![]() ![]() 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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