PUTIN AS THE BEST RULER RUSSIA HAS EVER HAD

I hate Putin with passion, but in my saner moments, I realize that everything must be judged in comparison.

Compared to Yanomami people (who are naked), I am very well dressed. Compared to Vincent Van Gogh, my accomplishments are meager. If we put Putin on a larger scale, we will see that Putin is, by far, the best ruler that Russia has ever had.

In the thousand years of Russian history, his 15 years were:

· A period of lasting peace

· A period with no political repression and the ability of citizens to express and exchange their opinions freely and without fear of retribution. Putin is, by far, the most democratic leader Russia has ever had. And that includes Gorbachev (people were going hungry then) and Yeltsin (people were discussing sex and rock music while Chubais was transferring country’s wealth to Berezovsky)

· A period of greatest growth and prosperity

Putin not only put meat in stores: he also allowed everyone to taste it. Putin’s period was the only one, in the entire Russian history, when everyone could afford meat. Putin allowed the middle class to travel to Turkey or Thailand and millions of Russians saw how humans should live and what they should eat. And the elite was able to travel to Europe. In Moscow, a taxi driver traveled to Germany and tasted real cheese — never in the history of Russia has it been the case. The Russian saying goes, “Cabbage soup and porridge — this is what we eat.”

So, Putin’s regime is Russia’s Golden Age. Yes, it happened because of high oil prices, but so what? You cannot blame people for luck. You cannot say, “If Monica Bellucci were ugly she would not have been a famous actress” — this is just silly.

What enrages people are three things:

1. As a leader, Putin could have done EVEN MORE. He is a bad manager and failed miserably in economics, as a leader of an absolutely passive and uneducated society, where he was expected to do everything personally, facing great resistance.

2. Putin took a bit too much for himself and for his friends, and all of these funds were wasted (though it was good for yacht building and for London real estate, so much so that the largest private yacht in the world should always be named after Putin.

3. Putin miscalculated in Ukraine, found himself in a deep disequilibrium, and showed amazing willingness to completely reverse the gains he had made. In fact, Putin is like a Saudi king (who legally owns his country, being an absolute monarch) who goes to Monaco, and then comes back and says. “Saudi Kingdom is bankrupt. I had a dream advising me to bet it all on number 11. I went to a casino, put a check for 700 billion US dollars on the 12 (because my hands were shaking) and then the roulette wheel rolled and the ball stopped at 30. So, I do not know what the hell it was — but here we are. We lived as poor nomads under my grandfather, we will have to live like that again. All the infrastructure of my Kingdom now belongs to the casino. So there. Putin had the right to lose it all — it is his money. Yeltsin (the “democratic” leader) handpicked Putin and told him, “Take care of Russia”. All Russians are Putin’s guests, and he can do whatever he wants.

In Thailand, a man was charged with insulting King’s dog, and he WILL go to prison. In Thailand, people do not come up to the Royals: they crawl to their feet. In comparison with Uzbekistan or Belarus, Russia is a completely free country.

In fifteen years of Putin’s rule, ten political opponents were murdered. I said ten, not ten million. As far as the Georgian war, the number of casualties was less than what happens after a good soccer match. The Russian-Ukrainian war apparently resulted in less than 10,000 casualties, one third of the number of Russians dying in traffic accidents next year, and a small number, compared with the number of Ukrainians dying from a drug overdose.

Putin did not perform to the expectations, failed to be as great as we expected him to be. We thought that without any help from the Russian population, Putin has turned Russia into a prosperous country and a functioning western democracy. And then we discovered that he has not done so, and now we are upset.

We even blame Putin for falsifying elections. How cynical can we be? Yeltsin did not falsify the elections: he stormed and burned the Parliament (and he was right to have done so, because Russians should not have been permitted to vote in the first place).

For example, we blame Putin for hiring trolls to post on Facebook in support of his policies. But we forget what is traditionally done in Russia: the opponents of the regime are tortured and killed and their families are exiled to Siberia.

Putin is like a Kasparov losing three games in a row. It is as if Facebook were to show a quarterly loss of 2% and a 5% stock price decline. And people would say, “What is this guy, Mark Zuckerberg, doing running our Facebook: fire him! Get a better manager!” Calm down: Zuckerberg OWNS Facebook. He can run it the way he wants. Same with Putin. Russian people support him because he is a moderately murderous ruler who does not steal the state budget in its entirety.

I wish the very worst for Putin in the coming year. But I must remind myself that the next ruler of Russia may be far worse than him. And this brings me back to my main thesis: the citizens of Russia must be taught the principle of the mutually beneficial cooperation (Win-Win), so that they do not allow a bloodthirsty thief to lord over them.