The Daily Beast: Shades of Stalin
Nostalgia for the Soviet past is nothing new in certain quarters of the former U.S.S.R. But the ongoing show trial in Kiev of Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister, is providing a dark new twist to the theme. Ever since the U.S.S.R. collapsed, businessmen and politicians have sought to breathe new life into various Soviet practices, usually with harmless, if kitschy, results. Oligarchs decorate their Danish-modern offices with socialist-realist paintings of Stalin dressed in the white ice-cream-vendor uniforms he favored. Mothers dress their children in retro uniforms of the Young Pioneers, the communist version of the Boy Scouts. A restaurant in St. Petersburg used to run endless newsreel clips of my great-grandfather Nikita Khrushchevmaking speeches or inspecting new-model tractors.
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