Commentary
It might seem that Vladimir Putin doesn’t have a propaganda problem, at least at home. George Orwell presented a vision of the totalitarian future—based on what Stalin’s Russia was already like—in his 1949 dystopian novel “
1984.” It’s a world where opposition can’t even be thought.
In Orwell’s fictional world, Big Brother sees everything; all media and education are state-controlled and promote the same message. Everyone is under close and constant surveillance. People convince themselves that what they’re told is true; they’re reduced, not simply to silence, but to open avowal of falsehood. They live by lies.
Putin has in place the apparatus and techniques of a totalitarian state. No one in Russia is allowed to call Putin’s war in Ukraine a war—at least until he declares one. They can’t discuss, even if they hear about the devastating setbacks, the loss of men and military equipment in such a short time. The first sinking of a Russian flagship since 1905 is officially a mistake, the result of an accidental fire. The factory where the Ukrainian Neptune missiles that, according to the Russian narrative, did not strike the ship was bombed in a furious response to this “accident.”
Putin has also adopted the
“Stalin-esque” practice of installing political commissars in government workplaces to ensure that no dissent develops and to report back to the Kremlin on employee morale. Textbook publishers are being
told to remove references to Ukraine from their books, as if the country didn’t exist (a sinister kind of curricular genocide?)
How’s It Working?
So far, despite catastrophic losses, Putin seems to have wide Russian public support for his war. According to one poll by the independent Levada Center, 81 percent of respondents
supported the “special operation.”
But to prosecute a real war, an unprovoked war of choice aimed at the territorial integrity and sovereignty, if not the very existence, of Ukraine, another European state and fellow member of the United Nations, the regime needed more than passive acquiescence. It required the turning of citizens into haters.
Attractive, smiling television news announcers became “cheerleaders of death,” relishing the death and destruction being wrought on Ukrainian cities and citizens. As Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny
said from prison when he learned about Bucha, “Propagandists create the kind of public opinion that no longer simply allows Putin to commit war crimes, but demands them of him.”
The “denazification” of which the propaganda speaks becomes in practice the mass murder of unarmed civilians, local officials, and politicians identified by pro-Russia Ukrainian collaborators. Many of the dead had been executed in Stalinist style with hands tied behind their backs and a bullet in the back of the head. The Wall Street Journal
describes a four-story office building in Bucha that became a center of the Russian military’s systematic use of torture, execution, and imprisonment.
Ukrainian authorities have named and accused 10 individual soldiers—the “despicable 10”—of taking civilians hostage and mistreating them in Bucha—the first such move by prosecutors investigating possible war crimes by Moscow’s forces.
Moscow, meanwhile, has denied any crimes were committed in Bucha, and Putin has
awarded the Russian brigade that was occupying Bucha an honorary title—recognizing what he says was “mass heroism and valor, tenacity and courage.”
The failure of the initial attack on Kyiv and the continued leadership of the courageous and persuasive Ukrainian government there, with its many virtual (and some in-person) meetings with leaders and legislators across the world, changed Russia’s propaganda needs. The failures and the missed deadlines, when they could no longer be ignored or denied, were blamed on a bigger, better-armed force, that of NATO. Russia was confronting not just Ukrainian Nazis but the Nazis of the whole world. Blaming Nazis, who are present in both Ukraine and Russia but don’t run either, is important to Russian propaganda. It appeals to the memory of the Great Patriotic War (World War II).
The Russian military, though huge, is poorly led and trained. It became bogged down around Kyiv, suffering heavy losses in men and materiel. There have been pro-Russian collaborators, but local people, even in Russian-speaking cities, didn’t welcome the occupiers. The “special military operation” has flattened the cities they were supposed to liberate from Nazis. The worst hit, such as Kharkiv and Mariupol, have been cities with Russian-speaking majorities. Where Russian troops have occupied areas, there’s mounting evidence, not of fraternization and wide support, but of torture, rape, pillage, and murder on a large scale.
