Same old, same old…

In the old bad days of the Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union, it was quite normal to erase the opponents of the Supreme Leader (or the enemies of the Party and the people as they were called then) from official pictures, edit them out of film clips and make them vanish, often literally, without a trace. The process is well documented in a very interesting book The Commissar Vanishes by David King. Well, guess what, nothing ever changes in Russia: Clifford J. Levy writes in the Tuesday’s (June 2, 2008) issue of the New York Times (KREMLIN RULES. It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Are Made to Vanish From TV) about the practice of “vanishing” people who beg to differ with the current rulers of Russia by (more or less skillfully) erasing them from the existing footage of TV shows and public appearances. The old is coming back…