With all the money going into the Ukraine war and other ventures since Putin came to power, I imagine there’s a lot of stuff he could’ve done to make the world a better place and Russia a formidable world power.
He could’ve sold all the nuclear warheads in exchange for goods which could be used as a foundation to get the ball rolling for the economic situation.
Try to establish a proper western-style liberal democratic system and culture in Russia. They have a constitution that is nominally liberal democratic, but they are so used to authoritarian rule that they can’t really manage to keep it that way.
Scary is that in a few years the USA could have that exact description
You see, the shape of the asiatic brainpan predisposes the slav to authoritarianism.Russians just have an authoritarian culture. They’re trained to hate freedom and democracy from 2 years old.You’re trying to make them sound racist but that’s really not it. Russia has never been a democracy. They don’t have the culture build by more than a century of democratic rule like America, France or Britain. They don’t have the culture that leads to more than a century of democratic rule. You make it seem comical by saying “they’re taught to hate freedom”, but cultures do vary in how predisposed they are to obeying authority or rebelling against it, among a variety of other things. I mean, just take a look at this. See this if you’ve never seen these terms before.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that it takes a lot more work and good faith to keep a democracy going in a country like Russia and China than in Western Europe, where people are more used to and comfortable with fighting authority.
Yeah most Americans think that democracy/liberalism is just the natural state of the world and doesn’t need any effort to maintain. That is very much not the case in Russia.
That is very much not the case in Russia.
Or most of the world, really. Source: Am Middle Eastern and don’t like being told what to do. Sometimes it feels like either I or everyone around me is crazy.
Last time Russia was a formidable power, it was part of the USSR.
Modern Russia is a capitalist state. The interests of the capitalist class and the interests of the working class are opposed. The capitalists wouldn’t permit Putin to remain in power if he made Russia a better place for people, by supporting the people instead of his fellow billionaires.
The USSR was a formidable power because of vassal states also known as good old imperialism, something Putin desperately tries to replicate. The mindset of Russia’s leaders today isn’t so different from Soviet times.
If that was the relationship, the USSR’s constitution wouldn’t have permitted SSRs to leave with a simple referendum, nor would they have suffered so much after breakup of the USSR. Instead we see their housing and public infrastructure has been left to rot without the cooperation and relative effectiveness of the USSR’s economic system.
We know what imperialism looks like. When the UK built infrastructure in India and Africa, it consisted of railways from the mines to the ports. The literacy rate in India under Britain never got above 12%. The USSR built trains connecting even remote villages and subway systems in any city >1 million. Most of the former USSR countries still have some of the highest rates of educational attainment in the world.
The USSR blurred the line. There was decentralized industry and multiculturalism, but also Russian supremacy, genocide, and military conquest.
There was very much the threat of violence in 1990 and 1991, even if the original USSR framework was very liberal. Not to mention the USSR-led coups in Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
It’s also important to note that the Russian SFSR itself was an empire ruled from Moscow before the revolution. That did not change much after the revolution.
Do you honestly believe the USSR honored it’s constitution? There were referendums because the dictator at the time decided to allow it. If Putin or Stalin were in charge at the time, this wouldn’t have happened just like the decades of suppression and exploitation prior. It’s very disrespectful and somewhat unhinged to claim all those vassal states had a choice all along and wanted to be part of the soviet union just because they were granted the privilege in the very end when the regime lost it’s grip anyway. The truth is Moscow couldn’t hold them together for much longer. Most of those states would just revolt even more so than they already did anyway.
Because yes, of course they tried to free themselves in the past but didn’t have the means to do so previously. Similarly, Russia’s vassal states today have no choice, as all elections and referendums are only for show and all leaders are installed by the Kreml.
Long story short: Constitutions in autocracies are worth as little as the paper they’re written on.
They did absolutely not allow anyone to leave with simple referendum. They sent tanks against peaceful protesters who demanded independence
Hungary was never an SSR, Kruschev sent the tanks into the Hungarian People’s Republic at the behest of their elected government to put down an uprising that had been coopted by fascists.
But yes they literally did secede, that was the legal mechanism which the SSRs broke off of the USSR in the 90s. It was enshrined in the soviet constitution.
Abdicate years ago instead of bending the laws that prevented him from ruling indefinitely
The amount of minable materials in the vast area of Siberia could have set russia up as an economic powerhouse. That’s why China is helping them run themselves into the meat grinder in Ukraine. The inevitable collapse will allow them to scoop up the area.
Almost every single country with an extraction-based economy is either a dictatorship or a failed state. The single exception is Norway, which discovered oil after it was already an advanced democracy. A country with natural resources does not need to invest in its human capital, or worry about democracy.
Russia’s natural resources are its curse.
