How (un)popular Putin is really in Russia?

a reply to: Nikola014I think they are anything but accurate.

He's a douche bag and they have to like him or they go to Siberia.

-doctor make of me a second Stalin -afraid skin not enough cdn4.img22.ria.ru...

On Wednesday, candidate registration closed for the more than 5,800 local elections that will take place across 84 of 85 Russian provinces on Sept. 14, according to the Central Election Commission.

Thirty governor seats are up for grabs, from St. Petersburg to the far eastern Primorye region, and 14 regional legislatures will be re-elected, including in Moscow.

But not a single incumbent, Kremlin-endorsed governor risks defeat, Titkov said — mostly because electoral authorities have banned all dangerous rivals from the race.

This includes popular opposition figure Oksana Dmitriyeva in St. Petersburg, Russia's one-time vice president Alexander Rutskoi in the Kursk region and former regional prime minister Rail Sarbayev in the republic of Bashkortostan.

Read more:

www.themoscowtimes.com...

(my emphasis)

Putin does look good for many Russians, no doubt.
However.

In the information age nobody oppressing on a large scale will prevail for long, as long as they have a decent standard of living.
Which they do not, since Russia was largely neglected by the West when the Soviets collapsed. A few oligarchs were allowed to seize control of a lot of assets nationalized during Soviet times (which lasted for almost three generations, longer than in the rest of Eastern Europe) and no checks and controls were developed, no real free market in many things during the catastrophic nineties.

Oligarchic capitalism and consumer society came and conquered before and instead of democracy and free markets. Socialism - not the Stalinist kind - could have managed Russian developments (think Gorbachev, not Stalin), welfare capitalism could have just as well. They are still in the top as regards scientific research, and not bad at technology either.

But the kind of Wild Western, Dickensian retro stage they witnessed in the 90's was doomed to a giant disappointment. Russia went through a veritable national catastrophe, not unlike what Germany went through after WW1. Very few people in the West are aware how traumatic the change was to the ordinary Russian folks. Millions died for reasons of restrictions and a sudden transition to a capitalistic but not really free market state. Plus now we have prostitution, the worst drugs of Planet Earth (check out Krokodyl), famines, mafiosi ruling, ethnic murders and neofascist gangs terrorizing the colored guest workers and the gay.

Russians who grew up partly in the old times probably remember the good things and the stable social order, and that is why they put their hopes in Putin. They want some reasonable authority that is theirs. While I understand their collective motivation, I think the solution lies precisely the other way to popular sentiment. The expectations of ordinary people are usually Social Democratic (moderate left wing) on the political scale, but their conscious views are right to neo-liberal - a total discrepancy. Whic could result in - add the terms together - National Socialism. (Rings a bell?) You could say that historically part of what the French and American revolutions and similar transitions accomplished in the West, plus with the Industrial Revolution, was partly accomplished by Russia by the Soviet state, and in China by Maoism. This is a sweeping historical statement, and you could say it is Hegelian, but I think there is some truth to it. The Bolsheviks had an almost manic urge to develop the modern: Lenin's slogan was "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country."

Part of it was never accomplished. I mean, not the electrification, but the revolutionary part. Plus you could rightly say in a geopolitical sense that welfare society was kept up in the West partly as a response to a permanent challenge of Communism (the more accurate historical term would be actually Bolshevism). By the time of Gorbachev, welfare society was designed to be over by the ruling elite of the West - there was a deal with China in the making. A global relaxation of all the trade barriers formerly kept up by the largely Rooseveltian principles, and outsourcing production to the third world.

As a result the common Russians arrived not into a gradualy expanding freedom of the West, but into a backwards, neo-liberal world order, stricken by fundamentalism, into almost a third-world status. (The numbers then providing grounds for Russia's non-treatment were exaggerated, because exchange rates were tied to Western money markets - so it is unrealistic to say that they had a bad GDP.)

The EU and NATO never wanted to include a modern Russia, so many Russians feel collectively and politically excluded and some even betrayed. As are basically most smaller Eastern European nations, though admittedly some fare better than others. As far as prosperity and democracy go, Czechs and Slovenes do far better than others, the Baltics are not bad, neither is Poland. Hungary and Bulgaria seems to go the opposite way in both, lining up with the Milosevic-Putin model now.

The cultural part is that these peoples are all white and mostly Christian and considered themselves part of Europe for hundreds of years. So these Eastern nations are partly like a hidden mirror of our identity. And, the highest immigration as far as I know into Israel has been from Russia and Ukraine.

Can you see the writing on the wall?
Yugoslavia was only a prelude.

a reply to: Nikola014

Russian Politics are different in many ways as are Russian citizens but they also share much in common with the rest of us. They are intelligent and well informed there. I am not a big fan of many of the policies coming from the Kremlin or from Putin but then the same can be said for the White House here in my own country. I like Putin in general. I think he is doing right by his people. Could he be doing better? You bet. Just like My President could be doing better for his Nation.

Now if you look at it on a global level. The I am leaning towards Putin more than Obama. Foreign Policies etc. is about 50/50 with me. It seems to me that Putin is not anywhere as bad as the rest of the world would have us believe but he is a far cry from a saint. He is capable of doing bad and stupid things like anyone else.

Putin rules. I wish America had a leader who had half the balls Putin does. If Russia had the resources the USA had he'd be killing it.

originally posted by: Nikola014
a reply to: tsurfer2000h

All this time i thought you were a Putin hater. But now, i realize that you actually hate Russian people in general. I mean, implying that people in Russia cannot think for themselves and basically saying that they are stupid, proves it all. Do you think they base their opinion on just what's being said on the news? Do you think they cannot think for themselves? I think you are wrong. I think a lot of Russia people actually know what's going on in the world and that's why they at least don't hate Putin. Think about that.

You make it sound like the Russian system is truly set up to give a choice either way. When you can be arrested for political dissent for saying otherwise with no right to protest and your news agency is government controlled you don't get much anti-governmental displays publicly in Russia.

Here we go! This is the video I was looking for. Residents of Upper Vereya Nizhny Novgorod confront Putin: "You tried to burn us alive!" (Burning innocents seems to be a pattern for Putin.)

Very interisting thread, that I allow myself to update.

How Russia props up Putin in the polls

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity appears to resist the laws of political physics. Despite the price of oil sinking below $50 a barrel and the Russian economy falling into a tailspin, Putin’s approval ratings hover above 80 percent, seemingly defying ­gravity.

But the numbers should not be taken at face value.

Deeper scrutiny is especially important because the more Putin’s sky-high popularity ratings are mentioned, the more they become accepted wisdom. Western news media and political analysts frequently report on them without providing critically needed context.

I wonder what will be the outcome after the latest cease-fire in Ukraine ...

Of course Putin's approval rating is astronomical. The ones who disagree with him are dead, in jail, or exiled.

"When the price of beer rises, governments fall." --Old Czech proverb