The Putin Murders

[uhnope]

A pretty interesting article
BTW I am not a Russophobe--I actually like all the Russians I have met and have clients and good friends who are Russian or Russian-speaking Ukrainians. I just abhor the growing dictatorship in Russia (as do every Russian I know), the destruction of hope for democracy being conducted by Putin, and I fear for what it all means for the future of our world.

March 1997

45-year-old former KGB agent Vladimir Putin (pictured, left) is plucked from obscurity out of the St. Petersburg local government apparatus by President Boris Yeltsin and named Deputy Chief of Staff. In June, he defends his PhD dissertation in “strategic planning” at St. Petersburg’s Mining Institute. Later, this document proves to have been plagiarized from a KGB translation of work by U.S. professors published many years earlier (as if nobody would notice, and in fact for quite a while nobody did).

July 1998

In a second inexplicable move, Yeltsin names Putin head of the KGB (now called the FSB).

November 1998

Less than four months after Putin takes over at the KGB, opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova (pictured, right), the most prominent pro-democracy Kremlin critic in the nation, is murdered at her apartment building in St. Petersburg. Four months after that, Putin will play a key role in silencing the Russian Attorney General, Yury Skuratov, who was investigating high-level corruption in the Kremlin, by airing an illicit sex video involving Skuratov on national TV. Four months after the dust settles in the Skuratov affair, Putin will be named Prime Minister.

Read much more: https://larussophobe.wordpress.com/putinmurders/

[Igel]

1. The problem is in knowing the Russian-speakers you know.

Most Russians have never left Russia.

Most Russians that Westerners deal with in Russia know Western languages. Most Russians don't know Western languages.

The kinds of Russians that Westerners know are those that tend to like Westerners or at least be comfortable around Westerners. And if you're a Westerner that knows Russian, your net may be wider but there's still self-selection involved in who'll hang with you.

These groups totalled up are still a minority. They tend to be better educated, less narrow in their viewpoints, and typically younger, young enough to have had at least part of their formative years post-Soviet. In some cases if you know the language they may sheath their claws because you've shown that you think Russian's a good thing.

The same works for a lot of Ukrainian Russian-speakers. (Heck, or for Czech-speaking Czechs. Some I knew bared their teeth when I stopped nodding and grunting in answers to their questions and actually spoke--then they heard my accent and realized I was a Yank. Others were appreciative, even if they hated Americans--I was a kind of linguistic turncoat.)

The point is that most Russians like Putin. They either refuse to believe bad of him, or figure that good people can intentionally do bad things for good reasons. Or like the bad things he does because they show he has a spine and a pair and they want to give it to the amerikosy (which is "American" with a suffix that says "faggot"--I guess "Ameriqueer" would be close in meaning but not in connotation).

One problem is groups like Nashi. They're making Russian society into a kind of donut: the older generation(s) are anti-Western, there was a bit of a surge in pro-Western or at least non-anti-Western thought, and they're targetting teens and pre-teens to inculcate pro-Russian nationalism, which often means "anti-Western thought." It's a deep-seated trait that to be pro something is usually indistinguishable from being anti its opposite.

[uhnope]

2. yes I know

One Russian friend said that 80% of Russians were eagerly eating up Putin's lies. I just wanted to make it clear that I am anti-Putin, not anti-Russian, to put it in clunky terms

Ja taky umim cesky