Silencer said:
Also, unless you breathe, eat and live Russian sociopolitics, I'd take any "opinion" of Putin with a grain of salt. Or salt 2.
I live, eat and breathe Russian sociopolitics, but I have never been able to compartmentalize and then present my thoughts on Putin. I've written some uni papers on some of his politics but his era has never been the focus of my studies.
I gotta say, though, the easiest thing to underestimate is where his value came from in the Russian perspective. Jeltsin was not only embarrassing, he was incompetent, the neo-liberalism was a failure, and the massive fraud that fleshed out the oligarch clique in the 1996 elections nothing short of a national catastrophe. By comparison, the time since has been stable, profitable, just good on average. There's a lot people can put up with in politics if the trade-off is beneficial. Both for people "in general" (though it's a mixed bag) and in regaining pride in Russia and international respect for Russia lost under Jeltsin.
That's why Putin and Medvedev's collapse in popularity is not that surprising. It has little to do with political freedoms, as glorious as that sounds, and more to do with their perceived failures handling the economic crises during Medvedev's reign. Once his popularity started wobbling there, the Russian people no longer putting up with electoral fraud and blatant idiocy was inevitable. I don't know how much longer they can keep it up, either. I know a lot of people are disappointed there were no instantaneous "color revolution" answers, but in a lot of ways a gradual process is preferable. Anyone who doesn't think it will matter that Putin's regime has lost a significant amount of legitimacy over the past two elections is just kidding themselves. Change will continue to brew.
Commonly misunderstood points in the West:
The Oligarchs in general, and Khodorkovsky specifically. When Putin came into power, a bunch of powerful positions were staffed by oligarchs who bought in during the electoral fraud of the mid-90s. He wanted them out. He told them they could keep their money, but they would stay out of politics or he would bring down the hammer. Khodorkovsky, for reasons beyond me, decided a few years later to forget about this deal and try to get involved into politics. Now, opposition is good, but it shouldn't come from the likes of Khodorkovsky, thieves, gangsters, murderers all. Putin was right to clear them out of politics, Khodorkovsky was insane to rock the boat, and not the poor hero he is portrayed as here.
Georgia. Is iffy. The Georgian conflict was at least as much about that war-mongering idiot Saakashvili as it was about Putin. People forget Georgia did try a kind of genocidal push to clear out or dominate the regions of south-Ossetia and Abkhazia and the early 90s, and there's a good reason Russia was there, to protect them. Saakashvili decided he had enough international support to try and provoke Russia. He didn't, and he fell flat on his face because of it. The reporting here on the conflict was weird, especially since news channels barely discussed the background of the regional conflict.
