"Bashing" President Putin has become the norm for Western mass media.

[Igel]

41. I've enjoyed bashing Putin for far longer than most.

I'm at about the 15-year mark.

Then again, most of the Russians I know are "liberal" by US political standards, and brought their Putin-bashing with them when they emigrated and had only bad things to say about him. Even as they applauded things he was doing, they pointed to the dark side of the outcomes. Reduce the power of oligarchs? Good, but all that happened is that the oligarch's authority went to Putin cronies, many of whom were oligarchs in position of government authority or government-compliant oligarchs in industry. Things changed, but they were "our" (nashi) people, not even "svoi."

Then I watched the archives get closed, access to things that might prove embarrassing to Russia or specific Russians get shut down, and watched a lot of dissidents grow quiet. You could watch the reaction to perceived humiliation, the conspiracy theories and the nationalistic venting flower in the popular media and get reflected and encouraged by the dominant parties, and the reaction to it that in the fine-arts literature. A lot of the presentation of the West and Americans in particular would be deemed "hate speech" if the same were said about Muslims in the US popular press; there's no real corresponding kind of literature in the West. And the response in the popular literature to the fine-arts literature was downright fascist (or Soviet, not a big difference there). Sorokin was fascinating and went ever more extreme until I ran out of time to follow Russ lit like I used to; Bushkov did likewise. All of this was by 2010. Before "Putin-bashing" was interpreted as being pro-imperialism and fascist.


Notice how the award to the author of Zinky Boys was received. It was decidedly mixed, all but ignored in some arenas but touted in others. In some, it was ignored because she was able to be excluded as Belorusian. In a few, the award was mentioned with pride because she was "Russian," but not the specifics as to why she got it, or it was spun as showing how horrible things were--either the USSR or, as often, how horrible US sponsorship of anti-Russian terrorists was. In more than a few, it took a day or two for the news to make it from press release to the public as the media tried to figure out how, exactly, to present something--was it safe, and if not, how to redact it to make it safe or spin it to neutralize it for the domestic audience while not hurting the media's image abroad. How that award was dealt with is a decent indicator of attitude towards Putin (or level of government influence).