What's going on in Putin's Russia?

June 4, 2015 1:01 AM

A conversation with Ilya Ponomarev, an exiled dissident Russian State Duma Deputy living in San Jose - "When the Russian government voted to annex Crimea last year, only one member of parliament stood in opposition—Ilya Ponomarev. The final tally was 445 to 1, with Ponomarev wanting the world to know that the annexation did not have unanimous support. He is now barred from returning home to Russia. First elected to Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, in 2007, Ponomarev became a leader of political protests that shook Moscow before Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. Now, the Russian parliament has voted overwhelming to strip Ponomarev of the immunity from prosecution granted to lawmakers by the Russian Constitution. How long can this government maintain control by silencing these voices of opposition? With elections scheduled for next year, what is the future of Putin's government and Russia's relationship with the United States?"

also btw...
-Putin's War
-My Ukraine
-The Secret Money Behind Vladimir Putin's War Machine
-Transnistria shapes up as next Ukraine-Russia flashpoint
-Baltics eye flashpoints with Russia, guard against 'green men'
-Can an Exiled Georgian Rescue Ukraine? (previously)
-China and Russia are stepping up their collaboration [1,2]

posted by kliuless (13 comments total)

Few Americans really understand the courage it takes to stand up to an authoritarian state led by a vindictive and mercurial leader that has almost complete control over the legal system, the police, the media, public opinion, the economy and just about everything else that matters in society. And before you say, hey what about Ferguson or Caitlyn Jenner or Elizabeth Warren or even Martin Luther King - they're all admirable figures fighting important battles against powerful forces and displaying a level of courage I admire and whose causes I probably support, but what's happening in Russia is on an entirely different level.
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 4:19 AM on June 4, 2015 [6 favorites]

I worry that they're just putting targets on themselves with no chance of any substantive change. I don't see Putin falling from internal dissent; he's still very popular in spite of the economic downturn due to the drop in oil prices. I'm not entirely sure what would cause him to lose power, even given his increasingly erratic behavior. I worry what other dangerous and destabilizing decisions he's going to make before he retires or dies.

What is it with Russians and their strong men?
posted by leotrotsky at 4:29 AM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

RandlePatrickMcMurphy: "Few Americans really understand the courage it takes to stand up to an authoritarian state led by a vindictive and mercurial leader t"

Americans vote for leaders that can barely stand up against a drunk frat boy and a cyborg asshole, they wouldn't know shit about standing up against an actual strong man doing this bullshit.

I feel sorry for Russia, I really do. They got rid of "Communism" with a grand hope, then they get a shitty leader, then they get an evil leader, and they figure - well at least under tyranny, we did pretty well compared to the Capitalist Crisis after the fall. So let's regain our former Glory.

Only this time with Nationalism, Homophobia, Religious Links and more. (Not that there wasn't any of that in the Soviet Union, mind... just that it wasn't, AFAIK, the primary mode of attack/political control in the way it is now).
posted by symbioid at 5:57 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

leotrotsky, I don't really think it's Russians, I think it's most people. The difference is that Russia lacks a history and legal structure that allows for reigning in strong men and preventing this sort of thing.

Look at all the dictators worldwide who are adored. Look at how, in the USA, there are a large number of people who long for a strongman to kick some ass. Heck, I was talking just a few days ago to a man who assured me that the biggest problem with Obama was that he just "didn't have a pair" and that what America needed was someone like Bush who "wasn't afraid to kick some ass".

The man I was speaking to was on food stamps, housing assistance, and so forth because his job vanished and he's not been able to find a new one, but he's a staunch Republican mainly because he wants an abusive daddy figure in the White House.

For that matter, have you not noticed the large number of American rightists who are pro-Putin and explicitly say they want someone like Putin to run the USA?

There's a depressingly large number of people who really like it when some bullying jackass has power and uses it to be a bullying jackass. They're not so happy when they're the victims, but for people of a certain mindset even that's ok. Some people just really love a hierarchy, even if they're at the bottom, as long as the person on top is strong and plays the role of the man at the top well.

James Fitzjames Stephen, in 1874, wrote: "To obey a real superior, to submit to a real necessity and make the best of it in good part, is one of the most important of all virtues - a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting"

The love of the strongman isn't particularly Russian, it's endemic to the human species.
posted by sotonohito at 6:10 AM on June 4, 2015 [22 favorites]

Reminds me that the sentiment behind Marty Robbins - Ain't I Right persist as strongly as ever in so many places...
posted by Drexen at 6:54 AM on June 4, 2015

There are consistent voices in India to move away from democracy and towards a one-party system - "Look at China," they say, "and we can't even keep the railways going."

You even hear them in the UK - "what we need is a dictatorship, so we can stand up to everyone and get what WE want for a change. The politicians are all owned."

