Russian Opposition Figure Thinks Anti-Putin Movement Has Faltered

New submitter FilatovEV writes "Interview with Russian liberal opposition politician Vladimir Milov taken by Los Angeles Times reveals a different side of the Western narrative about Russia." From the article: "All they have for a plan is a very simple formula: Let's lead a million people out into the streets, and that will scare the hell out of Putin. He will run away, and we will grab power. But even if they get a sufficient number of people out in the street, they don't know what to do next. All they can do is chant their old anti-Putin incantations instead of offering a program of action. "

Comments

yeah and?

[i_ate_god]

Ever see the movie Network?

You have to get mad first...

Re:yeah and?

[__aaltlg1547]

Correct. And it should be pointed out that people don't have a responsibility to agree on everything just because they agree the current dictator had got to go.

Re:yeah and?

[khallow]

There are consequences to throwing out a dictator without coming up with a replacement.

Re:yeah and?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yeah. They can build coalitions based on selling natural resources to foreign banks and vandalizing churches with nude, obscenity-laden "performances."

Yay!

Re:yeah and?

[Bobakitoo]

There are consequences to throwing out a dictator without coming up with a replacement.

But you do it anyway when the consequences of keeping him are worst.

Re:yeah and?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that they're not. The Russians were fooled once with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Unbridled capitalism does not work. Putin is a dictator, but he is a dictator who wants Russia to remain strong and to make oligarchs subservient to the interests of the state.

It's exactly the same approach which has made China successful, except that China is about forty years behind in human rights terms: allow businessmen to get rich by doing whatever it is they do as long as they don't act against the interests of the country. By doing exactly the opposite since Reagan/Thatcher - i.e. making governments subservient to the will of big business - we are now in the shit.

I would vote Putin any day. I don't want the right to a free press which will be ignored anyway - illusions of freedom serve no purpose to anyone but the stupid.

Re:yeah and?

[Luckyo]

I'm not sure where you get your information, but level of sanity of your source is quite questionable. I'm not going to even bother talking about facts, of which your tirade is completely void.

First of all, majority of russians support Putin. There really is no question about this, not even in opposition camps. In fact, one of the main arguments in the opposition camps is that they need to "wake up the nation to oppose Putin". Because they're not opposing him now. Heck, even western election monitoring bodies agree on this part. They just disagree with how much of a majority support Putin commands in Russia.

As a result, Putin wouldn't have to "order an army to shoot down citizens". The anti-Putin mob would be counter mobbed by local youth groups and pro-Putin hardliners, of whom there's plenty. As has happened before.

In Syria, we have a fairly open civil war between different ethnic groups in a country where one ethnic minority has successfully oppressed all other groups for decades. To even think to compare this situation to Russia requires complete of ignorance of basic human interactions. I shudder to think what kind of environment one must live in to suffer from such illusions.

Re:yeah and?

[cheesybagel]

The "revolution" in Syria started near the border and is chock full of Al-Qaeda and is being funded by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

This is definitively not a spontaneous movement.

Re:yeah and?

[Yomers]

Mod parent up!

I would like to add a few points:

-fear of what happened after "perestroyka" in a name of democracy (USSR collapse, local wars, hyperinflation, poverty, corruption to name a few)
-those opposition leaders are no better than guys in power - they want to get to the feeder, or the a fed from US, or they are fed by current powers to show how crazy opposition is.
-real democracy currently works only in a few small European countries with very educated (on average) population. In Russia fair elections and free (means controlled by big businesses) media will result in Special Olympics game of shit-throwing, so every candidate will be in deep shit and the one who will promise more free money to old people and throw more quality shit on the opponents will win.

Some of the people who were on the streets in Russia lately do not want to change Putin for somebody, just want him to behave in a manner expected from elected president and not get too self confident

I'm Russian living abroad for long time, I get my information from different sources. I do not know this "opposition leader" who gave this interview, do not understand why his opinion matters, especially to the nerds.

