Putin: Russia's Strange Love for Tyrants.

One of the most recurring charades and characters in international politics has just played itself out; for the umpteenth time. The revolving wheel of tomfoolery has come full cycle again with the arrow pointing to Vladimir Putin as the president of Russia for the next six years. For as long as one could remember now, if he was powerful president, the hapless Roy Medvedev  would be puppet prime minister and in a most macabre exchange you could find anywhere, in another round of selections we call elections out of pure courtesy, Medvedev would switch to puppet president and Putin would be powerful prime minister. Dictatorship could be very outlandish at times and nowhere is it more bizarre than in present Russia.
A very predictable oddity. Opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, the only candidate who could have given him a good contest was barred from the polls on trumped up charges by a kangaroo court, leaving the field for a curious posse of contestants that included a reality TV star, Russia's pathetic version of President Trump, and that most pathetic of all comedians, the old, rable-rousing Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Only one outcome could be reasonably expected: a landslide that was going to bury Russia's and Putin's credibility. If only credibility still mattered. Instead of the brute, bare-faced power that now commands respect.
So Putin has another six years, at least, to gloat over his annexation of Crimea and continue with the bullying of near and far neighbors which include Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states and independent states that formerly made up the Soviet Union. He has already dismembered Georgia and could at will send crude, unrefined exterminators to murder or poison opposition activists and enemies abroad. Putin's authoritarian excesses stretch far and wide.
Whenever he mentions his grandfather was chef to that most heinous of all dictators, Josef Stalin, you could feel undercurrents of pride in his voice. It shows those that he admired. He seems to tell us that nothing has really changed in the Kremlin and that he would be too happy to carry on the tradition of repression and serfdom and Tsarist conquests. That is Putin is a continuation of bad news to neighbors far and near.
But of certain good news to Russians themselves, the folks that tolerate him, adore him and prop him up. Strange folks who seem to thrive very well under tyrants. Check out the list: Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Vladimir Putin. Someone once said there is no Russia without her tyrants. It is difficult arguing with that postulation in the light of present events. Russians will rather take the poetry and folklore that their tyrants give them than raise a whimper under these conditions of brazen assault on democracy.
Could you blame them? Even those enamored of democracy, if not congratulating him, are accepting whatever is coming out of the sham elections with numbed resignation. They could do better. Russia is a member of the UN Security Council, a veto-wielding nation and the least that is expected of the international community is insistence on greater transparency in the selection of who leads such an important place. Gary Kasparov, the great chess champion, has said it all, admonishing democracies now warming up to Putin over the elections that their behavior is a salient commentary on their own democracies. You cannot dine with the devil and not get something stuck in your teeth.
It could start from the US but nobody is expecting much from Donald Trump. His most coherent foreign policies are on his tongue and it is often that that piece of equipment gets stuck to his cheeks, He would get something into his tweets but it would be so ambiguous that the murky investigations into alleged Russian meddling in his election would seem clearer in comparison. Right now, Putin has no opposition, both at home and abroad.