The General Russia Thread

His arrest is mostly a gift from Putin to Navalny, since the latter's entire PR modus operandi is deliberately breaking proper procedure when organising protests in order to get arrested and gain martyrdom points.

...You've just described the purpose of protest. The whole point is to turn the public against the oppressive institution.

I somehow doubt that Putin (regularly) arrests the opposition figures as a favour to them.

edited 5th Oct '17 2:42:08 PM by Grafite

For a gift from Putin to Navalny, this sort of thing doesn't exactly have a great record of success. I'm not seeing hordes of angry Russian citizens united in righteous outrage for Navalny the martyr. Makes me wonder why he'd intentionally get himself arrested.

Really, every time Putin does something bad, your first response seems to be waving your hand and dismissing it based on the idea that there's no cause and effect between [X bad thing Putin did] and whatever obvious benefit he gets from said bad thing being done. I find it really unconvincing. Is it really more probable that Navalny intentionally gets himself arrested despite this never having helped him before, or that Putin gets opposition arrested because it clearly is useful to him, based on the results?

I'm guessing this arrest didn't earn him too many new followers, but instead merely further endeared him to the people who already supported him.

Him being arrested over lacking paperwork...

Navalny's supporters: "Arrested over some paperwork?! Putin is a tyrant! Navalny is great!"

Putin's supporters: "Putin was merely upholding the law!"

Everyone else in Russia who doesn't really care either way: "...Meh."

Seems like a picture of the body of Russia's Turkish ambassador who was assassinated late last year was found in a photo inside Telltale's Batman games.

edited 5th Oct '17 7:26:21 PM by tclittle

Grafite - Nah, that was just a figure of speech on my part in order to point out that Putin's current method of dealing with the opposition does them at least as much good as it does them harm - they'd be absolute political nobodies if the current government didn't hate them that much and let them use the Galileo gambit.

Dougsh - Well here's the thing: arresting Navalny does not actually benefit Putin. Arresting Navalny does nothing to shut him up and instead only further legitimizes his opposition in the eyes of his supporters and the general European public. Is Putin okay with Navalny being arrested? Absolutely. Is that a smart thing for him to do in any way? No. The best way for Putin to deal with our opposition would've been to use his genuinely decent level of public support to crush them in a free and fair election, after which they would've had absolutely no legs to stand on, but this isn't the first time that Russia shoots itself in the leg by obsessively cheating when it doesn't have to.

And the reason why I try to find explanations for things happening in Russia other than "evil Putin being evil" so much is because I sincerely believe that the problem with Russia lies within our political system itself first and in Putin and his cronies a distant second, i.e. Putin isn't the cause, he's a symptom, and focusing on him as the cause with no real explanation beyond that is why we can't have nice things in our politics. Putin's approach to ruling his country is very hands-off in the sense that he gives the local functionaries a lot of freedom to do whatever they want and doesn't really care what they do as long as they don't openly go against him, and this means that a lot of human rights abuses and other unpleasantness within my country is actually the work of some random local asshole/idiot and not really Putin himself, who's mostly just an enabler (not that that makes him in any way not an ass). And until we start focusing on reformatting our government from the foundation up and not just demolishing the top and hoping that everything else will just sort itself out magically, we will never see any real progress.

M84 -

edited 5th Oct '17 10:00:13 PM by KnitTie

I would think the usefulness of persecuting opposition figures to Putin is evidenced by the fact that there is no effective opposition to Putin remaining. But I'm sure those two things have nothing to do with each other.

Putin might be able to win in a fair election without any dirty tricks, but in doing so he'd be inviting the formation of an actual effective opposition. I don't believe he employs the methods he does arbitrarily, I think he uses them because they're proven to work quite well, given the results.

No, he employs the methods he employs because he thinks that they're a good choice, while in reality, they are not.

Thing about our opposition is that there never was any effective opposition in Russia ever since the USSR fell due to a slew of social and cultural reasons, the chief among them are that our public is monstrously apathetic and that we are convinced that revolutions and coups are a bad idea due to our history with them screwing us over. Loot at Yeltsin: this repulsive, idiotic drunkard was a very weak autocrat and a very unpopular ruler, and yet absolutely nobody ever did anything other than going along with his orders, not the military, not the police, not the working class and not the elite. Nobody even tried to protest. Borya had to name Putin his successor for Vlad to have any chance of getting into the big chair, and everybody just went along with that transfer of power, too.

