Growing up in the 1970s I was told by American media that Russia was to blame for everything that wasn’t going well here in the U.S. This is apparently still true today. A one-day (May 16) sample from Facebook:
- “Trump Revealed Highly Classified Intelligence to Russia” (nytimes; referenced by a concerned Facebook friend)
- The guy under investigation for illegal ties to Russia leaks classified material to the…Russians! Yes, but she used email
- Another Russian Connected To Trump Has Turned Up Dead – That’s 8 So Far
- DEMAND A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR ON RUSSIA (ACLU)
- Trump’s business network reached alleged Russian mobsters
- “Top Senate Democrat Calls on White House to Release Trump-Russia Meeting Transcripts” (nytimes)
Our media portrays Russians as living under a cruel dictatorship. Vladimir Putin and his friends are stealing all of their money. Our go-to “look how they abuse their women” slam against enemies doesn’t work with Russians (since women obtained an equal role in their society 100 years ago) so we decry the cruel oppression of gay and transgender people by a heteronormative government.
What was it like on the ground? I visited Moscow, which I was told was the part of Russia least likely to support Putin. Nonetheless, I met Putin supporters and Russians of all political persuasions agreed that Putin would win 65-70 percent of the vote in a completely free election. Putin is credited with eliminating corruption and chaos at local and intermediate levels of government. Although Russians might be happy to live in an English- or German-style parliamentary democracy, they don’t see this as the alternative to Putin. Instead they envision pervasive corruption, violence, and looting. What about the fact that Putin and people close to the government seem to have become richer than typical civil servants? [Though let’s keep in mind that these folks haven’t made anywhere near as much money, in the aggregate, as cronies of the U.S. government! Consider the $182 billion A.I.G. bailout, for example, and all of the Wall Streeters protected from their own incompetence thereby.] “I look at Putin as a hedge fund manager,” said one Russian. “We have about $500 billion in foreign currency reserves and Putin should get a fee for managing that. At least he hasn’t buried us in debt the way that Bush and Obama buried the Americans.” (A Boston-based emerging markets bond fund manager confirmed Putin’s basic fiscal prudence: “When oil prices went up, Russia paid off a lot of its debt early. Compare that to Venezuela where they spent it on social programs and making Hugo Chavez’s daughter a billionaire.”)
Russia has a flat 13-percent individual income tax, a flat 20-percent corporate income tax, and a European-style value-added tax of 10-18 percent (PWC). They are suffering from more or less permanent “austerity” because the government spends only about what it takes in via revenue. I.e., they don’t have deficit spending.
Tyler Cowen said that the stagnation of the U.S. economy shouldn’t make us weep because we now have the option of same-sex marriage (and, fortunately for litigators, divorce). Russians certainly don’t have this option. Is the oppression of gays as bad as portrayed in the American media? “You can be as gay as you like here,” said one expat. From the Lonely Planet Moscow:
Moscow is the most cosmopolitan of Russian cities, and the active gay and lesbian scene reflects this attitude. Newspapers such as The Moscow Times feature articles about gay and lesbian issues, as well as listings of gay and lesbian clubs. Visit Gay.ru (http:// english.gay.ru) for up-to-date information, good links and a resource for putting you in touch with personal guides.
Students at the university that I visited had a much more diverse set of opinions regarding social and political issues than their American counterparts. On the issue of gay rights, for example, students at the same cafeteria table might range from someone actively interested in promoting LBGTQ issues (maybe not the Transgender part, though; I didn’t hear anyone mention gender ID) to someone who would openly say “It doesn’t bother me if people want to have sex in their apartments, but I don’t want to hear about it.” They could all go back to eating after discovering these differences, instead of one group trying to enforce political orthodoxy on the other! What do university students who don’t put energy into enforcing conformity do with all of their leftover time and energy? I met economics masters students who not only knew the names of a bunch of (Russian-language) poets, but actually had poems memorized!
