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https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/02/20/the-kremlins-cri...
Let them go, one day will understand that there's a middle way between being a (masked?) dictature and an US vassal
"Putin will kill or jail anyone who opposes him, but they sucked anyways. As soon as a good challenger comes along we'll for sure vote them in!"
I wasn't even trying to be snide, but actually writing out this scenario made it too absurd to signal any other sentiment.
It's not that a bipartisan system fixes any and all problems, it's that a system where any opposition doesn't fear for their life at least opens up the possibility of viable alternatives.
Not sure, that US system is such a system https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
You saying
> as soon as there emerge a political forse which will feel like they may fix them we'll definitely vote for it
is waiting for a scenario that can't happen, by Putins/Kremlins design.
1. My approach is not pragmatic, but rather naive.
2. You seem to be a defeatist :-)
I don't agree with 1 - people die, Putin's no exception. People in ruling party rotate, change etc. The design you are talking about is, imo, overrated.
No, the reason I mentioned "they sucked" is that for an experienced politician killing his less dangerous opponent is a very stupid move. It wouldn't give any profit but will definitely harm the reputation. Сui bono tells us to search for another beneficiar.
> I wasn't even trying to be snide, but actually writing out this scenario made it too absurd to signal any other sentiment.
> is waiting for a scenario that can't happen, by Putins/Kremlins design.
I see only two options: waiting and starting your own party. I don't feel qualified for the second option.
> It's not that a bipartisan system fixes any and all problems, it's that a system where any opposition doesn't fear for their life at least opens up the possibility of viable alternatives.
This sounds reasonable. But it is in case a panacea.
Yet he spends 0 effort on finding the guilty parties when journalists/political opponents die. That you actually attempt mental gymnastics trying to explain it in more convoluted ways tells me that the Kremlin propaganda machine works.
Yes, you are right this is very disturbing and needs to be dealt with.
> That you actually attempt mental gymnastics trying to explain it in more convoluted ways tells me that the Kremlin propaganda machine works.
This is not a "convoluted mental gymnastics", this is a necessary exercise to resist the very propaganda. Talking about propaganda - could you come up with some particular example of it which makes me perform all these mental gymnastics attempt? I'm honestly curious whether I would be able to distinguish it.
All important positions in government of USA are occupied by people from the oldest and wealthiest US families. Is it democracy? I doubt that.
There's no freedom of speech. Which we hear is "freedom" of speech, because censorship is performed by not government, but private entities like Facebook, Twitter, Google. Yeah, maybe formally it's not a censorship for some strict definition of the word, but de-facto it's censorship and it's stronger than censorship ever were in Russia.
Secondly, so-called "democracy" is weaponized by the West to oust regimes West doesn't like (e.g. that aren't willing to sell rights to exploit their natual resouces to Western corporations) or simply to bomb anyone they don't like. There's no need to explain anything: "We bombed Afghanistan because they have no democracy! Hooray!". "So, have people of Afghanistan started to live better after 20 years of bombing and killing?" - "You're banned from Facebook and Twitter for violating our TOS".
Sorry, I no longer believe in "democracy".
This doesn't contradict the fact that democracy is something to strive for. Most people would like to have their voices heard and not be subjugated by authoritarian leaders.
Alas, this is were it seems like a lot of Russians have just given up; "We'll have an authoritarian regime, because it's always been like that. This one isn't as bad as the previous ones, so it's fine."
Exactly. This is why it is also possible for USA to bomb or otherwise subvert any country because they don't confirm to some definition of democracy. Because there will never be perfect democracy, the strong bully can plunder any country saying: "You're not perfect democracy, so give up your resources to me!".
This doesn't contradict the fact that democracy is something to strive for. Most people would like to have their voices heard and not be subjugated by authoritarian leaders.
Is there any country in the world where your voice would be heard unless you're a highly ranked bureaucrat or media star? In US, which is considered a "near perfect" democracy you can't say a lot of things because either you'll be blocked by monopolistic Internet media (FB, Twitter, YouTube) or you'll be "canceled" (like RMS and many others) or both.
So what should we strive for?
And why would I care? What do I need to say to the government? There're 140,000,000 of us in Russia and all have different opinions and little understanding outside of our area of expertise. If we'll all say something, the result we'll be chaos and noise.
Besides, contrary to what western media says, there's more freedom of speech in Russia than in the West. E.g. I read critics of Putin every day on all Russian social networks. I have friends that criticize Putin for years openly. They were never even invited to police or their accounts blocked. So what?
I'm not going to entertain your tangential whataboutisms. There are a lot of problems in the world today, we can agree on that.
That being said, Navalny probably won't suffer from actual violence or anything too explicit. The government isn't stupid, and they know he'll get the word out if it happens. And it doesn't really serve their purpose. They just want to shut him up. Keeping him locked up with restricted access to communication is probably enough.
