British - Historian | June 27, 1965 -
Russia is so feudal in its system of patronage and reward that it is virtually impossible for a leader to hand over power without controlling his successor or at least receiving an exemption from prosecution - something Mr. Putin granted his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1999.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
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Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.
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Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.
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Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late '80s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.
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The political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power.
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Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.
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Russia's first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean.
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After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.
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The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.
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Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar - and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else.
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I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.
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She grounded me. I have become very disciplined now. I would never have written the books without her. Definitely the cleverest thing I ever did was to marry Santa. Maybe it's the only clever thing I did.
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