Russia Orders Stalin-Era Leather Coats for Putin Guards

June 18th, 2011

Via: AFP:

Russia’s federal guard service, in charge of protecting President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, may soon sport black leather overcoats harking back to the era of Stalin’s purges. The elite service known by its Russian acronym FSO has launched a tender to purchase 60 leather trenchcoats on the official site for government purchases, instantly drawing tongue-in-cheek criticism from Russian bloggers.

Long leather trenchcoats are infamously associated with uniforms of Soviet NKVD secret police, worn by its low-ranking officers at the height of Stalin’s pre-war purges in the late 1930s.

The coats ordered by the FSO appear to be nearly identical to the NKVD coats, according to the tender documentation and images uploaded on the website zakupki.gov.ru last week.

Research Credit: cptmarginal

3 Responses to “Russia Orders Stalin-Era Leather Coats for Putin Guards”

  1. Dennis says:

    An internet search of was rather interesting.
    This reminded me of an article I read a long time ago about how, during times of harsher socio-economic conditions, Western fashions required the use of larger quantities of fabric…or could there be a climatic connection there between colder climates, decreased food production, warmer clothes and more repressive regimes?

  2. Dennis says:

    Oh, boy…That should be “an internet search of the terms was rather interesting”

  3. Dennis says:

    No, I’m not a complete moron. It would seem using the characters used in maths to communicate ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ which I’ve seen used similarly to quotation marks when defining search terms results in the exclusion of all characters between them when posting here.

    I’ll try again:

    An internet search using the search terms ‘fashion’ and ‘fascism’ together was rather interesting.

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