Many of the photos and videos of Prigozhen's forces marching toward Moscow showed citizens standing in a garden with a hoe or on a corner with shopping bags barely bothering to turn around to look. I expect they figure their lives will be little affected by which murdering thug is actually in the Kremlin.
Many of the photos and videos of Prigozhen's forces marching toward Moscow showed citizens standing in a garden with a hoe or on a corner with shopping bags barely bothering to turn around to look. I expect they figure their lives will be little affected by which murdering thug is actually in the Kremlin.
It's like that cartoon where the Russian standing in a long line to shop becomes angry at conditions and storms off "to shoot Putin" but shortly returns. "Why?" asks someone else. "The other line was even longer" he replies. The Russian citizen has little hope for change, little training in genuine participation in their government, and thus little interest in the storms that rage back and forth across the mountain tops, expecting there will be some fallout but no big change in climate. I remember Gorbachev with the sad regret of lost opportunity and would find it hard to trust the Russian people not to "vote" in their next autocrat.
Foreign Affairs has a very interesting article a few days old (I assume prompted by Prigozhin's messages challenging upper level military officials even before they may or may not have responded with missiles) titled "The Treacherous Path to a Better Russia" which says "Since the end of the Cold War, authoritarian regimes have outlasted 89 percent of the longtime leaders who died in office. And in every instance in which an authoritarian leader’s death led to the collapse of his regime, its replacement was also authoritarian. Even in personalist autocracies, where the question of succession is considerably fraught, the same regime has survived the leader’s death 83 percent of the time." One would generally then expect Putin to retain power even if Prigozhin had continued on the march and demanded removal of some of the military leadership... to better support dear Leader.
Many of the photos and videos of Prigozhen's forces marching toward Moscow showed citizens standing in a garden with a hoe or on a corner with shopping bags barely bothering to turn around to look. I expect they figure their lives will be little affected by which murdering thug is actually in the Kremlin.
It's like that cartoon where the Russian standing in a long line to shop becomes angry at conditions and storms off "to shoot Putin" but shortly returns. "Why?" asks someone else. "The other line was even longer" he replies. The Russian citizen has little hope for change, little training in genuine participation in their government, and thus little interest in the storms that rage back and forth across the mountain tops, expecting there will be some fallout but no big change in climate. I remember Gorbachev with the sad regret of lost opportunity and would find it hard to trust the Russian people not to "vote" in their next autocrat.
Foreign Affairs has a very interesting article a few days old (I assume prompted by Prigozhin's messages challenging upper level military officials even before they may or may not have responded with missiles) titled "The Treacherous Path to a Better Russia" which says "Since the end of the Cold War, authoritarian regimes have outlasted 89 percent of the longtime leaders who died in office. And in every instance in which an authoritarian leader’s death led to the collapse of his regime, its replacement was also authoritarian. Even in personalist autocracies, where the question of succession is considerably fraught, the same regime has survived the leader’s death 83 percent of the time." One would generally then expect Putin to retain power even if Prigozhin had continued on the march and demanded removal of some of the military leadership... to better support dear Leader.