Tsar Putin spreads his tentacles

[Codeblue009 3]

Ahhh democracy!

Remember, Czar Putin said it is "Russian Democracy!" He will be president again. There is no force that can withstand him.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Remember, Czar Putin said it is "Russian Democracy!" He will be president again. There is no force that can withstand him.

He will probably fly another jet, or help a tiger or some bs, and the peasants will love their Tsar Putin even more. Every time he does something macho (small ####### syndrome) the Russian peasants suck it up and then some.

[Brad and Vika 129]

The thing is, I don't know what would replace Putin. There are no clear leaders otherwise.

And Russia also is a country that suffers from the "resource curse." Whoever controls the national resources controls the country. In the 90s, that was the oligarchs and despite better freedom of press, etc. economically it was a disaster. Quality of living has improved a lot even just in the 5 years I've been here, nevermind what it must have been like 10, 15 years ago. I can see why people would be reluctant to take a chance and change course. Plus there is an overwhelming belief that politics are meaningless and political participation is a joke, not just in Russia, but everywhere. Nobody believes me when I say that, for instance, Republicans and Democrats are different, or that voting actually means something in the US.

I keep hearing that eekee, but I think the fact that there are no clear leaders is kind of a which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg debate. Are there no leaders, so Putin fills the void and just crowds out the weaker contenders, or does Putin actively eliminate his competition before they have the power base to really challenge him.

To me the more interesting question is why do people in Eastern Europe seem to lean so far towards the strongest appearing candidate, regardless of his/her position on issues? In Ukrain for example, people are well aware that the socialist/communist model was a failure, but they voted back in a President that was known to be crooked, known to be affiliated with the Kremlin, and was a clear reversion to the old way of doing things. I am told it was because the old administration was divided and weak (at least in part). Could it be that people there have had so much hardship, they just want stability, and will support the strongest (and therefore most likely to promote stability) leader?

German influence imo had a small impact if any. Sure ethnic German rulers such as Catherine had an impact, but only after her Russian husband was deemed weak. A lot of Germans were moved to Russia for their skills...but anyone who compares German culture to Russian culture knows that they have about zero in common. One trip to Germany and then to Russia solves that question.

Mongol rule was alive for 300+ years in Russia and it's impact was significant enough to where it changed an entire people in regards to politics...and more. Russia has St. Petersburg which is meant to look like a European city, but past that they don't have a lot in common with Europeans other than a border they share with European country's. Russia imo resembles it's Asiatic and Turk neighbors much more than it's European ones.

I am of the opinion that many Eastern Europeans look like westerners, but think like asians. That thinking manifests to me in the closeness of family and social groups. Maybe one of the reasons Marx and Lenin played so well there.

[eekee 182]

Yes Brad, I think people want stability. True instability has not been known in the United States since maybe the Civil War. It's hard for us to understand why people would make certain sacrifices (i.e., true freedom of the press) for stability (food being readily available in stores, jobs) if they have no real understanding of what living in an unstable society is like. And frankly most people aren't human rights lawyers, politically-orientated journalists, or the CEOs of companies that the Kremlin wants for itself, so they don't really feel the burden of lack of freedom on a daily basis. There are small annoyances, I suppose, but those are universally shrugged off as "eh, Russia," and forgotten about.

And I don't know anyone who has been beaten by Nashi activists or whatever.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Yes Brad, I think people want stability. True instability has not been known in the United States since maybe the Civil War. It's hard for us to understand why people would make certain sacrifices (i.e., true freedom of the press) for stability (food being readily available in stores, jobs) if they have no real understanding of what living in an unstable society is like. And frankly most people aren't human rights lawyers, politically-orientated journalists, or the CEOs of companies that the Kremlin wants for itself, so they don't really feel the burden of lack of freedom on a daily basis. There are small annoyances, I suppose, but those are universally shrugged off as "eh, Russia," and forgotten about.

And I don't know anyone who has been beaten by Nashi activists or whatever.

How about "shot to death" ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Markelov <---- Those two (if they were even the ones that did the crime) were members of Tsar Putin's NASHI Hitler Youth Brigade before they went even more extreme. If I had a nickel for every journalist, human rights worker, and lawyer that got whacked in Russia these past 25 years I would pay my internet bill.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/konstantin-popov-russian-_n_429694.html <---- The Police in Russia have also been known to do Tsar Putin's dirty work. He can't ever get enough help keeping the peasants in line eh ?

