Putin's Popularity

Knowing her work, I'm pretty sure this isn't how she'd put it, but it seems to me that what Masha Lipman is getting at here is that Vladimir Putin has been so successful in consolidating power in Russia mostly because . . . people like him because their lives have improved a lot under his leadership.

It's easy -- and even accurate -- for us in the West to say that this is mostly just the inevitable upshot of rising oil prices and not actually anything Putin deserves credit for. Nevertheless, when you put the reality of Putin's popularity together with the fact that Russia's western-approved opposition is held in low esteem due to its complicity in robbing the country blind during the 1990s and you'll see western efforts to harangue Putin into liberalizing are unlikely to change anything or strike ordinary Russians as plausibly motivated by sincere concern for their well-being.

Photo by Flickr user Yeowatzup used under a Creative Commons license