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World News See other World News Articles Title: Is There a “6th Column” Trying to Subvert Russia? For those of us who followed the Russian Internet there is a highly visible phenomenon taking place which is quite startling: there are a lot of anti-Putin videos posted on YouTube or its Russian equivalents. Not only that, but a flurry of channels has recently appeared which seem to have made bashing Putin or Mishustin their full-time job. Of course, there have always been anti-Putin and anti-Medvedev videos in the past, but what makes this new wave so different from the old one is that they attack Putin and Mishustin not from pro-Western positions, but from putatively Russian patriotic positions. Even the supposed (not true) “personal advisor” to Putin and national-Bolshevik (true), Alexander Dugin has joined that movement (see here if you understand Russian). This is a new, interesting and complex phenomenon, and I will try to unpack it here. First, we have to remember that Putin was extremely successful at destroying the pro-Western opposition which, while shown on a daily basis on Russian TV, represents something in the 3-5% of the people at most. You might ask why they are so frequent on TV, and the reason is simple: the more they talk, the more they are hated. So far from silencing the opposition, the Kremlin not only gives it air time, it even pays opposition figures top dollars to participate in the most popular talk shows. See here and here for more details Truly, the reputation of the pro-Western “liberal” (in the Russian sense) opposition is now roadkill in Russia. Yes, there is a core of russophobic Russians who hate Russia with a passion (they refer to it as “Rashka”) and their hatred for everything Russian is so obvious that they are universally despised all over the country (the one big exception being Moscow where there is a much stronger “liberal” opposition which gets the support of all those who had a great time pillaging Russia in the 1990s and who now hate Putin for putting an end to their malfeasance). As for the Duma opposition, it is an opposition only in name. They make noises, they bitch here and there, they condemn this or that, but at the end of the day, they will not represent a credible opposition at all. Why? Well, look at this screenshot I took from a Russian polling site: Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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