Putin’s frank confession in the film on the seizure of Crimea, obviously made on the pattern of Goebbels’ productions about similar seizures, has stunned many. This was even used as grounds to appeal to the Hague Court, but nobody will, of course, take Putin there because Europe and the US are bending over backward to please him. Then there was a 100,000-strong rally in Moscow, and other things are sure to follow.
All this needs to be adequately appraised on the basis of valid criteria, which is not yet the case. Many people variously comment on Putin’s speech and words of different-level toadies, pointing out absurdities and contradictions in them. Indeed, very much resembles the Bombay-London tunnel in Abuladze’s film Repentance. The revealing film became prophetic very fast and without too much effort.
The trouble is that the surrounding world continues to assess and analyze what is going on in Russia by the criteria of the world that country opposes. Sometimes it is ridiculous: seemingly wise people in Russia itself are seriously discussing the strategies and tactics of the opposition in the next elections, although there has been no opposition or elections for a long time – only the imitation of both. As for the outside world, it has simply overlooked what has occurred in Russia over the past few years. It is utterly unwilling to change the habitual way of life, which inevitably results from the recognition of changes.
The West has been cutting expenditures for Russian studies in the past few years – even in the field of literature. At a closer examination, political experts are the people who were considered veteran Sovietologists 30 years ago. It is a foregone conclusion what each of them will say. Nor is it a secret who is on the Kremlin’s payroll and who prefers to be honest but poor. Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, is a good, knowledgeable, and judicious person. But he is absolutely inadequate – his reset of Russia-US relations resulted in President Obama dancing attendance on Putin. I was naive enough a year ago to presume that the seizure of Crimea would impact the US establishment as Pearl Harbor once did – I thought it would dispel isolationist illusions. Nothing of the sort happened.
And what can you expect from the Europeans who are appeasing the Kremlin and pretending not to hear Putin’s tough-guy-style bragging? They are not exactly concerned about the picture of the world that shapes his policies and sentiments in Russian society. All these seemingly funny stories about the killer trains that ran to Crimea a year ago, a US landing force, and a Washington-orchestrated coup in Kyiv are a serious thing. This is the way the absolute majority of my dear Russians see the world.
It is pointless to try to influence this. One just must take it into account and watch, at least occasionally, Russian informational programs, serials, and films similar to the one on Crimea. I am sorry for self-quoting, but I will repeat my description of the current situation – not in a newspaper style:
The tsar said
the Antichrist had settled
where water springs
are called “krynytsia.”
For this reason, the Lord
doomed to a flood
all that is west of Konotop –
mountains, forests, rivers,
and plains.
The country that was called
Russia yesterday
is Anti-Ukraine now.
There is no truth,
there is only force left.
Naturally, it is also Anti-America, but it is too weak to grab Alaska and California. But it is a proven fact that the Russian picture comprises a real likelihood of the US attacking Russia.
Sketch by Viktor BOGORAD
But there seems to be 14 or 16 percent of sound-minded people. No? Yes, they exist, but they do not live on a different planet. Now the sole leader of what is called opposition after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, Aleksey Navalny has got confused in his own wording on whether the US should give Ukraine weapons. His loyal followers – and there are public opinion leaders among them – are very likely to justify this statement, as they did his Crimea-is-ours attitude.
Navalny continues to distract people from the main thing – the war – by offering various ways to remove corrupt officials. Whenever I say this, I hear an objection: one can do both things.
No, this won’t do because to be against the war means to oppose the system, while to strive for a corruption cleanup means to be part of the system and struggle to improve it, which the so-called opposition is doing in Russia. The progressive public and the rest of the Russian intelligentsia have not even noticed that the struggle for principles and values was substituted with a constant defamation of some power-wielders, including peeping into the keyhole and counting money in someone else’s pockets. But this behavior is only good for hurt lackeys. And the killed Nemtsov did quite a lot for this substitution.
All this is on the surface. But there are also deep-seated layers of mass consciousness in which Soviet stereotypes still dwell. For example, Yuly Kim, quite a decent person, has composed a song in which he is amazed why Russia is fighting against Ukraine. This thing is utterly impossible in Russian commonplace mentality. The latter holds no place for what I think is quite essential to Ukrainian identity – the history of struggle against Russian expansionism. Maybe, it is not worthwhile to go very far, recall the abolition of the Sich, Shevchenko’s life story, and the aspiration of autocracy and Slavophiles to replace Ukrainianness with Little Russianness. But has Kim at least read The White Guard? I leave apart the 1920s repressions and the Holodomor, but has he heard of the war that lasted in Ukraine until the mid-1950s? Does he know about the assassination of Bandera and other resistance leaders, which is in the same line with the murder of Litvinenko?
If he knew, he would not be amazed with what is going on. It is surprising how long the authorities managed to maintain relative calmness between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, suppressing any Ukrainian originality, deliberately provincializing Ukrainian culture, and creating the image of an inferior Little Russian.
It is this image that underlies the concept of a single Ukrainian-Russian nation, which shapes the Kremlin’s policy. But there is no need to moan. We should just take into account their vision of the world.
Nor do we have to tease those who organize and hold pro-Kremlin rallies, saying, for example, that while only 50,000 people came to pay their last respects to Nemtsov, the Kremlin gathered 100,000 by way of coercion and cash gifts, still claiming that they “followed the dictates of their hearts rather than the call of the Party.”
But no dictates of the heart are needed. The authorities couldn’t care less about the public mood. What is important to them is to show the organizational power of the state machine that can mobilize multitudes of people irrespective of their sentiments and persuasions. If the authorities had come to know that only opponents of the seizure of Crimea were driven together to Vasilyevsky Spusk, they would have been happy too.
Moreover, as I have said many times, those who were driven together even once will become the government’s most loyal allies. They will form a union of the humiliated who do not wish to admit their humiliation. From now on, these people will consider as their mortal enemy anyone who dares to resist and evades the common lot even at the cost of his or her freedom and life, whereas the authorities are their darlings – like a terrorist to a hostage, a jailor to a prisoner, and an investigator to the one he tortures. This happened and was described a million times.
And many have already said that a worsened economic situation makes regimes, similar to the one in Russia, more aggressive and brazen. But still more people continue to hope that domestic economic problems will distract the Kremlin from external expansionism.
What is going on in Russia can be discussed over and over again. It is important to understand one thing: what is in that country is different to what is in the surrounding world. This can be understood and described provided there are adequate methods and knowledge of the inner logic of the subject under study.
