If Bernie Sanders wins, the President of the United States will have something in common with Vladimir Putin. They're both big fans of the"S" word.
“You know that I, like millions of Soviet citizens, over 20 million, was a member of the Communist Party of the USSR and not only was I a member of the party but I worked for almost 20 years for an organization called the Committee for State Security,” Putin said, referring to the KGB.
“I was not, as you know, a party member by necessity,” he said. “I liked Communist and socialist ideas very much and I like them still.”
In his speech, Putin insisted he was never just a “functionary” when it came to party matters and said the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism—a set of rules to be followed by all party members—“resembles the Bible a lot.”
According to the Russian president, the code revolved around key concepts such as brotherhood, equality and happiness.
Yeah, Das Kapital, the Bible, who can even tell the difference? And the KGB was all about brotherhood, equality and happiness. At gunpoint. In gulags.
But Putin's critique of Communism is interesting. He doesn't object to the Soviet mass murder of millions. Here's where he really thinks Lenin went wrong.
Speaking at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education in Moscow on the anniversary of Lenin’s death on Thursday, Putin was asked about his opinion of Lenin and the Communist Revolution of 1917, by the head of Moscow’s Kurchatov institute.
“Ruling with your ideas as a guide is correct, but that is only the case when that idea leads to the right results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin),” Putin said using Lenin’s middle name. “In the end that idea led to the ruin of the Soviet Union,” he added.
“There were many of these ideas such as providing regions with autonomy, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia and which would later explode,” said Putin. “We did not need a global revolution either.”
What Putin finds most problematic about Lenin is regional autonomy. That's something he has been reversing. It's also a very nationalist argument. As is his rejection of a global revolution.
Putin criticizes Lenin for an overemphasis on theory. That's certainly something that his regime has also dispensed with. The ideological underpinnings of Putin's rule are heavily pragmatic. There's a cult of personality and heavy doses of nationalism, but little ideology. The Putin regime remains quite fond of the KGB and the USSR and Communism. The man at the top just believes that not all of their ideas were viable. But he does believe their ideas were moral. You would think that he and Obama could get along better.