Just ignore Mironov and his party. There are no independent parties in Russia, it’s all just a facade for Putin and his administration.
You still may find naive young members in Social Democratic, Communist, and even United Russia (the ruling party) that got ideas tey can do something but they either adapt to party lines or drop out over time. Mironov is a leader of the party and naturally he will say what Putin’s administration let him or tell him to say or what he thinks they like him to say.
This is nonsense. The idea that Putin controls everything and everyone in Russia is infantile, it is a liberal fairy tale. But it is easier for people to blame everything bad on the Putin government than to accept the truth which is that sadly these shared reactionary lines between otherwise very different parties reflect a common attitude in Russian society toward the LGBT.
Various groups arrive independently at these same positions because these positions have some not insignificant support among the population. Of course we can have a nuanced discussion about how the media has pushed certain narratives to become widely adopted and which interests this serves, but this doesn’t mean that there are no independent parties with their own interests and agendas.
People who want to achieve positive change have to engage with reality even if it’s not what we wish it was. If the extent of your analysis is to blame one single person you won’t get very far. You can’t hope to solve a complex socio-political problem if your understanding of it boils down to a one dimensional caricature.
I gave maybe an oversimplified answer. I agree with you that a single person doesn’t control everything. But the government system is built to control what political entities are allowed to exist and express their views publicly. So, again naturally, the only parties that remain exist only because they follow president and party lines.
All independent parties have been stripped of the party registration or removed from all elected positions. Independent politicians get “foreign agent” status, forced to immigrate, get jailed or killed. Rigged elections don’t let almost anyone to be elected without government approval.
If we focus this discussion on LGBTQ topic, then I agree that many people in Russia are not “allies”, but as you mentioned yourself it might be caused by media (which is also far from being free) and the fact that there are laws in Russia making support of LGBTQ a crime. However, even with that, according to 2021 survey about a 1/3 of people there believed that LBGTQ people should have equal rights. Here is the link to that survey, they also have some details on trends of public opinion on the topic: https://www.levada.ru/en/2021/10/19/the-attitude-of-russians-to-the-lgbt-community/
Anyways, don’t judge people living in totalitarian state for the lack of progressive views.
But the government system is built to control what political entities are allowed to exist and express their views publicly.
You are absolutely correct on this point. The same of course applies in any other country. That is just the nature of state power. It is always a dictatorship of one class. Nonetheless parties with differing and competing interests can and do exist within any system.
Rigged elections don’t let almost anyone to be elected without government approval.
don’t judge people living in totalitarian state
Russia is no more totalitarian than any Western “liberal democracy”, their elections no more rigged than ours. So let’s not engage in this finger pointing, we are all adults here, and i should hope that no one here believes the childish myth that western countries have free and fair elections or that our media is independent and not carefully curated state propaganda.
There are a myriad ways in which a political system is controlled and adherence to the status quo is ensured, and Russia’s is of course no exception. Their methods may perhaps appear superficially slightly different but the result is the same.