As in Soviet times, though there is probably more freedom of expression in social and work situations than we have here in the Boston area (e.g., you can express your opposition to race-based hiring preferences at your employer, but you won’t have a job a day later!), running a mass-market TV network with 24/7 anti-government stories wouldn’t work. People thought that Putin would still win in totally free elections in a country with totally free media, so restrictions on media may not have any practical effect on the government.
What about something that corresponds to our obsession with Russians controlling important events here in the U.S.? Are there Russian stories about how various officials are being manipulated by Americans or the American government? There don’t seem to be. Government-influenced Russian media do seem to enjoy pointing out American hypocrisy and of course we give them plenty to choose from. The Land of Liberty (TM) has the world’s highest incarceration rate. The Land of Opportunity (TM) has a massive underclass. From those two contradictions alone the Russians can fill all of the pages that they want with stories that make us look ridiculous.
Everything about this defense of a strongman is saying, “it’s not that bad relative to what you might think.” With your love for authoritarian governments why choose Russia to fawn over? China has done better in every conceivable way.
Sure, gays are rounded up in many areas of the country, but there are a few gay clubs in Moscow. Sure, real GDP per capita has declined since Putin consolidated power a few years ago, is flat since 2008, and is in line with Greece and Latvia despite incredible mineral wealth, but hey at least we have some Forex. Questioning of a few people on the street in the richest city in Russia found some people it was working out well for, so I assume that’s true for the country as a whole.
Thanks for the on-the-ground reporting! I think of the competent strongman / one-party model (Singapore and China are two other examples) as the last remaining ideological rival of liberal democracy. This is Trump’s model, but he’s too incompetent to be plausible as a strongman; in his interactions with foreign leaders, he really doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing.
The fundamental problem with Trump’s curious relationship to Russia is that the US and Russia have conflicting interests. The basic conflict in international politics isn’t between good (us!) and evil (them!); it’s between those countries which seek to maintain the international status quo (the US and its allies) and those which seek to overthrow it (currently Russia, China, Iran, al-Qaeda and ISIS).
Comparing the power of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II to the diminished position of Russia today – its objections ignored by the US as NATO expanded into Eastern Europe – it’s easy to see why the Russian leadership would be resentful of the current international status quo, and would seek to weaken the US, the EU, and NATO.
Scott: When you consider how much nicer Moscow is compared to Boston or D.C. (measured by trash on street, potholes, etc.) and that Russia is less wealthy than the U.S., it does make one wonder what had to be extracted from the rest of the empire to gold-plate a capital. However, the posting is about what Russians with whom I spoke thought, not about what I might think if I had enough first-hand information to form an opinion.
“gays are rounded up in many areas of the country”? Is there a non-Muslim part of Russia that you can find as an example for anti-gay pogroms? Russians conceded that gays (along with anyone else on the wrong side of Islam) were treated badly in Chechnya, but that’s not really part of “Russia” from their point of view nor is it truly under the central government’s control.
Russil: On the subject of “reduced power compared to 1946” you could say the same about the U.S.! Everyone was afraid of our war machine and economic power back then. For the past few decades, however, we have had people laughing at us in our own neighborhood (see the Castro brothers in Cuba, for example, or Hugo Chavez and political descendants).
And, Scott, have you actually been to Russia recently? Or is your knowledge about purported persecution of gays derived from Western media reports?
(One thing that I have noticed on Facebook is that if I post anything favorable about Russia people get angry. I can write “the Louvre has some nice art” and nobody says “If you like art so goddamn much why don’t you move your sorry ass to Frogland?”. But if I say “the Moscow subway runs every minute” people respond with “Why don’t you move there if it is so great?”)
Phil please do a post on “The conceptual penis as a social construct” academic triumph/hoax.
Wait, wait! You are saying that both countries are run by banksters? But in one country they “elect” the bankster to be their leader, while in the other the nominal leader is a “puppet” of that country’s banksters? Say it isn’t so! Reminds me of L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth,” where the conquering alien invaders were revealed to be beholden to intergalactic bankers who, if memory serves, put a lien on the Earth.
