[sam_lowry_]

The events in Belarus recently demonstrated that you are wrong.

I ran a small (1 mln pageviews/month) online Russian-speaking community since 2003 and since 2014, my main preoccupation are Kremlin bots.

The population in Russia is mostly anti-Putin, they just do not speak up, because the state made sure they feel isolated.

[dilyevsky]

Not a secret russian government spends considerable resources on online astroturfing but there are large constituency of closet (or not so closet) putin supporters even among tech folks of 30yo and older (basically people who were alive and old enough to remember 90s and 80s)

[siliconvalley1]

Why would you think that there is a large number of Pro-Putin Pro-Political Assassination tech workers? This seems like a ridiculous statement.

[dilyevsky]

It’s quite anecdotal but my sampling is rather large as I’ve worked with those people over multiple years and still have contacts there. Nobody would admit they approve of this assassination obviously same as mh17 but as long as putin maintains plausible deniability they’d be ok with supporting him

[actuator]

Not that I don't believe you, but how would you back such statement when you say "majority".

[sam_lowry_]

By matching what happens in Belarus now to Russia.

It was long believed, even in US, that Lukashenka had the majority. In reality, he faked all elections since 1994.

Once his deeds became hard to ignore even for pathetically peaceful Belarusians, all the population turned against him. Gosh, the exit poll in my voting station recorded only one vote for Lukashenka among 358. I was there watching the exit poll for a couple of hours. I fully trust the organizers, but one in 358... I could not even imagine it.

Same for Russia.

P.S. Yes, I have a Belarusian passeport. Yes, I run a Russian-speaking community site. Pass on.

[actuator]

The election results had him at ~80% votes, if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic numbers. If I have just 40% support, I might go for showing it to be about 55%, so that it at least looks close.

I think he did rig elections but he might have had majority already, which makes his numbers look so unrealistic or he is just plain stupid to not even rig elections to make them look believable.

I do really sympathize with the Belarussian people though, every community should get a say on who represents them.

[throwaway8941]

>would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

I am from Kazakhstan. If you've ever heard of it, would you consider it to be an autocratic state? Because according to the official results our beloved leader received 98% of votes in an election a few years back. Now that's an unrealistic number for sure.

[baybal2]

98% still can't beat 146%

https://www.alux.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/25-insane-cr...

[actuator]

At that point, why even a facade. :)

[dhosek]

That's how these things have always worked. Autocratic leaders like to have "elections" that they win by unrealistic margins.

[noctune]

>if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic number

You are assuming someone has an overview of the rigging being done. It's probably more chaotic than that. If 1000 different people are chucking opponents' votes into furnaces, how do you coordinate hitting that number?

[sam_lowry_]

He just told his long-time ally the head od Central Electoral Comission to give him 80%. It is THAT simple.

[actuator]

If that is true, quite stupid of him then. I hope things work out for you guys.

[rxhernandez]

> if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

He would if he wanted his quiet dissidents to feel isolated and his loud ones to be that much easier to find.

It's not that much different than other leaders declaring there are no gay people in their country.

[notahacker]

That depends on whether the purpose of the election result is to be universally accepted as an accurate reflection of public sentiment or just to say, the opposition couldn't have won

[xorcist]

> would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

That part is pretty well established by now.

Coincidentally, he established again a level of support a couple percentage points above Putin, who received "just" 78% last election.

[nephrite]

And how does what happens in Belarus match what happens in Russia? Lukashenka and Putin are different kinds of people, they do different politics, Russian and Belarussian governments are not that alike. Just because both of them are "dictators" doesn't mean their people think the same about them.

[nomadnomad]

That is not true.

Putin's approval rating is actually pretty high even when measured by NGOs sponsored by the "West". You'll be surprised, but it is quoted to be 60% in July 2020. [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Vladimir_Putin

[baybal2]

I'll tell you how they are cooked:

1. The legacy of 8 decades under a government practicing public polling under a gunpoint.

2. Only the most well fed, and carefree Potemkin villages can be surveyed.

3. The lack of any other genuine option other than saying "I back a complete joke "alternative" candidates," which are set up by the regime itself to play Pope Gapon

4. Plainly faked polls

[nomadnomad]

I am not referring to fake government-run polls.

