The 3-day elections in Russia concluded on Sunday with the re-election of Vladimir Putin for the 5th consecutive time as President of the same person who, together with his prime ministerial terms, has been leading the country for the past 25 years, with an iron fist – a term extremely lenient.
In these elections, the 71-year-old Vladimir Putin received a percentage close to 88%, with a turnout of 67.5%, which is close to a farce percentage as reported by the reputable British Guardian.
Similarly farcical, but unfortunately not so, is the fact that there were only 3 candidates (something reminiscent of similar autocracies – names we won’t mention…), who were just pitiful puppets, negligible quantities – otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed to participate.
As it happened with others, who either withdrew voluntarily (supposedly), or disappeared from the face of the earth, or were eliminated, like Navalny.
Putin’s statement after his uncontested victory the day before yesterday regarding the disputed circumstances of the death of his only serious political opponent, the leader of the opposition, in a gulag-like prison in Siberia, is commented on with anger by all reputable Western media. Putin specifically said that he had decided (on his own) in a prisoner release, which, he says, included the leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny.
But, “it’s sad that he died,” added the Russian leader.
However, he further stated (and here is the most outrageous of all) that a key condition for the exchange-release was that Alexei Navalny pledged that he “would never return to Russia.” In other words, he would supposedly grant him clemency but would send him into exile for life…
I now turn to a great, very important Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, to extract from his book “What is Religion,” an excerpt.
The three texts contained in this volume constitute the quintessence of the author’s mature thought.
Specifically, they deal with a version of religion that seeks love, the origin of man, faith as a pan-human way of life, not monopolized by the respective official religious institutions.
Also, Tolstoy prefers to trust reason as the understanding of the meaning of life and how the infinity of God enters the world, rather than submission to obvious, outdated rituals. For him, the meaning of faith lies in the truth of love.
When love is universal, that is, directed towards everyone, it returns to us generously; in this faith lies his opposition to materialism, a stance he maintains consistently until the end. Gorky said in 1910, the year of Tolstoy’s death, that “the world stopped.”
But by studying the quintessence of his thought, it is up to us to refute him.
“I wanted to say that we have now reached a point where we can no longer remain, and whether we like it or not, we must follow a new path: And, in order to be able to do this, we do not need to invent any new faith or new scientific theories, which could explain the meaning of life and guide it. Above all, we do not need any specific type of activity, beyond our liberation from the superstitions of both misleading Christianity and political structures.”
