Russian expert Julia Ioffe knows what she is talking about. Here is a link to a recent Frontline interview where she describes Putin’s centralized power.
She is a Russian-born American journalist that some of you may know about. I have read her articles and listened to many of her interviews on Frontline and appearances on other TV programs. She knows from years of study and living in Moskva the facts about Putin and Russian history, politics and corruption. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. She has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS and other news channels as a Russia expert.
Julia Ioffe was born in Moskva, to a Russian Jewish family. When she was 7, her family emigrated to the US. They settled in Columbia, Maryland. She attended Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School where she graduated in 2001. She attended Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in history in 2005 after completing a 152-page-long senior thesis, titled “Selling Utopia: Soviet Propaganda and the Spanish Civil War,” under the supervision of Jan T. Gross.
On several levels what she says resonates with what we have heard from our Ukrainian neighbor and the family living in our house.
-On Putin creating “Ukrainian Identity” by invading Crimea and Donbas…
Our neighbor was born in Russia and grew up in Eastern Ukraine. On Saturday night, her Irish husband was saying, “up until about 2014, she used to tell people she was Russian, and after Crimea she shifted into telling people she is Ukrainian.”
-At the 40 minute mark, she talks about how she’s too close to the situation, seeing whole lives destroyed in a matter of days…
We can tell that the father of the family staying with us is terribly homesick. He keeps showing us videos of the house they just built and moved in last fall. They would barbecue in the winter because they built a beautiful deck and they just wanted to use it. They planted two trees in the yard the same age as their two daughters and named the trees after them. A few months after the photos and videos were taken, they fled with one suitcase each.
They showed us a video of the older daughter a few years ago. There was a silly reality show on Ukrainian TV where kids told jokes to celebrities. The longer they make the celebrity laugh, the more money they win. She lasted 3 minutes and went to collect her prize and a high-five from the celebrity–who is now President Zelenskyy.
For some reason, these videos of them being happy affect us the most.
This resonates with me and all my relatives still living in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Canada and USA because of the stories that our parents told us about fleeing Estonia by boats, ships, trains, cars and buses in September of 1944 while being bombed and strafed by Russian airplanes, and the years spent in Displace Persons (DP) refugee camps in Germany before immigration to USA and other places. Millions of people from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary with Jews from all of these countries were in the DP camps.
I am the son of parents who fled Estonia (me 21 mon old, my brother 2 wks old) as the Russians were re-invading Estonia. I have no memory of the escape from Estonia by mail buses and trains through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland to Germany. But I do remember the DP camps in Southern Germany in Dillingen and Augsburg.
During the Russians re-invasion of Eastern Europe, they were bombing civilians in Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Warsaw, Minsk, and many other cities. Russian soldiers were raping women as they advanced into Germany.