Putin’s Reelection Campaign Begins on Stalin’s Birthday and Ends on Day of Paris Commune

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 18 – Given Russia’s tragic history, it is probabl difficult to find any dates on which something many might prefer to forget happened. But given the proclivity of Russians to focus on anniversaries, a tendency the Kremlin has always promoted, it is difficult to avoid paying attention to the parallels such events on the same date in the past suggest.

            Thus it is that some Russians are today pointing out that what the Russian government calls the presidential campaign that will see the re-enthronement of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin next March is beginning on Joseph Stalin’s 138^th birthday, an event some Russians are marking for other reasons (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5A37825A0AA7D).

            And other Russians are taking not of the fact that this “campaign” will end of what the Soviet government celebrated and what many Russians of a certain age remember as the Day of the Paris Commune, the short-lived revolutionary government set up in Paris in 1871 (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/12/18/glavnoe_chtoby_narod_prishel_na_vybory/).