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0 pointsmaratc2y ago0 comments

> If Navalny became Russian president

I have lots of respect to the guy, but realistically the only scenario where he would become Russian president would be if the vote for the Russian presidency was conducted in the West. He would win a landslide victory. In Russia though, if you go outside Moscow and St.Petersburg, it's not that people are against him — they simply never heard of him.

In the USSR in the 80s there was a lot of talk of one Angela Davis. She was presented as "the only opposition leader" or something. There's no doubt that if the election for POTUS was conducted in the USSR, she'd win over Reagan by a huge margin. In the USA though not many people knew who she was. So Navalny is the Angela Davis in reverse — the media across the border makes him look like punching in the weight category he does not really belong to.

Regarding Russian political landscape, you can look in any corner, from Gorbachev to Solzhenytsin and anything in between. There are not many points that these people could all agree on. But not a single Russian politician was comfortable with the thought of Ukraine joining NATO. And this includes Navalny too.

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ajuc2y ago

Putin will die one way or another and Russia will have to exit the war and try to return to normal economy. Nawalny or another similar leader is their best shot at that. They created nadiezdin for a reason, they kept nawalny for a reason, they will create somebody new like that eventually. It's internal struggle in Kremlin that will determine which of them will succeed Putin and when, but Ukrainian war has a huge influence on that.

Every time Russia lost a war they had a temporary liberalization. Usually orchestrated by the government because there's no civil society in Russia.

As for what Russians thought about Nawalny - doesn't matter, never did. Nobody knew who Putin was, yet fsb made him a president no sweat.

And don't get me started about NATO. Russians will almost all immediately flip from "Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat" to "nobody cares" the moment the narration in tv switches.

The russian trick of presenting their dictators as the reasonable forces keeping the even worse tendencies of Russian people contained is obvious bullshit. In reality Russians will just go along with almost anything.

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