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They are a grim echo of similar units formed by Stalin, characterised principally by their extremely high rate of attrition.

Authorities in Kyrgyzstan will be aware of the risk of offending its ally, Russia, a week after the latter unveiled a brand new statue of another Soviet figurehead, Josef Stalin, in Moscow.

He transparently believes he’d have gotten along smashingly with Hitler and Stalin, and it’s a shame he wasn’t around to help defuse World War II and the Cold War.

It’s worse than that: Like Stalin’s inner circle or a Bourbon king’s courtiers, Trump’s factotums seek to outdo each other in embracing absurd, impossible, offensive and dangerous ideas.

In the 1930s, his successor, Joseph Stalin, cited the “inefficiency” of individual farming as justification for the collectivization of millions of peasants into state farms, creating a “terror-famine” in Ukraine.