But certainly Russia has its own problems with wealth inequality and a “massive underclass:”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inequality-and-the-putin-economy-inside-the-numbers/
“Are there Russian stories about how various officials are being manipulated by Americans or the American government?”
Well, yes. They are quite convinced we have influenced their political processes (isn’t that what the CIA is for?):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samuel-ramani/why-russia-is-interfering_b_12801892.html
And not without reason:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/13/the-long-history-of-the-u-s-interfering-with-elections-elsewhere/
Bonus reading:
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Have you tried posting ‘Russian education system is far superior to the US one (something that is almost surely factually true)’? I’d be curious to know the responses. BTW I have said it before, your FB friends suck.
“People thought that Putin would still win in totally free elections in a country with totally free media, so restrictions on media may not have any practical effect on the government.” How would they know? Ignorance is bliss! If we had a less free media, maybe we wouldn’t have heard about Clinton’s email issues and we’d have a totally different president.
Do Moscowites still primary live in apartments? No standalone houses or townhouses. What Russia, including Moscow region, has in abundance is undeveloped land.
You keep having all these points of contention with your Facebook friends and it’s because they’re on Facebook. It’s a cesspool. Get on vk.com with the cool kids.
Ok, a disclaimer before my 2 cents. I’m from India working for company that provides health care equipment to local labs and hospitals. I was in the US for a few years while pursuing my master’s in Arizona. When I graduated school (1997) I pursued Engineering. At that time the only disciplines worth pursuing if you intended to have a job was either Engineering or Medicine. My school mate attended some seminar in the local russian embassy and decided to pursue medicine in Russia. He was not well off and had to break a lot of his (fathers) savings to fund his education. 2 years later he came back and offered a bleak outlook- he said that his degree had no value outside Russia and most of his professors would come to class high on vodka. He had taken up a part time job as a bar tender which was being run by a local gangster. Of course a lot of this could be discarded as an embellished version of what happened given his fertile imagination, but this guy was no lazy idiot. Over the years we lost touch. Last I heard was he was working for some oil company in sales. This was all pre-putin so I dont know if things have changed remarkably under Putin. Also, if people claim that Putin would win elections if the media was free, what exactly is the rationale for keeping the media “un-free”?
What’s that old saying? Ah yes, “the grass is always greener on the other side”.
Hahaha.
“As in Soviet times, though there is probably more freedom of expression in social and work situations than we have here in the Boston area.”
-This would remind any Russian of the joke: An American is arguing with a Russian about freedom, American says “I can go right in front of the White House and yell ‘Reagan is an asshole!’ and no-one would arrest me” The Russian says, “So, I can stroll right in the middle of Red Square and yell ‘Reagan is an asshole!’, too”
-Yours are very superficial comments, like you said gleaned from Muscovites talking with an American. It’s true that many educated Russians memorize poems, and are intelligent and hardworking – I’m sure some of them were in your classes at MIT, having decided that clean streets in Moscow were not enough of freedom. The government also actively supports fairly uneducated gangs of skinheads, Jew-hating, gay-hating thugs who then get away with various intimidations, beatings and murders.
-Not having free media doesn’t bother them? Maybe, but how do they know anymore and why would they say otherwise? Free media didn’t just go away by itself, it was purged with systematic police raids, trumped up charges, license revocations, physical intimidation, murders. See what happened to NTV (and including “Kukly”, which was quite a bit more literary than your average poem quoting economics student – episodes based on Bible’s invisible God, after an order to remove Putin character from the program, or ETA Hoffman’s Klein Zaches, enraged Putin and at the same time predicted much about the course of his rule almost 2 decades later). After free press, they came for other institutions including courts.
