The only reason Russia "matters" is that it's non-compliant to the Western interests. The only kind of "freely-elected" government that the West would approve of is one that would bend to its wishes. Take a look at Ukraine to see what happens to elected governments that don't.
Russians (and the rest of us?) are supposed to fall meekly into line in the world created by the likes of GWB, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, David Cameron and Merkl? No thanks.
I think everyone has been looking forward for this to happen for hundreds of years. Nothing has happened. It's still land of kleptocrazy (let's not start arguing that there are other equally bad players as well). And even to this day, Russians seem to be like: "there is nothing we can do". And Putin is more popular than ever. Take this as a critizism for Russian people. You have allowed such a bad leaders run to your country. Russians I have met, talk more about leaving the country.
Now that we have the leaks, look what is happening in Iceland and compare that to what is happening in Russia. In Iceland people are demanding their prime minister to resign. In Russia, people think that this is an attack from the west.
I think any person in the "west" would be delighted to see free elections in Russia. Why wouldn't we? Since it would be a missive influence on our lives, of course western media should care!
A government elected by popular vote would be stabilizing to the region (and the world) since it wouldn't have the same need of maintaining poopularity by inventing an external enemy (and at regular intervals, creating one, if necessary).
> "does not match the western narrative"
What is the "western narrative" really?
I suppose one historical "western narrative" is that the Soviet Union was dissolved in the early 90's, and that the borders drawn then are those of sovereign states who each have a choice of trade/military alliance. I'm getting increasingly worried that this isn't the historical narrative tought in some schools in parts of the former union.
No, they will be delighted to see the candidate they (westerns) like more - win, they won't care who most people really voted and supported in Russia. Putin won on the recent elections and I did not notice any "delighted west media" after that, even thought as I said in a separate comment - vast majority of the people in Russia actually did support Putin vs other candidates. It's hard to see from the outside, but most people in Russia are actually supporting Putin, I think the reason is that those who were against Putin have a better reach to international media since they speak english and are more socially active thus from the outside it looks like most of the population dislikes Putin, which in reality is not true.
North Koreas leaders have traditionally enjoyed a 100% support, and it might even be genuine support, but it doesn't mean anything.
The media climate in Russia isn't yet North Korean of course, but it's far from a climate in which elections would be called fair. https://index.rsf.org/ (You really don't want to rank with Belarus and Congo on the freedom of press index).
To win a real election you make sure you have freedom of press, then you have an election overseen by internationally recognized observers such as the oecd.
The fact that Putin is popular despite rapidly growing deficits and receding standard of living (at the same time as massive military spending) is pretty telling.
Really? What is it based on? Compared to a period after the perestroika, level of life has greatly improved in Russia, the worst period of crime and absolute horrendous inability of police to prevent the growth of organized crime is not something most of the people of Russia want to experience again and that is why they want to go with stability which they think Putin gives them.
> in a country without free press or free elections
Throwing around big captions like this does not help a single bit, these words mean absolutely nothing to me, what do you mean by "free press" isn't most of the popular media in UK or US owned and heavily censored by corporate leaders or government parties? What makes this media "free" and media in Russia "not free".
The fact that the budget is balanced on a completely different oil price, and no sanctions. The russian reserve funds are falling pretty rapidly, while defense spending is still increasing and over 5%.
> Compared to a period after the perestroika, level of life has greatly improved in Russia
No doubt. The period after the union dissolved standard off living rapidly rose. The period of openness over the last decade meant great growth and together with rising oil prices it saw rising standards of living. This only changed in the last years with falling oil prices and sanctions which have seen prices rise at a faster rate than wages and pensions. This is also known as a "sinking standard of living". Russian price and wage indices aren't subjective or secret information so please let's not debate whether you can e.g. buy more or less food for a teachers' salary in 2016 than 2013. I'm talking about the very last years now, not the period since 1990.
> stability which they think Putin gives them.
I don't blame them. Putin saw great economic success in his early years. I do however consider it foolish to vote for an authoritarian if the cost of this stability is lack of opposition and lack of free press, which has been the result in recent years.
> what do you mean by "free press"
The methodology used by Reporters Without Borders is a pretty decent one:
"[The level of] pluralism, media independence, environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and infrastructure. The questionnaire takes account of the legal framework for the media (including penalties for press offences, the existence of a state monopoly for certain kinds of media and how the media are regulated) and the level of independence of the public media."
