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Well, the vast majority of people aren't influential, though – I don't think measuring the impact on influential people is the best way to evaluate the extent of repression! To pull out the C.S. Lewis quote:
I think Putin is pretty clearly the robber baron here, and from what I can tell at least some of the European states (England specifically springs to mind) strike me as aspiring to be omnipotent moral busybodies. But on the other hand, the omnipotent moral busybody-ness is still aspirational, and on the other I think it's important not to underestimate how chilling pushing a few politically influential people off of buildings is on ordinary, non-influential people. So I think it is best to characterize the European state's oppression as different and bad moreso than worse or something like that (and certainly, all else being equal, literally murdering someone seems worse to me than hassling them over their bank account.)
But it doesn't seem to me that it then follows that everyone will prefer bad Western policies to bad Russian policies. I can imagine some people who would be more impeded by German's restrictive speech code than Russia's. It seems to me perfectly reasonable that some people who aren't me have a preference for the latter because of what they value – and surely a nonzero and in fact substantial amount of such people must exist in real life, choosing to side with Russia instead of fleeing Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
This may be the case, but I've always been a little puzzled at the allegations that Putin systematically fakes elections (versus pushing people off of buildings, which makes a lot of sense to me). By all accounts (including independent Western polling, from what I recall) Putin is quite popular, and should be expected to win elections. It makes me wonder if these allegations are cope from Western elites that can't understand why people would willingly vote for Putin. (The reasons for voting for Putin should be pretty obvious from looking at how Russia has rebounded since the fall of the USSR, although it is possible that he will end up undoing that progress on his Ukraine adventure.)
On the other hand, possibly there's some quirk of the Russian political system (which I am not particularly familiar with) that makes the extra bit gained fraudulently worth it, or some other risk assessment that is opaque to me.
The other option, of course, is that when people say there aren't "real elections" what they mean is that there's enough voter fraud to swing the vote considerably. This seems pretty bad, and much more plausible to me. But I think it's more precise to describe that as fraudulent than faked – maybe it seems like a weird difference, but e.g. I wouldn't argue the 1960 Presidential election in the United States was fake (which, to me, connotes a complete disconnect between the input and output of the votes) even though it was substantially fraudulent (possibly by enough to swing the election).
You may have considerably more insight into this than I do – when you say they don't have real elections, what precisely do you mean?
The research into Russian elections that's out there (percentage digit anomalies, turnout:percentages correlation anomalies) leads me in the direction of believing they're fake as in they don't count the ballots. They pick a number and say it's the result. At some voting stations there had been videos of what looked like ballot stuffing. Perhaps not in the latest election, but other ones.
Why would Putin do that if he can be confident he'd win? Extra control freaking? Local attempts to ensure the numbers look "correct"? 4D demoralization chess? Your guess is as good as mine.
It's a test of loyalty, from the head of the electoral commission and the governors all the way down to the teachers falsifying the results at their polling stations.
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Interesting – thanks!
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