From Democracy Digest. Here is an excerpt:

Stalin was a Marxist, while Putin is a 21st-century tyrant, populist and nationalist, a practitioner of 21st-century identity politics who deploys old-fashioned military heavy metal and the new hi-tech weaponry of social media, says Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose books include Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar. 

Yet Stalin could not be more relevant. Stalin’s influence is imprinted everywhere in the state structure of Russia; he remains omnipresent. 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. So far, he writes for The New Statesman:

Then there is Ukraine, a country that was brutally repressed by Stalin and now attacked by Putin. The Russian president shares a part of Stalin’s determination to liquidate the nationality and ­independence of Ukraine at any cost. The differences ­between the two are as great as the similarities, Montefiore adds:

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