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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy Do Russians Still Support Vladimir Putin? (from the New Statesman website)
(Note: before anybody says it-NO, I do not support Putin and never have. Just thought I should post this to try to explain why our favorite real-life "Bond villain" retains public support in his own country. It's useful to hear explanations of such things).http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/why-do-russians-support-still-support-vladimir-putin
A recent poll, conducted between 20 23 February 2015 among 1,600 Russians aged 18 or more in 46 different regions of Russia by an independent Russian not-for-profit market research agency Levada Centre for Echo Moskvy radio station, found that 54 per cent of the population agreed that “[Russia] is moving in the right direction”. Eighty-six per cent of the respondents approve of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president. When asked to name five or six politicians or government officials they trust, 59 per cent responded: ”Putin”.
Let’s put aside the possibility of rigged polls because there is little to suggest Putin’s popularity is fake. Putin is respected, if not revered. He is referred to as batyushka, the holy father. Many Russians are particularly upset and angry about Nemtsov’s murder because western fingers are pointing at Putin. In their opinion, Nemtsov was most likely killed as a provocation to destabilise Russia and fuel hostility between Kremlin and the west. “With all due respect to the memory of Boris Nemtsov, in political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin, said presidential press secretary Dmitriy Peskov. “If we compare popularity levels, Putin’s and the government’s ratings and so on, in general Boris Nemtsov was just a little bit more than an average citizen.”
Russians love and support their president. I wanted to understand why, so I spoke to a number of people in their 20s, 30s and 60s who helped me crystallise their reasoning into the following arguments.
(More below)
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Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)(Note: These are simply the arguments the author of this piece heard when speaking to ordinary Russians. I neither endorse nor condemn them in posting them here, but simply quote them).
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/why-do-russians-support-still-support-vladimir-putin
Putin built Russia’s middle class. There is a popular, if ignorant, view that Russians are either super rich or extremely poor. You don’t need to travel to Moscow (a quick trip to Cyprus or Turkey’s sea resorts would do) to see that many Russians now drive a decent car (anything other than a Lada), travel abroad, wear clothes from Zara and can afford to buy whatever else signals middle class. Since Putin came to power, Russia’s gross national product per capita increased from 49,800 roubles in 2000 to 461,300 in 2013, according to the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation. From the same source, we learn that Russian citizens travelled abroad 9.8 million times in 2000 and 38.5 million times in 2013.
Putin has improved social welfare in Russia. A sales manager in his late 20s talked to me about Putin’s welfare reforms, raising pensions, investing in education and healthcare, infrastructure and social security laws which sought to encourage families to have children and address declining population. For the first time in the last 20 years new births in Russia were recorded as higher than deaths in 2013. Average pensions (stated in 1992 prices) went up from 694 roubles a month in 2000 to 9,918 roubles in 2012. Crime went down, including murders (from 28.2 per cent in 2000 to 10.1 per cent in 2012, the coefficients indicating deaths from murder per 100,000 people). There were 9.3 hospital beds in Russia per 1,000 people in 2012, as compared to 3 beds per 1,000 people in the UK in 2011.
Putin has restored Russian might. Throughout his time in office, Putin has demonstrated his dedication to addressing the values Russians care about most: the integrity of their country, its sphere of influence in international relations, and its ability to withstand the US dictating its policies to the world at large. This is perhaps the core factor in Putin’s popularity, which came across in all the conversations I’ve had with those Russians who support the current regime. ”It’s not about the economy or the welfare,” a professional woman in her 30s said to me, ”it’s about thinking on a much bigger scale and more globally”. Putin has gradually rebuilt Russia’s defence industry, making it a strategic priority. Taking Crimea, Putin protected Russia’s military base on the Black Sea, was an important manoeuvre at the time of the accelerating hostility from the US and Nato. The Russians have regained self-respect, rising from the financial ashes of the 1990s and restoring national pride. ”The world has been looking at us as a third world country throughout the 1990s but today we are a force to be reckoned with.”
