Vlad the bastard

When I went to Russia, I bought a Vladimir Putin T-Shirt. It says bce putem. it means ‘going the right way’ and it’s a gentle pun on his name. That was 2003. Now I keep it in a drawer with my Hitler and Idi Amin tshirts. It’s hard to get a really good macchiato in the bohemian inner north when you’re wearing a genocidal dictator around.

Now Putin is trying to spin the legacy of one Joseph Stalin: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/vladimir-putin-praises-joseph-stalin-for-winning-ww2-making-a-superpower/story-e6frg6so-1225806886630

Putin is, in my view, the major threat to world peace. If it wasn’t for amateur hour in the middle east distracting all the good theorists, Russian studies would be the flavour of the day.

Here’s what we know Putin has done

– Muzzled the media.

– Invaded Chechnya and Georgia.

– Reinstated long-range, nuclear-capable bomber flights.

– Changed the national anthem back to the Soviet-era anthem.

-Staged weird media moments including this one with his shirt off, this one demonstrating his mad judo skillz, and this one with a tiger.

Here’s what I suspect he has done:

– Blown up Moscow apartment buildings to get legitimacy for attacks on chechnya (When the appointed investigator reported that the basement of one building was leased to a FSB officer, he was arrested, and after his release, died in a very unfortunate car accident.)

– Killed the journalist Anna Polikovskaya.

– Kill people with his bare hands while working at the KGB, and its post-Soviet successor, the FSB. And that’s just when someone failed to clean up after themselves in the communal kitchen.