Russian-speakers, have you seen the documentary “Who Is Mr. Putin?”
I highly recommend. This what I’ve been saying for years pretty much verbatim, getting a reputation as a conspiracy theorist of the first order. And now it turns out I was right the whole time. I feel hugely vindicated.
For non Russian-speakers, here is a very short recap: “the collapse of the USSR” was a fiction, a scam. The point of the scam was to change the economic model while keeping all the power and the riches in the same hands. Putin is just a front for the organization that faked the whole perestroika thing. His role in the organization was to facilitate criminal endeavors that underpinned the change of the economic model that wasn’t a real change. There was also an enormous amount of effort invested into ensuring that Russian people despised democracy. (Which they now obviously do.)
The film explores Putin’s many criminal acts that extend to Spain, Germany, Liechtenstein, his collaboration with the Colombian drug cartels, his cronies who hold all the leading governmental positions in Russia.
It’s not that the USSR is coming back. It simply never went away. It just halfheartedly masked itself for a short while.
Also, Russian-speakers: I have been saying that Sobchak was a gangster since the early 1990s and nobody believed me. This was before anybody even heard Putin’s name. But I was always told I’m prejudiced. What do you have to say now?
Clarissa's Blog 
I watched a few minutes in the beginning and have a question: how those are those people not afraid to speak badly of him? Shouldn’t they and the person who produced the movie be afraid to pay with their lives? Why would Putin and his org let this movie be created and put on the net?
LikeLike
Putin knows from his time in the KGB that it’s a good idea to have a small group of dissidents around because they serve as an escape valve for any existing frustrations. But the movie is not dangerous to Putin because aside from a small minority that already knows all this, everybody else in Russia will like Putin more, not less, after these revelations.
LikeLike
Clarissa, don’t you think all these recent investigative reports on Putin’s corruption are a sign that a removal of him from power is in the works? Can it be a coincidence that this is all coming up at the same time and so suddenly?
LikeLike
Yes, I do believe this is a possibility. But so what? Putin or no Putin, it’s the same mafia in power.
LikeLike
So what needs to happen for there to be real change in Russia?
LikeLike
When two million people go out into the streets to protest in Moscow and hundreds of thousands join them in other cities, and when the protesters don’t go home but stay on for a few months, when they topple the Lenin statues and create organizations to investigate the Soviet past, when they start considering that it makes sense to apologize to Ukrainians, Georgians, Tatars, etc, I’ll say that maybe there’s a chance. Maybe.
LikeLike
A Russian Maydan? I doubt it’s possible. Unfortunately.
LikeLike
I don’t think it’s possible either. But that’s the only way.
LikeLike
For an important gangster, Sobchak was living very modestly and unsafely in France. I once rode a night Paris-Munich bus, and to my immense surprise I discovered he was riding the same bus. Exited in Stuttgart. 🙂 No obvious bodyguards.
Some other passenger recognized him, and asked something about Russia, but I was sitting too far to listen to their conversation…
LikeLike
Yes, he was not important. Just a shesterka type fellow, used and then discarded.
LikeLike