I sort of agree with your last point though. Navalny does seem to have a checkered past to put it lightly. He comes from a nationalist background, and seemingly still hold some of those values. It's hard to reconcile that fact with his (in my mind) positive influence as a catalyst for change.
For a person living in Russia, I cringe every time I read news from western media about our country and our people. It's a collection of blatant lies targeted at people who don't know what is Russia, where is Russia, how Russia lives.
E.g. how would any westerner fact check any news source like this without being able to read Russian? Rely on opinions of CIA-ceritified translators?
Buddy what CIA did to you? Seriously!
They don't dominate the world. There's a good part of Europe watching that do know Russian as well. Don't live on that dream.
E.g., what's your opinion on this: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/4/7/what-do-russians... ?
(I assume this music video features a look-alike rather than the real Sobchak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmhbOgSKF9k ... it's not relevant but it's a fun bit of Russian culture.)
Does it ever occur to you that it's exactly by design?
But it's not like Putin is a bad leader. Maybe the lack of choice is due to his actions, but he's doing lots of good things for Russia. For me, clear sign of this is how he's hated by the western media.
Bad Russian leaders are loved by western media (e.g. Gorbachev, Yeltsin) and good ones are hated.
It's a little strange that in all of Russia one can't find an alternative, for decades. One might think that when an alternative shows it might get poisoned and jailed.
That is to say, someone smart enough to become a political force to be reckoned with is probably smart enough to realise that they will be faced with some terrible consequences for doing so. Their chances of success are extremely small and the chances of punishment is high. The smartest move is not to participate, and so this filters out all but the most principled or naive and foolhardy.
I happen to remember USSR collapse, then the awful years of Yeltsin, when everything went to hell: economy was dead, crime rate went through the roof - there were shootings every day on the streets, suicide rate went through the roof, population started to decline because people didn't want to have children (or didn't have means to raise children), millions were starving to death. And I remember how this started to change almost the next day after the first election of Putin. No more street shootings and businessmen cars explosions. Corruption started to wither (and continues to this day). Not only old buildings stopped to deteriorate, but new buildings, roads and bridges started to appear everywhere.
In short, just about every metric you can measure started to improve under Putin's rule. Except maybe some "freedom of speech" which is almost unimportant to me. I remember that "freedom of speech" was used to calumniate Russian past and present in 90s, I don't remember a single good thing caused by "freedom of speech" in 90s. Bunch of freaks were allowed to speak on TV and other media, what they said caused only strong negative emotions in everyone. It was obvious that it had nothing to do with making our life better.
Fine then, if money is enough to make this basic right unimportant then we're definitely not on the same page.
It's not much different from what happens in places like Dubai.
It is interesting that you talk about different metrics and different words meaning different things to Russians compared to those in the west. If we can't use "left" and "right" as descriptors, and you don't place much emphasis on "freedom of speech", what _are_ the values that you think are important? (I suspect, from what you say, even "freedom of speech" means something different to you than it does to me)
As for left or right I would label Putin as right inclined centrist.
Now, West suddenly become very concerned with Putin's alleged wealth (nobody had seen it) - why? Why Putin's wealth is more important than Yeltsin wealth? Why current level of corruption which is measly compared to level of corruption during Yeltsin times had become so extremely important to the west? Why it didn't bother anyone before?
What is important to me: being able to live normal life: have a job, have access to medicine and education for me and my family, having enough food on my table to not starve. Less important but nice to have is enough income to travel somewhere for holiday at 1-2 times a year. To have friends and family. To not have war in my country (which is US currently actively pushing as well - they hope to force war between Europe/Ukraine and Russia because that will be very beneficial for US economy and US being separated by the ocean will not experience the devastating effects of the war on its own territory).
I do not believe that democracy exists anywhere or even actually possible. I do not need some kind of "free speech" whatever that means. I like to blog, but I seriously doubt my blog would cause any problem in any society. I'm definitely aware that blogging in the US is more likely to create problems than in Russia.
In Russia nobody cares if you're rude or politically incorrect or you have contradicting political views. Many of my friends do not support Putin unlike me - that doesn't ruin our friendship. Whatever I write on my blog will never put me in trouble in Russia, even if I'll write "I hate Putin, he's a crook" - nobody cares despite what you may read in western media. In Russia I can write or say: "BLM" or "All lives matter" and I won't have any problem at my job or with the police or with anyone. In the US there's only one approved view that you can openly support, otherwise you're destined to have problems, e.g. you can be fired from your job and become homeless if you don't agree with your latest election results or don't support some SJW movement or you support it but not in an approved way.
