De-Stalinization and de-Putinization
After so many hopes had been raised in Russian protest circles and in the West with candidate Boris Nadezhdin, despite his program which raised many questions, the hammer fell: the Russian Electoral Commission did not validate his candidacy on the pretext of a few thousand invalid signatures. But the emergence of a candidate, even if he has been rejected, who advocates an end to the war and a new rapprochement with Europe, is symptomatic. Historian Françoise Thom sees a sign of the end of Putin’s rule and a post-Putin era… Stalin starved Ukraine in 1933 while obliterating the Ukrainian intelligentsia; after the war, he waged a merciless war on Ukrainian resistance fighters, most of whom came from annexed areas. […]