Re:yeah and?

[khallow]

The Russians were fooled once with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Unbridled capitalism does not work.

A system where ownership of capital depends on your connections to the ruling class is not capitalism but cronyism. And that's still the system in place today.

By doing exactly the opposite since Reagan/Thatcher - i.e. making governments subservient to the will of big business - we are now in the shit.

Let me guess. A UK resident who still hasn't gotten over the Thatcher era. No one else whines about Thatcher.

As to Putin wanting "to remain strong", so did Reagan and Thatcher for their respective countries. The latter were far more successful than Putin has been.

I would vote Putin any day. I don't want the right to a free press which will be ignored anyway - illusions of freedom serve no purpose to anyone but the stupid.

Ah, so you're a useful idiot. One only needs to look at countries with a free press to see that your point of view is shit. Sure, there are blatant propaganda sources like Fox News in the US. But word gets around, be it in the "main stream media", the blogs, or whatever. One can't have genuine freedom if one doesn't have a clue what's going on.

Re:yeah and?

[shutdown -p now]

There is a reason Russia backs Bashar al-Assad to the hilt, and its ...

... Russian naval military base in Tartus. Which, obviously, would cease to exist the moment Syria is under control of a pro-Western regime.

Re:yeah and?

[shutdown -p now]

Who knows. But it's better then it was before him.

Buy a goat, sell a goat...

And quite normal.

A lot of people beg to differ. I don't consider it normal when the state, directly or indirectly, controls every TV channel in the country.

Yes. If it's not Putin then it will be communists.

Commies get, what, a steady 20% votes every election? They've got a single faithful bloc of people voting for them, but those are mostly aging people on pensions, and the further we go, the fewer there are of them. There is also a vocal young commie minority, but it's really tiny (same as vocal minorities on other sides of the spectrum, really).

Putin

[fiannaFailMan]

His small talk has changed foreign policy. Sasquatch has taken a picture of him. He once ran a marathon, just because it was on his way. He is... the most interesting man in the world.

Sounds like OWS

[zlexiss]

Sounds much like Occupy Wall Street in the USA. Didn't like the status quo, but doomed with no clear platform or list of achievable goals.

"We want change"
"Well, what policy changes are you hoping get made?"
"We don't know"

Re:Sounds like OWS

[wierd_w]

It was more like:

"We want change!"
"What do you want?"
"We want resolution on $Economic/Regional_Issue!"

Where $Economic/Regional_Issue is a hugely disparate, often contradictory laundry list of intractible demands.

Things like "no more bailouts!" And "bail out student loans!"

The problem was that the OWS crowd could not agree on much beyond "the status quo is unacceptable!". As such, they could not *agree* on a short list. The overall demands from all the actors in the protests were untenable.

Re:Sounds like OWS

[dkleinsc]

Occupy did actually make some fairly specific demands that were entirely ignored by those in power. One of the most notable was a demand that banks and if appropriate their officers be prosecuted when they were found to have committed fraud (the Obama administration instead announced a few months ago that they were closing the investigation on Goldman Sachs without pressing any kind of charge whatsoever even though some pretty damning evidence is a matter of public record).

The vaguer message of Occupy was that the Democratic Party in the US has utterly ignored the liberals in their base in an effort to pander to Wall St and the right wing. And why should people like Obama do that, when all they need to do to get their votes is scare the bejeesus out of them by threatening them with the prospect of President Romney?

Re:Sounds like OWS

[wierd_w]

OWS was also the subject of a fairly successful smear campaign to malign the protestors as a bunch of lazy whiners, who wanted free stuff, as opposed to angry and disenfranchised people demanding culpability of the persons responsible for the financial meltdown.

There were quite a few people frm both sides of the political spectrum in OWS, which the media capitalized on. The leftwing focused more on the social aspects, and the rightwing focused more on the financial. This was presented by the media as a heterogenous group without specific charges, who were protesting nebulously. The effectiveness of this slanted coverage is evident by the language used elsewhere in this thread.

