Многие из тех, кто ранее называл западные санкции незначительными, теперь жалуются на международную изоляцию России.
Putin’s people
The president remains popular for his Ukrainian adventure, but that could change faster than many expect
A GOVERNMENT television channel dubbed Vladimir Putin’s latest state
of the nation address “A Message from Above”. Dmitry Kiselev, Mr Putin’s
chief propagandist, even likened it to speeches by Roosevelt, Churchill
and De Gaulle.
Mr Putin’s sermon had both messianic and defensive overtones. He
called Crimea a sacred place, rather like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
“It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, that
Grand Prince Vladimir was baptised before bringing Christianity to
Rus…this allows us to say that Crimea and Sevastopol have invaluable
civilisational and even sacred importance for Russia. And this is how we
will think of it—from now and forever.” Andrei Kuraev, a Russian
Orthodox deacon, noted in his blog that, although Mr Putin’s statement
had little basis in religion, it resembled Mussolini’s 1930s assertion
that “Ethiopia, from now and forever, belongs to Italy which has become
what it was during the time of Julius Caesar.”
In fact, remarkably few Russians are even aware of Vladimir’s baptism
in Crimea. For them the peninsula is linked to hedonism rather than
spirituality. It was a place for holidays, summer romances, state
sanatoriums and dachas. It is also at the heart of Russia’s
post-imperial nostalgia, and it was to this that Mr Putin was appealing.
Soviet ideology proclaimed a Utopian future; modern Russian ideology
focuses on the past. But the key ingredient of confrontation with
America remains the same. In his speech Mr Putin cast it as part of an
existential struggle for Russia’s survival as a sovereign state,
likening the West to Hitler who “set out to destroy Russia and push us
back beyond the Urals”.
Western sanctions, Mr Putin insisted, were a result not of his
meddling in Ukraine, but of America’s desire to weaken Russia: “If none
of that [ie, Ukraine] had ever happened, they would have come up with
some other excuse to try to contain Russia’s growing capabilities.” He
blamed the West for supporting Chechen insurgents who launched an attack
on Grozny on the eve of his speech. Russia, in this narrative, is not
an aggressor but a victim and defender of its interests and values
against America, which staged a coup in Ukraine in hopes of placing
missile defences there. Had Russia not moved into Crimea, it would have
become a military base for America.
The main reason why people believe propaganda is because it resonates
with their own feelings. As Mikhail Yampolsky, a cultural historian,
argues, the dominant feeling, exploited and fuelled by the Kremlin, is
of resentment: a sense of jealousy and hostility. People who are
deprived of any say in their own fate turn their resentment on an
imagined enemy, be it Ukrainian “fascists” or American imperialists.
Yet, just as with Soviet propaganda, which blamed outside enemies for
the country’s failures, resentment is vulnerable to reality. When
television pictures contradict people’s personal experience, they stop
working. “You can’t really ‘sell’ anything to people, that they don’t
wish to buy,” says one television boss. As the ratings show, Russians
are tiring of news about Western aggression. “People now want to watch
melodramas and fairy tales,” says the TV boss.
What most Russians really need is news about the unfolding economic
crisis that Mr Putin’s message from above largely ignored. The
continuing fall in the rouble, eroding living standards and a sharp rise
in food prices are worrying people far more than the fate of
separatists in Ukraine. Now that sanctions are starting to bite,
enthusiasm for war and isolation is diminishing fast. “Cognitive
consonance between propaganda and people’s self-feel does not withstand
external shocks,” says Mikhail Dmitriev, head of New Economic Growth, a
think-tank.
Over the past nine months opinion polls find that support for the
presence of Russian troops in Ukraine have fallen from 74% to 23%. Many
who dismissed Western sanctions as irrelevant now fret over Russia’s
isolation. “The sanctions are working,” says Lev Gudkov, head of the
Levada Centre, an independent pollster. The consumers who have emerged
in Russia’s big cities in the past decade are “not prepared to tighten
their belts,” he adds. This does not mean that such people are prepared
to sacrifice their consumption for civic freedoms, either.
Despite growing anxiety about living standards, Mr Putin’s popularity
rating remains at record levels. Yet, as the street protests in 2011
showed, this could change quickly. Polls show that the overall view of
the state as corrupt and uninterested in the people remains as strong as
ever. Mr Putin is aware of the dangers. To sustain his position, he
needs the West to start lifting sanctions so as to induce more economic
growth in Russia, but he also has to keep up the appearance of an enemy
both within and outside. To achieve this Mr Putin might yet surrender
the east of Ukraine while keeping Crimea. Novorossiya, an historic term
that Mr Putin invoked to justify Russia’s intervention in south-east
Ukraine, was notably absent from his state of the nation speech. He is
also hoping that he can entice businesses to invest more in Russia
without any political liberalisation.
Less than a week after his speech, in which Mr Putin proclaimed
“freedom” as a necessary condition for the country’s growth, Russian
civil institutions came under renewed pressure. The Moscow School of
Civic Education, one of Russia’s oldest NGOs, which campaigns for the
rule of law, was added to the list of foreign agents. Memorial, a noted
human-rights group, is under threat. And Andrei Sakharov’s centre is
being harassed. Yet while this will further undermine civil society, it
is unlikely to compensate most Russians for their declining incomes.
So far, it seems, Mr Putin’s preferred method of dealing with
Russia’s crisis is to talk the country out of it. His message from above
was meant to persuade the people and the elite that nothing terrible is
happening and that Russia can weather both the West’s sanctions and
falling oil prices. Yet Mr Putin looked tired and anxious, betraying a
lack of confidence. It was a sharp contrast with his question and answer
session of four year ago, when a young Russian from Tyumen, an oil town
in Siberia, asked him: “Is it true you are blessed with luck?” “Yes,”
Mr Putin answered confidently at the time.
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