> Isn't most of the popular media in UK or US owned and heavily censored by corporate leaders or government parties?
Yes, a lot of the press is owned by corporations, or non political organizations, or political parties, or individuals. A lot of it has a party bias. That's entirely natural. Pluralism is the key -- e.g. are there media outlets representing all political parties etc? Is there excessive control of one type of media such as TV by a government entity? Self-censorship is a problem, but this problem is accounted for in the freedom-of-press index.
> What makes this media "free" and media in Russia "not free".
It's not black and white, it's a scale from completely unfree (North Korea) to completely free (Nowhere!). Somewhere along this scale we can argue that is are "free" and somewhere I'd argue they are not free.
Where one draws that line is entirely arbitrary. Out of pure interest - if you yourself were to use the freedom of press ranking to draw a line somewhere above north korea where you consider the press to be "free", which state is that? Since it is below Russia in the ranking, where is it? Belarus? Cuba? Saudi Arabia?
I do suspect this -- you will not be able to pick a state on that list as being below Russia but still enjoying press freedom. What you will have to do instead is a) dismiss reporters without borders and their "freedom of press index" as a western invention deviced to make "western style media" look good, while painting the Russian media landscape as failed, or b) claim that no country on the rank has free press, even Finland at the top spot, since hey, all media in Finland are owned and self censored by individuals and corporations or parties or organizations...
If you are going to do a) or b) above, don't bother - you'd be better of not responding.
Any data to back up that claim? Looking at the national reserve fund data it does not look to be anywhere near "falling pretty rapidly" [1]
Also Russian national debt has decreased by quite a lot in recent years [2], and now is only about 25% of GDP, which is a very low figure compared to other countries.
1 - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B5%D1%80...
2 - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%BD...
http://old.minfin.ru/en/nationalwealthfund/statistics/amount...
1 - http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/foreign-exchan...
The last couple of years have seen large inflation, and also stagnated salaries/pensions. This is a very recent phenomenon and started with falling oil prices and was worsened by the Crimea sanctions.
You could argue that discussing 2013-16 is cherry picking but those 3 years are pretty special -- they are the most recent 3!
With the sanctions in place 7+ percent inflation and oil prices looking to stay low for a long time, spending 5-6% on the military while the public can buy less every month for their salaries is only sustainable in one single way - make a story that the nation is in a conflict with an external enemy. That it's "us against them". It's simple nationalism and it has always worked. To support that story you cannot have an alternative narrative either so you must effectively control media and ensure there is no working opposition. This is exactly what the rest of the world believe has happened, which is why everyone is worried. It's becaus we fear that given enough time - the people of Ru wouldn't actually know they don't like Putin because there is no media that gives them any reason not to!
The point isn't that Putin is mismanaging the economy directly - it's that he is isolating Russia economically e.g by the Crimea story which will hurt the economy over time.
The same would happen in the US if Mr Trump was elected, but the difference there would be that media would eat him alive after that (e.g alienating Mexico or the entire Muslim world) and the opposition would win in a landslide come the next election.
In practice, that's not true. Take Egypt as an example where the US government tried to keep Mubarak/Suleiman in place [1] until it was unfeasible during the Arab Spring. When it was time for elections, they pretended to be for them (And so did the western media and public) until the Muslim Brotherhood was elected. That was not well received because democracy is only good if people elect who we want them to elect.
The military coup [2] happened, probably with foreign intervention, and the US government couldn't be more pleased with it. Most of the western public either doesn't know, doesn't care or thinks it's better that way and the media will go along official US lines and not call them dictators like they don't call US aligned governments authoritarian or non-democratic. That's strictly reserved for our opponents.
[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/05/hillary-clinton... [2] - https://theintercept.com/2014/10/02/feigned-american-support...
Well, there is always the age-old question of whether democracy canbe abandoned with democratic means. (Note I don't know what the MB platform was in these elections, nor what the constiution looked like). Egypt has deep rooted issues with its military being entrenched in all parts of society and politics (A problem which in turn to a large part was created by western intervention /long time subsidies!). Reversing that will take a very long time, and there is always the risk that the people elect a populist government (be it religious populism or some other kind). There is little reason to believe the situation in Egypt will improve any quicker than it has in e.g. Burma. Which is to say, the west will try to meddle in semi-democratic elections for many decades yet.