Re:Sounds like OWS

[steelfood]

Haven't you seen any of the election coverage? "Liberals" don't hold the power. Independents do. Just look at the money spent on battleground states like Ohio and Iowa and Colorado. Now look at the money spent on firmly "red" or "blue" states like California, Texas, Alabama, New York.

Who are independents? Well, if you're in IT support of any kind, just imagine your most average user. Imagine the most middle-of-the-road, undistinguished, normal person. Those are your independents.

Don't get me wrong. They're not stupid by any measure. No, most of them are fairly good at what they do. They're just not really that good at anything else. Politics, understanding social issues, these are among the things they're not so good at. So to make a decision, they rely on campaign speeches and television ads and above all else, their gut feelings.

The gut feeling is often useful in small environments of few variables. It is not so helpful when it comes to large things like national economies and social welfare and things pertaining to more than three individuals with three differing interests. But it's really all they have, since they're very average and the matters at hand are very, very complex.

And they're not motivated by the wealth congregating in a smaller number of individuals. They don't care about the social ramifications of legalized abortions. Now, they'd certainly be interested if they weren't able to put dinner on their table every night, but they'd only be interested to the extent of getting dinner back on their table. They're not so interested in understanding the entire process where dinner ultimately ends up on their table, from deficit spending to farm subsidies to transportation to taxation to local education. They scratch their heads at such things. Now, bring in constitutional law, and they just turn away.

A functioning democracy (not a republic, because we went away from that a long time ago) requires an educated, well-informed voting populace. We don't have a functioning democracy because the majority of the voters are neither, largely because they have been socially engineered since the advent of the television to have no interest in either.

OWS was a failure of epic proportions. Or perhaps, in making these people look as ridiculous as they possibly could, and in allowing them a forum in which to vent, it could be considered an epic victory. Only, the people didn't win, the corporations did.

Re:Sounds like OWS

[nbauman]

The vaguer message of Occupy was that the Democratic Party in the US has utterly ignored the liberals in their base in an effort to pander to Wall St and the right wing. And why should people like Obama do that, when all they need to do to get their votes is scare the bejeesus out of them by threatening them with the prospect of President Romney?

I heard Amy Goodman of Democracy Now give a good answer to that, when she introduced Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. The Republican Party has been moving further and further to the right. The Democratic Party has been moving further to the right to match them. On domestic policy, the Democratic Party is further to the right now than Richard Nixon (don't forget, Nixon's secretary of HEW was Pat Moynihan). If we continue to vote for the Democratic Party, they will continue to move to the right until there's no meaningful difference between them. We have to vote for third party candidates to tell the Democrats that they can't take us for granted.

Since that time, Obama gave us a health care plan that was literally written by the Heritage Foundation. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told progressives that they were "fucking retarded" for wanting the single payer system Obama promised us. He appointed Wall Street financiers to run his White House. They tossed Acorn under the bus, which was one of the best campaign organizing tools they had.

What I don't understand is why the Democrats didn't learn from 2000 that if you tell the left wing of your party to go fuck themselves, you can lose an election. Maybe it's like training a mule -- you have to hit them on the head with a sledgehammer -- again.

I think it's like a strike. You don't want to go on strike, you don't want to lose weeks or months of salary, you don't want to take a chance on having your employer move to China. But if we hadn't gone on strike over the last 100 years, we would be making Chinese wages right now, and if we never go on strike, we will be making Chinese wages.

Somebody tell the Democrats. If you tell us to fuck off one more time, we'll fuck up your election, just like we did in 1968 and in 2000.

Re:Sounds like OWS

[pseudofrog]

Yeah, totally. Remember when we had that budget surplus? What a disaster.

