“Putin passed his point of no return with the Malaysian Boeing. Alexander Baunov* On the evolution of Russian autocracy

What do you think at what point Putin deteriorated? Political scientist and publicist Alexander Baunov* believes that the point of no return was the fall of the Dutch Boeing over the Donbass embrated war in 2014. It was then that the Russian president preferred the geopolitical goals of the values ​​of human life. And that disaster has turned into a catastrophe of the current one, which in terms of the number of victims and the volume of suffering exceeds not only the accident in transport, but, it seems, almost everything that was in the history of the Earth after 1945. About Putin, about censorship, about prospects - about all this Andrei Shashkov talked with Baunov in a cozy Berlin cafe.

- The alleged upcoming block WhatsApp, a ban on the search for extremist materials. Do you think this will change something for people? After all, the Internet censorship in Russia began to develop and grow, to put it mildly, not yesterday. And what will she grow up tomorrow?

- They go, of course, along the Chinese path. To the conditional weChat, which is much more than just a messenger - you can pay inside it, and so on. And here, probably, they will be bred by the fact that this Max from VK - it will be more than just a messenger. And probably, they really can build this. Although at the initial stage the same “public services” did not seem at all that they would take root.

- And what is the next station on this path ?

- At one time, the ruler realized that the key to owning the political situation is television. Since then, there is still a whole Internet nearby. He did not react to this quickly, because by the time the Internet was stuck in full growth, the ruler had already flew off the orbit, on which ordinary people live. Nevertheless, when he even through his current lifestyle in residences and with daddy from referents realized what the Internet is, he simply began to take the same complex of measures against him as once at the dawn of his reign in relation to TV. And what could have stopped on this path? For example, considerations like “If we are now isolating our Internet from the world, we will begin to lag behind in digital technologies.” But, firstly, the Chinese are isolated, and nothing. And in Russia, digital technologies are not so critically dependent on the outside world.

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