JLW
Diamond Member
- Sep 16, 2012
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”…..With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.
The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor oversuspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.”
Russia Is returning to it’s roots. Its people have been abused for millennia first by the tsars, then the Communist Secretariat. For only the briefest time, it enjoyed a fling with Democracy until it descended into kleptocracy. Now it has come full circle.
Ukraine is now fighting for its freedom. Absorption into the Russia means absorption into an increasingly totalitarian terrorist state.
The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor oversuspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.”
Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War (Published 2022)
Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society.
www.nytimes.com
Russia Is returning to it’s roots. Its people have been abused for millennia first by the tsars, then the Communist Secretariat. For only the briefest time, it enjoyed a fling with Democracy until it descended into kleptocracy. Now it has come full circle.
Ukraine is now fighting for its freedom. Absorption into the Russia means absorption into an increasingly totalitarian terrorist state.
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