Re:Sounds like OWS

[dkleinsc]

Well, here's the thing: Republicans pandering to their extreme right wing doesn't risk losing their big donors, because their extreme right wing wants many of the same things that the big donors want, like no taxes on investment and inheritance and no regulation of business, and the things their extreme right wing cares about like imposing Christianity on the rest of us the donors are totally fine with. For the Democrats, though, pandering to their base would involve regulating and taxing people who form key donor constituencies, so the Democrats don't think they can do so without risking their existence as a party.

Re:Sounds like OWS

[dkleinsc]

What makes you think that most of the protesters were smelly hippies? There were Iraq War veterans, 83-year-old grandmothers, unemployed steelworkers, and all sorts of other distinctly non-hippy folks involved.

Re:Just like the USA

[geddo]

Hey asshole, lets not turn this into the drudgereport.

Hey Spoogestain! I got nothin, just figured if we were going to start name calling I'd get my $.02 in.

Re:Who cares?

[guttentag]

Why is this on Slashdot? Is there a tech/science/maths/nerd angle I'm missing.

To help you see the nerd angle, I'm going to answer your questions in Reverse Russian Notation:

There are many smart tech/science/maths/nerd people in Russia. Don't forget they're only the ones still putting humans in space. This is also where many of the black hats penetrating Western computers are based, because things are so bad there this is the best employment a lot of those smart people can get.

This is on slashdot because ever since Kasparov was arrested they need someone to come up with a strategy for revolution, and slashdot is full of people who are well-versed in the "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, ???, Profit" form. With a thousand slashdot monkeys submitting thousands of random 5-step plans, someone is bound to come up with the answer. Then all they have to do is figure out which one is correct.

+

Slashdot set Russia up the revolution

Re:Just like the USA

[Hatta]

Actually, it sounds more like Occupy. The only movement that has accurately identified the problems that face us, but can't field any practical alternatives.

Re:Just like the USA

[hawguy]

I'd say repealing Obamacare is a helluva good start.

Why? I've heard many (mostly republicans) say that we need to repeal Obamacare, but why?

Do you not think providing health care coverage for everyone is important?

Do you not understand why providing healthcare insurance for everyone means that everyone (healthy or not) needs to have coverage?

Do you think that forcing insurers to accept those with prexisting conditions is wrong? If so, how will people unlucky enough to have a chronic illness obtain coverage?

What should happen to those who are unable to obtain healthcare insurance on their own when they have a serious medical condition? Are you OK with paying for their urgent treatment in the ER? Should they be left to die? If so, are you ok with paying for their burial, or should they be left to rot wherever they happened to die?

Do you worry that it's too close to "socialist" healthcare coverage? How do you feel about Medicare?

So really, what is it that bothers you so much about providing healthcare coverage?

Re: Russian opposition

[ezdiy]

I, for being one of the citizens of one of these puppet states, welcome our new nuke-wielding, choice-giving overlord.

On a serious note, US radar installations - built under the guise of "humanitarian NATO purposes", are giving rather crisp picture of geopolitical situation in ex-soviet satellite states of eastern to mid Europe. CIA prefers to buy politicians via straight, old fashioned strong-arm political tactics (think ACTA) against EU and state politicians. Russian influence, on the other hand, manifests itself via ex-criminal oligarchs from the 90s, who are actually the most powerful financial groups in our area nowadays.

Basically, the roles have switched. Americans are thought-police, whatever Moscow used to be under the communist rule. Russians are all about hard cold cash and much more subtle - it's take it or leave it. US tactics is really strong arm, which is effective only short term, it will eventually end with swift reaction to the opposite direction.

Funny how OP is most probably...

[Kephie]

... paid pro-Putin poster. Since his russian forum is full of propaganda stuff about "rotten Western world", "stupid americans" and "great country of China".

Re:Just like the USA

[hawguy]

Do you not think providing health care coverage for everyone is important?

It'd be nice, I'll grant. However, there's a question that never really gets answered, somehow: Who's going to pay for it? AIUI, if you can't pay, it's free, and right there's a big problem because the demand for a free good is infinite.