The strongest adherents to this idea that I know - or knew, it's been a while - were people who were members of criminal families in the East End of London, who were all for what basically boiled down to rule by gangsters. To be fair, they had some experience with this mode of social organisation. It worked for them better than democratic civil society, and certainly has a much longer history.
posted by Devonian at 7:13 AM on June 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Putin clearly fancies himself as Peter the Great for the Twenty First Century--destined to "restore" the greatness of Mother Russia. That he is an old Bolshevik--a Chekist by training and avocation--adds the sinister quality to his manipulation of a society that is an enigma to outsiders. As Joe Stalin showed, the combination of tsar and secret policeman is a heady mix indeed.

It is beyond disturbing that Putin also appears now to be making Uncle Sam his cartoon villain/universal scapegoat, propelling anti-American sentiment in Russia to levels not seen since the worst of the Cold War. Rather like Fidel Castro was able to blame the Yanquis for the uncertainties of Cuban socialism, Putin now casts the US and NATO as the encircling forces trying--as evil forces always have done to Russia, in the eyes of Russians cognizant of their country's history--to restrict the country to second rate status. It is impossible to see the seizure of the Crimea--home of Russia's Black Sea Navy--as anything but a reanimation of the historic spectre of Mediterranean exclusion that has haunted Russian foreign policy since Peter the Great and before. Likewise, control of Ukraine has been contested since before the Romanovs, and control of the region has never been settled to the satisfaction of all its inhabitants.

It must be nerve-racking for the leaders of the three Baltic republics that escaped Soviet domination in 1991 to contemplate the possibility that Putin will--as did his imperial predecessors--seize them as a supposed buffer against Western aggression. Now however, because of the premature, some might say misguided and provocative, inclusion of these essentially indefensible countries as NATO members, Russian aggression against the Baltics would trigger a wider war of astonishing destructiveness.

I hope that Putin is willing to allay national paranoia long enough to broker a Ukrainian settlement. As long as "Russia out of Ukraine" remains a slogan for the US GOP--in essence, a call for an impossible result--then peril remains for all.
posted by rdone at 7:18 AM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

For that matter, have you not noticed the large number of American rightists who are pro-Putin and explicitly say they want someone like Putin to run the USA?

Even if they're not explictly pro-Putin, they tend to compare his ridonkulous displays of staged manliness with Obama eating arugula and Grey Poupon and going golfing and whatnot instead of doing more overtly studly things--such as, I'd guess, "landing" an airplane on an aircraft carrier and posing in front of a "Mission Accomplished" sign, say. (You have to wonder if Putin was inspired in his bear-wrestling or whatever by W's stunts; W seemed to regard him much better than Obama has.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:02 AM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

The bear-wrestling is a photo shop.

But there is definitely gold to be mined in the stories of him playing hockey, hunting and fishing, driving F-1 race cars, discovering archaological artifacts, &c. The one in the United States Congress who voted against Bush's terrorism adventure, Barbara Lee is still in office. That's the good news. The bad news is there was only one person in the United States Congress who voted against Bush's terrorism adventure.
posted by bukvich at 8:15 AM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

And before you say, hey what about Ferguson or Caitlyn Jenner or Elizabeth Warren or even Martin Luther King - they're all admirable figures fighting important battles against powerful forces and displaying a level of courage I admire and whose causes I probably support, but what's happening in Russia is on an entirely different level.

I am astonished how thoroughly you kicked that strawman's ass.

One can admire more than one person for a multitude of different reasons without the use of non-existent "levels." This is not D&D.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:45 AM on June 4, 2015

I'm not sure how much to make of it, but after reading a few surveys of Russian history over the past few years, its quite apparent that Russia really has no durable tradition of any democratic institutions. Seeing how difficult it is in the USA to extirpate the remnants of slavery and Jim Crow from our national consciousness, I have to think it must be even harder for Russia to rid itself of its authoritarian mindset.
posted by hwestiii at 9:23 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

It is impossible to see the seizure of the Crimea--home of Russia's Black Sea Navy--as anything but a reanimation of the historic spectre of Mediterranean exclusion that has haunted Russian foreign policy since Peter the Great and before. Likewise, control of Ukraine has been contested since before the Romanovs, and control of the region has never been settled to the satisfaction of all its inhabitants.

Once again, the Entente should never have dismembered the Ottomans.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:10 PM on June 4, 2015

> That he is an old Bolshevik--a Chekist by training and avocation

Your comment is excellent, and I do not mean to detract from it in any way by making this nitpicky point, but since I care about these things: I would prefer to reserve the term "Old Bolshevik" for members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917, its traditional sense. Although the party was officially called the Communist Party (bolshevik) until 1952, in practice the term "Bolshevik" fell out of use after the Civil War and was replaced by "Communist."
posted by languagehat at 6:55 AM on June 5, 2015 [4 favorites]