"He [Putin] rebuilt, stabilized and modernized Russia in a way to prevent future collapses" - A Review of Prof. Stephen Cohen's Excellent Recent Talk About the Real Putin, February 2018, By The Saker, // Video: Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen F. Cohen, Dec. 2017, The Nation

"I don’t pretend to be an expert, just an NGO program developer who has lived in Russia and the Soviet Union for the past 30 years. But during this time, I have had far more direct, on-the-ground contact with Russians of all stripes across 11 time zones than any of the Western reporters or for that matter any of Washington’s officials." Understanding Russia, Un-Demonizing Putin, 2011, By Sharon Tennison

True knowledge about Russia is systematically suppressed in the Western media. The information here help explain why Western neoliberal politicians attack and lie about Putin. And why Putin is very popular in Russia. Gorbachev & Yeltsin worked with Western governments and economists to implement a pure form of neoliberal 'chock doctrine', which almost destroyed the Russian society and created the infamous oligarchs (friends of Western neoliberal politicians). Putin took the political power away from the oligarchs, which were good friends with similar powerful people in the Western nations. This explains why the Western media propagandists suppress and lie about it: the Western neoliberal politicians and the corporate powers do not want that people in the West understand that Putin is a sensible politician working for the people's welfare. They want access to buy up and control Russian resources. So they go on with lies about "Putin's oligarchs", and blatantly contradict themselves asking for the oligarchs to rescue Russia - see the page here to the left.

The Guardian editor, Seumas Milne (now press chief for Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn), explains Russia's Catastroika. Milne reviews Prof. Cohen's: Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia): "By the late 1990s, national income had fallen by more than 50% (compare that with the 27% drop in output during the great American depression), investment by 80%, real wages by half and meat and dairy herds by 75%. (...) The numbers living below the poverty line in the former Soviet republics had risen from 14m in 1989 to 147m even before the 1998 financial crash. The market experiment has produced more orphans than Russia's 20m-plus wartime casualties, while epidemics of cholera and typhus have re-emerged, millions of children suffer from malnutrition and adult life expectancy has plunged." (...) "As this human tragedy was unfolding, western politicians and bankers harried Russia's leaders to push ahead more energetically with the "reform" and privatisation treatment producing it: a transition in many areas to a premodern age." 'Catastroika has not only been a disaster for Russia', 2001, S Milne, The Guardian   

"Those were the good old days in the 1990s when the Clinton administration was propping up Yeltsin as he let Russia be ripped off by the joint efforts of such ambitious well-placed Russians and their Western sponsors, notably using the “loans for shares” trick. In a 2012 Vanity Fair article on her hero, Khodorkovsky, the vehemently anti-Putin journalist Masha Gessen frankly summed up how this worked: “The new oligarchs—a dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that money brought—concocted a scheme. They would lend the government money, which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises without parliamentary approval.” The Real Russian Interference in US Politics, Aug. 2018, by Diana Johnstone