For the Russian audience the show was largely free of charge. The sanctions imposed by the West on Russia did not affect the majority of the population, at least initially. And the deaths of Russia’s own soldiers who were sent to fight in Ukraine were carefully covered up and concealed. The popularity of the show transferred into Putin’s rating, pushing it close to 90 per cent approval. But this also suggested that as soon as the show ended, the rating would fall. Mobilization, therefore, was the only resource available to Putin.
To sustain the audience’s attention, the plot had to evolve to produce new virtual enemies and raise the level of aggression and hatred. The narrative of war has now moved beyond Ukraine to the West in general. The claim that Russia is at war with America and the West has been drilled into the minds of ordinary Russians. Those who protested against the war have been labelled as national traitors and collaborators with Western-sponsored fascism.
All television channels attacked liberals, but NTV did it with particular zeal, perhaps compensating or taking revenge for its own past. One of its regular targets was Boris Nemtsov – a man who once symbolized Russia’s hopes for becoming a normal, civilized and above all free country of which NTV was supposed to be a part. In May 2014, the state of the country filled him with despair:
I can’t remember such a level of general hatred as the one in Moscow today. Not in 1991, during the August coup, not even in 1993. Aggression and cruelty are stoked by the television while the key definitions are supplied by the slightly possessed Kremlin master. ‘National traitors’, ‘fifth column’, ‘fascist junta’ – all these terms are coming from the same Kremlin office… The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. People are set off against each other. This hell cannot end peacefully.9
Less than a year later, Nemtsov was shot dead next to the Kremlin.
After Nemtsov’s murder, Vladimir Yakovlev, the founder of Kommersant, made a public appeal to everyone who worked in the media. He spoke not just for himself, but also on behalf of his father, Yegor Yakovlev. ‘Stop teaching people how to hate. Because hatred is already tearing the country to pieces. People live in a crazy illusion that the country is surrounded by enemies. Boys get killed in a war. Politicians are executed by the walls of the Kremlin. It is not Europe and America that stands on a verge of social catastrophe. The information war is first and foremost destroying ourselves.’10
Television images work like drugs, creating a sense of elation, destroying judgement and intelligence, lowering moral barriers and suppressing inhibitions and fears. No enemy of Russia could cause as much harm to the country as has been inflicted by those who pump out these drugs into the bloodstream of the nation.
The vast majority of Russians now contemplate the possibility of a nuclear war with America and 40 per cent of the younger ones believe that Russia can win, as though it were a video game in which people have lives in reserve. Few Russians are prepared to pay for it with their lives or their suffering.
Just as in any trade in drugs, television propaganda exploits people’s weaknesses and cravings. The main reason Russian propaganda works is because enough people want to believe it. Many of those who crave it are not poor and ignorant – but affluent and well informed. They are deceived because they want to be deceived. Opinion polls show that almost half of the Russian population knows that the Kremlin is lying to the world about the absence of Russian troops in Ukraine, but approves of these lies and sees them as a sign of strength. More than half think it is right for the media to distort information in the interest of the state.
This propaganda feeds not so much on ignorance, but on resentment – a mixture of jealousy and hostility. Having an imagined but mighty enemy, America, makes people feel noble and good; it compensates for personal weaknesses and failures, and frees them from the need to justify themselves to anyone and above all to themselves. Russia is running the risk of overdosing on hatred and aggression. The euphoria and nationalist frenzy cannot just be switched off like a television set – energy does not simply vanish. History cannot be rewound like a tape and the choices that brought it to this state cannot be unmade. But the future is not predetermined either.
The only consistent feature of Russia’s history is its unpredictability. As Yegor Gaidar, who chronicled the collapse of the Soviet empire, once said, big changes happen later than we think but earlier than we expect. Putin’s war in Ukraine is aimed at modernity and the future. The forces that it has awoken are not the forces of imperial expansion – Russia does not possess the energy or vision required for empire-building – but forces of chaos and disorganisation. They may plunge the country into darkness or Russia may rid itself of its post-imperial syndrome and emerge as a nation state. But history does not have a will of its own and what kind of place Russia becomes depends on the next generation that will come to invent it.
Notes
Anyone dealing with Russian language sources and names comes across the problem of transliteration. The existence of several systems makes it difficult to be entirely consistent in rendering words from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin one. In the main text of the book Russian names and titles are presented in the form used by most English language newspapers, so Yeltsin not Eltsin, Yegor not Egor, Novy Mir not Novyi Mir. However, in transliterating references and citation sources provided in the endnotes I use the Library of Congress system of transliteration adopted by most English language library catalogues. This makes locating the sources easier. For example, the Cyrillic letter е is transliaterated as e, й as i, у as u, х as kh, ц as ts, ч as ch, ш as sh, щ as shch, ю as iu and я as ia. Russian soft and hard signs ь and ъ are indicated by ’.
The titles of Russian literary works that have been translated into English are given only in English. When a book that has not been translated is mentioned, its title is given both in Russian and in English. The translations of Russian texts are my own unless otherwise noted in the endnotes. The names of cities that have changed their names after the Soviet collapse are given in their historic context, so Mikhail Gorbachev visited Leningrad in 1985 but Vladimir Putin worked for the mayor of St Petersburg.
Some institutions have changed their name more than once. Channel One used to be known as ORT (Public Russian Broadcaster) and also as Ostankino (the name of the television centre from which it was broadcasting). To spare readers from confusion, I refer to it as Channel One throughout. The Moskovskie novosti newspaper had foreign language editions including an English one called The Moscow News, but since I only refer to the Russian language newspaper, I use the Russian name: Moskovskie novosti.