The Invention of Russia

Epilogue: Aerial Combat

In May 2000, two months after Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president, Danila Bagrov, the main character of Russia’s most popular blockbuster Brat (Brother) returned to the screen in Brat 2. If Brat had been an instant hit, its sequel became an instant cult.

The film follows Danila and his brother as they travel to America to take revenge for the death of a friend, Konstantin, whose twin brother was being blackmailed by an American businessman who also deals in drugs and violent sex. Danila spares the life of the Russian banker who was responsible for Konstantin’s murder, and instead decides to track down the banker’s American partner and deliver justice. After killing a few Ukrainians and ‘niggers’ and saving a Russian prostitute, Dasha, the Russian Robin Hood shoots his way through the American’s office. ‘Tell me, American,’ says Danila, putting his gun on the table, ‘do you think power is in money? I think power is in truth. The one who has truth is stronger.’

Made according to the canon of a Hollywood thriller, the film discerned and accurately captured Russian national instincts, thoughts and prejudices. When Danila’s brother, before shooting a Ukrainian gangster, shouted: ‘You will answer to me for Sebastopol!’ audiences in Russia erupted in a slightly embarrassed laughter of recognition and approval. This and many other lines instantly turned into popular catchphrases. ‘Are you gangsters?’ an American woman asks Danila and Dasha as they barge into her flat. ‘No, we are Russians,’ Dasha, the Russian prostitute, replies.

The film had the charisma of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Danila shot people with the calm coolness of the character played by John Travolta. But it also made some serious points. It divided the world into ‘ours’ or ‘brothers’, and ‘others’ or ‘aliens’. ‘Brotherhood’ was established through blood rather than ideology or values.

Preparing to fight for justice, Danila buys his weapons in Moscow from a freak collector of Second World War trophies who dresses in an old Nazi coat and goes under the nickname ‘Fascist’. ‘Willing or not, we are all brothers,’ he says to Danila, who meekly tells him that his grandfather died in the war. ‘It happens,’ the ‘Fascist’ replies peacefully.

After years of futile search for a national idea and common values, Brat 2 provided a simple and highly enticing answer: Russians are strong because they are moral and have truth behind them, while Americans are weak and hypocritical because they are all about money. Russians who were sucked into America, like Konstantin’s twin brother, were corrupted morally. Just like the Soviet maxim, ‘the teaching of Marx is all-powerful, because it is right’, it required no further proof. Russians are better simply because they are.

At the end of the film Danila and Dasha fly back home. An airport official checking their passports tells the Russian woman in astonishment: ‘But your visa expired years ago! You will never be able to return to America.’ By way of reply, she gives him the finger. The closing credits of the film were accompanied by the soundtrack of ‘Goodbye, America’, sung by a children’s choir.

The film was a product of art, not ideology. It did not tell people what they should think, rather it told them what they thought. It was not made to order by some official body. It was made to order by the public and appealed to some deeply rooted sense of injustice and humiliation that demanded satisfaction. Directed by Alexei Balabanov, the film had the strength, clarity and directness of a powerful beam that projected the country’s future. Danila did not live long enough to see it.

In 2002, two years after the film was made, Sergei Bodrov, the actor who played Danila, died in a freak accident. He was filming in the Caucasus when a block of ice fell from Mount Dzhimara and dislodged a glacier that moved down the ravine, burying the film crew alive under the mud and boulders it brought with it. A decade later some Russians retrospectively imputed symbolism to his tragic end, as though it had contained a warning about the dangerous forces that Danila had set into motion. At the time it was made, however, the country was in the grip of a postmodern malaise, in which nothing was real, particularly politics, and the film was not taken as the prophecy that it turned out to be.

One man who was in charge of constructing Russia’s political life in the 2000s was Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s political adviser, who created a system of make-believe that dominated the country’s political reality. Surkov had trained as a director of mass theatrical events and had worked as a PR man for the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, before moving to the Kremlin administration where he occupied the office that had belonged to the chief Soviet ideologists. Unlike his predecessors, however, he had no ideology. He was a master of an ‘as if’ world that consisted of simulacra and manipulations.

