“You can say of the Russians, both great and small, that they are intoxicated with slavery.” ~ Marquis De Custine, 1838

And while critics accuse Putin of presiding over the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin – preferring to downplay the human cost of his rule to focus on the Soviet Union’s successes – an independent poll conducted in Russia in March last year revealed that 45 per cent of those questioned said they thought that the sacrifices made under Stalin were justified given the speed of the Soviet Union’s economic growth during his rule. It’s a statistic that has nearly doubled since the same poll was taken two years before.