Pot, Meet Kettle

Talk about keeping Putin in power is swirling through the halls of the Kremlin, the Federation Council and the State Duma. Little of the talk has made it onto the public record, but Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov acknowledged in an interview published in Izvestia on March 2 that Putin might stay if there is "a real danger that a new fuehrer with a fascist-type, nationalist ideology" might win the presidency.

I couldn't make this up if I tried.

In a related story, Russians seem to think that maybe Stalin wasn't really that bad of a guy:

The answer came in the form of a survey conducted this month by the state-controlled VTsIOM polling agency. Pollsters asked Russians if they thought that their country needed a ruler similar to Stalin. Almost half of all respondents, 42 percent, answered yes. In the age group that most of the political elite belong to -- 45 to 59 years old -- 52 percent favored Stalinist-style leadership. But most worrying was that 45 percent of young Russians -- 18 to 24 years --were also positive about the tyrant.