Inside The Mind Of Putin: How Did It Get To This?

The ultimate goal of a dictator is to gain power and then once you've got power, the goal of the dictator becomes to keep that power . You know, it's like you've won a gold medal , but people are wanting to snatch it away from you all the time . So, you got to keep holding on to the gold medal . it it becomes a vicious circle because in order to maintain power you've got to get more powerful as you gain more enemies and to get more powerful you've got to restrict people's liberties more so in fact you get worse and worse power corrupts it feeds on itself and you end up becoming it's sort of on a par with you know dictatorships such as you will in in Africa, in parts of the Middle East, in South America and so on . The Economist Intelligence Unit has a thing they do every year called the democracy index which ranks countries according to their to their democracy and it has four categories . It has full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime and authoritarian regime . Ukraine is 85th and Russia is 124th and more to the point Russia is deemed an authoritarian regime . So Russia is right down out of 180 odd countries, Russia is right down in the bottom category in terms of its commitment or otherwise to democracy . These number of rulers are increasing . Unfortunately, I mean the world is moving in that populist authoritarian direction . Most dictators start off with good intentions . One thinks of [music] Pinish in Chile or Lee Kuanu in Singapore who they might be brutal . They might want to get rid of their opponents, but at the of modernizing goal for their country . Pines sees himself as saving his country from the evils of communism and creating the kind of Chile which can actually uh pay its way in the world . And so he's really trying to improve the welfare of his citizens . Uh and of course Putin's to some extent starts out in that kind of a way as well . He has a vision of restoring order in Russia and [music] improving the prosperity after the after the really difficult sort of economic situation in the 1990s . One of the great ironies of communism was that the two sets of people