Vladimir Putin's tirade against Russian “traitors” he accused of seeking to undermine Russia from within has been called “Orwellian” and drawn comparison with the rhetoric of Stalin-era purges.
Mr Putin on Wednesday launched an attack on internal critics of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, saying they had been turned against Russia with western ways of thinking and that the west wanted to use them as a “fifth column” to destroy the country.
He said Russians “will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths.
“I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country,” Mr Putin added.
For some, this might have been seen simply as the latest in a series of impassioned rants from Mr Putin, but Kremlin watchers familiar with his constant attacks on the west were alarmed as the president turned such rhetoric on the Russian people.
Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, said: “When leaders single out people as ‘scum and traitors who needed to be removed from society’, as Putin just did for pro-Western Russians, it is often a prelude to ugly repression.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov adopted the president’s tone on Thursday, saying that opponents of the government were beginning to “show their true colours”.
“Very many people are showing themselves, as we say in Russian, to be traitors,” he said.
Mr Putin’s comments were also echoed in parliament by Gennady Zyuganov, head of the nominally opposition Communist party that often backs the government on important matters of policy.
“We need to defeat the fifth column that is entrenched inside and is ready to stab us in the back any minute,” he said. “All these troubles started in 1991 when [modern Russia's first president Boris] Yeltsin with his clique sold and betrayed the country.”
Some commentators noted the resemblance of his speech to one of the darkest periods of Russian history when Josef Stalin's regime rounded up and executed “traitors of the motherland”.
Carl Bildt, prime minister of Sweden in the 1990s, said: “Putin’s language in his rambling TV speech today on ‘scums and traitors’ and how to deal with them start to approach the language of the times of the purges of Stalin. This will not end well.”
Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst, said: “Putin in an Orwellian way has divided the citizens of Russia into clean and unclean.”
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