Understanding Putin’s Popularity in Russia, with Prof. Matthew Slaboch

Jakub Ferencik
4 min readFeb 12, 2024

On the latest episode of “Loosely Eastern Europe,” I talk to Prof. Matthew Slaboch, who is an assistant professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University and author of “A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018).

I thought that I would once again bring your attention to the podcast, as I know many of you will be interested in this prescient topic.

Understanding Putin’s popularity is now even more relevant since Tucker Carlson traversed to Russia to speak with the Russian leader. If you are also interested, I wrote an article on the topic, titled “Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Vladimir Putin.”

Here is a link to the interview on Spotify; and here is a link on Substack. Please let me know in the comment section if you are having difficulties accessing it.

Photo by ANTIPOLYGON YOUTUBE on Unsplash

Summary of Podcast Episode

In this episode, we first address whether Putin has any Russian leaders he models his leadership after.

Then we talk about the assumption that there is something fundamental in Russians and post-communist citizens that makes them more sympathetic to authoritarian leaders. Prof. Slaboch establishes the…

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Jakub Ferencik

Journalist in Prague | Author of “Up in the Air,” “Beyond Reason,” & "Surprised by Uncertainty" on AMAZON | MA McGill Uni | 750+ articles with 1+ mil. views