Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Vladimir Putin, Hero of Soviet Labor

December 12, 2012 at 2:02 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has found an ironic way to mark the first anniversary of mass protests aimed at pushing the country toward democracy: On Dec. 10, he called for the revival of the Soviet Union’s highest peacetime honor, the Hero of Labor medal.

The hard part will be figuring out what, exactly, the award should stand for in modern-day Russia.