There is no one else. Ultimately, there is no other viable candidate to lead Russia instead. If it’s a chicken and egg problem, it would take time to grow credible opposition, although the soil is hardly fertile. As it stands, even moderate supporters of Putin agree that current opposition leaders are neither convincing nor capable. Putin has a track record of delivering economic stability, however justified were his means. Russians are too used to local and national government officials helping themselves to the state pocket, so the prevalent philosophy to the change in power is that the incumbent is always ”the least worst”. A woman in her 60s said to me: ”What’s wrong with Putin? At least he holds the country together – look at what happened to the Ukraine. It’s in pieces; its people are beyond despair.”
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The big problem is, Russia had leaders(Gorbachev and Yeltsin)who were totally cooperative with and friendly towards "The West", and "the West" rewarded their friendship and cooperation with punitive conditions for financial assistance and an insistence on making Russia play the role of the vanquished foe. This sent the message to the Russian people(and Russia's leaders) that there was nothing ever to gain from reaching out to "The West".
And it gave Putin(Boris Yeltsin's chosen successor)a chance to build popular support and backing within both the military and the security services that he would never have been able to build if "The West" had let the aid flow and given Russia(as well as Eastern Europe)a modern-day Marshall Plan and accepted Russia as a permanently equal partner with "the West" in the world order.
We could have had a long-term era of peace and stability and the complete entrenchment of democracy in post-Soviet Russia. But the leaders of "The West" wouldn't let it happen.
That's why we've got the mess we've got now.
May future Western leaders learn the lesson...if the human race survives long enough for them to learn it.
Man from Pickens
(1,713 posts)We would have it.
They don't.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)that the idea was to create an American hegemony. A nation with no challengers or potential challengers.
THAT's the sort of totalitarian central control of 'peace' the neocon believing hangers-on in the military/surveillance/security complex want and if it can come at all, it's only going to come at the cost of bringing to heel some pretty substantive militaries around the world.
In otherwords war, conventional and economic, stands between the time we live in and that future time of peace
Man from Pickens
(1,713 posts)it is merely a perpetual war of elites vs. everyone else
We had chances for some real lasting peace, all we needed to do was not to be raging greedy assholes after the Cold War ended, but no, we had to then immediately expand NATO and start a campaign of conquest in Asia and Africa. Cui bono? Not me, not you.
elias49
(4,259 posts)Putin, bad. But US also bad in its own subtle way.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)We really need to fix OUR government before we start pointing fingers and imposing economic warfare (sanctions) on others.
newfie11
(8,159 posts)hifiguy
(33,688 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)the fact that he's an obstacle to the US hegemony is just another good reason to ignore the propaganda that tries to dislodge him from office.
Like Chavez and Maduro, Morales and the Castro brothers, Putin says "nyet" to selling out his people to the banksters and the Corporations and the Military/Industrial/Espionage complex that has enslaved us here.
Would that we had such a principled leader in this country.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)His homophobic policies, his generally bullying approach to politics and international relations, his suppression of internal dissent.
I didn't post this as an attempt to exonerate the guy of all wrongdoing...simply to try and explain why he retains the levels of public support he continues to hold.
And also as an illustration that people in different countries may want different things in a leader than people here might prefer.
A lot of things would have to go wrong inside Russia for people there to decided they were ready to break with the Putin regime.
And a lot of what the Russian people support in Putin is still probably in reaction to the way things went there when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were still in power-In those days, Russia had leaders who totally cooperated with everything the West asked of them and were repeatedly humiliated and disrespected by the west(including the Clinton Administration)for doing so. My theory is that Yeltsin chose Putin as his preferred successor in order to get payback for that.
Perhaps, if Russia ever again has leaders that are willing to be friendly with and cooperative towards "The West", "The West" will learn the lesson and not make them regret the friendship and cooperation.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)Particularly a halfway credible enemy like Russia, making friends with them would be idiotic from the point of view of the military industrial congressional complex.
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)http://rt.com/news/medvedev-rock-music-meeting/
MOSCOW — The conflict in Libya caused an unusual rift on Monday between Russia’s two leaders, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin and his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who typically choreograph their statements and refrain from criticizing each other.
Mr. Putin appeared to displease Mr. Medvedev on Monday by harshly assailing the airstrikes by coalition forces in Libya. Mr. Putin said the United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized the attacks was “deficient and flawed.” Russia abstained from voting on the resolution last week, deciding not to use a veto to block it.