-Clean streets in Moscow is nice… I’d like much cleaner streets in NY, say like in most European cities. But without free press they don’t get stories about corruption, or mismanagement or the extreme pollution, hazardous waste and garbage that litter much of the rest of the country. As someone noted why do they work so hard to suppress the press and feed propaganda if it didn’t work?
Your first section makes no sense. Nothing in any of those six bullet points indicates that American media blames Russia for America’s problems.
Regarding the messages that you get on Facebook, it appears that you must have a very large number of Facebook friends. Some very small fraction of those people occasionally remarks critical of Russia, while none ever make remarks critical of France. Not much in the way of conclusions about anything can be said about that. There are opinion polls that show that many Americans’ attitudes about Russia match their attitudes about President Trump. It’s just as foolish for an individual to admire Russia and Putin because he likes Trump as it is to hold the opposite view.
lvl: You have succeeded almost as well as the nytimes in making Russia sound hellish. But https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2112.html shows that people are voluntarily moving into the hell that you’ve described. Russia attracts 1.7 migrants per 1,000 population. This is less than the 3.9 that pile into the U.S. (makes us all better off because we don’t have enough traffic jams or high enough real estate prices?). People are a lot more eager to leave Puerto Rico (7.4 annually going OUT per 1,000), Syria (2.1 departing/1,000), French Polynesia (0.8/1,000 want to leave Tahiti! Say it isn’t so), etc.
How are these numbers consistent with the portrait you’ve painted?
Vince: You are convinced that Putin “likes Trump”? What leads you to this conclusion?
http://globalinterests.org/2016/07/27/what-putin-actually-said-about-donald-trump/ (by a native Russian speaker, apparently) says that Western journalists are essentially too lazy/stupid to translate Putin’s statements correctly and also that Putin has given only a few hints as to what he might think about the issues where Western journalists confidently report his innermost feelings.
Russia is a permanent tragedy, whereas the USA could probably reverse its worst aspects with a dose of “democratic socialism” (in the European/UK sense). The Soviet experiment took a huge toll. My wife was an English-language tutor for Russian refugees, mostly Jews, in the 90’s. These seniors had lived their entire lives in the Soviet system. To sum up their experience: “In Russia we were hated because we were Jews, now we’re hated because we’re Russians.” Go figure.
“the USA could probably reverse its worst aspects with a dose of “democratic socialism” (in the European/UK sense)” This could indeed increase number of migrants to Russia!
To the Russia haters: have you ever been to Russia? What do you know about Russia other than what you know from the U.S. news and Western history books?
Why is there support for Putin, you ask? All they all just brainwashed from the controlled media? Look at it from the perspective of the average Russian. During the Soviet collapse and the Yeltsin years, the country was a complete mess. Lawlessness became rampant (mafias sprung up everywhere, forcing people to hand over their apartments, houses, businesses, etc). Life expectancy for everyone plummeted drastically around this time. Russians had looked to the West for support in the transition to a functioning democracy, and instead it got offered a bunch of oligarchs – thanks to Chubais (Khodorkovsky, Abramovich, Berezovsky , the list goes on). Putin was planned as Yeltsin’s successor and puppet to the oligarchs. Interestingly, he turned the whole plan on its head and kicked out the ones that thought they would be the bosses of him. From a Russian’s perspective, Putin is a hero. He re-established order (there can only be one mafia – his mafia). They all recognize it as a corrupt regime albeit, but order nonetheless. So in choosing between Putin and the unknown, the average Russian is most likely going to go with Putin. Will Russia ever be a classical liberal democracy – one would hope, but don’t hold your breath. btw – does the USA really have a classical liberal democracy if all we are offered to vote is two major parties? When people are not allowed to freely express themselves (under threat of losing their livelihoods if they are not PC)?
“Russia attracts 1.7 migrants per 1,000 population.”
True, but most of these migrants are coming from much poorer countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
There’s a separate (smaller?) wave of migrants leaving Russia to richer European countries.
Disclaimer: I’m Russian who has recently moved to Finland.