control, not for the sake of world revolution". In 2005, Communist politician Gennady Zyuganov said that Russia "should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague". Zyuganov has said "Great Stalin does not need rehabilitation" and has proposed changing the name of Volgograd back to Stalingrad. In 2010, the Communist leader stated: "Today... the greatness of Stalin's era is self-evident even to his most furious haters... We liberated the whole world!". In 2008, Dmitry Puchkov accused the authorities of raising a wave of anti-Stalin propaganda to distract the attention of the population from topical troubles. In a December 2008 interview, he was asked a question: "Dmitry Yurievich, what do you think, is the new wave of 'unveiling the horrors of Stalinism' on the TV related to the approaching consequences of the crisis or is it merely another [mental] exacerbation?". He replied: "The wave is being raised to distract opinion of the population from the up-to-date troubles. You don't have to think of your pension, you don't have to think of the education, what matters are the horrors of Stalinism". Russian writer Sergey Kara-Murza believes that there is a trend to demonize Russia that is common not only in Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, but in Russia as well. He contends that it is a good business and that it was a good business previously to demonize the Soviet Union: "Why do we need to take offense against Poles, if we in our country have the same (and for us – sufficiently more dangerous and hazardous) cohort of pundits, philosophers, historians who enjoy the maximal favourable regime set by the state and do the same things as Poles do?" United States Sameera Khan, a former Miss New Jersey and reporter for RT, made a series of tweets glorifying Stalin and the gulag system and calling for his return. Khan was harshly criticized for expressing these views, including by RT itself, and the controversy led to her apologizing and leaving the network. See also Grover Furr Ludo Martens Neo-Sovietism Nostalgia for the Soviet Union "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" Soviet patriotism Stalin Society Tankie, a pejorative term for pro-Soviet communists References Further reading Khapaeva, Dina. "Triumphant memory of the perpetrators: Putin's politics of re-Stalinization." Communist & Post-Communist Studies (March 2016), pp 61–73. celebrations of Stalin's memory