On the face of it, Russia had all the trappings of democracy: it had political parties and elections. But most parties were controlled by the Kremlin and elections – which are supposed to be a mechanism of orderly transfer of power – turned into a mechanism of retaining power. It worked like a house of mirrors. Those trying to challenge the Kremlin ended up fighting their own distorted reflection.

In 2003 Surkov set up and ushered into parliament a fake left-wing nationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) led by the demagogue and populist Dmitry Rogozin, who campaigned against immigrants and oligarchs. The party got 9 per cent in the parliamentary elections. Putin and his United Russia Party were marketed as the only alternative to the dark forces of nationalism.

Behind all these political games, which Surkov called ‘sovereign democracy’, was not a vision of Russia’s future or an ambition to restore an empire, but something far more primitive: personal enrichment, comforts and power. Money was the only ideology the Kremlin subscribed to. Unlike Danila, who believed that truth was more powerful than money, the Kremlin believed there was no such thing as ‘truth’ and that strength was in money, that there was no such thing as values and that the only difference between Russian and Western officials was that Western ones could hide their cynicism better. If the new Russian elite had money, it could buy itself a Western lifestyle and the loyalty of the population, without bothering with all those ‘values’ which it considered to be no more than just wrapping.

Whereas Yeltsin’s era bred the oligarch, Putin’s introduced a far more dangerous type – the bureaucrat-entrepreneur who used the powers of the state for personal enrichment. ‘Entrepreneurs’ who work for the security services or the police have done especially well, because they have the ultimate competitive advantage: a licence for violence. The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the appropriation of his vast oil firm Yukos was the biggest coup these men achieved and marked a turning point for the country, from one where universal human values were at least proclaimed to be at the centre of everything, to one where the state was proclaimed the top priority and people acting in its name had complete power over any individual, however rich or powerful. To justify their racketeering, Putin’s people portrayed themselves as great ‘patriots’ who served the interest of the state. And since they were the state, helping themselves to its riches seemed only fair. The public, which resented the oligarchs, approved.

For all his authoritarianism, Putin derived his legitimacy from popular support and while he did not believe in fair elections, he paid careful attention to public opinion.

Opinion polls in 2004 showed that the number of Russians who considered themselves no different from people in other countries had fallen, while the opinion that Russia was surrounded by enemies had grown stronger. ‘It is as though an invisible wall still counterpoises everything that is “ours” to everything “foreign”,’ wrote sociologist Yuri Levada.¹ One of Russia’s oldest ideological constructions – the ‘besieged fortress’ – was also one of the most durable ones.

As a professional KGB operative, Putin ‘recruited’ people by telling them what they expected to hear. He told his core, traditionalist electorate that the state was the only provider of public good and that it was surrounded by enemies. But he also had a message for the middle class: don’t involve yourself in politics and enjoy life while we, in the Kremlin, deal with the dark and uneducated plebs which have neither desire nor taste for Western democracy.

While the Kremlin pumped people with anti-Western tripe, its close friends, who had enriched themselves, shopped in Milan, holidayed in France, kept their money in Switzerland and sent their children to the top private schools in England. Money and corruption, many thought, would prevent the Kremlin from nationalist ideology and serious confrontation with the West. High oil prices allowed Putin to satisfy all: his friends became billionaires, the traditionalist paternalistically minded electorate got wage increases, while the middle class enjoyed low taxes and personal freedoms. Although money was the main mechanism of ruling the country, it was supplemented with entertainment: the show of Russia’s resurgence, be it a football match or a war in Georgia, was enthusiastically received by all.

By the end of the decade the middle class had grown to 25 per cent of the population and nearly 40 per cent of the workforce – and those proportions were higher in big cities. In less than ten years Russia had transformed into a mass consumer society. Most of what it consumed, however, was imported. Russians in big cities drove the same cars, wore the same clothes, bought the same iPads, ate the same food, saw the same films, worked in the same open-plan offices and hung out in the same stylish bars as their counterparts in the West. Moscow acquired all the trimmings of a normal European city, but something was missing: a sense of security and justice, respect for one’s achievements, the rule of law, property rights and healthcare – and none of these could be imported.