[eekee 182]

The Kremlin doesn't even have control over the police, really. It's basically the dumb lunkheads from high school who can't get a job anywhere else and like having a job where they can beat people up without consequences. This is something Medvedev actually IS trying to reform and I have noticed that the police have gotten noticeably nicer in the past year or so.

And like I said: 99.5% of the population aren't human rights workers, journalists, or lawyers with an activism bent. People who go into those careers know exactly what they are getting into in Russia. This is perhaps why it does not elicit the shock and horror that it does in the West. It is pretty much expected that some things are just dangerous. Also certain characters, such as Anna Politovskaya, are not always looked upon the same way in Russia as they are in the West.

I think there is just a legacy of, well, if you want to keep your nose clean, you'll be fine. If you want to stick your nose in dangerous situations, you can expect it to be chopped off but right now people want food on the table and a work that will actually pay them their promised salary.

[visaveteran1 33]

As Neo says in the Matrix: "Get me guns, lots of guns."

The US is different than most countries because we have guns, lots of guns. We are an armed citizenry.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

The Kremlin doesn't even have control over the police, really. It's basically the dumb lunkheads from high school who can't get a job anywhere else and like having a job where they can beat people up without consequences. This is something Medvedev actually IS trying to reform and I have noticed that the police have gotten noticeably nicer in the past year or so.

And like I said: 99.5% of the population aren't human rights workers, journalists, or lawyers with an activism bent. People who go into those careers know exactly what they are getting into in Russia. This is perhaps why it does not elicit the shock and horror that it does in the West. It is pretty much expected that some things are just dangerous. Also certain characters, such as Anna Politovskaya, are not always looked upon the same way in Russia as they are in the West.

I think there is just a legacy of, well, if you want to keep your nose clean, you'll be fine. If you want to stick your nose in dangerous situations, you can expect it to be chopped off but right now people want food on the table and a work that will actually pay them their promised salary.

I have to agree with most of what you posted there. It's for those very reasons that it will be many years if ever that the civilized and democratic West will change the rules and have an open visa policy with Russia.

As far as Medvedev goes...he's not only as crooked as the rest of the Kremlin mafia...he's a lame duck president atm. He's on his way out and Tsar Putin is on his way back in...like if he ever actually left...

[eekee 182]

My friend told me tonight that starting in September, the only free subjects at school will be math, Russian, "patriotism"/phys ed, and maybe English. Everything else, parents will have to pay for. They are also planning to change the healthcare system somehow to make things not free anymore. I had read about this school stuff before and thought it was the dumbest thing, but I didn't know they were actually going to go through with it.

So I guess if they keep on doing things like that, things that are absolutely detrimental to the common person's quality of life, we will see some kind of civil force for change.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Here's an interesting article that I just saw on the Yahoo main page.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110509/wl_time/08599206839800;_ylt=AsY5FZTWZs5kH0XoW56GS0VvaA8F;_ylu=X3oDMTJsM2hyMWZrBGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMjAxMTA1MDkvMDg1OTkyMDY4Mzk4MDAEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX2FydGljbGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawNhYmFuZG9uYWxsaG8-

Abandon All Hope: The Russian Region That's Been Left to Die

By SIMON SHUSTER / LOPOTOVA – 2 hrs 55 mins ago

Having tucked into his first bottle of vodka earlier than usual, Anatoly Zhbanov goes on an afternoon stroll to buy another one along the dirt road through Lopotova, a dying village on Russia's western edge, in the region of Pskov. It is mid-April, and clumps of snow are still melting at the roadside where Zhbanov, a local artist, stops to peer inside a lopsided cabin, the home of a local bootlegger. In the window stands a plastic jug filled with murky liquid, its neck sealed with a rubber glove that seems to be waving hello. "That's how you know it's ready," Zhbanov says. "The gas released from fermentation makes the glove inflate. We call that the Hitler Salute."