Obamacare is not "free" to most people -- most people will purchase private healthcare insurance. Those that can't afford private health insurance will have their costs covered by the government, much like the situation today.

But even if the government did provide "free" healthcare, it would be just as "free" as the other governmental services that most modern countries provide - fire protection services, police services, roads (taxes on cars pay only a fraction of road costs), military protection, etc.

Demand for healthcare is not infinite even if it's "free" because healthcare practitioners don't dole out unlimited amounts of healthcare - you matter how many times you beg for a head CT after you stub your toe, your doctor isn't going to prescribe one. I have practically unlimited healthcare through my employers plan, I pay only a $15 copay for each visit -- but whether my copay was $0 or $100, I don't think I would visit the doctor any more or less frequently than I do now. I don't *want* any non-neccessary drugs or medical procedures.

And you're missing the other half of the equation.... who is paying for healthcare now? We're not letting (usually) people die in the street because they can't afford healthcare, those that can't afford health insurance wait until they have an urgent situation and then they visit an ER where they know they will get care regardless of ability to pay. And when they can't pay and the ER has to absorb the cost, then the rest of us end up paying more in taxes and/or our healthcare costs to cover it. So you're paying for universal healthcare whether you want to or not, but you're probably paying more now than if you paid for more preventative care so people can have their ailments treated before it requires a trip to the ER.

Re:Just like the USA

[gizmonic]

So really, what is it that bothers you so much about providing healthcare coverage?

I'll bite on this one. It's not the coverage, it's the way in which it was implemented. I know what I am paying for my healthcare at work, and I know what my company pays (it's a 25% / 75% split). So, take my plan (which, btw, is the most expensive one offered as my wife has asthma and we tend to need services more than others), and multiply that by 25 million (as my plan covers 2 people). Guess what? You could have covered all uninsured 50 million people (which includes people not here legally) for slightly more than what the Universal Health Care Act is supposed to cost. And that assumes you're paying my price, which, with a group of 50,000,000, you very likely wouldn't be. At even 75% of what I pay, you'd have 100% coverage for about 80-85% of the yearly cost of the UHCA without having to change a single other thing.

So, from a simple financial standpoint, it makes no sense whatsoever to make a law that requires thousands of IRS agents to be hired when you could have done it cheaper and easier simply buying a private plan for everyone who didn't have one. But, that's just it. This wasn't about healthcare coverage, it was 100% about control. The government wants to control every aspect of our lives, as it thinks it knows better than us what is good for us. And they don't want private plans, they want single payer coverage, because they're stuck on the firm belief that an evil private corporation can't ever do anything better than the benevolent government. Cause they've managed everything else so well financially so far, right?

Do you even know WHY your job pays for your health care in the US? Because there was a time when the government stepped in and mandated pay freezes for everyone. But benefits weren't considered pay, so to win people over to work for them, companies started offering free health coverage, since they couldn't offer competitive salaries. Over time, it digressed into what we have today, where the only affordable plan is the one your company offers, and even if you decided to buy a different one, the premiums wouldn't count as tax deductible since that only works for buying your employer's plan. So, in the end, I am not my Insurer's customer, my employer is, and the insurer knows they don't have to keep me happy, they only have to keep my employer happy, as I don't have a choice. Funny how government regulation and meddling in private affairs has led us to the point we are now, yet we have people claiming it's all capitalism's fault and we need yet more regulation to fix it.

If you truly wanted to fix healthcare, instead of passing a law that "we have to pass to find out what's in it" you'd decouple healthcare from employment, and allow people to buy any plan from anywhere. Unfettered capitalism isn't the answer though. You'd still need some regulation to cover pre-existing conditions as well as something to handle people who can afford coverage and don't buy it, along with the last bit of paying for coverage for those who can't afford it. You'd end up with a cheaper system, that cost the government less, and provided universal coverage (while allowing people to willfully exclude themselves and suffer their own consequences of that exclusion) and everyone would be happy.

