I'll combine answer to this two questions into one because they are similar.
do you like putin as your president ? what is your opinion about oligarchs, they should be shot dead or not ? do you drink alcohol ? :)
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 69700313 How do Russians feel about Putin? Obama?
Do you like Vodka, if so, what is your favorite?
Quoting: Kraut I've already answered about vodka and alcohol in general here: [
link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
As for the rest...
Oligarchs are now mostly stripped of the power they had at the 90s. Putin used Khodorkovskiy (who clearly lost it thinking that he can buy everything and everyone just because he had enough money - stolen money I should note) as an example, resulting into quite ridiculous behavior sometimes. There was a story with Vekselberg and his Faberge Eggs, Abramovich who became governor of Chukotka and some other such things... Now they are the necessary evil. They have next to nothing political influence and that's it.
The problem here is that "cleansing" the top won't help: you could replace them only with other people of the same kind. The only difference is that if current ones are already full, new ones would be starved, resulting into another tour of what we call "peredel" ("redistribution [of property]"). And one
peredel was quite enough for us.
About Obama and Putin...
I'll begin from my (and my family's) voting history.
During 90s my parents voted for Yeltsin mostly because alternative was even worse. In 00s they stopped voting because everything was stable and everyone just wanted to enjoy it. Also - Putin had a clear impenetrable majority. The same majority elected Medvedev on inertia of Putin's approval. In 2011, when Parlamentary elections were proclaimed to be rigged by the opposition (mostly people who were in power during 90s and are unpopular among the general population for this very reason). Fun fact here is that the result of so called "Bolotniy process" (protests on Bolotnaya square not far from Kremlin) was quite opposite: people who stopped voting long ago, but remembered 90s and what those people done while being in power, made their way to the voting booths and elected Putin with overwhelming majority. My family as a fine example: non went on 2008 elections and everyone voted for Putin in 2012.
About current Putin's policy...
According to Levada public opinion monitoring center, Putin have an approval rate of 89%. That's considering the fact that Levada is pro-Western entity.
Of course not everything is perfect here. But there's an interesting division in Russian politics and minds. Our government is divided onto two parts: Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Internal Affairs are subjected directly to the President and people mostly approve of their work. But other Ministries - of Welfare, of Education and Science, of Transportation etc. are under Prime Minister Medvedev jurisdiction and are often criticized for inefficiency, corruption and other things. Not that there's no corruption in police for example, but here the old Russian principle "Tsar is good, but retinue is vile" is working.
The general rule is - if Putin is monitoring something personally, it works. Part of it is his personal charisma and competence, another part is the aura of supreme leader even Yeltsin and Gorbachov had despite all their numerous faults.
About Obama...
Well... it's unclear how to describe a public Russian opinion about him with polite terms. The most brief explanation would be this one: [
link to klou.tt] "Obama is a schmuck".
My personal opinion is that he, as the vast majority of Western democratically elected leaders, is out of his league. He would be nice notary somewhere. Just like I can easily picture Hollande working in a library, and Merkel - in some bank in the province.
The problems with western democracy as it is now is that it gives the best chances to mediocrity. Actually it was the same with late-Soviet higher-ups.
