Special for my friends in the West.
As you know, US, Canada, and EU are sanctioning a list of Russian oligarchs and politicians (who are as rich as oligarchs, actually) and their companies for making Crimean case possible and for being suspected of destabilizing the situation in East Ukraine.
Guys, your governments should find another way to deal with Russian politicians. These sanctions won’t work for good at all, and I am going to try to explain you why.
Say, you sanction a democratic country. Its citizens feel worse due to economic problems, mass-media (which are free to express any opinions) blame their politicians for having incurred the sanctions, and the citizens simply do not re-elect the current politicians for the next term, or even force them to give in their resignation. Thus, you force the country to change its policy. In Russia it doesn’t work that way. Russia is rather authocratic than democratic. Here most powerful mass-media are controlled by the state, which is why there is no one here to explain frankly why things have gone worse. The government will lie to the people that «Evil West» wants Russia to be weak and to fall apart to get our oil and gas (they’ve been doing this for the whole winter and spring and even before), so the people won’t blame neither the president nor the government - they will blame you. On the contrary, they will consider the authorities as the last line of defence of «Mother Russia» against «Evil West». In a situation in which a leader’s popularity would decrease in a democratic country, here Putin’s support is growing. The worse for the country - the better for him. Compare this to other authocratic and totalitarian countries, like Iran and North Korea: the West has been strangling them for decades - no result. Of course, Russia has had a lot more freedom than the countries I just mentioned through the last 25 years. But, you know, during the last two years we’ve had so many dystopian changes in our legislation that I am not even sure if I’ll still have access to Facebook this summer. You ask why we didn’t protest? Well, we are not really allowed to. Those who tried have been sentenced to years in jail. And even when we are allowed, there is no powerful mass media to tell the people the truth about what was the point of the protest. I mean, there is no chance we’ll have any other authorities than Putin’s soon, so you guys will have to treat our assholes like equals, they won’t accept any other treatment.
Last day a number of IT companies, such as Microsoft and HP, stated that they will have to to break off their deals with those Russian banks which are being sanctioned by the US. What will the result be? These companies have spent over two decades to teach Russian companies that licensed software should be used instead of pirated. Now they are just not going to license their products. Will that make any sense? Of course not. Russians have a huge experience of pirating software - they’ll simply return back to 10-20 years ago, on one hand, and, on the other hand, our parliament will never set this aside. After Visa and MasterCard had postponed their services for these banks for just a few days, our parliament issued a law which makes Visa’s business in Russia a dead loss, like it was Visa’s fault and Visa should be punished. It is obvious that American IT companies are to face something similar very soon. It means damages, it means haemorrhage of jobs (our parliament won’t give a shit about any local jobs in western companies representative offices that are sanctioning Russian companies, regardless of the fact that the employees are well-educated and eminently qualified Russians - they don’t actually care about educated and qualified since their electoral base consists of lumpen-proletarians, retirees and all kinds of workers on a government, otherwise these creatures would never be elected).
Sanctioning Putin’s circle and even himself is throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. Recently, a group of Republican senators, led by Bob Corker, demanded an expansion of sanctions to a stronger effect on Russian economy. Again - wrong way. The worse for the population - the better for Putin. That’s a strange paradox, but the wealthier the citizens are, the more political freedom they demand, the lower Putin’s rating of popularity is. The poor do not protest against Putin, since they depend upon him. The rich do not protest against Putin, since he is powerful enough to rob them of their property. The middle class is the power which may once demand changes in Russia - and that’s why Russian parliament is issuing variuos laws which bring back censorship, limitations of internet, restrictions of public protests, etc., cutting middle class off information.
I don’t have any suggestions yet. But I am sure that sanctions are not the solution. Sanctions might work against Western governments, but they’ll never work the same here. Your countries will just loose money and time.
by Vladislav Pasternak, Russian filmproducer & blogger
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