The General Russia Thread

I think you are giving Navalny not enough credit here. He would likely try to tackle Russia's worst problems. Its' rampant corruption, military spending, agressive foreign policy including wars and probably also try to regain some confidence with Russia's Western neighbours.

Yeah, he has plenty of nasty sides, but then again given Russia's political climate, they are hardly surprising. We are not going to see e.g. a popular Russian politician who advocates LBGTQ-rights any time soon, given their constant villification. If you look to other Eastern European societies, you'll find similar problems even in - flawed - democracies like Poland. How succesful he'd be with those endeavours is a different question, but Russia and the world would be a better place with him as president. And Putin knows that he offers a potential alternative, otherwise he would not have - implicitely ord explicitely - ordered his assassination.

Edited by Zarastro on Nov 19th 2020 at 6:52:52 PM

I agree with your overall point, but does Poland even really count as a "flawed" democracy at this point? It seems to be backsliding about the same as Hungary.

It still has free elections, the opposition is allowed to act and there are still media outlets critical of the government. So I would argue that it is still not at the level of Hungary, though of course the overall trend is very worrying.

Without trying to argue whether Navalny’s foreign policy would be good and without trying to say that I wouldn’t be happy if Putin was gone, such a racist president in a country whith such volatilie regions inhabited by minorities such as the Northern Caucasus would be anything but ideal.

Yes, his poisoning was a gruesome crime, but I’m actually happy he is not a president.

Edited by LordforlornII on Nov 20th 2020 at 2:11:58 AM

I hope you are not thinking that Putin is not a racist. Putin is not only hardly tolerant towards minorities but also has used them in his foreign policy to destabilize Russia's neighbours.

I mean let us be perfectly clear here. Russia has played under Putin a very negative role in world politics and this leaves out his impact on Russia itself. If nothing else, Nawalny would have likely pursued a less agressive foreign policy and not undermined democracy in the West so openly. That in itself would be a huge improvement.

Edited by Zarastro on Nov 20th 2020 at 11:16:40 AM

Again, I’m not going to argue if those conflicts were completely Russia’s fault or not (judging by your earlier conversation with Knit about Crimea, we couldn’t convince eachother of anything), but Putin doesn’t want to evict the Northern Caucasus and many Central-Asian immigrants from Russia (which, under the current circumstances, would definitely result in bloody wars and clashes).

Neither does Nawalny as he made clear in recent statements.

Putin's foreign policy has actually caused and fuelled such wars, let us not forget this.

Considering how he (as far as I know) never retracted his previous remarks about Caucasians I would say I don’t trust him.

About the conflicts,... well, let’s agree to disagree.

I don't see how one can disagree about e.g. Ukraine. The conflict in its' shape and length would never have happened without Putin's support.

Again, let’s just not get there.

Something tells me as President of Russia, Navalny would be widely hated among the populist right. Especially in the West. Trump for example would probably loathe him for overthrowing Putin and compare him unfavorably to Lenin or his own successor Biden.

Edited by superboy313 on Nov 27th 2020 at 8:55:57 AM

Well yeah because Putin is backing the far right populists over here.

Trump would also blame Biden for Putin's downfall (probably because of civil unrest that resulted from the Biden administration imposing sanctions on Russia for interfering in American elections) saying that he got him illegally ousted based on the so-called Russia hoax and demand that he be impeached for "destroying a country that did nothing wrong".

Navalny is never going to be president. And if he was, again, he'll end up more like the Burmese leader than Gorbachev/Yeltsin.

Absolutely. In an alternate history where he's president, Russia may be less geopolitically adventurous with regards to Europe and the US, but it'd definitely be involved in all sorts of shit in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and maybe even the Far East. Like, the man is openly racist and anti-Muslim. And he'd give crap to our native Muslim minorities, too.

He's just Le Pen with a dick and without any support, he's not some sort of noble hero of democracy.

Medvedev or Lavrov would be more predictable, at least.

Paging all the historical architecture geeks out there — pick your favourite medieval kremlin:

• Moscow (okay, hardly medieval anymore, buuut)
• Rostov◊
• Pskov◊
• Novgorod◊
• Kazan◊
• Suzdal◊

(Vladimir doesn't seem to have an extant one, for some reason?)

Russia under Putin is already engaged in the Caucasus and leading a brutal war against Muslims in Syria, not to mention his responsibility for the atrocities against gay people and muslims in Chechnya.

