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Comment by larnmar | Hacker News Reader

I found the speech very interesting, and the columnist’s attempt to twist it into relevance about his own hobbyhorse of US politics to be very boring.

Russian politics is very interesting on its own, and we hear far too little about it (whilst also hearing far too much about US politics). The analogies between the two are extremely weak and generally uninformative; saying “my opponent is like Putin” carries no more information than “my opponent is a big poop face”.

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Russian politics? There are no such things since late nineties.

Whatever "opposition" is left in Russia today, is no more real than the token opposition to the CPSU that legally existed in the Soviet Union.

There is a long held Russian political tradition that long proceeded the creation of the Union: they pick the weakest enemy, the weakest opposition camp, and then surround them with spies, puppets, and then purposely let them show everybody their helpless, futile struggle.

In comparison, all credible opponents to the CPSU was dealt with in the swiftest way, without even a token trial. They either met their demise from KGB's signature potato trucks, or simply "disappeared" Latin American style.

The same was with modern Russia. The last credible, real opposition to MAFIA—KGB chimera was the Primakov-Lebed group. Lebed died in a helicopter crash, and Primakov, you know it. At the same time, KGB plotters didn't care the slightest about formal liberal opposition, because they knew that they were complete jokes, incapable of killing a fly.

Nor Primakov, nor Lebed were even remotely "liberal." That fabled "Russian liberal opposition" only existed in the imagination of Western "Kremlinologists." Those "non-violent resistance" clowns brought demise not only on themselves, but all and everybody else who was capable of standing against resurgent KGB. Their last chance assassinating Putin expired right around 2005-2006, and you know what those clowns did back then? They said "we need to bring Putin to Hague...," few month later a wave of assassinations rolled over Russia

It's always been interesting to watch that despite a lot of common similarities, politics took a different turn in Ukraine. While Ukrainians regularly run their politicians out of office, the same doesn't happen in Russia.

That's probably why Ukraine's per-capita GDP is about one third that of Russia (itself a pretty poor country) - each new cohort of politicians has to rob the country blind again and again, and they have to do it quick before they are chased out of the office. In Russia everyone knows Putin and his cronies aren't going anywhere until Putin croaks, and dude seems to be in good health for the time being.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...

Russia has oil, Ukraine doesn’t.

This comment make me wonder if it was written by a Markov chain.

One of the worst comments I've ever read on HN.

Also the word 'interesting' has to be the weakest adjective in the English language. It conveys no information.

The common thread is corruption.

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