Wash off New York and take away a summerhouse of a neighbor: what letters do Russians write to their president

Political analyst Dmitry Nekrasov published an incredibly interesting post on his blog.

“Once upon a time, President Medvedev wrote an excellent article“, Russia, go ahead!”, which, among other nonsense, called on the Russians to write to the president about their thoughts on how to make Russia much better. And the people wrote.

In those now almost epic times, I worked in the presidential administration and the authorities instructed me to do one simple reasonable thing: read what the people wrote there, and pick out 3 sentences from what was read that are distinguished by relative rationality and ease of implementation. The idea was to fulfill them and to publicize how we execute popular orders.

I don’t remember how many people’s letters were in total, but the department for working with citizens' appeals told me that they sifted out more than 80% of outright abuse and idiocy of the entire volume, and the remaining less than 20% they gave me. It took me about two weeks to read all of these letters fluently. Thus we are talking about tens of thousands of letters in total and thousands that I reviewed personally.

Among those who wrote these letters were academics (dozens of doctors of science) and retired colonel generals (retired dozens of generals), and many other serious people with regalia and ranks.

So of all these tens of thousands of letters with proposals, it was not possible to find even AT LEAST ONE that meets the minimum criteria of reasonableness and feasibility. And somewhere in the middle of the viewing, I realized that instead of the task of selecting the best of many (from which I naively proceeded at first), I was faced with the task of selecting at least something in order to fulfill the assignment of the authorities. And I, of course, there was a short sheet compiled with a comment that it was all insanity, but the rest was even more insanity, and the authorities agreed with my assessment.

What did those tens of thousands of sometimes well-deserved people write about? About 10 percent were about ball trains, intergalactic elevators, and how to flush New York into the ocean by slightly affecting the Earth’s axis.

And 90% wrote exclusively about how to repress someone and when. Well, in the sense of direct everyone to the seventh generation, or only together with immediate family, whether it is necessary to rip open the stomach before shooting, and what specific signs should be followed when selecting people for mass executions. Of course, there were no individual humanists who were ready to simply plant, but the majority called for massive bloody repressions against corrupt officials, oligarchs and further down the list to the most extravagant social and ethnic groups.

That's how deep Russia wants to improve itself. It is clear that a mentally healthy person will not write to the president, but nevertheless the sample was really huge and really scary.

Why am I doing all this? Now online mathematical models are very popular about how really, without taking into account the stuffing, the great Russian people voted. And someone is surprised, but someone is glad that Moscow is not the most oppositional place in the country, but even in the outback, the primordial and indiscriminate Russia also does not like Putin.

Many rejoicing underestimate one small detail. Of course, there are different people everywhere, and even in a remote province you can meet a person whose ideas about how to build a beautiful Russia of the future coincide with the ideas of the average listener of Echo of Moscow radio station. However, the statistical majority of representatives of the deep-seated people who said "no" to Putin told it because Putin did not shoot enough, had not bombed America, and had not taken away the summerhouse of the rich neighbor.

And if it suddenly happens that the ideas of this deep-seated people begin to influence real processes, today's rejoicing people will remember Putin’s rule in much the same way as in 1920 under military communism they remembered Nicholas II...”

https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.al.nekrasov/posts/285501057460607070