On Russia's "Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Repression" it is instructive to return to the Western media's deceitful claim that a rehabilitation of Stalin has occurred during the soft authoritarian, albeit, rule of Vladimir Putin. Every year, on 30 October 2017, Russia remembers the victims of Stalin's repressions in a national day of commemoration.
This day has been commemorated every year, including every since Putin first rose to power in 2000, since the year the remembrance day was established in 1991. But the Putin-era assault on Stalin and his repressions has been far deeper than this. Putin's Russia has seen a pluralist state policy regarding Stalin and his legacy, and within that pluralistic universe it has itself
facilitated and issued articulations highly critical of Stalin and his repressive policies.
As Western scholars were blithering about Putin's love for, and rehabilitation of Stalin in the 2000s,
Putin-era state television produced a series of films commemorating Russian figures destroyed during the Stalin era. Some of the state or state-tied television channels' productions on the Soviet regime's atrocities, include
Yesenin (a film about the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances and pressure from the communist regime),
Moskovskaya saga (the story of a Moscow family's destruction under Stalinism), Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel
Doctor Zhivago, the great Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
The First Circle, and Mikhail Bulgakov's anti-Stalinist satire
Master and Margarita, among many others. At the same time,
the Russian Orthodox Church has been carrying out a permanent campaign against Stalin since the Soviet collapse-under both Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Putin (
see, for example).
Comment: Japan has historically been a US imperial vassal state, ever since the atom bomb was dropped on them. The news that they are looking towards the "enemies" of the Empire (Russia, China and Korea) certainly seems to be a sign that American control over Japan is waning and that Russian influence in the East is on the rise.