In the past few years, the region of Pskov has become famous in Russia for two interconnected blights: moonshine and depopulation. In 2006, a brew tainted with chemicals killed at least 15 people and poisoned hundreds, marking the first time a Russian region had to declare a state of emergency because of vodka. Last month, when the federal government released the census data collected in 2010, Pskov earned another claim to fame. It is dying out faster than any other region in Russia's heartland. (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory Day.)

Of course the rest of the country isn't doing so well either. The population has dropped by 2.2 million people, or 1.6%, since the last census was taken in 2002. These were supposed to have been the glory years under Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000, first as president and now prime minister. And in that time, a handful of cities have indeed prospered, with Moscow becoming home to more billionaires than any other city in the world. But more than 6,000 villages have meanwhile turned into ghost towns, or as the census calls them: "population points without population." About 2,000 of those are in Pskov.

In just eight years, the region has lost 11.5% of its population, a rate of decline more often seen in times of war and famine. This might have been expected in Russia's permanently frozen north, like the region of Magadan, once home to the Gulag prison camps, where the population dropped 14.1% in that time. But Pskov lies on the border with the European Union, and the city of St. Petersburg, Putin's birthplace, is only 100 miles away. (See pictures of Putin.)

In Soviet times, huge collective farms and machine works were based in Pskov. Village life thrived, and the main city was still famed for nobler things, like fending off the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. But traveling the region's backroads now inspires the creepy feeling that a plague has just passed through. Every few miles a cluster of huts emerges from behind a hill, and most of them turn out to be abandoned, their floorboards warped and splintered, releasing a smell of decay. The fields are overgrown, and old grain elevators tower over them like enormous ghosts - landmarks to Russia's demographic catastrophe.

So by local standards, the village of Lopotova is doing fairly well. The villagers say it still has a few hundred residents (down from about a thousand ten years ago) as well as its own grocery store, where the saleswoman spends most of the day ringing up liquor sales on an abacus. No surprise that the most popular item is vodka, the cheapest half-liter bottle going for 68 rubles, or $2.25. Far from everyone can afford it.

Behind the store, at the end of the unmarked village road, Zhbanov comes across a group of five young men in their 20s sitting on a log in front of a sheet-metal shack. They are not homeless, but they look it. In a week or so, the weather will let them pick mushrooms and berries to sell on the side of the road, the steadiest form of employment they have had since 2003, when the local farm went bankrupt. Aside from that, they can forage for scrap metal or go talk to Zhbanov, who makes enough selling his paintings in St. Petersburg to give them a handout from time to time.

One of the men, a native of Lopotova named Alik Matveev, scratches his head when asked the last time he had seen any sign of the government. "I can't really remember," he says. "There's no hospital, and our school closed in 2006. I guess that was a government building."

That was also the year Putin imposed the policy of per-capita financing for education, which meant that schools with too few students could not afford to stay open. In many sparsely populated regions, this crippled the education system, and young families fled to the cities to put their children in school. Many ended up in Moscow, boosting the city's population since 2002 by 10.9% to 11.5 million people, according to the census.

See 10 things to do in Moscow.

On April 20, Putin announced a plan to spend more than $50 billion through 2015 on projects to alleviate the demographic crisis. A huge portion of the money would be used to try to encourage families to have more children by offering them one-time payments. But having a baby requires that parents feel secure in their overall standard of living, from medical care to education and employments, says Galina Vyatkina, head doctor at the main prenatal hospital in Pskov. "So offering handouts can only do so much," she says. "It has to be a complex approach."

The new earmarks are also unlikely to change the government's broader policy of urbanization, which is driven by the fact that basic services are much easier for the state to provide when the population is massed in huge apartment blocks. Most villages have thus been left to fend for themselves until they either disperse or die out, says Lev Shlosberg, a political activist in Pskov. "It is a semi-official death sentence for rural communities." (See more on Putin's billionaire boys judo club.)

The regional governor, Andrei Turchak, concedes that many more villages will have to disappear. There are more than 4,000 of them across the region with a population of less than 10 people, he says. "That usually means just one or two old folks living in the backwoods ... We cannot provide for everyone."

But Turchak's connections have brought Pskov at least some relief since he was appointed by the Kremlin in 2009. A baby-faced ex-wrestling champion, Turchak, 35, is the son of one of Putin's old friends from St. Petersburg and shares the Prime Minister's passion for judo. Both of them are black belts, and in the clan politics of Russia, these ties can help a lot.