When I say everyone in the west would be delighted to see free and fair elections in Russia it's because I believe that the Russian people are quite sensible and would elect a decent leadership if given the chance.
You're assuming that free elections would benefit common Russians. They wouldn't. You're right about one thing, though: it wouldn't be Putin and his cronies siphoning all of Russia's wealth (resourceful citizens, natural resources, ...). It would be the western conglomerates.
For some reason individuals in Russia think that if the candidate they were voting for did not win the elections - it means the elections were not free and somehow fake, but you have to understand that there are a vast majority of people in Russia who thought that Putin is a better candidate compared to Prokhorov and others
For example, Moscow voted as two different cities: https://github.com/alamar/elegraph/blob/master/moscow.png Note the two obvious centers of blobs. I'm yet to see any non-handwavy explanation of that phenomenon, and why it then disappeared for the next President elections.
There would be a few outliers and a massive core of "typical" districts with similar results in them. We're even bound to get Gauss distribution of results or something similar.
However, for Duma election, there's no continuity. There are two distinct profiles. There are a lot of districts with one kind of results, a lot of districts with different kind of results. As if it was two different cities, possibly in two different countries. Or if election results were rigged in a large subset of districts.
Why would that be?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
One just should not use "external abuse" as reason to act (or not).
I did not know that Axel Springer actually has support for America, the EU and Israel literally written into its corporate constitution. That seems like a powerful source of bias for a media organisation.
The part about poor Russia being targeted by German media for no apparent reason. German media space has plenty of differing opinions in it altho I do understand that the vocal Russian minority in Germany would rather if any criticism of Russia stopped regardless of its veracity.
[0] http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/
[1] https://panamapapers.icij.org/the_power_players/
[2] http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/...
It somehow goes beyond just hating America and NATO which are good common enemies. It is weird of course, as some of these people are very wealthy and in a real communist revolution would clearly get a bullet in the back of the head.
In Russia the State is nearly all powerful, and realistically directly controls the means of production by its whim. It can change ownership of or nationalize any means of production at will. The only way it could be more Socialist, is if they nationalized all food production and stopped pretending there is private ownership. The government of Russia already controls all aspects of the economy and all major businesses. Supposed private ownership without actual private control is a farce, they're Socialist in everything but pretending regarding who owns what.
US and Europe seems is extremely hypocritical. They deny self-determination to Russians, Serbs, Kurds etc yet they happily support it for their enemies.
[0] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/09/how-many-ne...
But nothing compares to German media when it comes to paranoia about Russians. They're truly in the league of their own. They have tabloids like BILD that devote several pages of every issue on "evil russians". They even print special issues about evil Russians and new Hitler aka Putin.
When I visited Germany last year, I felt like they're in a second Cold War or something. In the US, we managed to stop being paranoid after 1990s but Germans are still paranoid about Russians. It was explained to me by a german friend of mine that this is because their biggest publisher, Axel Springer, was started with CIA money and that every journalist who works for any of the Axel Springer properties has to sign a contract that says that they have to foster the relationship with the US. Unsaid rule is that they have to disparage Russians. And sure enough, if you search for some of this stuff, you can find things like [2] and [3]
[0]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-28/top-german-journali...
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4192998/reference
[2] http://i.imgur.com/ufKQh49.png
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_SE#Corporate_pri...
Edit : After some googling, I came across this interesting article by Rüdiger Göbel... it sums up things nicely.
http://russia-insider.com/en/groundhog-day-german-msm-keeps-...
Edit #2 : I see my comment is controversial and is being heavily down/upvoted with downvotes winning.
Anyway, to add even more evidence to what I'm saying, see the Twitter feed [4] of Julian Röpcke, who's a 'political editor at BILD'. Go take a look for yourself and start scrolling. Everything that happens in the world, Russians are somehow behind it according to him. Millions of refugees from Syria in Europe? That's because of Russians and Putin (never mind the fact that millions arrived way before Russians started their deployment in Syria). I guess he cannot mention that unrest started after US implemented a policy of destabilizing Assad and funding of various islamic terror organization... because that would be against his pro-US "jounalistic" contract that he signed.
[4] https://twitter.com/julianroepcke