Moscow military parade. Vladimir Putin’s decision to revive this symbol of the cold war is, critics fear, a step closer to turning Russia into a pastiche of the Soviet Union
by Luke Harding in Moscow
It was one of the highlights of the Soviet calendar - a chance for the communist superpower to show off its military might and for ordinary citizens to check that their gerontocratic leaders were still alive, perched on top of Lenin’s tomb.
But 17 years after the last hammer and sickle tanks trundled through Red Square, the Kremlin is to revive on May 9 the Soviet-era practice of parading its big weaponry, the Russian defence ministry confirmed yesterday. As well as 6,000 marching soldiers, it will show off its latest tanks and rockets - such as the new intercontinental ballistic missile, Topol-M.
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“Under the plan adopted by the president, land and air military equipment will be involved in the parade on Red Square,” General Yuri Solovyov said. The parade will include the new S-300 missile defence system that Russia has just sold to Iran.
The decision to revive this symbol of the cold war is likely to provoke criticism from opposition parties, which accuse Vladimir Putin of turning Russia into a pastiche of the Soviet Union. The parade might also raise a few quizzical eyebrows inside the British embassy in Moscow. Last week, Russia closed the British Council’s two regional offices in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg using what UK officials described as “classic KGB tactics”.
The British ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton, compared today’s Russia to the Soviet Union after officers from its domestic intelligence agency - the FSB - interrogated British Council workers.
Putin has already shown his fondness for Soviet emblems, such as updating the Soviet national anthem. One observer said yesterday that the Kremlin was using symbols from the past to recreate a “new national idea” of Russian greatness.
Nikolay Petrov, scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, said: “It’s an ideological concept. The point is to show that Russia was great before the revolution, was great during Soviet times and to say we are restoring its greatness.”
The Soviet Union’s military parades - to celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9 and the Bolshevik revolution on November 7 - were watched by millions live on TV. Combat vehicles were last paraded in Red Square on November 7 1990.
8 responses so far ↓
Rich Hill // January 24, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Oh come on now. Another Putin hit piece? What is it with this site? What are you? Crypto-zionists?
They are the only ones with a grudge against him. Don’t do their dirty work for them.
wil // January 24, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Yes Putin is just Pooh Bear looking for honey with Hu Jintigger.
pjwalker911 // January 24, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Are you a member of the anti-American Nashi Putin Youth group Rich Hill? So you like to see lavish Soviet-style military parades of ICBMs destined for the West do you? You are pretty sick and twisted in such case. Not to mention anti-American.
If Putin (who is a KGB terrorist) killed millions of people (including many Jews) like Uncle Joe Stalin did (with American Skull and Bones elite’s help), you would still think he was a great guy, wouldn’t you? The problem with your type is you see a Jew around every corner and only the Jews are to blame for the NWO. Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. Sorry Pal, it don’t work that way. The NWO is served by elites of just about every race, ethnicity and religion. That includes power-mad Stalinist Russians like Putin himself.
By the way, if you don’t like it, get your news someplace else where they focus on the Jews.
Rich Hill // January 25, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Me, Anti-American. Wow, now there’s a first. Me, a Nazi. Well, not the first time and certainly won’t be the last. That bit of name calling is never going to die out.
I love my country thank you very much, I hate the management.
Of course, where is my self-consorship? Let me clarify. This has nothing to do with the Russian oligarchs who buggered off to Israel after Yeltsin’s everything-must-go fire sale. Don’t get hysterical. Moving on.
Is Putin concerned with libery in Russia? Hell no. Has he shown his concern for the people of Russia? Yes, I think this can be deduced from his high approval ratings. So what’s he really done to be so demonized?
What? We’re the only ones in the world who are allowed to swing our military out in the wind once a year?
wil // January 25, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Did Putin ever say where his 40 billion came from? Or was that just somebody else saying he had all that?
pjwalker911 // January 26, 2008 at 2:00 am
Rich, I hate to have to tell you this, but if you support Soviet military parades, you are anti-American. Nobody called you a Nazi, but you accused me of being a crypto-zionist, so get straight on who started the name-calling.
I hate the management too, especially since the American Establishment is in bed with the old Soviet system represented by Stalinist Putin as it has been since the Bolshevik Revolution. Homeland Security was set up under the tutelage of the KGB and the Stasi who know best how to control the masses through fear. Bush and Putin are buddies who go fishing together along with Poppy Bush. No matter what the staged rhetoric is, they are on the same NWO page period, working for the same masters at the top.