The Propaganda Challenge
The Russian failures, incompetence, and atrocities create a problem for Russian propaganda. Responses include increased suppression of dissent (fines, prison,
encouraging children to report their own teachers and parents), denial, projection, paranoia and playing the victim, bullying, and saber-rattling. All have their dangers and limitations.
Russia isn’t a tomb society, lifeless and hermetically sealed from outside information and news unwelcome to the government. The government doesn’t publish news of failures or casualty rates, but word slips out, and the deaths of Russian soldiers, seemingly around 20,000 in two months, are very high and hard to keep from the mothers whose young sons have died. Russian mothers of soldiers were a potent political force in the Afghanistan conflict and have shown signs already in this war of
becoming a problem for the regime.
In contrast, wealthy and privileged socialites, media stars, and “influencers” who
make a display of angrily chopping up their expensive Chanel bags cut a pathetic and ridiculous figure. They complain that European sanctions caused by “Russophobia” have interrupted the supply of such bags. This morbid fear of Russians—in the paranoid world of Putin propaganda—results from the world’s Nazis with whom Russia is now at war. As a New York Post headline ironically
put it, “Wealthy Russian socialites enraged as Chanel blocks them from shopping.” The bags retail for some $5,000 to $6,000 and up.
The “cheerleaders of death” on Russian TV are continuing to whip up war fever and rage, with calls to destroy the Ukrainian state completely and extirpate the very idea of a Ukrainian nation as a Nazi fiction. Francis Scarr, who monitors Russian TV for a living,
reports that the propaganda is changing. It’s becoming even more belligerent and wider in scope. The new rhetoric is of a war against the West and the elimination of Ukraine as a sovereign country of any size. Even ahead of an announcement by Putin (now referred to mainly as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief), threats of nuclear weapons or talk of World War III are now an almost daily occurrence.
Russia’s slide toward totalitarianism has costs for the regime itself. As the independent Russian journalist Andrei Kolesnikov put it, “A significant proportion of Russians—those who support the ‘operation’ and Putin—have become haters who do not listen to arguments that destroy their deathblind vision of the world.”
Putin, urged on by his army chiefs,
appears to be on the point of dropping talk of a “special military operation” and announcing the mass mobilization of the whole country, declaring that “we are now at war with the world’s Nazis and we need to mass mobilize the Russian people,” according to the UK defense secretary. No more special military operation, but a world war against Nazis. Not only did the Cold War never end, it seems, neither did World War II.
Believing Their Own Propaganda
There are three dangers from all this for the Russian regime. One is that such heavy-handed, top-down authoritarianism makes it hard for the man at the top, the despot, to learn what’s actually going on. All the way up the chain of command and control, those lower down lie and tell those above them what they think their superiors want to hear. The second is that the regime starts to believe its own propaganda, bizarre as it may be. It lives by the lies it makes others live by, deaf and blind to reality. And the belligerent propaganda along with aggressive policies may incentivize rather than deter other countries from joining or allying with NATO.
One aim of Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine is to deter anyone else from moving closer to the West, putting a stop once and for all to NATO expansion and encirclement.
The belligerent propaganda may be effective for a while at home but still have the opposite of the intended result abroad. Ukraine fell victim to Russian aggression because it wasn’t a member of NATO and not assured of its protection. The invasion isn’t deterring previously neutral Finland and Sweden from joining NATO but showing them that in order to protect themselves from Russia’s aggression and imperial ambitions, they need to join as soon as possible.
Russia’s intransigence and refusal to countenance any kind of diplomatic solution that doesn’t reward its aggression with Ukrainian territory and surrender of its sovereignty is reflected in its increasingly belligerent propaganda. The West in turn has toughened its stance as the extent of Russia’s imperial ambition becomes unmistakable.
The result has been a key new war aim openly stated by Britain, the United States, and others. That aim is to weaken the Russian military so it will be deterred from launching future wars against its neighbors. As U.S. defense secretary Lloyd Austin
said, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
