On election day, I always remember what Joe Stalin said: It doesn't matter who votes; it only matters who counts the votes.
I was living in St. Petersburg when Putin was elected and I spoke to Russian friends about the new President. They said, we will decide if life is better when he is President. I wonder, today, if life is better in Russia now.
I had ominous feelings about Putin at the time. Like almost every other person, I didn't know that much about Putin, except that as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, he was pretty chummy with the local mafia. As life changed for the worse in Russia after Putin came to power, I moved to Kyiv to get away from him.
I used to go cafes in St. Petersburg with friends. One day, we were eating in a small place and there were other men too, a shadowy group, with one guy alone positioned facing one door and another guy facing the other door, guards guarding the entrances.
Some local mafia Don got assassinated in the street right outside the English Hotell (Hotel Angleterre) when I was living there.
I sat once with a girl while a mafia type ate at another table and she kept saying, they are criminality, criminality, with disgust.
That's Putin's world. Assassinations, poisonings, murder in parking garages and elevators, men committing suicide by jumping out of windows on the top floors of buildings. Berezovsky, Putin's great enemy, committed suicide in his mansion in Britain by hanging himself in his shower, of course, with two broken legs. And the guy who started RT (Russia Today), the Putin propaganda channel) died of natural causes in a Washington DC hotel the night before he was going to testify to Congress. Right! It was ruled an accident even though he was beaten to death. In Berlin, an enemy of Putin was shot to death in Berlin's biggest park. And naturally Navalny died of "natural causes" on the day his wife was due to speak at the Global Security Conference.
Is anybody's life better since Putin became the perpetual Czar of Russia?
On election day, I always remember what Joe Stalin said: It doesn't matter who votes; it only matters who counts the votes.
I was living in St. Petersburg when Putin was elected and I spoke to Russian friends about the new President. They said, we will decide if life is better when he is President. I wonder, today, if life is better in Russia now.
I had ominous feelings about Putin at the time. Like almost every other person, I didn't know that much about Putin, except that as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, he was pretty chummy with the local mafia. As life changed for the worse in Russia after Putin came to power, I moved to Kyiv to get away from him.
I used to go cafes in St. Petersburg with friends. One day, we were eating in a small place and there were other men too, a shadowy group, with one guy alone positioned facing one door and another guy facing the other door, guards guarding the entrances.
Some local mafia Don got assassinated in the street right outside the English Hotell (Hotel Angleterre) when I was living there.
I sat once with a girl while a mafia type ate at another table and she kept saying, they are criminality, criminality, with disgust.
That's Putin's world. Assassinations, poisonings, murder in parking garages and elevators, men committing suicide by jumping out of windows on the top floors of buildings. Berezovsky, Putin's great enemy, committed suicide in his mansion in Britain by hanging himself in his shower, of course, with two broken legs. And the guy who started RT (Russia Today), the Putin propaganda channel) died of natural causes in a Washington DC hotel the night before he was going to testify to Congress. Right! It was ruled an accident even though he was beaten to death. In Berlin, an enemy of Putin was shot to death in Berlin's biggest park. And naturally Navalny died of "natural causes" on the day his wife was due to speak at the Global Security Conference.
Is anybody's life better since Putin became the perpetual Czar of Russia?