Essay On Oppression In Russia

During the Communist regime in the former Soviet Union, life was very difficult. The people who lived within the countries controlled by the Soviet government experienced levels of oppression akin to slavery. They could not express themselves through any means and had to conform both body and soul to the views of the Communist Party. People could be arrested, imprisoned, shipped off to exile or executed often without trial. Some twenty million people died while Joseph Stalin led the USSR and for many years after his death it was still dangerous to dare criticize his regime, although some scholars put that number closer to forty million people who died. Now that the Soviet Union has broken up and Russia is its own country there is more freedom, but the people still live under the yoke of an oppressive leader who does not tolerate political or social challenges. The people do nothing to stand up to this government because they have all been scarred by the decades they lived under Stalin. In the book The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, author Adam Hochschild entered Russia an interviewed people who had survived Stalinism. What he found was that despite the fact that Stalin has been dead for decades, he still lives as a tangible presence within the country. His memory functions as a reminder to all those who dare to criticize President Putin or other members of the current government about how bad things could be and this fear pushes them into

The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has created and/or passed certain legislations that furthermore limit freedom of citizens. One of them gives almost unlimited power to the government to restrict access to “harmful to children or extremist content.” Additionally, the president has been known for his encouragement of severe punishment of non-violent protests and direct criticism of his power. Some protestors on the Bolotnaya Square have been sentenced to years of imprisonment for protests that should have been punished with administrative fines for minor cases of “public misconduct.” The president’s superior power is not only against ordinary citizens but against some of the wealthiest people. One such case was with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once wealthiest man in Russia, who was repeatedly sentences for years of imprisonment for new crimes, which seem to have few legal justifications.

This is similar to how Russia limits the citizens’ rights and uses propaganda to control its

For this project, I will be comparing and contrasting the online censorship practices of Canada and Iran. To think of the two countries simply; Canada has a free market for online communication while Iran has one full of restrictions. From my research, I have found that the Canadian government encourages the free flow of online communication and as a result has very little modes of censorship. For example, Canada aims “to provide quality and accessible communications services…a target to provide 100 percent of Canadian households with access to internet connectivity and broadband speeds of at least 5 Mbps by the end of 2016” (“Canada”). This only proves that Canada is focused on empowering their people’s rights with the ease and capability of browsing the internet.

Yet the election was not like the ones that preceded it- there were large scale demonstrations on the streets of Moscow and other metropolitan areas that were against (and some in support) of Putin. These large scale protests as Elkin notes while certainly disruptive and cast a negative light on Russia globally forced Putin to reaffirm his power when he won the election in 2012. Putin was as discussed by Moskowitz and others in class able to use the media to effectively convey his agenda. But Elkin also notes that the resurgence in popularity for Putin was not simply due to a stymied media presence. Putin strategically allowed Medvedev to become the nation’s prime minister, where he was relegated to a position where he could quietly work on making the changes he set during his presidency. Putin set about “restoring” national prestige by being firm on dealings with the west. In particular, during the crisis in Syria, he averted crisis by securing a deal that allowed Syria to dispose of the chemical weapons while also preventing U.S aggression. Elkin notes how Putin would frequently play on populism and patriotism in justifying his action- a formula which combined would ensure that in the crisis to come regarding the annexation of Crimea that he would have the support of the Russian people.

The Internet powers our country. Not only do hundreds of millions of Americans use it daily, our government and states use it to do important national and international business. Our government already utilizes it to monitor the activity of its people. This monitoring has especially risen after events such as the Boston Bombing and the attacks of 9/11. The main reason that the government does this is to keep us safe. If the government puts more slack on this matter, then it will give a chance for terrorists to complete their objective. The normal person does not know how many terrorist attacks may have been stopped in the past years due to this surveillance, and how many lives it may have saved. Therefore, we cannot let our government halt

In the novel, 1984 by George Orwell the corrupt fictional government of Oceania closely resembles the real life government of Russia, whose unscrupulous actions have been condemned for over 120 years. Much like Big Brother from the novel 1984, Russian President Vladimir Putin controls the news that his citizens are allowed to view. Every piece of information released in Russia is carefully selected and monitored by the government, dubbed the Kremlin (Shuster, and McDonald-gibson). For the last 10 years that Putin has been in power, the Russian government has faced many ups and downs.

