It has now been 21 years since the end of the Soviet Union, but Stalin’s policies still appear to have a strong hold over the country’s leader.  Two separate articles this week have picked up on this, analysing contemporary Putinism’s affiliations with Soviet Stalinism.  The grounds for comparison were laid by Vladimir Putin himself last month at the Battle of Borodino re-enactment where the President, whilst not mentioning Stalin by name, called for Russia to ‘carry out the same powerful, all-embracing leap forward in modernisation of the defence industry as the one carried out in the 1930s [by Stalin]‘.  Sergei Shelin says that current trends in military spending, and economic policy more broadly, ‘bring about the same sensations as one gets from watching an old newsreel‘, comparing the following two quotes from Stalin and Putin respectively:

“The slogan ‘the cadres decide everything’ demands that our leaders show the utmost concern for workers, for the ‘little ones’ and ‘big ones’…raise them, move them up and forward…” (Stalin)

“A word or two about cadres: it’s an extremely important question, and at all levels, at that – beginning with the rank-and-file worker and engineering cadres up through those of the company managers… We’ve done a lot to upgrade the working cadres, but if it hasn’t been enough, we’ll continue this work…” (Putin)