Martial Law Likely a Trampoline for Russian Administrators as It was in Stalin’s Time, Gorevoy Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 23 – The governors over regions where Putin has declared full or partial martial law have been given unprecedented powers and thus unprecedented possibilities, Ruslan Gorevoy says. If they succeed in their assigned tasks, they may make truly dizzying careers upward just as was the case with administrators under Stalin in the early days of World War II.

            That makes the four in the newly annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe – Denis Pushilin, Leonid Pasechnik, Vladimir Saldo and Yevgeny Balitsky, and the heads of eight others where lesser degrees of martial law have been imposed people to watch, the Versiya commentator says (versia.ru/glavy-regionov-v-kotoryx-obyavleno-voennoe-polozhenie-budushhaya-federalnaya-upravlencheskaya-yelita).

            Gorevoy suggests that these people now have a chance to rise to the very top of the Russian political pyramid much as Aleksey Kosygin, Dmitry Ustinov, and Nikolay Vosnesensky did after being put in a similarly demanding situation by Stalin at the start of World War II. Indeed, the new special coordinating council for these men may have an impact on the new men like that of the State Defense Committee in the 1940s.