What is going on in Russia on the eve of the presidential election? Was Alexei Navalny assassinated? And what impact does the Russian war in Ukraine has on Russia itself?
In this episode, we talk about the Russian economy and society, the structure of power in Putin’s Russia, dictatorship and Putinism, the Russian war in Ukraine, and the future of Russia.
The most recent poll conducted by the Levada Center, Russia’s foremost independent polling institution, following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s incursion into Moscow, leaves no room for doubt: 82 percent of Russians continue to express support for Putin. While not questioning the absolute precision of these surveys or their methodologies, it becomes challenging not to ponder their proportionality and, consequently, their credibility.
Russia. The word still evokes images of conspiracy behind gray concrete blocks, while a strong military marches through the streets in a tour de force of the iron hand that rules the harsh country. The Kremlin was working hard to ensure that this stereotype, of influential and ruthless Soviet toughness, is exaggerated. Disinformation, ostentatious secret service operations and bellicose rhetoric all served this illusion.
In 2017, the looming threat of communism has not vanished completely. According to a poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 44% of American youth would prefer living under socialism, 7% under communism, and only 42% chose capitalism.
We are witnessing the EU’s declining normative influence in three levels: inner circle of membership, middle circle of prospective members and outer circle of neighbourhood, and is expressed in the primacy of hard core economics, the weaker promotion of democracy, the inefficient political conditionality and the gradual realisation that illiberalism is becoming a threatening part of several national competitive politics.
From among the EU member-states, the Hungarian government used the most lenient approach to the Russian operations in Ukraine. The opposition parties’ immediate reactions to these events made the government party express its opinion too.
I wish I were wrong, but all the piece come together reminding of the Munich scenario, the defence of the Russian minority, Ukraine waiting for its allies to take action, the allied armies standing idle, the aggressor producing facts and a desperate fight to keep up pretences of law and order by the West.
First of all, they should just stop using the word “democracy” together with the word “Russia” (if anyone has done it since Khodorkovsky’s trial).