...
Mr. Medvedev referred more positively to the United Nations resolution, saying that it was important to remember that the Libyan leadership had committed crimes against the Libyan people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/europe/22russia.html?_r=0
They probably all have heard about the Wolfowitz doctrine by now
March 8, 1992
U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop
A One-Superpower World
Pentagon’s Document Outlines Ways to Thwart Challenges to Primacy of America
By Patrick E. Tyler
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, March 7 – In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.
A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”
The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.
http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm
Demeter
(85,373 posts)"his generally bullying approach to politics and international relations, his suppression of internal dissent"
sounds really like NSA, FBI, CIA, IMF, World Bank, NATO, Coalition of the Willing, those amazingly magical disappearing Weapons of mass Destruction, etc. Standard Administration policies that Obama ran against, until he could embrace them with even more fervor than his predecessors.
So, Obama isn't a public homophobe. Somehow, I don't think that makes a significant difference, even for the non-hetero population.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Homophobe and Putin is a nhomophobe in private and in public.
It matters big time ot the LGBT community to have a president that stands up for us instead of putting up laws against us.
You are wrong!
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The big problem for anyone trying to organize opposition to Putin within Russia is the sense a lot of Russians have that, without Putin being in power, they'd lose everything they have again (as they did under Yeltsin) and that there country would face international humiliation and disrespect(again, as it did under Putin).
Any effective anti-Putin campaign would need to be able to offer guarantees from the Western powers that a post-Putin Russia would not face austerity again and not be treated as a defeated nation again. At the moment, bad as Putin is, no one in Russia
has any reason to trust that.
Until that problem can be overcome, Putin is going nowhere.
"The West" is largely responsible for causing this state of affairs-Most Russians still have bitter memories of how, in the Nineties, there country did everything the Western leaders asked and those same Western leaders treated Russia like the Winners of the 1914-1918 war treated Weimar Germany.
This wasn't the fault of LGBTQ people in Russia or anywhere else, but they've been made into scapegoats, as Jews and gays(among others)became the scapegoats in Germany.
Wherever it's brought in, austerity kills.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)"So, Obama isn't a public homophobe. Somehow, I don't think that makes a significant difference, even for the non-hetero population."
I think it makes a huge difference. I really could care less about the insecurities of the Russian people. I do care that citizens are discriminated zgainst because of who they are or what they believe.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Nor do I disagree with you about Putin's homophobia. Just trying to provide some understanding about why Putin's popularity persists.
Explanation is not defense.
Response to Ken Burch (Reply #30)
hrmjustin This message was self-deleted by its author.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)I agree with you about Putin's homophobia.
My point in starting this thread was to show why it's so difficult to get the guy out.
I totally agree with you that Putin is a total bastard to gays.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)
NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)I can't believe what I'm reading here.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)That you, Rudy?
Bugenhagen
(151 posts)Yeltsin was weak. I have heard he was worthless and drunk too much of the time. The country was in a financial disaster. The place was pretty lawless. Lots of Russians were leaving and basic goods were in short supply. People weren't getting paid (remember news stories about teachers in remote areas being paid in vodka?) for months at a time. Above all the now-oligarchs were privatizing (read: stealing) public property (read: everything) hand over fist. All movie stereotypes of the Russian mafia date to the 90s.
Things began improving quickly for Russians under Putin. The economy really got traction and people started getting real jobs and getting paid well. People may not believe, but the crazy lawlessness of the 90s is practically gone. The rich are still above the law, but it's improving. Police are a lot harder to bribe now. Life is way better, not for everyone (capitalism always leaves the weakest behind) but for a hell of a lot. I'd say "for most", but I can't back it up with hard numbers.
Before the anti-Russian propaganda really started to escalate (circa "we came, we saw, he died"
I felt that anti-Putin demonstrations were starting to take hold. His benefit to the country was held by many to be outweighed by the authoritarianism. But Russians come together when they feel put-upon.
I have one friend, a small business owner who is madder at Putin than ever because her business is being devastated. But as my other friend said, "In the 90s we couldn't get anything. People would rush to buy food when they could. With today's EU sanctions, people are buying up BMWs and appartments and French cheeses."
