As Charles De Gaulle allegedly commented upon the Marxist dictator’s death, “Stalin didn’t walk away into the past, he dissolved into the future.” This billboard is a vivid illustration of that. It features a celebratory Joseph Stalin raising a glass of champagne on Red Square, inside a flat-screen TV with an old USSR brand logo underneath. That logo had gone out of use years before flat-screen TVs came about, in addition to the fact that Russia never produced such TVs, mostly because its national industries have yet to recover from the curse of inefficiency inflicted on it by Lenin, Stalin, and their communist successors.
Who came up with this politico-economic fantasy? The answer is in the right-hand upper corner, emblazoned with the logo of the Communist Party of Russian Federation, right above the words in Russian that say, “Happy New Year.”
This must be a special addition of insult to injury to the Crimean Tatars, whom Stalin had deported en masse from their homes in the 1940s, and who had been given a chance to return and settle in their ancestral land only after Ukraine’s independence from Russia.
Below is the front page of this month’s Sevastopolskaya Pravda, which congratulates its readers with the 135th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Stalin. The motto at the top says, “For socialism, soviet power, and brotherly union!” The words above Stalin’s photo say “Great Stalin,” and the lead editorial next to it is titled in the best Cold War traditions, “USA and NATO are escalating military presence in Ukraine.”
Of all parties, the Communists feared Ukrainian independence the most, and they have also been very helpful in agitating for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, as well as taking active role in the separatist movements and establishing the self-proclaimed breakaway “people’s republics” in the southeast of the country. Indeed, the offices of the leaders of DPR and LPR are often decorated with red banners, hammer-and sickle logos, other Soviet symbolics, and portraits of Stalin.
Those American conservatives who fall for the notion that the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine are somehow a freedom-loving, people’s militia fighting for Christian values, are up for a big disappointment.
The cherry on top is the arrival in Moscow of the Hollywood radical Oliver Stone, who is going to channel Putin and Russia’s communist diehards in a new “documentary” about how the current conflict in Ukraine is the fault of the CIA and U.S. State Department. Take that, John Kerry!
The photo below shows Oliver Stone interviewing the runaway corrupt Ukrainian ex-president Victor Yanukovich in Moscow, December 2014.
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