Your statement that Putin is anti-liberty and yet is somehow still for the people is a bit of mental gymnastics I don’t get. I guess that’s the same as saying Bush is trashing our rights and constitution but he’s doing it for our own good. Putin’s approval rating is inflated by his own team of handlers and spin-meisters in the media that he has almost total control over. There is a large anti-Putin, pro-liberty movement in Russia that keeps getting squashed by Putin’s boot-heel where protests are brutally put down and policed by Nashi fanatics. Their leaders end up in mental hospitals, prison or gunned down on the streets. Do I have to sit here and explain everything to you? Try doing some research.
The Nashis are the Hitler Youth of Russia, fanatics who breed more cannon-fodder for Putin, get anti-American indoctrination, carry little red books and spout the virtues of Lenin and Stalin. Putin himself has never resigned from the Communist Party. He rose to power on the heels of his own 9/11 Reichstag event, the 1999 apartment bombings that are widely believed, both inside and outside Russia, to be the work of the KGB of which he was a high officer. Alexander Litvenenko was killed because he wrote a book exposing this and other crimes of Putin. His latest efforts were to expose the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya who was offed for her attempts to expose the war in Chechnya. She was also poisoned by the KGB on her way to expose Putin’s school massacre psyop at Beslan. Litvinenko knew who killed him and his finger pointed directly at Putin as his family also does to this day.
Putin is a thug, a liar, a murderer and a terrorist just like his lying, murdering sack of crap buddy Bush. They are manipulating us toward global dictatorship using the time-tested Hegelian Dialectic that works for them every time because fools buy into the false appearance of conflict between supposedly opposing sides. Like two heads of the same beast, they both work for the Illuminati, the international elite, the high aristocracy, the globalists, the high criminal cabal, whatever you want to call them. They are deeply involved in it, bred and trained to work in it, and that is probably what you will never get. But so be it.
Rich HIll // January 27, 2008 at 12:01 am
Russia is one of the largest exporters of oil in the world. That’s where they get the money. Russia plus every other country in the world combined spends as much as the US warfare-welfare program or Socialized Warfare as I call it. I don’t see this parade as any kind of threat. If any country of the world wants to parade their equipment around and I don’t froth at the mouth I’m anti-American. Yeah, that makes sense.
Ok, you are perpetuating the Hegelian Dialectic by your demonization of Putin. He has not done a thing that should piss of any Americans. What has he done to us? I’m not saying he’s a saint. And YOU do your research. The Litvinenko assassination trail leads to those pesky exiled oligarchs.
There are no Soviets. The key players are long gone. The white Russians are in charge now, as opposed to the Soviets.
I won’t be coming back to your site and leaving comments. You do have some really interesting entries and you are doing a great job of exposing Global Warming for the hoax that it is. I thank you for that. I’ll just leave on a positive note.
Peace.
pjwalker911 // January 27, 2008 at 12:51 am
Yeah, well all I can say is you are a hopeless case regarding Putin. Love is blind they say. He is no friend of America, I guarantee you that, anymore than Bush is. And you are completely wrong about Litvinenko who was a loose cannon and had to be silenced by Putin, yet you deny the man’s own evidence that the assassination was ordered by Putin who had a long-standing contract out on him as confirmed by KGB agent Mikhail Trepashkin. But you deny that too.
By the way, Putin is now one of the biggest Oil-igarchs of all, but he claims only to have only a modest flat, $150,000 and a couple of old cars. Is that why he wears an $80,000 watch? Come on tell me more. Please…… His government is one of the most corrupt on the planet, but you still stick up for him. Shameful, really. And you dishonor the names of real Russian patriots who have given their lives and faced prison for standing up to Putin. Ask politician Sergei Yushenkov, gunned down for investigating the 99′ apartment bombings and demanding human rights in Russia, or Mikhail Trepshkin who also investigated the bombings and is on Putin’s hitlist, or Mr. Vladimir Bukovsky who spent years in the Gulag and is now fighting the Chekist Putin, or the Mothers of Beslan who grieve not only their dead children but protest Putin’s coverup of the event, or all the long list of dozens of journalists murdered in Russia who were anti-Putin critics, or the great Garry Kasparov who goes out and faces Putin’s goon squads out in the street like a man. I love these people. They are the cream of Russian humanity, and the exact opposite of KGB scum like Putin.
I suspect you are a follower of pro-Putin Webster Tarpley. But go your own way. Maybe eventually you will run into something that will wake you up. But like I said, I doubt it.
You seem to have some of the pieces of the NWO puzzle, but you appear to be looking at only a few aspects of this hydra-headed phenomenon (Bush, Iraq, etc) and not getting the big picture. I am glad at least you understand something about the global warming hoax. Maybe you aren’t all bad.
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