Putin: Russia’s great propagandist

April 16, 2014 5:47 pm

Putin: Russia’s great propagandist

By Kathrin Hille / Financial Times / http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3c8495d0-c0ba-11e3-a74d-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2z7ZUOaMu

Putin’s use of Soviet-era symbolism has alarmed those already fearful for the country’s democratic institutions

Igor Dolutsky finds nothing unusual in disagreeing with everyone around him. In the 35 years he has been teaching history in Moscow schools, his habit of questioning official narratives and challenging political taboos has cost him his job more than once.

But when the mild-mannered 60-year-old tried to discuss Russia’s annexation of Crimea in class, things almost got out of hand. “My students swore at me and said I wasn’t telling the truth,” he says. “Then they said I didn’t love Russia or the Russian people, and told me to leave the country.”

Mr Dolutsky has long been a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin’s government. Ten years ago the government pulled his history textbook from the curriculum for its critical description of President Putin and its inclusion of unpalatable facts about Soviet history. Today he teaches in a private school, headed by a friend from his university days, which allows Mr Dolutsky to continue to talk about the Soviet Union’s occupation of the Baltic states, discuss whether Russia committed genocide in Chechnya and label Mr Putin’s changes to the political system a coup d’état.

But Moscow’s annexation of Crimea has set off rapid and drastic changes that threaten to submerge such outposts of dissent. In a speech marking the consummation of Russia’s union with the Black Sea peninsula on March 18, Mr Putin lashed out against a “fifth column” of “national traitors” enlisted by the west to subvert Russia. He vowed to respond forcefully.

His warning – especially his choice of phrases widely used by nationalist dictatorships as well as Russia’s own former Communist regime – has resonated strongly with Russians. They have been taken as a rallying cry among those aggrieved by Russia’s diminished power to build a prouder, stronger and more authoritarian state. For Mr Putin’s liberal critics, it is a worrying sign that the rest of the country’s imperfect democratic institutions are under severe threat.

In a column that set the tone for both commentaries and blogposts, the conservative journalist Ulyana Skoibeda raved two weeks ago that after the return of Crimea “I no longer live in a conquered country”. In a long lament that reflects the feelings frequently expressed by ordinary Russians, she described the past 23 years as humiliating. Ms Skoibeda said her life had been dominated by western norms, and she had had to suffer through the chaos and deprivation unleashed by the democratic and economic experiments of the 1990s.

Standing proudly against the entire world had revived the essence of the Soviet Union, she wrote. “It is not Crimea that has returned. We have returned. Home. To the USSR.”

Since the Crimea annexation, there have been frequent moves that symbolise a Soviet revival.

In March Mr Putin announced the re-establishment of “Prepared for Labour and Defence”, a Soviet-era system under which students, officials and workers took part in nationwide sports competitions. The same week, the government said it would restore the Stalin-era All-Russian Exhibition Centre to its former glory.

This month the trade ministry set up a council for the “innovative development of Russian industry”, manned exclusively by former ministers who presided over different industrial sectors in the Soviet Union.

Some observers discount such moves as symbolic concessions to widespread nostalgia among a public that feels the new Russia lacks a strong national identity.

A number of food producers, for instance, have opted for retro packaging designs emblazoned with Soviet symbols, taking advantage of consumers’ conviction that food quality control was stricter in the Soviet Union.

But the recent changes go far beyond nostalgia. Nationalism is now a powerful component of the Soviet revival. Critics fear that it has distinctly sinister overtones.

“I would argue that for years we have been seeing what you could call the Nazification of the elite,” says Igor Yakovenko, former head of the Russian Journalists’ Association, pointing to the installation of Putin loyalists in key posts in academia and the media.

Supporters of Mr Putin dismiss references to fascism and claims of undermining democracy as exaggerations. Pointing to the fact that the communist politician Anatoly Lokot defeated the candidate of Mr Putin’s United Russia party in mayoral elections in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third most populous city, last week, a Kremlin adviser says Mr Putin will continue what he called a liberalisation of the political system.

Earlier signs of this were the election of the opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman as mayor of Ekaterinburg and that the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was allowed to run for Moscow mayor last year.

However, some Kremlin loyalists agree that Mr Putin is tightening his grip. “He is convinced that the west will behave the same way in Russia as in Ukraine and ultimately try to unseat him,” says Sergei Markov, a political consultant close to the Kremlin.

“Therefore all resources, not just regular politicians but also [non-government organisations], some media and crucial players, must be consolidated.” Mr Markov says that to ensure mass support for Mr Putin, the formation of a new ideology is under way. “What exactly it will be is not clear yet, but it could be close to [France’s Marine] Le Pen. It could be close to the Freedom party of Austria,” he says.

This month a representative of Mr Putin’s regime in the US signalled there could be more revisionist steps. Andranik Migranyan, the head of the US-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a Putin-backed think-tank, published a commentary in which he rejected criticism of the Crimea annexation that compared it with Germany’s aggressive moves against its neighbours in the 1930s.

“One must distinguish between Hitler before 1939 and Hitler after 1939,” he wrote. “The thing is that Hitler collected [German] lands. If he had become famous only for uniting without a drop of blood Germany with Austria, Sudetenland and Memel, in fact completing what Bismarck failed to do, and if he had stopped there, then he would have remained a politician of the highest class.”

Mr Migranyan’s argument appears to echo remarks made by Mr Putin on March 18. The president said the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the Russian people as one of the world’s largest separated nations.