After the 2009 financial crisis, which exposed the fundamental weakness of Putin’s economic model, the middle class became restless and started to talk about ‘shoving off’ from the country. This was not so much a statement of intention but a sign of an approaching crisis. The frustration was exacerbated by a false expectation created by the Kremlin among the Russian public. In 2008, in order to circumvent a constitutional rule that prevented him from serving for more than two consecutive terms as Russia’s president, Putin made himself prime minister by installing the obedient sidekick and former lawyer Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s president. This was another of the Kremlin’s simulacra. Medvedev talked about modernization and freedom, tweeted and recorded video blogs creating an illusion of change. The purpose of this illusion, however, was to leave everything intact and allow Putin to reclaim the title of the president four years later. But when Putin broke the illusion of change by saying that he would simply retake his job as president, making Medvedev prime minister, the frustration of the middle class boiled over. Medvedev’s announcement that the ‘job swap’ had been planned all along added insult to injury. Many Russians felt duped and humiliated. By returning to the Kremlin, Putin was moving against the flow of time.

In December 2011, after the Kremlin rigged parliamentary elections, tens of thousands of Muscovites took to the streets. It was the biggest protest since the early 1990s and it marked not a revolution, but the transformation of the middle class from consumers to citizens. They demanded to be treated with the same respect by the state as they received as consumers. It seemed like a carnival rather than an uprising. People wore white ribbons and carried white balloons with the slogan ‘If you blow us out again we will burst’. There were students, businessmen, journalists, pensioners, teachers and managers of different backgrounds and views. Some sported ski jackets previously worn on European slopes; others wore Russian felt boots and sheepskin coats.

Putin’s rating started to slide and the trust in the media wobbled. Surkov’s system of imitations was clearly failing. People who came out on the streets were real. Worse still, Putin with his PR stunts, which included his flying with cranes or diving for (planted) amphorae, evoked laughter. He had turned into a butt of jokes – just like the old Soviet leaders. He was out of fashion.

Putin was angry and rattled. He likened the protesters to the tribe of unruly monkeys from Kipling’s The Jungle Book and ridiculed their ribbons and balloons by comparing them to condoms. The people who came out on the streets chanting ‘Russia without Putin’ were once his supporters and owed everything they had to his ten-year rule.

The protest was driven not by opposition politicians – they were largely caught by surprise – but by civil activists, journalists, writers and Internet bloggers. These were the ideologists of the protests who set its agenda and articulated its demands and slogans. They spread the ideas through social networks, mainly Facebook.

Afisha, a popular fashion and entertainment magazine that set the fashion and tastes of Moscow’s creative class and which constructed the image of Moscow as a European city, became one of the voices of the protest movement. Its young editors – the children of the Soviet-era intelligentsia – found themselves in the same position as their parents had done thirty years earlier.

Like the intelligentsia of the 1970s that had been fostered in closed research institutes, Moscow’s creative class grew up in the folds of an oil-rich authoritarian state. For much of the 2000s this creative class eschewed politics for the make-believe world of fashion. Now politics became the fashion. Russia’s most fashion-sensitive television journalist, Leonid Parfenov, who had ridiculed Evgeny Kiselev for climbing the barricades a decade earlier, addressed his audience of successful, Westernized professionals frustrated by the lack of prospects for personal fulfilment in Russia from the stage of a street rally.

What the middle class wanted was institutions and lifestyle, not another political leader or a revolution. In fact, they mistrusted all political parties and organizations. They were happy to organize themselves into civil-society groups, and monitor the elections, but they were not prepared to delegate their power to any party or politician, including Alexei Navalny, a popular anti-corruption blogger turned politician who galvanized the protest in the first place.

A young, charismatic and blue-eyed lawyer in jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he was a Russian version of an American-style grass-roots politician whose style and tactics were inspired by The Wire, an American television drama. He used the Internet to circumvent the state monopoly over television and turned his social media followers into real crowds.

