Trilarion: Meanwhile Putin himself signed the renaming of a special police force unit with the new name of Dzerzhinsky which was a really nice guy back in the 1920s. So I guess if Russia is not democratic and you want to know what the future will bring, have a look into the past.
That's not quite correct. Cold war propaganda messes with people's reporting and thinking. You have to look into the past, but a bit farther than that.
The mayor of Krasnodar keeps insisting that the city be renamed back to Yekaterinodar for patriotic reasons, Crimea and stuff. Blah blah. Of course, Krasnodar is a Soviet-inspired name, but it's also identical to an old Slavic city name and quite appropriate for a Russian city no matter one's political persuasion. And he's far from the only one. As far as the Russian government is concerned, Communism is the enemy, the opposite of patriotism.
Recently, WW1 has been making an astroturf comeback, as in, let the courage and bravery of WW1 fighters never be forgotten. Upon seeing the first wave of propaganda, I corrently assumed Putin's gang is again attacking the Soviet Union, and lo and behold, I was right: the official doctrine is that if only, on the verge of victory, the evil wicked treacherous Jewish bolsheviks hadn't sold out Holy Slavic Russia to Germany, Holy Slavic Russia would've won the (first and only) war, become an economical powerhouse and ruled the world spreading godly Orthodox grace everywhere like anthrax spores.
(Roizman is a neo-Nazi gangster, kidnapper and protection racketeer. Such people wield considerable power in the suburbs of Moscow (Ruza, Krasnogorsk, Istra), and the fact that one became a mayor of a larger city halfway across the continent is entirely unsurprising.)
edit: forgot the conclusion:
If you think Russia's internal and foreign policies and propaganda are Soviet or neo-Soviet or Communist or Totalitarian Stalinist or whatever, you're wrong -- they are literally neo-Nazi policies with Imperial Russian flavor. Friendship of the peoples? Fuck that noise, go go apartheid. Workers of the world, unite? Fuck that noise, go go Juche. Communal ownership of property? Fuck that noise, privatize everything. Hell, the guy who funds the Eastern Ukrainian insurgency runs an internment camp for children.