With regards to tensions around the border with Russia and Europe, Putin is firmly seen as the aggressor from here, especially after the annexation of Crimea. To us it seems that Russia is testing the water, with the full knowledge that essentially everyone in Europe wants to avoid an outright war.
You say that you can blog freely without consequence in Russia, but I wonder what the effects of publicly disclosing e.g. homosexuality would be? The impression I have is that it would be analogous to admitting to racism in the US or Europe.
I do appreciate being able to have a reasonable conversation with someone who literally sees the world from a different angle to myself!
I assure nobody wants a war here. From here it's seen as USA aggressively trying to push Ukraine to start something stupid like trying to take Crimea back by force. Ukraine is not a sovereign country, it's under external control and they have a very little choice. Their economy is unviable, and I guess US gives them a hard choice: either you go to war with Russia or the flow of credit from the West that allows you to feed your people will stop.
We don't need Ukraine at all. It's useless for us, it's useless for Europe. If we'd captured the Ukraine (and I'm sure that would be easy), we'd have to feed the big population that can't feed themselves and about 50% of that population also hates us to guts. Everybody understands it, including Putin. Why waste resources feeding big ungrateful population if you can offload this problem to Europe?
USSR tried to feed too many hungry mouths: Georgia, Asian republics, Baltic Republics. USSR built infrastructure: schools, hospitals, industry in those countries. They were prosperous during Soviet times because Georgia for example, consumed roughly 10 times or more money its economy generated. The difference was covered by RSFSR (Russia). Only to hear after USSR collapse that we were oppressors. Nobody is going to make this mistake again. Nobody wants to take back Georgia or Tajikistan or Estonia or Lithuania. Let them care about themselves, we better spend our resources to make our life better rather than trying to buy loyalty.
So, I highly doubt Putin have any desire to start a war. It's not beneficial to him or to our country at all. It would be highly beneficial for the US, though.
The message I'll take from our exchange here is that what you and I know to be true is a result of the culture and media that we've been exposed to throughout our lives, and that objective truth is hard to determine, even for well educated people. Less well educated and informed people stand little chance of discovering the true-truth in this environment.
All the industry was destroyed, especially after the coup of 2014. Agriculture remains, but EU sets a tiny quote for Ukrainian exports. So maybe Ukraine could produce and sell more agricultural products, but they can't sell them because EU quotes are exhausted usually within the first month of the year.
Also, agriculture isn't so simple. It requires huge amounts of hydrocarbons for fueling agricultural equipment (tractors, harvesters, etc consume huge amounts of diesel for example). You also need fertilizers and other chemicals. Ukraine has to import all that.
Also, Ukraine is hostile to Russia so we don't want to import anything from them and law explicitly forbids many ukrainian imports. But EU also has its own industry and its own agriculture and they do not need one more competitor on its market. For example, after 2014 sanctions, when Russia stopped importing many articles of food from EU, many agricultural companies of EU started to experience difficulties. E.g. meat producers in Czech Republic. EU needs to give work to its own citizens, why would they open the market for cheap competing products from Ukraine? So that more EU producers go bankrupt? Not going to happen.
I guess nothing will happen. It's not like homosexuality is persecuted in Russia. I've seen several times people openly admitting their homosexuality in public with no consequences. It's explicitly prohibited to "promote" homosexuality, whatever that means. Though I've never seen or heard anyone being prosecuted by this law.
Maybe because every alternative that pops up gets assassinated or jailed by Kremlin.
If it was a democracy maybe more viable alternatives would be seen.
1. Everyone who opposes Putin dies or ends up in jail.
2. Putin hasn't been tried in court to be proven guilty, so we don't "know" who's responsible.
2 is actually barely relevant in context. The fact of the matter is that the chilling effect occurs regardless.
That the incentives clearly points to one explanation and nothing else makes sense is unmistakable, but also secondary.
a) Not everyone - a lot of people oppose Putin. https://echo.msk.ru, https://novayagazeta.ru Most content on these sites devoted to critisizing Putin and current regime. These people do this for years.
b) Not everyone from your list opposed Putin, for instnace Khlebnikov mostly concentrated on Beresovsky.
2. Correct. We don't have any official evidence. This means that the only thing we can do is to analyze what is available. The links you provided don't help much in this endevour.
We know that people die or are jailed. We can definitely see patterns that group those people together. Everything points to a single explanation, but regardless if that is proved or not, the effects are black on white.
I don't have to understand/prove weak forces or gravity to state that 100 of 100 apples dropped fall to the ground.
Black and white facts are the person murdered, crime commited and some other person guilty. The hypothesis is who this other person is.
The fact that the person murdered is not the most dangerous for the person suspected support the hypothesis that this has been done to discredit him. (but doesn't prove or disprove the hypothesis).
The fact that nobody has been prosecuted supports the hypothesis that the suspect is guilty.