But like I said, this was never about universal coverage, it was always 100% about control. If not, why did McDonald's get a pass from having to provide coverage to their minimum wage employees, which this whole thing was supposed to help?

That's what bothers me about it.

Re:Excellent

[shutdown -p now]

Hey Moron. Learn some history. The Russian invented Communism. Ever herd of Marx

I have bad news for you...

Re:Plan of Action

[Alex Belits]

But can you, guys, at least stop pretending that you would have your Utopia if only Putin stepped down and let aforementioned clowns take his place?

Re:Just like the USA

[hawguy]

So really, what is it that bothers you so much about providing healthcare coverage?

I'll bite on this one. It's not the coverage, it's the way in which it was implemented.

So it sounds like what you're saying is that you'd support a plan where instead of a single-payer government run system, you'd like a system where people can continue to purchase insurance on their own (or where businesses could still offer plans if they wanted to). Where insurance companies could not deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. But above all, you want the government out of it, and you want private insurers to provide the coverage.

Well you're in luck! Let me introduce you to Obamacare!

I believe that the system you describe was the failed US National Health Care Act which was never passed.

You don't want that

[ElusiveJoe]

The Russians were fooled once with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Unbridled capitalism does not work. Putin is a dictator, but he is a dictator who wants Russia to remain strong and to make oligarchs subservient to the interests of the state.

1. After the USSR has fallen apart, there was a period called primitive accumulation of capital (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital). It was very violent and unstable, but capitalism had not yet formed. It was pre-capitalism.

2. When Putin came to power, capitalism was buried before it was born, the country spiralled into dictatorship. What it meant is that capital got redistributed again between Putins' friends and relatives. The only concern of so called government now is to ensure the capital stays in their hands, no matter the cost.

Lesson Well-learned

[some old guy]

In Russia fair elections and free (means controlled by big businesses) media will result in Special Olympics game of shit-throwing, so every candidate will be in deep shit and the one who will promise more free money to old people and throw more quality shit on the opponents will win. .

If such is indeed the case, then congratulations for adopting what looks for all the world like American politics today. I guess all of that Cold War-era Voice of America broadcasting paid off after all.

Actually, my take on it, based on conversations with some Russian engineers I work with, is that Russia has been an oligarchy since the time of Peter the Great. Only the faces and names of the oligarchs and their "systems" have changed over the centuries. The nomenklatura will always run things via government, corporatism, and/or organized crime. The long-suffering average Russian knows this and shrugs,

Re:Just like the USA

[Sique]

That's all prejudices and misconceptions about health care rolled into one.

1. Everyone is going to pay for it. Each one according to his possibilities. And you know what? It will be inversely to your actual needs. People without severe conditions will pay more than sick people in the end. Young people will pay more than the old ones. That's because being sick is by definition not being able care for yourself. To cure a sick person, you need a healthy person to take care of him. A health care system that lets sick people care for their sickness and lets healthy people go free can't work, protestant work ethic be damned. Whoever tells you something else lies to you.

2. Most health care services are services that are nearly completely useless to healthy people. There is no point in eating antibiotics if you don't have an infection. There is no point in wearing a splint if your leg isn't bend or broken. And there is no point in getting tubefed if you are not comatose. There are a few services which are interesting also for people in good shape, for instance painkillers and physiotherapy. Those have to be controlled for. But for the most, health care services will not be used by healthy people - they are not worth it if you are not sick. And so the abuse of those free (more correctly: pre-paid) services will be low.

3. Private health insurance plans have a high overhead. The current rate in the U.S. is about 30%. You pay a third of your insurance fee to keep the staff and the private owners of the insurance companies happy. The current overhead for governmentally controlled health care services as Western Europe has them is 10%. You might argue that this goes against conventional wisdom, but maybe the wisdom in this case is not as wise as it thinks it is.