The Washington Post cited an article titled "Facing a gloomy present, Putin belongs to Stalin's glorious", whose writer rarely begins that intellectuals in Moscow like to joke that Russia's dark past is indeed its bright future.
Andrey Kolesnikov, head of the Russian Domestic Policy and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly appears to be thinking this way and is not joking.
He adds that Putin depends on the glories of history to try to motivate the masses and distract them from the current social problems, especially the deteriorating economy, low living standards and the paralysis of the political system.
For the current regime, the victory over Nazism is the cornerstone of its national ideology and legitimacy. As official politics becomes increasingly more stringent in its defense of the past, its defense of the man is also closely tied to the greatest victories of Soviet power: Joseph Stalin.
It indicates that Stalin's encroachment into consciousness has been going on for years. According to the Levada Analytical Center - an independent polling center - the number of Russians expressing their "respect" for Stalin increased from 29% in 2018 to 41% in 2019, and Stalin's personal support in his role in Russian history was also growing steadily, reaching 70% last year.
The author goes on to say that Putin's historic speech increasingly echoes Stalin's speech, in which he explicitly called for Russian patriotism rather than Marxism-Leninism. Then Putin uses the same language, giving the Kremlin a new life for Soviet historical symbols.
When listing the achievements, only the average Russian will remember the victory in World War II and the position of Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space.
No wonder the average Russian tends to share Putin's view of the Soviet collapse as a "major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century."
Kolesnikov believed that a leader who could only present the country with its past as the future would unintentionally lead himself to the trap, taking all the Russians with him, and asked: "If Stalin is our past and our future, which development can the country aspire to?"
And he concluded that by preventing the nation from having a serious dialogue about its turbulent past, it makes it difficult for the Kremlin to find a way forward, and this is a more serious obstacle to Russia's development from all economic hardships.