One year later: The Russian political system and the info-war front, part 2 w/ Stanislav Byshok

“On the Barricades” s06e30

This weekend Stanislav Byshok, a Russian political scientist living in Moscow, is back on the Barricades for a two-part release with hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski. He earned a PhD after graduating from Moscow State University, and he is frequently described as a scholar deconstructing nationalism and populism in international researcher databases. He's written a number of books and reports on current Russian, Ukrainian, and European politics.

In part two, we hear Stanislav’s insights into some questions that help explain the last year on the info-war front and how we’ve arrived at a situation where so little resistance is made to the war-support, despite that it’s achieved little and now would be a time to end it before it escalates to a new level of loss for Ukraine and Russia itself. Why has Russia not learned its historical lesson from the Cold war, in which the USSR lost spectacularly to the US in terms of propaganda? Does this defeat on the info-war front result from lack of means, the Kremlin’s leadership style, or specific mistakes which prevented Putin’s line from connecting to its audience? Or is it a result of the Russian political system itself and a lack of negative feedback and opposition? To what extent does the psychology of the media consumer count, and where is it currently at, in Russia? This and more in this second part of the discussion.