Margarita Simonyan ...
A BBC-nik asked me:
- Among the 150 million Russians is there really no one better than Putin? How can it be understood that you would vote for him again?I explained it for him something like this:
- To understand this, you had to live here before Putin. Just picture it, you live in a country where a civil war has going on long since, which has no end and no end in sight. Where a crisis has just struck, which has nullified all your money, again.
Where everyone understands that Chechnya will not come to an end, and there will be Dagestan, Ingushetia and even Adygeya, and then Tatarstan, until we fall apart completely in torment, hatred and blood.
Where my regional governor, for example, forbade the sale of our Kuban grain to Moscow, because this Moscow would go away, far off, along with the rest of Russia.
Where our bloody and final collapse is inevitable, and nothing can be done.
Where for months or even years salaries and pensions go unpaid. Where every year is worse than the previous one. Where all hopes have collapsed long ago.
And then a man comes, and all this stops. War, hopelessness, collapse, massive permanent non-payment.
Wages, pensions are growing. By slight increments, but growing. Mortgages can be had, unheard of before, there are some bank account savings from the population, mass TOURISM abroad:
Not shuttling to Poland with trunks loaded with alarms, like my mother, for example, (with her advanced degrees), but rather to vacation in Turkey. And then to Italy.
And in general, - I say, I do not know any person who would not live here much better under Putin than before Putin.
The problem is that you compare our life with your own. But we compare our life with our own life before Putin.
And we understand: maybe with someone else all these years it would be better. But in fact it was worse, way worse. Would you take risk the of such a situation?
"Well, indeed," the BBC-nik said, "Understood. I would not, I think. Thank you for explaining."
You're welcome.
Comment: A very good point and something that is usually overlooked. Western society generally being ego-centric (to put it nicely), won't take a moment to put themselves in someone else's shoes. If they could see how bad things were before Putin and seeing how things are now, would you take a chance on an unknown when the known is so good? See also: