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Originally posted by Dinner
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Prior to WW2 you could literally be sent to a gulag for being seen to be religious and Stalin only reopened the churches during the Nazi invasion as a way to get people to continue to support him when he saw a very real threat of the Nazi invasion being a success. Even after WW2 you could lose your job or be passed over for promotion and certainly be refused party membership for not professing to be an atheist. Post 1991 the Russian government has had to rebuild the national identity of what it means to be Russia, after almost 80 years of communists repeating there is no real national identity and only their status as workers really mattered. The only thing the new regime really had to go on was the old pre-Soviet Tsarist government which always used the Russian Orthodoxed Church as a means to legitimize its rule and its actions. The Putin government (and Medived who was nothing but a Putin crony acting as a seat warmer) has actively tried to promote Orthodoxy as a defining characteristic of what it means to be Russia; obviously Putin isn't religious himself in any meaningful way he is just trying to build nationalism and get his name/regime identified with said nationalism. This is why you have the state funding the construction and reconstruction of old Tsarist era churches, rules restoring church properties seized during the revolution and the civil war period, and, of course, you have the clergy speaking in lock step with the government's orders because they know who pays them. It is a classic Tsarist era move and the government promotes it actively in the state controlled media (which is to say virtually all media in Russia as the second thing Putin did was concentrate control of the media in the hands of the Kremlin; his first move was to go for the money by taking over most of Russia's oil companies by hook or by crook).
Putin's biggest problem? His autocratic regime will have a big problem keeping a lid on things when oil prices decline or oil production declines. He's basically using oil money to paper over major economic problems due to the lack of reforms and the arbitrariness of the Russian legal system (which has lost most of its independence under Putin). Already Putin is losing much of the natural gas exports as both fracking in the EU & China have taken off while even worse competing suppliers (in North Africa and the middle east) are trying to build pipelines to compete against the Soviet era natural gas pipelines supply eastern Europe. That leaves oil as making the vast, vast, vast percentage of Russia's exports so the country is now hyper sensitive, economically, to any drop in oil prices.
This is sad because Russia could be a huge non-oil exporter but Putin, out of fear of anyone having the power to challenge him, has really reigned in both the business community with in Russia while discouraging foreign investment into Russia both of which could really increase the dynamism of the Russian economy if given a solid footing.
Like I said, the Russian people themselves aren't very religious but Putin is using religious identity (even if only great grandma is the only truly religious one in the family) as a way to build Russian nationalism and his own political control. It's very similar to the flag waving and jingoism of Fox News and the Republicans after 9/11. You play this stuff up, you find an "enemy" for people to blame everything on (like gays in Russia right now or Jews in Nazi Germany or how dictatorial Arab regimes always try to blame Israel and/or the US for everything or how the Cuban government blames the US for every one of its failings) so they can focus their popular anger at someone other than the government, and then they don't notice that their pensions got cut, that wages suck, that freedom of speech has decreased, and that the game is rigged for the defacto dictator. This will work for a while but eventually people get tired of hearing the same old excuses.
Putin's biggest problem? His autocratic regime will have a big problem keeping a lid on things when oil prices decline or oil production declines. He's basically using oil money to paper over major economic problems due to the lack of reforms and the arbitrariness of the Russian legal system (which has lost most of its independence under Putin). Already Putin is losing much of the natural gas exports as both fracking in the EU & China have taken off while even worse competing suppliers (in North Africa and the middle east) are trying to build pipelines to compete against the Soviet era natural gas pipelines supply eastern Europe. That leaves oil as making the vast, vast, vast percentage of Russia's exports so the country is now hyper sensitive, economically, to any drop in oil prices.
This is sad because Russia could be a huge non-oil exporter but Putin, out of fear of anyone having the power to challenge him, has really reigned in both the business community with in Russia while discouraging foreign investment into Russia both of which could really increase the dynamism of the Russian economy if given a solid footing.
Like I said, the Russian people themselves aren't very religious but Putin is using religious identity (even if only great grandma is the only truly religious one in the family) as a way to build Russian nationalism and his own political control. It's very similar to the flag waving and jingoism of Fox News and the Republicans after 9/11. You play this stuff up, you find an "enemy" for people to blame everything on (like gays in Russia right now or Jews in Nazi Germany or how dictatorial Arab regimes always try to blame Israel and/or the US for everything or how the Cuban government blames the US for every one of its failings) so they can focus their popular anger at someone other than the government, and then they don't notice that their pensions got cut, that wages suck, that freedom of speech has decreased, and that the game is rigged for the defacto dictator. This will work for a while but eventually people get tired of hearing the same old excuses.
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