Russian soldiers were portrayed as liberators, rather than occupiers. Videos were uploaded on the Internet showing a Russian soldier in Crimea holding a small child in his arms – a reference to the giant statue of the Soviet Liberator Soldier erected in Berlin in 1949. In Sebastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, local people celebrated their liberation. There was only one thing missing: the enemy.
While the military were at work, Moscow PR men, coordinated by Vladislav Surkov, turned former local crooks and racketeers into the ‘freedom-seeking government’ of Crimea. One of these PR men was Alexander Borodai, the son of an orthodox nationalist philosopher, who had participated in the nationalists’ uprising against Yeltsin in 1993 while studying philosophy at Moscow State University. He was particularly interested in the ideology of the ultra-nationalists who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and had strong sympathy for (and influence over) the rise of fascism in Europe.
As a nineteen-year-old in 1992, Borodai went to fight in Transnistria to defend ethnic Russians against Moldovan ‘fascists’ and a year later turned up at the White House in Moscow. He claims to have led some twenty armed men in the siege of the Ostankino television centre in October 1993. He managed to escape from Ostankino unscathed and continued his studies while also writing for the nationalist Zavtra newspaper. But he made money by consulting private oil companies, both Russian and foreign. He epitomized the union between the party of ‘crooks and thieves’ and the nationalists. While Putin believed he was using the nationalists, the nationalists were convinced that they were using Putin. Crimea was just the start. Russia also planned to create a protectorate in the east of Ukraine that would stop the country drifting towards Europe and the West.
Borodai’s job was to help stir the situation in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine in the hope that it would set off a chain reaction of separatism in the east of the country. They called it ‘the Russian Spring’, analogous to the Arab Spring. Putin promoted the idea of the ‘Russian World’ and Novorossiya (New Russia), an historic term that described the southern part of the Russian Empire that contained the territory of modern Ukraine, including Odessa, though, ironically, not Donetsk, the capital of the region. To help Novorossiya into being, Russia funnelled money, weapons and agents provocateurs into Donetsk, helping a ragtag of thugs, opportunists and jobless to take over the local administration, which quickly turned into an unruly and smelly squat rather than a revolutionary headquarters.
But while the region smouldered, it did not burst into flame. To set off a big fire, a generous helping of petrol and a firelighter were needed. Enter Igor Girkin, an old friend of Borodai, who arrived in Crimea shortly before the annexation. Girkin, who went under the pseudonym Strelkov (Shooter), first fought in Transnistria in the early 1990s, then in Bosnia – on the side of the Serbian army – and finally in Chechnya, where he was responsible for the ‘disappearances’ (secret executions) of several alleged rebels. He claimed to have served in the Russian security services. Far more important, though, was his passion for reconstructing past wars. A graduate of the Institute of History and Archives, he belonged to a group of aficionados who dressed in historic costumes and staged theatrical re-enactments of famous battles. Strelkov was particularly keen on the Russian Civil War of 1917–22, in which he would dress as a White Army officer. The scripts of his most recent military historic games concerned the actions of the Russian volunteer army in the south-west of Ukraine in 1920. In the summer of 2014, Strelkov got the chance to re-enact the Russian Civil War with real weapons.
In April 2014 Strelkov, with a group of men backed by the Russian military, stormed the town of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine. The first thing they did was to seize the television transmitters. Ukrainian channels were taken off the air and replaced by Russian state channels. Within a few days fierce fighting was raging across the region.
Had it not been for Russian television, the war probably would not have started. The notion of television as a weapon lost its metaphorical sense. It was the real weapon causing real destruction.[1]
Wars have been televised before. But never before have wars been conducted and territory gained primarily by means of television and propaganda. The role of the military was to support the picture. The Russian media have not just distorted reality – they invented it, using fake footage, doctoring quotes, using actors (sometimes the same actor would impersonate both the victim and an aggressor on different channels). ‘Our psyche is set up in such a way that only an artistic form can explain the time [we live in],’ Ernst once said.
On 12 July 2014, Channel One ‘interviewed’ a Ukrainian woman with a heart-wrenching story. The woman said she had witnessed the public execution of a three-year-old boy, who was crucified in the crowded main square of Slavyansk when Ukrainian forces retook it. She provided the gory details: the Ukrainian ‘animals’ – descendants of the fascist collaborators during the Second World War – cut into the little boy’s flesh and made him suffer for an hour before he died. The woman added that the boy’s mother was then tied to a tank and dragged along until she too was dead. The story was a fake. By planting stories about children crucified or tortured by Ukrainians, Russian propaganda deployed the same time-tested mechanism of arousing hatred as the one used in Jewish pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Russian television worked like a psychoactive agent, a hallucinogen. As Nevzorov wrote, ‘Patriotic hallucinations are aggressive, hysterical and persistent… One must remember the ideological drug [of patriotism] is injected into the country’s veins for one main purpose: so that, at the first click of the fingers of any idiot in military stripes, crowds of boys voluntarily agree to turn into burnt and rotting meat.’8
The point of the information war unleashed by Russia was not to convince someone of Russia’s point of view, but to ignite the fighting and draw the civilian population into the conflict, and this is what it achieved. Many of those who joined the fight were jobless and disenfranchised, some were paid pittances in illegal coal mines, many were former Soviet soldiers who felt abandoned by their Soviet motherland when the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian television exploited their weaknesses and lured them into a fight for a country that had ceased to exist nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Russia’s ‘hybrid’ war lifted them from their miserable, anonymous and hopeless existence onto the television screen, told them they were victims and heroes, provided them with weapons and pointed to an enemy. Russian propaganda also mobilized thousands of Russian volunteers who flocked to take part in a bloody battle against ‘fascism’ in Ukraine.
Those who produce Russian propaganda are not driven by the idea of the notional ‘Russian World’ or empire rebuilding – they are too pragmatic for that. They acted not out of conviction or a sense of reality but out of a disrespect for it. The hallucinations they produced took on a life of their own and started to behave in an unscripted way, unaware they were only part of a television show. Five days after the airing of the story about the crucified boy, the Russian-backed separatists brought down Malaysian flight MH 17, killing all 298 passengers on board.
For the vast majority of Russians, however, the war in Ukraine was just a show provided by television. For most of 2014, news programmes, often twice as long as usual, were entirely dedicated to Ukraine, as though life in Russia itself stopped. The war was ‘serialized’ into hour-long episodes filled with blood, violence and suspense. News programmes used cinematic devices and special effects: clips, dramatic flashbacks, montage, music. Television channels competed for the largest share of the audience (and advertising market) by selling the war drama, which they had staged. For the first time in Russian history, news programmes consistently topped the viewing tables, overtaking soap operas and serials. As ever, Channel One and its Vremya came first.
1
Konstantin Ernst, the head of Channel One, has long had an affection for military hardware but none had as wide a range as television.