There is actually a good video by CGP grey on why this is. https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?si=F5u-G90XJ9d6vMWp
Remove the tracker from that url https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
The Netherlands is also wealthy because of their natural gas.
So it is definitely possible to not be a dictatorship, and a good Putin would make it so.
The Netherlands is absolutely not wealthy because of its natural gas. The Netherlands is a manufacturing center, a farming powerhouse (it’s literally the world’s number 2 food exporter). It was Europe’s original trading empire. Today it contains the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley, with world-class universities and the super-high-tech ASML. It’s been a wealthy country for centuries because it has invested in its people. The natural gas is an anecdote.
It’s been a wealthy country for centuries because it has invested in its people.
OK, but mostly it’s the imperialism.
Sweden and Finland, to take just two nearby examples, are roughly as wealthy as the Netherlands. Neither had an empire. Portugal, the world’s first superpower, with colonies on three continents, is far poorer than any of those three countries.
Russia is currently trying to re-establish its empire, and impoverishing itself in the process.
Imperialism is a red herring.
isn’t asml British?
ASML Holding, a Dutch company that supplies photolithography systems for the semiconductor industry
You’re one search away from the truth, my friend
You’re thinking of ARM
in addition to mineral deposits they also have natural gas and historically a good amount of people in the developed cities well trained in math, programming, and technical sciences.
They could have been an economic powerhouse in 21st century if they weren’t beholden to Putin and oligarchy.
Use the vast resources to invest in the country such as building green energy, public transportation, plant agriculture, high quality apartment buildings, manufacturing and education to try to outcompete the other European nations in metrics such as the democracy index, human happiness index, corruption index.
Allow the regions to leave any time they want and if that does happen take it as a lesson for his leadership.
I don’t like the question because Putin being a good guy is unthinkable to me. Good guys aren’t in Russian politics, or at least not for long. But let’s say Russia had a halfway decent leadership where smart guys don’t fall out of windows. With their vast landmass, resources and workforce, they could easily be the third largest economy in the world again instead of not even making it into the top ten on their way to fall behind Mexico.
The smartest thing any leader could do at this point is educate the next generation.
He could have opened a lot of colleges and invited scholars from all over the world to come and learn for free.
Push the US, Europe and China to invest in asteroid mining and space colonization.
Russia has the highest rate of college attainment in the world, free college is one of the few legacies of the USSR that didn’t get privatized and destroyed during liberalization.
Now about those space colonies…
The Soviet space program only got mostly privatized and destroyed. It’s not easy to run a space program when your entire industrial base just had the copper stripped out of the walls.
It’s actually a major accomplishment that they were able to contribute modules to the ISS in the 2000s.
Retired after 2 terms in office
He’d accidentally fall out of a window long before he’d have the chance.
Absolutely this. Their commitment to corruption would not tolerate a “good guy” whatever tf that actually means.
I don’t think the definition of a good guy has changed recently…
- Established Moscow as an international hub for commerce and industry
- Waged economical war with China to be the largest economy in Asia
- Buried the hatchet with Japan over the northern islands
- Created a direct competitor for BRICS (BICS) and tried to tie his own Asian coalition with the European Union.
- Rebooted the Russian space program to compete with NASA/SpaceX
Watching For All Mankind makes me feel bad for present-day Russians because even those Soviet Russians have it better.
Watching For All Mankind makes me feel bad for present-day Russians because even those Soviet Russians have it better.
I just started watching the series and I’m in season 2. I’m loving it so far, and couldn’t agree more.
If he was a good guy he probably wouldn’t have come to power in the first place.
He would have stepped down in 2008 per constitutional limits.
When was the last safe transition of power in Russia?
His election in 2000.
That one was hardly legal, not sure about “safe”.
The Moscow apartment bombings were carried out in 1999. Putin used them, along with the invasion of Dagestan, to launch the Second Chechen War.
Alexander Litvinenko blamed Putin and the FSB for the bombings. For that he was infamously assassinated with radioactive polonium.
If Putin were a “good guy” then none of that would’ve happened either, so he might not have won the 2000 election.
He was the heir apparent to Yeltsin, which might have given him enough power to win the election by himself.
I agree Putin didn’t start off as a good guy, but I focused more on his continued presence in power and there was a peaceful transition of power between the two Presidents.
Heir apparent is one way to put it. I would argue that he used the Moscow Apartment Bombings as a false flag to install himself, just as Hitler did with the Reichstag Fire.
Both leaders (Putin and Hitler) already had a lot of power prior to the false flags but those attacks cemented their rule as dictators.
Good Putin was able to shoot himself in the head like 30 times.
He would have united the globe, and then been isekai’d to another world where his only goal is to ride every creature in said world.