As Mr Dolutsky experienced as early as 2003, the Russian president is intent on tinkering with the history curriculum. Since last year there has been an initiative to replace a broad range of textbooks with just two or three that follow a unified concept. Among the details that are certain not to appear in the new textbooks are atrocities committed by the Red Army in eastern Europe, questions about how Russia won some of its territory, and a detailed history of Ukraine other than as part of Russia.

“The main point is that pupils must never question that our country is always right,” says Nikita Petrov, a historian at Memorial, an organisation that specialises in Soviet-era repression. “That means that all around us will have one map of history, and we will have a completely different one. And the contradiction between Russia and the outside world only deepens because nobody is trying to overcome it.”

The government is not prepared to stop at history textbooks. A member of the United Russia party said this week a similar unified concept such as the one adopted for the history curriculum was also necessary for literature and language textbooks.

Mr Putin, addressing the group of historians he commissioned to work on the new books, said a unified approach to teaching history “does not mean one state-defined, official, ideologised line of thought”. But he dismissed some existing books as “ideological rubbish” that sought to belittle the Soviet people.

The government is also working on a set of cultural policy guidelines, a project that has already sent shudders through Russia’s liberal intelligentsia.

The paper stresses the “rejection of the principles of multiculturalism and tolerance. The preservation of a unified cultural code calls for the rejection of state support for cultural projects that impose value norms alien to [our] society”.

It also postulates that “liberal western” concepts that suggest a universal path of development must be rejected and that, in extreme cases, government must protect Russian society from the negative impact of inappropriate cultural products.

Even members of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, have been attending political schooling sessions. There they are guided to adhere to “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”, the three main values propagated by Count Sergei Uvarov, a 19th-century Russian statesman. “They are establishing a kind of hereditary line right from Uvarov to Stalin and then Putin,” says a person who took part in one of the sessions.

In line with such ideas, and true to Mr Putin’s warning about subversive forces, some modern artists and critics of his policies are feeling a renewed push of repression.

Late last month the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, or MGIMO, evicted Andrei Zubov, a renowned historian, for his comparison of the annexation of Crimea with Hitler’s 1938 grab of Sudetenland. MGIMO, the university where the foreign ministry trains most of Russia’s diplomats, denounced Mr Zubov’s criticism as “amoral”, a term that could block the professor’s employment elsewhere in Russia.

The university was later forced to reinstate him after the eviction was found to be unlawful.

But it is not just academics who are under pressure. Loyalists of the president have set up a website where users can propose people to be denounced as “traitors”. The list already features 21 politicians, artists and journalists, topped by Mr Navalny.

“Many people clearly understand that if the annexation of Crimea is accepted, then the real fascist state will emerge here and not in Kiev,” says Mr Zubov, in a reference to Russian propaganda accusations that the new Ukrainian authorities are fascist.

“There will be a partly free economy, state companies, partly open borders, but primacy of one ideology and an aggressive foreign policy,” he warns. “This will not be a revival of the Soviet Union but a revival of fascist statehood in its purest state, in the Mussolini sense. There will not be racial policies and no Holocaust. But there will be a basic principle: the state is everything.”

While the Ukraine crisis has triggered this latest mutation of Russia’s political system, Mr Putin’s critics argue it has been long in the making.

Some spaces for free thought remain. When Mr Dolutsky goes to class, he still carries his own history textbook, written in 1991. It carries marks in all the colours of the rainbow as reminders of where to ask questions and where to use other materials, and some in black – the marks left by Mr Putin’s censors 11 years ago.

But the teacher says his job has become far more difficult. “Twenty years ago, my students were looking to me for the truth. I was supposed to tell them that imperialism was decaying but in fact socialism was rotting away right in front of our eyes, so there was no need to prove to them that we were living badly. Now, they need to be enlightened, but they don’t want to be.”

Censorship: Authorities close in on the web

The Russian government is determined to control the internet as part of its quest to tighten the noose around free speech.

Under legislation that took effect on February 1, the internet regulator can block websites carrying content that is deemed “extremist” or suspected of inciting mass disturbances – merely on the orders of the procurator-general’s office. The authorities are making good use of their new powers. As of April 13, the procurator-general’s office had ordered 107 such blockages, at least 80 of which targeted pages with political content.

“The internet in Russia is becoming a very different place,” says Sergei Buntman, deputy editor of the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy. Its website was taken down and only went online again after it stopped hosting a blog by opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

After President Vladimir Putin brought almost all traditional media either directly under state ownership or into a position where they could be indirectly controlled, online news sites, blogs and social media had become the main source of information and debate for his critics.

Although this space is shrinking, experts say it is unlikely to disappear. “Russia is worlds apart from China, which identified the ‘threat’ posed by the internet upfront and made sure the internet that developed there was domesticised from the beginning,” says Steven Wilson, who teaches Russian politics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Apart from the “Great Firewall”, which helps block unwanted foreign-based content, China also has a vast quantity of homegrown internet services and web applications that mimic their global counterparts but help censor content on Beijing’s orders. “Blocking is easy but you can’t just build an ecosystem like this from scratch,” says Mr Wilson.

Russian experts believe that it would be politically unwise or even impossible for Moscow to suddenly impose a heavy censorship regime with systemic, large-scale permanent blocking because the public has grown used to a largely open space over the past 20 years.

The authorities are much more likely to apply pressure selectively. Apart from the new blocking rights, Russian law also gives a wide range of security services almost unfettered access to online communications data.

Despite those restrictions, the internet could still serve as a powerful tool capable of undermining Mr Putin’s regime – if someone tried.

“The web played an important role in the colour revolutions and the Arab spring because there was a spark in the first place. I don’t see that spark in Russia yet,” says Mr Wilson.