Navalny was born in 1974 into a military family and grew up in the semi-closed garrison towns around Moscow. He was an ardent supporter of Chubais and the team of radical market reformers of the early 1990s and rejected them as ‘failures’ in the 2010s. He represented the first generational shift in Russia since Putin’s generation seized power. For all their differences – in age, background, status and values – Navalny struck at the same two issues as Yeltsin did in the 1980s: corruption (the unfair privileges of the party bosses in Yeltsin’s days) and nationalism (independence from the rest of the empire). Navalny was no liberal and his appeal was far broader than the creative middle class. He positioned himself as a European-style nationalist and took part in their marches against immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Russia, he insisted, must shake off its imperial legacy and build a nation-state. He played on popular resentment of Chechnya, now ruled by Putin’s protégé Ramzan Kadyrov, formerly a rebel fighter.

But his main line of attack was the Kremlin’s kleptocracy and lies. He exposed the riches of Putin’s elite, published photographs of their palaces and the names of the English schools where they sent their children. He described the Kremlin nomenclatura not as dark villains or even gangsters, but as parasites who had hijacked power in the country and used it for personal enrichment. He branded the ruling United Russia Party as ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ – thereby deliberately lowering the tone. Despite the Kremlin’s tight control over the television, the term spread throughout the country like a rash.

The protest in the cities started to resonate within the provinces. The fastest decline in Putin’s support was among poorer people over fifty-five years of age who felt Putin had not honoured his promises, and who were tired of waiting. They were also aggrieved by the impudence of United Russia Party bosses who grabbed land and built large mansions. It was losing legitimacy across different social strata and risking a broader discontent. The revolution was happening not in the streets but in people’s heads, and that could not be stopped by the police force.

To dissuade ordinary people from joining their protests, Russian security services orchestrated clashes between protesters and the police, who threw ordinary and mostly innocent protesters into jail. But repression was limited in scale. Using real force against protesters as China had done in 1989 would have made things worse. Violence would have deprived the Kremlin of the remains of its legitimacy. Putin needed to defeat protesters ideologically. He had to change the narrative of the country and trump the political agenda set by the leaders of the protest movement.

Putin countered the idea of Russia as a modern, European-style nation-state by inciting traditionalist values of the state and the church. By prosecuting Pussy Riot, the young women punk singers who performed obscenely in front of the altar of Russia’s main cathedral, banning the promotion of homosexuality and barring the adoption of Russian children by American couples, the Kremlin was able to present the liberals, who protested against all this, as a bunch of homosexual, blasphemous mercenaries ready to sell Russian children. Having lost the loyalty of the middle class, Putin tried to cement his core, paternalistic and traditionalist electorate. He moved towards a personalized Franco-style rule, sidelining the elites whom he deemed opportunistic and unreliable, and appealing directly to the people.

He turned to anti-Americanism as the only ideological tenet that had survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia no longer aspired to be like the West, or sought its approval and recognition. Instead, it trumpeted its difference. Maxim Shevchenko, a TV journalist and a Kremlin-approved crusader against liberalism, argued in a newspaper column headlined ‘WE ARE NOT EUROPE? AND THANK GOD FOR THAT!’ that ‘Russia and the West are at war… There is a growing feeling that most Western people belong to a different humanoid group from us; that we are only superficially similar, but fundamentally different.’²

Putin’s tactic worked, but only partly: it discredited protesters and dampened the mood for coming out on the streets, but it did not boost his own rating. The mistrust of the Kremlin and its rhetoric seemed too deep. And whereas the protest in 2011 was about rules and elections, by 2013 it became more overtly political. Navalny attacked the regime not because of the way it counted votes, but because it was corrupt and morally bankrupt and therefore illegitimate. Putin responded in kind. He defended his rent-seeking, crooked, post-Soviet system of governance by claiming moral superiority over the West. ‘We see how many Euro-Atlantic countries are in effect turning away from their roots, including their Christian values,’ Putin said. Russia, by contrast, ‘has always been a state civilization held together by the Russian people, the Russian language, Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church’.³

Words had to be backed up with actions. A crisis in Ukraine, which in February 2014 turned into a revolution, presented both a threat and an opportunity. Revolution in Kiev, Russian state television claimed, was part of America’s plan to encroach on and emasculate Russia and to throw it back behind the Urals. The Kremlin had to fight back. The basic idea of the propaganda was the same as it was during the August 2008 war with Georgia, but the intensity and scale was unlike anything seen before.

