What are you talking about? There have never been any democracy in Russia.

But yeah, that's at most two decades out of the last thousand years or whatever. So on the whole as soon as the Russian people have got rid of one dictatorship, they seem to have been pretty damn eager to replace it with another one.

To pin this on the Russian people is ludicrous. I think Russia has been consistently dealt a bad hand when it comes to leadership. And interference from the "west" has also been a negative influence in modern times. Consider Lenin[1] and western economic advice that led to the looting of the Russian state after the fall of communism[2].

[1] https://m.dw.com/en/how-germany-got-the-russian-revolution-o...

[2] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-piratization-ru...

When you're dealt a bad hand, it's your responsibility as citizens to do something about it.

That's the part that Russians don't seem to get. As the video describes, it's as if they they enjoy suffering and oppression. Nothing wrong with that, I guess... whatever floats your boat, no kink-shaming here. But don't expect it to catch on elsewhere.

The endless complaints about 'the others' completely mitigates the facts that its Russians who stole from Russia and made it into crap place it is now. You want a simple proof? Check nationalities of all the oligarchs, all the politicians at power.

No Space Aliens came down in their UFOs and bequeathed enlightenment and democracy on anyone else in the world either. It's up to each people themselves.

This is either a victim of Russian propaganda, or an agent of Russian propaganda.

As to the presented ideas in the talk - as someone who knows Russia well, speaks Russian, has Russian family, he’s spot on - but no Russian will ever agree, because that is part of their complex.

Luckily for me, I did actually spent 1 hour watching the video (more like 4 hours in between managing kids) and it made sense of many things I didn't understand before. As somebody coming from country brutally occupied by russian forces for 21 years on a 'friendly special mission', yes the part about mentality is spot on.

I don't think Putin is on some holy mission for slav unification, seeing how he immediately ordered 10,000 chechen killers on their closest slavic neighbor. He is just an ordinary smart thug, highly functioning sociopath, who got lucky being at the right time and place and having good KGB experience to get him to the top and sustain.

Also, its a great lecture on how to not even react and completely ignore the russian news full of 'pravda', intended to just divert attention from other nefarious activities purported by them. Don't play the games they lay for the west.

How so?

What I specifically want to hear from you - presumably someone knowledgeable about the political history of the Russian Federation - is how the Yeltsin administration was more democratic. Because my understanding is that the Yeltsin administration was extremely unstable (ie Yeltsin shelling the Russian white house after trying to unconstitutionally dissolve the parliament).

Yes, their attempt was a miserable failure in many ways, but it was a democracy, albeit a very shallow one.

I feel like ever since the Ukraine invasion Russia has been down-graded from "flawed democracy' to 'autocratic dictatorship' - I mean it's not Switzerland but it's hardly North Korea..

And usually has a pretty light touch on this kind of stuff compared to Australia, Canada or the UK.

So no, that in itself is not enough to prove to me that Russia is an autocratic dictatorship, when parliamentary democracies all over the world have similar laws - they reserve the right to throw you in jail for content that expresses threats against the regime.

What exactly? I could not find anything by Googling on material which would land you in jail for 14 years.

d) Promotes criminal acts or acts of terrorism; or

e) Represents any particular class of the public as inherently inferior as a result of a characteristic of members of that class being a characteristic that is a prohibited ground of discrimination specified in the Human Rights Act 1993.

https://www.dia.govt.nz/Digital-Child-Exploitation-Objection...

So yes, non-CP content is punishable by 14 years in prison if it's against the "regime". What Russia is doing is hardly unprecedented.

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The broader point I was trying to make here is that more democratic does not mean more pro-western.

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[1]: "Western"?!? NZ is about as far East as you can get, innit? Oh well, you know, "generally regarded as non-dictatorships".

You seem to have your categories mixed up: Democratic or not is orthogonal to stable or not.