So I do not believe that our government's suppression of opposition is anything but excessive and an example of how you can gild refined gold.

edited 6th Oct '17 4:18:59 AM by KnitTie

Didn't Zyuganov come within spitting distance of beating Yeltsin in '96?

@Knit: Last I heard there was a glimmer of hope among the opposition in Russia, with several seats in Moscow'a city assembly being won by members of the opposition, who incidentally were not associated with Navalny at all. Not a huge victory, but perhaps a hint of what might come after Putin is gone, one way or the other.

edited 6th Oct '17 6:08:07 AM by CaptainCapsase

But he didn't, and there was no outrage afterwards, and during Yeltsin's tenure there were no major protests or crises or conflicts or other political upheavals. Nothing resembling the recent events in Brazil or even the political cold war in the US nowadays.

On the one hand, that's heartening, on the other hand, there's the fact that it's still a very, very minor victory that was all that the opposition could get even in the ground zero of anti-Kremlinism and also the fact that a lot of our opposition is composed of corrupt assholes a la United Russia who got unlucky in the corrupt asshole power struggles and now simply want to use opposing Putin as a way to get back their positions of wealth and power.

edited 6th Oct '17 7:53:23 AM by KnitTie

It really depends on whether they can build on this, big things often start in small places. In the long term these guys are hoping to contest the mayoral election, which I gather is highly influential. While there's a snowballs chance in hell of him losing his own election, one way or another Putin won't be around forever, and if this continues there's hope that whatever comes after him won't be even worse for Russia and the world at large.

Though that raises the issue of the various frozen conflicts if a liberal-leaning government were somehow to come to power in Russia. There's no way any Russian government would give Crimea back, and even paying reparations to Ukraine would probably be electoral suicide.

edited 6th Oct '17 8:18:35 AM by CaptainCapsase

Honestly, the way I think this whole crisis would go is that eventually everybody would just start politely ignoring it and tacitly not bothering to protest Crimea being Russian without any official changes. Other than that, there really are no big frozen conflicts around Russia that can unfreeze. Transdniestria? Nobody wants it. Ossetia and Abkhasia? Nobody wants them either. Nagorno-Karabakh? Really no reason for even an ultra-liberal Kremlin to stop supporting Armenia.

There was some confrontation by the police against protestors in cities including Vladivostok to go home and disband, but allowed them to go on, according to BBC.

The only ones stopped were protest groups near the Kremlin gates.

edited 7th Oct '17 7:30:29 AM by Ominae

Here's something that always perplexes me about The New Russia: What with the anti-LGBT nonsense? I mean, is it because of religious influence in the government?

No. More like it's "something the West promotes so it must be bad".

World's deepest lake crippled by putrid algae, poaching and pollution

That's...pretty bad. Yeesh, this lake and its fish are about as unlucky as the rest of Russia.

edited 18th Oct '17 11:27:45 PM by M84

Russian 'It girl' Ksenia Sobchak to stand in presidential election

Pop singer Zelimkhan Bakaev might have been tortured and killed by the anti-gay Chechnyan police.

Not confirmed yet, although I assume that when you fall into the hands of the Chechnyan police hoping for any kind of "official version" is wishful thinking at best.

But since I'm a nice man, I will give apologists a list of justifications to pick from:

• He shouldn't have gone to Chechnya, his sister's wedding be damned
• Putin doesn't control Kadyrov and shouldn't be held accountable for whatever monstrosity he commits
• Better to see that than islamic terrorism

Victim blaming, refusing to see a larger-scale issue, appeal to worse problems...yes, I think the bingo grid is filled.

You know, I really wonder how much of Russia's illiberalism is a consequence of direct action by the government and how much is simply a result of the thoroughly apathetic and politically disengaged Russian public.

Considering the history of the Soviet Union, you can count on the former as one of the main reason for that apathy. Including the clusterfuck of the post Cold War reforms.

Putin accuses the USA of running an Anti-Russia campaign without precedent... just as another Kremlin-unfriendly journalist is attacked. How unfair that silencing your opposition and rolling back civil rights doesn't get you world appraisal nowadays.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41720828

If the blog isn't fabricated the assailant is a Targeted Individual, which is a fancy way of saying that he has a terminal persecution complex in addition to detachment from reality.

In other words, this is a really unfortunate coincidence.

Russian officer shoots four soldiers dead in Chechnya. Second incident of another series of fatal shootings involving Russian security forces.

Either Russian forces are a magnet for dysfunctional men or thetreatment of their members is shit to the point of breaking them.