A Russian lawmaker has openly called for the return of Stalinist methods to crack down on dissent. “It’s time to introduce the concept of the ‘enemy of the people’: there’s no need to be shy about this,” State Duma deputy and former military commander Andrei Gurulyov said in an interview with Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. He said the “enemy of the people” designation should be used on not only those in the military who give “moronic orders,” but also ordinary people. “Do I want Stalinist repressions? I do! Moreover my grandfather served nine years on this charge,” he said, adding that “it was necessary to do this” at the time. “Yes, there were mistakes sometimes, but there was discipline,” he said. The “discipline” Gurulyov referred to entailed hundreds of thousands of people rounded up and executed by Josef Stalin’s secret police or sent off to prison camps in the late 1930s.