No, Nawalny would be no Gorbachev. Heck, even Gorbachev was not the saint many make him out to be, with him probably backing a coup against the newly independent Lithuania. But he'd likely be better than the guy who is openly empowering fascists and populists all around the globe.

So wait, you think that the dude who's openly racist won't empower fascists to an even greater degree? Like, what the hell do you think will happen? Navalny comes to power with his whole rhetoric of "white is best, glory to Western civilisation, remove kebab and build a wall" and all the fascists in Russia just sit tight and do nothing, and not rally around the guy who is promoting ethnic chauvinism and cleansing? And all the white fascists around the world won't welcome him with open arms because of their mutual hatred of brown people?

Sure, he's pro-democracy, or at least less autocratic than Putin. But so what? Democracy is not at all opposed to ethno-supremacist fuckery. All you need is a bunch of racists to vote for your racist reforms, and you'll have democratically supported institutional racism in no time.

Edited by KnitTie on Nov 21st 2020 at 7:26:57 AM

The architecture nerd in me wants to see what a new built kremlin would look like, maybe in some town that didn't historically have one.

Didn't Kiev have one too?

Yeah, those of us here who follow China stuff would also remember that a lot of overseas pro-democracy Chinese dissidents are arch-neocon weirdos with fringe Huntingtonian worldviews.

Chechnya right now is a police state and a net exporter of Islamist militants, thanks to people trying to escape by all means possible. There are ways to fix that, but somehow I don't think having an ethnonationalist leader pull the plug on Kadyrov with no further plan would be the answer. Anyone taking up Putin's mantle would have to deal with the vast array of mafia powers he'd leave behind, and you'd need someone with more traction than Navalny to keep the whole thing from imploding.

I'm curious about how a hypothetical Navalny presidency would affect the Gazprom deals in Europe, though, given his history as an activist shareholder.

And yeah, but this is the Russia thread, so I'm not including that. Vladimir was also supposed to be a big deal until the Mongols burned it down... wait, that actually explains it.

I would argue that although his policies didn’t improve it, Putin is not responsible for the creation of the mafia-situation in Chechnya. That has been a problem there at least since Dudayev’s regime.

Well, I mean. The independence movement was a made up of loose coalition of rebel groups in the first place, whose in-fighting worsened with the increasing role of foreign jihadist group and their legitimisation under Maskhadov. What Putin did was to take advantage of the in-fighting to reclaim Chechnya (though it technically started under Yeltsin) and appoint Kadyrov Sr. as his client ruler there, with the licence to go after the secessionists by any means necessary. Incorporating local strongmen into the oligarchy is kind of Putin's MO: you can see that in other regions as well, like with Murtaza Rakhimov in Bashkortostan.

Putin was and is entirely too happy to let Kadyrov do whatever he wants as long as Chechnya stays loyal to Russia and doesn't export Islamism too much. So while Putin's actions aren't the direct cause of Chechnya's sorry state, he is certainly aiding and abetting those directly responsible.

And also, damn, I had no idea that Chinese opposition was much like Russian one. We also have our pro-democracy groups be redoubts of turbo-neocons who think that the "Western civilisation" is constantly under attack by the forces of the barbaric brown and/or yellow people and needs to be violently protected and promoted. Hell, the late Novodvorskaya was particularly notorious for her support for racial segregation and nuking countries to make them more democratic.

Putin is ultimately responsible for the crimes of Kadyrov since he tolerates him and gave him free reign to supress his enemies. In recent years we had a large influx of refugees from Chechya in Germany so media coverage has increased over this.

And whether or not foreign fascists would welcome Nawalny is besides the point, Nawalny would almost certainly not empower and finance them like Putin did as a way to destabilize Western countries. Maybe Putin is not making overtly anti-muslim statements, but Russian propaganda channels like RT actively push narratives that villify them and serve as a gateway for many on their path to radicalisation. It has only been a few years since the Russian Foreign Minister! spread a lie about some refugees raping a German-Russian girl with the obvious aim to inflame German-Russians against refugees.

Putin is responsible for Kadyrov and his crimes but Kadyrov is not wholly responsible for the mafia-environment. Chechnya would be probably a maffia-state even if Russia had let it go completely in 1991

“Apartheid-is-a-normal-thing” Novodvorskaya was indeed a typical representative of this group. Another rather disturbing habit of theirs is to underplay the misdeeds of governments and groups supported by Western countries against Putin (see Ukraine).

Edited by LordforlornII on Nov 21st 2020 at 8:09:13 AM