Top Russian aide likens Putin to FDR
By STEVE GUTTERMAN, Associated Press Writer Thu Feb 8, 10:48 PM ET
MOSCOW -
Vladimir Putin has been likened to czars and Communist Party chiefs, but a top aide came up with an unusual comparison Thursday for the Russian president: Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Speaking at a conference marking 125 years since Roosevelt's birth, Vladislav Surkov, the deputy chief of staff seen as the Kremlin's main ideologue, drew a parallel between one of America's most famous Democrats and a Russian leader who has been accused by Washington of backtracking on democracy.
Surkov found echoes of the United States in Roosevelt's time in today's Russia, news agencies reported.
Likening Russia following the 1991 Soviet collapse to Depression-era America, Surkov suggested that Putin needs to use a firm hand to put the country on the road to recovery.
"Like Roosevelt in his time, today Putin must and should strengthen administrative control and use the potential of presidential power to the maximum degree for the sake of overcoming the crisis," RIA-Novosti quoted him as saying.
"In the 20th century, Roosevelt was our military ally, and in the 21st century he is our ideological ally," the agency quoted him as saying.
Putin and his supporters have often evoked — and sometimes exaggerated — the chaos and uncertainty of the 1990s when explaining their policies and touting their achievements. At the conference, called "Lessons of the New Deal for Modern Russia and the World," Surkov suggested that both Russians in that decade and Americans in the Depression struggled with a frighteningly dark vision of the future.
He said Roosevelt kept America "from catastrophic social upheaval," the report said.
Roosevelt, who was president from 1932 until his death in 1945, oversaw an economic recovery package that sought to lift America out of the Depression. One of the most enduring policies of his New Deal was
Social Security, but he also instituted work relief programs, imposed stricter controls on public utilities and levied heavier taxes on the wealthy.