Russia: Life After Trust: Once you lose faith in one institution, you start to lose faith in them all. Lessons from Putin’s Moscow.

[David Morris]

Russia: Life After Trust
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/lessons-from-putins-russia-for-living-in-trumps-america.html
Once you lose faith in one institution, you start to lose faith in them
all. Lessons from Putin’s Moscow.
By Michael Idov
One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and
oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans,
and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has
been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting
about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But
residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one
that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is
needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by
fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be
trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in
charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about
everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you
expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the
higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it. Now that
Russia has begun to export this Weltanschauung around the world, in the
form of nationalist populism embodied here by Donald Trump, I am
increasingly tempted to look at my years there for pointers on what to
expect in America.
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