Originally published at: What do young Russians think of Putin? This guy interviewed random people in Moscow to find out | Boing Boing
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Putin has become Czar of Russia, just like Stalin before him, and Lenin before him, and all of the Romanovs before them. YOU DON’T CRITICIZE THE CZAR, unless you want to wind up in the gulag, or worse, DEAD. Putin has made it clear that he has no problem with regularly ordering the murder of anyone who opposes him in any way.
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The end is never pretty for dictators and their enablers. History tells us so.
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But it always takes longer than it should to get rid of them, and it’s much more painful. History tells us that too.
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Eh. Lenin and Stalin both died of (apparently) natural causes and were venerated for years after their deaths, so sadly justice doesn’t always catch up with those bastards.
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They’re all frightened and careful how they phrase things but some of them manage to convey their true feelings despite that, even with some humour (an old Russian habit).
They’re all braver than I am. I’d completely avoid an interview like that.
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This American Life’s recent story on Putin included a recorded classroom debate (high school, I believe) wherein the teacher was trying to adamantly argue for the party line and propaganda version of Putin’s war. The kids were not havin’ it. They were extremely vocal in talking back to that teacher about how everything he was saying were lies and calling up independent sources on their phones to prove their points.
The reporter’s interpretation was that Putin has failed to control the internet the way that China (mostly) has, which is why older people who only watch TV love him. However nobody under 30 watches TV and they don’t buy any of this Putin BS for a moment because they consume neutral information sources. Gave me real hope for the future of Russia.
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Was going to say the same thing. Chairman Mao died of old age. Idi Amin (president of Uganda), Ethiopia’s Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti all escaped justice as well by fleeing to safe havens when they were overthrown.
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He says it will be unedited, but then he drops the sound periodically when people answer questions.
Eh. Lenin and Stalin both died of (apparently) natural causes
Both their deaths have a bit of suspicion about them though. Lenin was awfully young and Stalin was the obvious beneficiary of getting him out of the way, and while Stalin may have had a perfectly natural stroke, Beria and friends didn’t exactly rush to get him medical help (of course there was also a shortage of doctors after Stalin’s purge of Jewish doctors which didn’t help). But yes, as mentioned Mao and other dictators did live full lives and never were brought to account.
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Let’s hope it never comes to this in your country. An ounce of prevention now will prevent pounds of pain down the road.
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Lenin was in declining health for years though, quite possibly from a case of syphilis that was deliberately concealed by the government. He had no fewer than three separate strokes before he eventually croaked. If Lenin’s death was actually an assassination orchestrated by Josef Stalin then Stalin took an uncharacteristically long time to go about it.
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Sadly, history also tells us that sometimes, they die safely in their beds at an advanced age and the destruction they cause prior to their deaths is often massive and traumatic…
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Franco is still venerated by many in Spain today, and he was never called to account for his crimes.
Pinochet was never really called to account for his crimes either. Sure he spent a couple years detained in the UK and later under house arrest, but he never stood trial and eventually died of a heart attack.
On the other side of the ledger, it ended poorly for Hitler and Mussolini. Ceaușescu was tried and killed by firing squad, and we all remember how it ended for Saddam Hussein (even if the war surrounding it was not worth the result).
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That was pretty well covered in The Death of Stalin. As far as I’m concerned when a tyrant surrounds himself with characters like that the only suspicious thing would be if they were able to actually work competently together.
(Edit: after some thought I decided to remove the quotes which included some derogatory language about a woman character and just link to the movie preview instead)
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My heart breaks when they say they want fair elections and I begin wondering if any country has fair elections?
The early US policies really had their shit together, let the people fight each other while masquerading and shielding the 1% autocracy that still retains all of the power.
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“Ha ha! We’re having man on the street interviews”
Actual children: ‘I might die from this talk tomorrow’
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An effective one-party system in the Putin mode is a very real possibility in the U.S. It all turns on what happens this year and in 2024. I’m already prepared to make my exit if things go wrong. In the meantime I’ll do what I can to make sure the Party of Demonstrable Bad Faith doesn’t get what it wants.
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It seems that the audio went dead when they were talking about Ukraine, the war, the “special military operation”. Maybe if the audio is not there, when they get picked up by whatever the KGB is now, they can plausibly deny that they said it? Maybe?
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Hmm… possibly. I guess it’s illegal to call what’s going on in Ukraine a ‘war’. So maybe the video poster was silencing those parts since they are ‘illegal’ to say in Russia right now?
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