Serfdom is frequently regarded as a major institutional constraint on the economic progression of Tsarist Russia, which persisted after emancipation in 1861. Many Scholars have argued that even after the emancipation serfdom persisted due to its profitability and the genuine fear among Russians of ‘change’. This is shown by ‘The peasant protest’ when the 1861 serf emancipation act was formed. However, it is be acquainted to the high birth rate resulting from ‘near-universal and early marriage.’

In just over a year, Russia has seized 9% of Ukraine, killed 6,200, wounded 30,000, displaced 1.2 million people and shot down a commercial airliner with 298 people aboard.” Sure the Huffington

In 1860, the world's greatest nation was locked in Civil War. The war divided the country between the North and South. There were many factors that caused this war, but the main ones were the different interpretations of the Constitution by the North and South, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the arrival of

Vladimir Putin’s Global Orwellian Campaign to Undermine the West, a informative article explains how Putin’s campaign is similar to Big Brother in George Orwell’s book 1984. Much like the government system in 1984, Russia lies about many things to it’s citizens and surrounding countries. To help spread Russia’s lies they have many news channels such as Russia Today which you can also watch in America (RT America) that mainly focus on police brutality, protests, and poverty. Russia also has online websites one of which is called RT.com. RT.com was the first news channel to gain 1 billion views on YouTube. Another similarity between the article and 1984 is that there are people banding together to bring down the lies. StopFake is basically the

The most common censorship method used by the Chinese government is IP blocking. This means that when a user requests certain IP addresses, access is immediately denied. A Harvard study, discovered that more than 18,000 sites are blocked; many of them top websites in the United States. A government sponsored news organization states that only “superstitious, pornographic, violence-related, gambling, and other harmful information” are blocked but critics have been quick to point out that many sites that do not fall into these categories are also blocked. Another Harvard study found that 13% of social media posts were blocked. These were posts by political activists that promoted or could conceivably incite collective action (such as riots or protests). Popular American social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have been completely blocked, as have news organizations such as the New York Times. These websites have been recreated for the Chinese internet with censorship restrictions put into place.

The present day Russian Federation involves a democratic system, given the presence of elections, an independent judiciary, and the supremacy of law. Yet, in democracy, the crux of it involves an inevitable paradox: law limits state power, but the state must have the power to enforce the law. However, finding the balance of the ability to enforce laws, and therefore maintaining order, while not infringing on civil liberties, requires a mutual understanding, a social contract, between the rulers and the ruled. This requirement has not found its place in the Russian political arena, especially since “creating a rule-of-law-based sate out of dictatorship is not easy” (Bressler 2009). In addition, the Russian psyche views authority as a source of force and violence (Yakovlev 1996), an etymological result of a continuity beginning from imperial Russia. Although the Russian Federation, the Union Soviet Socialist Republics, the Russian Empire, and the Tsardom of Russia differ significantly, a strong state remains prevalent in the core of Russian history and politics. In short, the nature of political rule in Russia involves a never ending tug of war between the seemingly undying authoritative soulless entity known as the state and the equally undying Russian people’s hunger for liberty.

When we hear the term Russian culture many Americans tend to have negative thoughts like the cold war, their government ruling with an iron hand, and the Red Scare. These thoughts do not do the justice to the Russian people or to their long history as a people dating back to INSERT DATE. One of the major themes throughout Russian history and this course is the idea that the Russian people value intangible things more than the tangible. The Russian people have a long rich heritage, they are deep in there Christian faith, and they pride themselves on hospitality and value there community, families, and fellow Russian people. They have learned how to sacrifice from the constant invasions and being forced farther and

The Internet’s continuous advancement has produced the need for an on-going debate on whether or not the government should have the power to control the Internet. The idea of the government having control over what each country’s citizens can see on the Internet is also called Internet Censorship. Internet Censorship “is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet.” Internet Censorship varies from country to country depending on each country’s current usage and philosophy of how it should be used. (toptenreviews.com) Currently, there are ten countries including