I am referring to polling agencies that are very west-leaning, and even they can't blatantly lie about it. His approval rating as of a month ago is 59-60% [1][2][3].

In fact his approval rating after the annexation of Crimea was at all time high of 85%. Check the sources. Again, these are not government-run polls.

Lots of good data on it (thanks to google):

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/putin-facing-growi...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/05/06/putins-approval-ra...

And I am not saying Putin did or didn't order the poisoning of Navalny. I am just saying he is not the only one with motive/opportunity contrary to popular belief pushed in the mainstream media propaganda.

[pvg]

Polling in developed democracies has errors of a few percentage points, even with extensive work done to improve the accuracy of the results, correct for various sampling biases, etc. What do you think the error bars of a poll in an authoritarian country are, especially one that asks 'Do you like the authoritarian leader'.

As to Crimea, plenty of Russians believe Crimea is Russian, including Navalny - the Russian opposition is neither monolithic nor does it always represent views that in lock-step with Western ones.

[allarm]

So you guys don’t trust the polls results because polls in Russia are obviously inaccurate. You also don’t trust the Russians who said that from their experience, there’s still a huge number of people supporting the current president - because that’s only the Kremlin bots who would say that. Though for some reason you immediately believe a person who says that the majority of population is against Putin, not providing a single proof. Doesn’t that tell us that you actually speak with voices in your head and trust only what these voices say?

There’s a thing that you should understand about Russia.

Here it goes: Russia is a huge country and Moscow is only a part of it. A small and the richest part. Moscow is basically a country inside the country. It has almost nothing to do with Russia. And the overwhelming majority of the information you are getting is coming from Moscow only.

The polls, the internet blabbering, the protests happen in Moscow, mostly (do notice that I said “mostly” before calling me a liar. I’m well aware of the exceptions, believe me). All of the money is there as well - all the cash flow through the capital. All the money from regions flow through Moscow and only a small portion of it goes back.

People from Moscow mostly look down upon the people from the regions. Consciously or not. Some of them are outright aggressive towards the “country folks”. Many of them believe that Moscow is “feeding the regions”, and it should stop, because people there are lazy and not smart enough. I’ve had conversations like this with Muscovites during my life there, it was hilarious.

The rest of the country is concentrated on their own lives. The majority of them earn something around $300USD a month that barely allows them to live from pay check to pay check. Teachers, doctors, you name it. That’s the salary of low-skilled workers in Moscow.

These people realise that changing the president won’t help them, but in fact might make their lives miserable. And they are not wrong - I can only imagine what may start after the change of leadership and what consequences for the regions it might have.

This country has its roots in the USSR. The change in the headquarters won’t replace the people in charge in the regions - at least it won’t happen immediately. And if/when it does, the majority of the replacement would be just the same people from the same ruling party (or what’s left of it). That’s how things work in Russia, that’s how it’s always been, since 1917. That’s the system that we have. That’s us, Russians, who are the system, and the president is only a small part of the problem.

The majority of Russians either don’t use Internet or use it for social networking only.

The majority of Russians don’t have an international passport (the document that allows you to travel abroad). Why would they? They will never have the money to travel.

The majority of Russians that I know, people from outside Moscow, vote for Putin. Some of them do that because they support him and the ruling party, but the most of them (as per my personal experience) just believe that he’s a lesser evil. I can’t blame them for that.

There’s more to that. What I’m trying to say here is - Russia is far more complex and diverse than you guys might think. It’s not very obvious even for many Russians. So please, don’t downvote people who say things that are against your agenda simply because of that fact. Their reasoning might be more subtle than you think.

What you might want to do to better understand them is to ask them. They know better than you about the situation over there, the historical reasons and consequences. The only thing that you probably need to ask them first is where are they from. If they are from Moscow, chances are they are biased.

[pvg]

Well, thanks for explaining Russia to me (I'm one person though, not guys) but nothing you've written suggests we have accurate data on the support Putin enjoys. In fact, 'support' of the sort we typically think of, expressed in a poll for a democratically elected leader subject to periodic free and fair elections, is not really a commensurable quantity with 'support' for an authoritarian leader who's clung to power for a couple of decades.