P Putin looked at me—whether smiling or serious, I no longer know. But I remember how, exactly ten years ago, a poster of the Russian ruler surprised me in the apartment of my relatives when I visited them during the winter holidays in my birthplace, Novosibirsk. The TV in the living room showed hate-filled propaganda talk shows, and the women in my family had become churchgoers. I was astonished and understood that something fundamental had changed.
When I had previously visited in the summer of 2008, still as a child, there was no Putin poster, no church, only the television. On the screen I watched at the time how Russian tanks rolled through Georgian territory.
I did not yet understand what I was seeing. I did not understand that the Kremlin was supporting the separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia with its own troops in order to reclaim its power over Georgia, which looked toward the EU. And I did not understand that he had already tested the same tactic in Transnistria in 1992 and would later use it in Donbass in 2014.
For a long time, people like my relatives—one could call them “average Russian citizens”—cared little about politics. Raised in the totalitarian Soviet state, “politics” was something one would do better not to involve oneself with. Their worry was rather to earn enough money to live—literally to survive in the nineties. They were not particularly interested in the interventions and wars of their own state.
In a Holy War
But that began to change. With Putin’s rise to power at the turn of the millennium, the economic situation stabilized, and the rampant crime came under control. To consolidate his power, Putin began to indoctrinate people with hate-filled lies—delivered through television, the state-controlled church, the schools. Through these channels, people were made to believe that the West swarms with Satanic, anti-Russian haters who must be fought in a holy war.
The people should understand: One is indeed poor and unfree, but thus part of a great, superior empire—a part of the Russian world. Many succumbed to the lure and became fervent followers of the system.
During my visit ten years ago, I largely regarded the propaganda as a curiosity. Yet its mechanisms proved to be as perfidious as they were effective. For example, it exploits our tendency to believe things we hear often enough, even if they bear little relation to reality. Or it selects a fact, tears it from context, and inflates it dramatically. This combination of strategies explains how the absurd narrative of the “Ukrainian Nazis” could gain traction here as well. It served the Kremlin as a “moral” justification for its war in Ukraine, namely as the supposed continuation of the fight against the Nazis in World War II.
Facts Don’t Mean Much
For the activation of such historical constructions, also with the addition of venerable imperial myths, Vladimir Medinsky was chiefly responsible—first a member of the Duma, then Minister of Culture, and today an important Putin adviser. He literally rewrote history by designing new patriotic textbooks.
“Facts in themselves” mean little to him, as one of his works states: “Everything begins not with facts, but with interpretations. If you love your homeland and your people, the history you write will always be positive.”
But sooner or later reality will intrude into this world of propaganda. For war victims to receive justice, not only reparations must be paid and the Russian leadership brought to court, but also their poison-makers—the propagandists.
