Grant Shapps said Vladimir Putin is acting like a “modern-day Stalin” after the Russian president won a fifth term at the weekend.

write for telegraphDefense minister accuses Putin of manipulating Russian elections: “He is certainly not going anywhere after Sunday’s so-called election was stolen and political opponents were either jailed or murdered.”

Sir Andrew Wood, Britain’s former ambassador to Russia, said the comparison was an “insult” to Joseph Stalin.

Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for more than 30 years, brutally suppressing dissent by sending millions of his opponents to the Gulag, and historians estimate that he murdered more than 1 million political opponents. In a sham election, the Communists won with an outright majority, portraying Stalin as the only unopposed leader who could stand up to the West.

Putin grew up in the Soviet Union and later rose to become a KGB officer. Experts say he exploited historical grievances surrounding the collapse of the Soviet empire during his term as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012 and blamed it on the West.

The 71-year-old leader – who served as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and 2008 to 2012, meaning he has been in power for 25 years – is believed to have killed at least 20 political opponents, while state propaganda This allows Putin to tighten his power. Rule the country with an iron fist.

But analysts say that while both men were brutal dictators, Putin’s actions were incomparable to the scale of terror wrought by Stalin.

Marc Berenson, senior lecturer in politics at King’s College London I: “Putin is probably as ruthless as the world’s most brutal dictators, including Stalin. However, the world today is not what it was in the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s. Stalin is likely directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Russians responsibility, and Putin still needs more time to catch up on that.”

Author Mark Galeotti said that while Putin’s guilt was unquestionable, he was a “smaller man” than Stalin. Putin’s wars: From Chechnya to Ukrainewritten for this news outlet After Sunday’s results.

according to kyiv independentSince coming to power in 1999, Putin has killed 20 political opponents.

The hit list includes progressive opponents such as Alexei Navalny, who died suddenly while walking, and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, who threatened to march on Moscow before his plane mysteriously crashed, as well as critics Putin’s former FSB official Alexander Litvinenko, who was later poisoned.

The Kremlin has denied involvement in the murders, while Putin has called their deaths a “tragedy” or “sad event.”

Stalin was less cunning, calling his opponents “enemies of the state” before murdering an estimated 750,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937, while in the legislative elections of the same year the Communists won over 99% of the vote.

If modern Russia were a democracy, Putin would not be able to run for reelection after his second presidential term ended in 2008—until he helped change the constitution.

Sixteen years later, Russia’s only independent election monitoring organization was designated a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin and its co-founder was jailed.

Blindfolded from prying eyes, experts tell I Putin won the election with a fraudulent 87 percent margin by increasing his majority by some 30 million votes.

If Putin remains president for the next six years, he will be in power as long as Stalin.

Russia’s sham election serves an important purpose for Putin. Dr. Sean Roberts, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Winchester and a political science expert, said that although an 87% majority seems absurd in the West, in countries that have regressed democratically to authoritarianism, an absolute majority has Helps fend off elite opposition. Russian foreign policy.

As in the days of Stalin’s purges of the “elites,” Putin’s threat comes from within the Russian state.

David Lewis, professor of global politics at the University of Exeter, said I: “The greatest threat does not come from the streets or from the diaspora, but from within the elite – as we saw with the Prigozhin rebellion.

“If the economy begins to decline, there could be disputes over assets and businesses, or questions about Putin’s possible successor, or there could be discontent in the military or security services caused by a major failure in the war with Ukraine.”

“But at the moment there are no real signs of fragmentation within the elite – but we may not see evidence of internal discontent until it becomes public.”

Meanwhile, about 1,000 of Putin’s political opponents are in jail. While they are no longer sent to the Gulag, many remain in solitary confinement and exiled to Siberian prisons for speaking out against Putin’s rule.

British-Russian political activist and former journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza was recently sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Russian court for “treason” and other politically motivated charges for speaking out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. years in prison.

Dr. Maxim Alliukov, a Russian political sociologist at King’s College London, tells us I Killing and imprisoning opponents leaves Putin without any organized opposition in Russia, as they have all been “totally destroyed, killed or imprisoned.”

After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev came to power and condemned the dictator and his political repression in his 1956 “Secret Speech” “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.”

This was followed by a period of “de-Stalinization,” in which statues of Stalin were torn down and his rule denounced by current Soviet leaders.

Before his death, Leader of the Opposition in 2022 Navalny He once described his sentencing by Putin’s government as “Stalinist.” Putin’s murder of the Kremlin critic a month before the sham election was Putin’s way of sending a message to anyone planning to oppose his rule in the coming years.

People laid flowers on Navalny’s grave despite the opposition leader’s killing and imprisonment, and others cited the dissident’s words to speak out against Putin in Sunday’s election.