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.
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