OpinionJournal – Global View: “It does not matter here, as the Kremlin’s apologists are so fond of pointing out, that Mr. Putin is wildly popular in Russia: Popularity is what competent despots get when they destroy independent media, stoke nationalistic fervor with military buildups and the cunning exploitation of the Church, and ride a wave of petrodollars to pay off the civil service and balance their budgets. Nor does it matter that Mr. Putin hasn’t re-nationalized the ‘means of production’ outright; corporatism was at the heart of Hitler’s economic policy, too.
What matters, rather, is nicely captured in a remark by Russian foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin regarding Britain’s decision to expel the four diplomats. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ Mr. Kamynin said. ‘It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.’”

Putin is taking Russia back to the future.

FrontPage magazine.com :: America “More Terrible” than Stalin’s Russia? by Dr. Paul Kengor: “The USSR served as headquarters for a communist ideology that, according to conservative estimates, was responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people worldwide from 1917 through 1987. The late Alexander Yakovlev, a close aide to Mikhail Gorbachev who later assumed the grisly task of trying to total the victims of Soviet repression, estimates that Stalin alone was responsible for the deaths of 60-70 million, a stunning number two to three times higher than previous estimates. He recorded the gruesome details in his work A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2002), a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of the period—particularly Vladimir Putin.

The examples of Soviet criminality are so plentiful that one need not go far to illustrate the point—”