Russia - threadbanned users in OP

What worries me is that I'm seeing a place that's falling in line behind a 'strongman' authoritarian and one the has basically no culture of democracy. It might have art, pretty buildings, ballet and all sorts of stuff, but it has never really been through the same enlightenment experience that occurred in most of of Europe and the west more broadly.

They stood up against the Czarist regime of old and replaced it with a collectivist form of authoritarianism, never really having adopted anything even remotely like democratic values. It was just one crushingly all powerful system replacing the next. One type of unaccountable power replaced by another.

You see bubbles of protest, but the state has its tentacles into every aspect of life and seems to only have ever had a facade of pretending to be democratic in the 90s for a few years, while regularly using every power it had to intimidate, arrest, jail anyone who opposed it.

I talked with quite a few Russians in London who'd left and most of them just seemed to have turned their back on the place permanently if they had a bad experience, while others were just in that 'I don't talk about politics' kind of mode, which is also a feature of a society where talking about politics might get you into a lot of trouble. So, they focus on something else or they become highly critical about other countries' political upheavals, while completely ignoring their own.

I think we're probably kidding ourselves if we think that there's going to be a popular uprising in Russia. There isn't the desire to do so. It's a modern country on the surface of it but has really never moved on from feudal medieval leadership ideology. They seem to like their 'powerful king' and I suspect any solution to this is going to be a internationally driven diplomatic solution which creates a military stalemate. The Russian people are fundamentally cowed and fearful of their government and they're too weak to do anything about it or couldn't be bothered rocking the boat.

I don't really feel that the people fleeing should be pilloried for doing so. They can't organise within Russia and they're far better off out than in. At least there's some hope they might be able to live normal lives and impact Russian internal politics from outside.

It looks to me like Russia is still very much in Soviet mentality when it comes to control and oppression, but just it's now a sort of corporatist oligarchical company like state. It has more in common with a 1800s pre-democratic European imperial state than with anything else really.

It's also why I cannot in anyway understand why some morons on the far left of western politics seem to idolise Russia. It's neither left wing nor is it socialist. It's at best some kind of authoritarian state facilitated ultra capitalism.

If your argument is NATO is bad, therefore Russia must be good, then you're a complete moron and a simpleton of some sort. You can be critical of NATO's track record without getting into 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' nonsense.