Putin says he's fond of communist and socialist ideas

Vladimir Putin confessed yesterday at a conference of the All-Russia People's Front (a political movement Putin started in 2011) that he is personally very fond of the ideas found in communism and socialism. 

According to Putin, the Code of the Builder of Communism (a set of 12 codified moral rules in the USSR guiding every Communist Party member and Communist youth member) “strongly resembles the Bible.” “This is not a joke; it was actually an excerpt from the Bible,” Putin explained.

The president also noted that communism and socialism, as they were practically implemented in the Soviet Union, were far from what socialist-utopians proposed.

“The practical implementation of these ideals in [the USSR] had little in common with what the utopian socialists Saint-Simon or Owen spoke about. This country had little resemblance to their Sun City,” Putin said, referring to the utopian work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, published in 1602.

Putin also said he never threw out or burned his Soviet Communist Party membership card.

“I did not join the party simply because I had to, though I cannot say I was such a dedicated communist, but I treated this with great care,” Putin said.

This was not the first time Putin compared the Code of the Builder of Communism to the Bible. In 2013, he called the code “a pathetic copy from the Bible,” saying Soviet communism observed quasi-religious values.

On January 21, Vladimir Putin blamed Vladimir Lenin for the collapse of the Soviet Union. “There were a lot of ideas like autonomation and so on. They put an atomic bomb under the building we call Russia and then it blew up. We didn't need any world revolution,” Putin said at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education.