I had a graph I was going to paste here, but I can't figure out how and I'm tired and so screw it.
Response to Bugenhagen (Reply #9)
Post removed
elias49
(4,259 posts)Can't accept what you read? Or just don't like it?
Igel
(35,309 posts)That's the problem with politicians. We treat them like mommy and daddy, as though we're little babies who need our butts wiped while mommy and daddy have complete control over everything that happens.
If a job is created in Wichita, we act like Obama is personally responsible for fronting the investment capital and did the work himself. There's no "we built that", there's only "he built that." The last person we want to give credit to is the person who actually started the company, gathered the equipment, found the funding, kept the P&L statement in the black, and managed sales to increase demand. Even worse if he found a product that people want and wasn't able to self-invent itself.
Russians think the same about Putin, only more so. He brought prosperity. He made the jobs. Putin, tsar', ikh batyusha. Putin, king, their holy father. (Going back to how the tsar' was referred to in centuries past.)
By Putin's election some graphs show things were in the dumpster. Others, not so much. There are economic indicators that, taken over a few time periods, usually show reliably what's happening. There are economic indicators that, taken over a few time periods, usually show reliably what's very likely to happen in the near future; these are leading indicators. There are economic indicators that, taken over a few time periods, show reliably what was happening; these are lagging indicators.
Unemployment is a lagging indicator. As the economy gets better, it's among the last thing to improve. Investment, confidence, all sorts of things trend upward for months before unemployment drops.
Inventory is a leading indicator. When you see inventories rise too much you know that factory orders will fall; when you see factory orders fall, you know unemployment will rise.
By Putin's election all the leading indicators said, "Things are better." Corruption down, investment up. The lagging indicators had just started to trend up--so the underlying economy was on the mend.
But because we only see what affects us, and what we know is all there is to know, and because our leader, our batyushka, happily takes all the credit for all good things, Putin gets all the credit.
Even worse, in Russia the attitude is that "what we know is all there is to know" is even more proscribed than in the US. For the most part, what the government says is all there is to know. It's why Putin's busy closing down information flow from the West; it's why his puppets in the Donbas jam radio signals that spout "lies" (even if the "lies" are true facts that the regime just doesn't like, well, that's often the definition of "lie" in that kind of "progressive" system).
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)Financiers had gone into Russia under Yeltsin and installed a very rough and tumble version of Cowboy Capitalism. In Russian's enthusiasm to join in the world economy, Russians hadn't taken time to put in place consumer protections.
In the late 90's financial institutions that had gone up like a sky rocket, came down in ashes. Western investors yanked their money and their profits back into the west, essentially robbing many Russians of the contents of their bank accounts= their life-savings.
Those events happened just before I began participation research relationships with Russian scientists that ran from the late 90's into the early years of this century. Based on interaction with some real Russians over those years, I can say that Putin's overt statements about protecting Russians by running out western privateers were popular. We focus on Putin as a geopolitical player, often without much consideration of his domestic situation, because we largely ignore things like the collapse of western financed banking in Russia in the 90's.
cherokeeprogressive
(24,853 posts)Only one generation of Russians have lived in freedom. Freedom is scary. Unfortunately some if not most prefer authoritarianism over freedom because it's what they know best. Freedom forces a populace to think for itself. Having been deprived of that for so long, Russians are likely to go running back to where they've already been.
Kind of like a twisted version of the Stockholm Syndrome.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)But it's useful to know why most Russians do.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Hence his appeal. He's popular there for the same reason we hate the bastard. Strong father figure who will kick the crap out of disfavored minorities like Chechens and Ukrainians and GLBT Russians while flexing militarist muscle and bullying weak countries.
There are a lot of countries that could teach the US valuable lessons about how to create a better society. Russia is not one of them.
moondust
(19,981 posts)And Pooty the Terrible seems more than happy to oblige.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)But it remains true that, if you insist on making a nation play the role of the vanquished, it's not too surprising that a demagogue will emerge within that nation who can use the sense of humiliation that can cause for his own cynical ends.
Happened in Germany in the Twenties and early Thirties.
Happened in Russia early in this century.
The lesson there is...don't humiliate other countries, especially if the contest between your country and the other countries in question essentially ended in a draw.