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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel I understand why Putin would have anything to deal with here. It's not like he's some huge USSR booster or hater. That Russia didn't produce a prestige TV program about it before the west is not exactly a pressing issue, and Russia isn't particularly known for its prestige TV exports.

All criticism or compliment about anyone Russian, dead or alive, doesn't have to be contextualized into a salvo of a propaganda war that imperils or emboldens Putin. Or maybe it does, for clicks.

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I think, according to the official Russian government position, USA is the enemy, and is responsible for anything bad that happens. Russian propaganda is very unambiguous about its message: Russia is doing the right thing for the world, our Soviet history was great, and, by the way, look, we have new uber-weapons against possible American interventions.

The fact that HBO was able to create such a believable depiction of the Soviet reality, shatters the simplistic propaganda message of "We are good, they are bad". It shows that UK and US people can tell a story that hits so close to home for every Russian person, and no official historical Russian movie of recent time was able to do anything remotely close. People who are tired of the propaganda message, seek the truth, and the contrast between Chernobyl and propaganda movies is striking.

It is hard to demonize the West, if the West tells you such a realistic story of your own past.

You can believe that if the Russians make a film about the segregation of blacks in America, you too will be mad and say that Americans have never been so evil and stupid (and it will be true partly).

Do you imply that I should be also mad at the depiction of heroic Soviet firefighters in Chernobyl? I think, to the contrary, they are like the most brave and heroic Soviet characters I've ever seen in a western movie.

My point is that the West was able to make a more humane and relatable movie about USSR than what all modern Russian propaganda tried and failed to do. This series is shattering the "us vs them" mentality the Russian media tries to instill.

Film is fine. I say that someone else's view of your problems always not fair in some sense. This is the reason why the film annoys many Russians. My two uncles worked at Chernoble. One died after. The second one said us without a doubt that he would also go to the active zone if ordered. No soldiers with guns took part in it or ever existed. My aunt lived at Pripyat and she was pregnant. She lived in our flat in Minsk temporary after evacuation. She's daugther fine today because of the timely evacuation of the city. Ect..

> It's not like he's some huge USSR booster

Putin is pro-Soviet and views any insult against the USSR as an insult against Russia itself. He has said that the collapse of the USSR was a great catastrophe and given an option to change anything in history he would bring back the Soviet Union. He has also played a large part in the revival and rehabilitation of Stalin in modern Russia

https://www.tfp.org/the-errors-of-russia/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47975704

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/03...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_under_Vladimir_Putin#So...

We have another picture here. Putin is not dictator as Hitler or Saddam Hussein. He just does what most people (not all of them smart) in Russia expect from him. We say that collapse of USSR is a catastrophe not because empire fell apart. It was "catastrophe" because we had the contry where all worked fine (culture, law, technology, aducation ect.) and than it suddenly dissapered complettely and turned to just crowd of criminals and stupid savages on the ruins of USSR. And the country was no longer able to stand up. Democracy did not work and the attempt to restore the authoritarianism did not work either. Nothing works anymore and no one understands why. Yesterday we were a people who can do everything, today we are a people who can not do anything.

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