Putin’s tactic worked, but only partly: it discredited protesters and dampened the mood for coming out on the streets, but it did not boost his own rating. The mistrust of the Kremlin and its rhetoric seemed too deep. And whereas the protest in 2011 was about rules and elections, by 2013 it became more overtly political. Navalny attacked the regime not because of the way it counted votes, but because it was corrupt and morally bankrupt and therefore illegitimate. Putin responded in kind. He defended his rent-seeking, crooked, post-Soviet system of governance by claiming moral superiority over the West. ‘We see how many Euro-Atlantic countries are in effect turning away from their roots, including their Christian values,’ Putin said. Russia, by contrast, ‘has always been a state civilization held together by the Russian people, the Russian language, Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church’.3
Words had to be backed up with actions. A crisis in Ukraine, which in February 2014 turned into a revolution, presented both a threat and an opportunity. Revolution in Kiev, Russian state television claimed, was part of America’s plan to encroach on and emasculate Russia and to throw it back behind the Urals. The Kremlin had to fight back. The basic idea of the propaganda was the same as it was during the August 2008 war with Georgia, but the intensity and scale was unlike anything seen before.
In preparation for its offensive against Ukraine, the Kremlin cleared out the last pockets of independent media in Russia, including popular Internet news sites, personal blogs and the liberal cable TV channel, TV Rain. To be effective, propaganda had to be total. Dmitry Kiselev, the main anchor on the Russia Channel, run by Oleg Dobrodeev who had once set up NTV’s news, was put to work.
Wearing a tight-fitting suit, he paced up and down the studio, operatically gesticulating, squinting his eyes and accentuating his words, drilling the message home with a sadistic smile. ‘Here are fighting brigades,’ he said of the middle-class Kiev protesters who came out under EU flags. ‘There is fear and emptiness in their eyes; and here they are preparing food, a dish for gourmands: a piece of lard fried on the side of a rusty tin.’4 Kiselev’s weekly analytical news programme was close in style to Orwell’s two minutes’ hate, stretched to an hour. As part of their Soviet-era military service, many Russian television executives had been trained in ‘special propaganda’, which sought to ‘demoralize the enemy army and establish control over the occupied territory’.
In 1999 Kiselev had moralized about journalistic ethics: ‘People will, of course, swallow anything. But if we keep lowering the bar and drop morals we will, one day, find ourselves splashing in the dirt like pigs and eating each other, along with this dirt, and then we would not be able to sink any lower.’5 Kiselev’s programmes have now reached that state.
The unexpected fall of Viktor Yanukovych, the authoritarian and thuggish president of Ukraine, allowed Putin to execute an audacious plan long harboured in his mind – the annexation of Crimea. It provided the same miraculous ‘short-circuit’ effect as Putin’s response to the bombing of the apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999. It turned Putin into a historic figure who had revised post-Soviet history and had succeeded in returning to the country, suffering from phantom pain, a limb it had lost in 1991. Corruption – the main subject only two years earlier – receded into the background.
Putin’s rating jumped from 60 per cent to 80 per cent. Many of the affluent Russians who had protested against Putin a few years earlier moved to his side. Unmet hopes of personal fulfilment were assuaged by a symbolic victory for the state. The annexation of Crimea was a substitute for modernization. It gave people a sense of purpose without their having to make any effort. Only 3 per cent of Russians disapproved of the annexation. Crimea has long been the nerve centre of Russia’s imperial nostalgia and its annexation had been an idée fixe of Russian nationalists ever since the end of the Soviet Union. They now celebrated the triumph of their idea.
Announcing the annexation of Crimea in the Kremlin’s gilded Hall of St George on 18 March 2014, Putin repeated, almost verbatim, the words which twenty years earlier were printed in the nationalist newspaper Den’ by Igor Shafarevich, one of the ideologists of Russian nationalism. ‘Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride. This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized… The graves of Russian soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian empire are also in Crimea.’6 While it had been Prince Vladimir who was baptized in Crimea, it was President Vladimir who brought it back into Russia’s fold. In October 1993 Russian nationalists had tried to storm Ostankino television centre to air their ideas. Now these ideas were articulated by the president of Russia and broadcast by all central television channels without a single shot being fired.
In fact, very few Russians were even aware of Vladimir’s baptism in Crimea. For them, the peninsula was linked to hedonism rather than spirituality. It was a place for holidays, summer romances, state sanatoria and dachas, but to make the annexation look legitimate, Putin had to ground it in Christian mythology. The true symbolism of the annexation of Crimea was that Putin was reversing the course of history and elevating Russians to their past imperial glory – something that the nationalists and communists could only dream about.
However, the red–brown coalition that had formed in the early 1990s had undergone a change. Communists were dumped along the way. Nina Andreeva, who wrote the infamous letter ‘I Cannot Forsake Principles’, today lives in a shoebox-sized studio flat near St Petersburg, studying the works of Lenin and ‘commanding’ the Central Committee of the All Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks – a party that consists of her and a few other pensioners. The old communist Viktor Anpilov, who led the siege of Ostankino, nestles on the outskirts of Moscow in a basement that reeks of body odour and sour cabbage, surrounded by portraits of Stalin and old Soviet flags.
The new coalition emerged in 2013 – between nationalists and the party of ‘crooks and thieves’. The annexation of Crimea, performed by an extraordinary sleight of hand, cemented their union. Even Alexander Nevzorov, Russia’s first television stuntman who experimented with Russian fascism in the 1990s but became ‘disillusioned’ by the idea, cringed: ‘If Crimea was taken from a strong, rich and brave country, it would have been an honest and noble victory. But it was taken from a wounded, bleeding and motionless country, and that was looting,’ he wrote.7 Yet it was the television techniques that Nevzorov had used in the 1980s which allowed Russia to take Crimea without a battle.
Events on the ground unfolded according to a script created by television, which ran something like this: the Ukrainian revolution brought to power America-sponsored neo-Nazis. The descendants of those who had collaborated with Hitler during the Second World War now vandalized Soviet war memorials and threatened to annihilate the Russian language and history in Crimea. The Russian population of Crimea turned to Vladimir Putin for help, which he duly provided. The plot was enacted on 27 February when the Russian military seized airports, government buildings and broadcasters within hours, blockaded Ukrainian military bases and installed its marionettes in government.