of Stalin’s books – usually marked up by the Soviet leader himself with red or green crayons – remain in Putin’s office. When guests used to visit Vladimir Putin in his office in the Kremlin’s Senate Palace, he’d point at the bookshelves and ask them to choose a book from Joseph Stalin’s library.

Stalin simon sebag