The endless parallels between Putinist and Hitlerite symbolism and rhetoric have become utterly tiresome. So tiresome that every new column on the subject is enough to make you sick.
But the borrowings really are completely direct.
Volodin’s “Without Putin there is no Russia, and without Russia there is no Putin” is, as has rightly been noted, Hess in Triumph of the Will:
The film is well known, the quote is well known. Volodin’s words began to be actively circulated precisely through the Kremlin’s “newspaper,” *Izvestia*. Obviously, within a few hours someone would notice, and there would be fresh columns saying, “A Kremlin ideologue quotes the ideologue of fascism and Hitlerism in a speech.”
I see no other explanation except that they are doing it on purpose.
It is well known that insults like “Kremlin riffraff,” “Kremlin crooks,” “thieves,” and so on really annoy Putin’s thug clique. But “bloody regime” — that they rather like. They use it about themselves among their own circle. Supposedly as irony, but with a hint: “Come on, what kind of bloody regime are we... although...”
They do not want their public image built on photographs of marble garden beds at a dacha built with bribe money.
They think it is much more impressive when they are portrayed like this:
rather than like this, which is what they really look like:
In other words: “With our dachas, garden beds, cash in chests, and golden loaves, we look like pathetic suckers and nobody is afraid of us,” so let’s hint that we are “the heirs of Granddad.”
That is why they insert recognizable quotations into their speeches.
It is very revealing, and once again points to how important it is not to tire of explaining to the public that the people currently in power in Russia are ordinary thieves.