Putin and many of his gang may have once been Communists, but they are not that today. Rather, they have embraced a new totalitarian political ideology known as 'Eurasianism.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.
Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.
Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.
I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.
The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.
Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.
Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.