Already Turchak has gotten the Kremlin to promise a new state university for Pskov, as well as the region's first cardiovascular hospital, which is a godsend for a place where 67% of the men die of heart disease years before retirement. But the trick will be finding people to work there. With no place to train doctors, the hospital will have to bring in some 400 specialists from other regions, and it has been hard enough, Turchak says, to find farmhands willing to work in Pskov, let alone heart surgeons.

"People know that working a tractor means getting up at 5:30 in the morning, washing yourself, getting dressed, staying sober the whole time, and working a full day at the wheel," Turchak says. "The mentality here is such that people ask themselves, 'Why would I humiliate myself like that?'"

That doesn't seem far from the truth in Lopotova. Around sundown, one of Matveev's friends passes by, drunk and stumbling, having finished a day driving a combine a few towns over. "There goes one of our working stiffs," Matveev calls out to him, and the rest of the young men burst out laughing before they settle back onto their log. (See the one thing not growing fast In China: its population.)

Sober again, Zhbanov shakes their hands and starts the walk back to his cottage, which doubles as his studio. He turns on the lights, takes a long drink of vodka, and begins to dig through his paintings. At 67, he has already outlived the average man in Pskov by nearly a decade, which he has spent recording images of life in Lopotova. In one of his works, a bleary-eyed woman sips vodka and smokes beside a baby in a cradle. In another, Putin floats over a village hell-scape wearing his judo suit. And in several of Zhbanov's paintings, a jug of moonshine hovers in the background, giving the Hitler Salute.

Edited May 10, 2011 by Why_Me

[ONA 133]

To me the more interesting question is why do people in Eastern Europe seem to lean so far towards the strongest appearing candidate, regardless of his/her position on issues? In Ukrain for example, people are well aware that the socialist/communist model was a failure, but they voted back in a President that was known to be crooked, known to be affiliated with the Kremlin, and was a clear reversion to the old way of doing things. I am told it was because the old administration was divided and weak (at least in part). Could it be that people there have had so much hardship, they just want stability, and will support the strongest (and therefore most likely to promote stability) leader?

You might think it's impossible, but most babushkas were happy with their lives during Soviet times (with what was happening after Stalin's death anyway), so they will welcome everything that resembles that way of life. OK, people couldn't travel abroad, so what? But they had basically all the stuff they needed On the contrary they remember 1990s, which were disasterous. Putin's (and Medvedev's) policy mostly targets that generation, which was happy during the Soviet times and then THEY go to elections and they really vote for him or for Medvedev. What's more there are some people of my age, who truly believe that Russian people can't make the right choice and they should be told whom to vote for. And one more thing - there is a whole lot of people, who think that they can't change anything and they decide not to vote at all.

And then there is a small group of people, who doesn't miss any elections and votes either for a candidate, who doesn't have even a slight chance of winning or ruins the voting paper by drawing a smiley face or a flower, or writing a curse word on it. Those people also have been singing this song for over 20 years

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcqHiiPGy0&feature=related

(btw the movie is also good)

[Brusik 11]

I pray Putin stays away from Georgia........ :bonk: Its the people who always suffer not the Government

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

I pray Putin stays away from Georgia........ :bonk: Its the people who always suffer not the Government

What are you talking about ? He already invaded Georgia and now occupy's 1/5th of Georgia.

[Brusik 11]

What are you talking about ? He already invaded Georgia and now occupy's 1/5th of Georgia.

I know he invaded in August 2008.. Now he has the older Georgian opposition puppets, trying to toss out Saakashvilli..But there is to much of a positive youth movement in Georgia.. I was there visiting and hardly anyone showed up for their rallies.. I just pray the Country can stand on its own.. Georgia does have the support of the US, EU and Nato.. Time will tell.. I think Georgia needs to focus more on their domestic troubles and let the Breakaway regions mend themselves.. The only invasion of Georgia now is Donald Trump and his hotels lol

[Milushka 22]

What are you talking about ? He already invaded Georgia and now occupy's 1/5th of Georgia.

That what FOX news said? C'mon, dont touch that Condoleezza Rice & SUKAshvili love story, cause it stinks

Edited May 20, 2011 by Milushka