The simple reasons Russians love Putin
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.2 • 898 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2016
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the West, people tend to think of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strongman dictator – a former KGB man who oppresses his people, censors the media and antagonizes Russia’s neighbors. From the outside, it’s hard for anyone to understand how Putin stays in power, let alone stays popular.
And Putin is popular. Pollsters put his approval rating at more than 80 percent. It makes perfect sense if you understand Russia.
This week on War College, we sit down with Anne Garrels, a longtime Russia correspondent for NPR. Since the collapse of the USSR, Garrels has spent more and more time in smaller Russian cities and towns, getting to know people who don’t live the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the country's capital.
Garrels gives the reasons why Russians love Putin, and why it’s in the best interests of the West to understand them.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. |
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| 0:13.0 | The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. |
| 0:21.0 | Russians are now sort of saying, we're sick of you blaming us for everything. We're sick of |
| 0:26.5 | you accusing us of sins that you share. We're sick of being ignored. So we need to find a new way. Moscow gets all the attention, but that doesn't mean it's representative of Russia. |
| 0:50.0 | This week on War College, we talk with a woman who's taking the time to go out beyond the capital |
| 0:55.2 | and to talk with people who make up the heart of Putin's Russia. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing |
| 1:10.0 | on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Gault with |
| 1:24.0 | I'm Jason Fields with Reuters and I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. |
| 1:27.8 | Today we're talking with former NPR foreign correspondent and Garrels's. Gerell's, |
| 1:33.0 | Gerell spent decades covering Russia for various news agencies |
| 1:36.0 | and was even expelled from the country for her reporting in 1982. |
| 1:40.0 | Her new book, Putin Country, A Journey into the Real Russia, details the rise of Putin's |
| 1:46.8 | cult of personality from a perspective the West rarely sees, the common everyday Russian. |
| 1:54.0 | So Anne, thank you so much for joining us. |
| 1:56.0 | I'm delighted to talk to you. |
| 1:58.3 | So can you tell us what it means to be Russian now and how that's different from being a Soviet citizen was? |
| 2:06.8 | It's dramatically different in the 90s, late 80s, 90s. |
| 2:12.3 | You know, people were being paid suddenly $10 a month. They couldn't live on that. |
| 2:17.6 | So they were all just scrambling to survive financially. |
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