Back to the USSR: Putin introduces a Stalinist style re-armament program

Vladimir Putin wants to emulate Stalin´s armament policy
(image wiki)

Some time ago former chess legend - now an opposition politician - Garri Kasparov branded Russian President Vladimir Putin "an oligarch who wants to rule like Stalin" and urged the West not to think of him as a democratic leader. That Kasparov was spot on is obvious when one reads about the de facto dictator Putin´s new drive to emulate the red 
tyrant´s armament policy in the 1930s: 

Russia needs a "leap forward" to rejuvenate its sprawling defence industry, Vladimir Putin said on Friday, harkening back to the ambitious industrialisation carried out by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the runup to the second world war.

"We should carry out the same powerful, all-embracing leap forward in modernisation of the defence industry as the one carried out in the 1930s," Putin told his security council, without mentioning Stalin by name.

Putin´s top defence industry official, Dmitry Rogozin has echoed Putin´s drive back to Stalinist policies (which through executions and terror led to the death of at least six million people): 

Dmitry Rogozin, posted on his Facebook page a copy of a 1940 letter from Stalin to gun factory managers and accompanied it with a sarcastic warning: "Such methods of improving discipline also exist."

Stalin's letter to the managers said: "I give you two or three days to launch mass production of machine gun cartridges … If production does not start on time, the government will take over control of the plant and shoot all the rascals there."

Rogozin said: "Of course, it was a joke," but he added that failures would not be tolerated.

"Our satellites are falling, our ships are sinking, we had seven space failures in the last 18 months but not a single plant felt the consequences," he said after the council session.

"The culprits should come on stage. The country should know them."

Putin plans to spend £430bn in the next eight years modernising the military, with the bulk of the money going to 1,350 defence plants which employ about two million Russians. Many defence sector workers backed Putin during the election.

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Already last October Russia´s human rights commissioner Vladimir Lukin and several human rights activists warned about attempts to give Stalin credit for the policies in the 1930s: 

"Thanks to heroic efforts and a total disregard for humanity, our country managed to evolve from a backward agrarian country into a backward industrial one during the Stalin era," Lukin said.

Arseny Roginsky, head of the Memorial rights group, said the least the Russian government can do now is "give a legal appraisal to the crimes of the Soviet regime." Roginsky's group has offered a comprehensive package to help raise public awareness of Stalin's crimes, including suggestions for school curriculums.

Andrei Sorokin, director of the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History, warned that Russia will have no future if it fails to assess its difficult past.

"Russian society has been living in a crisis of public consciousness for the past 25 years," he said.

"Any forward movement or attempts to modernize Russia will fail if we don't work out a consensus on our attitudes toward the Soviet past."

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By openly favoring a Stalinist style armament program, Vladimir Putin has again shown his total disregard for democratic values.