In preparation for its offensive against Ukraine, the Kremlin cleared out the last pockets of independent media in Russia, including popular Internet news sites, personal blogs and the liberal cable TV channel, TV Rain. To be effective, propaganda had to be total. Dmitry Kiselev, the main anchor on the Russia Channel, run by Oleg Dobrodeev who had once set up NTV’s news, was put to work.

Wearing a tight-fitting suit, he paced up and down the studio, operatically gesticulating, squinting his eyes and accentuating his words, drilling the message home with a sadistic smile. ‘Here are fighting brigades,’ he said of the middle-class Kiev protesters who came out under EU flags. ‘There is fear and emptiness in their eyes; and here they are preparing food, a dish for gourmands: a piece of lard fried on the side of a rusty tin.’⁴ Kiselev’s weekly analytical news programme was close in style to Orwell’s two minutes’ hate, stretched to an hour. As part of their Soviet-era military service, many Russian television executives had been trained in ‘special propaganda’, which sought to ‘demoralize the enemy army and establish control over the occupied territory’.

In 1999 Kiselev had moralized about journalistic ethics: ‘People will, of course, swallow anything. But if we keep lowering the bar and drop morals we will, one day, find ourselves splashing in the dirt like pigs and eating each other, along with this dirt, and then we would not be able to sink any lower.’⁵ Kiselev’s programmes have now reached that state.

The unexpected fall of Viktor Yanukovych, the authoritarian and thuggish president of Ukraine, allowed Putin to execute an audacious plan long harboured in his mind – the annexation of Crimea. It provided the same miraculous ‘short-circuit’ effect as Putin’s response to the bombing of the apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999. It turned Putin into a historic figure who had revised post-Soviet history and had succeeded in returning to the country, suffering from phantom pain, a limb it had lost in 1991. Corruption – the main subject only two years earlier – receded into the background.

Putin’s rating jumped from 60 per cent to 80 per cent. Many of the affluent Russians who had protested against Putin a few years earlier moved to his side. Unmet hopes of personal fulfilment were assuaged by a symbolic victory for the state. The annexation of Crimea was a substitute for modernization. It gave people a sense of purpose without their having to make any effort. Only 3 per cent of Russians disapproved of the annexation. Crimea has long been the nerve centre of Russia’s imperial nostalgia and its annexation had been an idée fixe of Russian nationalists ever since the end of the Soviet Union. They now celebrated the triumph of their idea.

Announcing the annexation of Crimea in the Kremlin’s gilded Hall of St George on 18 March 2014, Putin repeated, almost verbatim, the words which twenty years earlier were printed in the nationalist newspaper Den’ by Igor Shafarevich, one of the ideologists of Russian nationalism. ‘Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride. This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized… The graves of Russian soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian empire are also in Crimea.’⁶ While it had been Prince Vladimir who was baptized in Crimea, it was President Vladimir who brought it back into Russia’s fold. In October 1993 Russian nationalists had tried to storm Ostankino television centre to air their ideas. Now these ideas were articulated by the president of Russia and broadcast by all central television channels without a single shot being fired.

In fact, very few Russians were even aware of Vladimir’s baptism in Crimea. For them, the peninsula was linked to hedonism rather than spirituality. It was a place for holidays, summer romances, state sanatoria and dachas, but to make the annexation look legitimate, Putin had to ground it in Christian mythology. The true symbolism of the annexation of Crimea was that Putin was reversing the course of history and elevating Russians to their past imperial glory – something that the nationalists and communists could only dream about.

However, the red–brown coalition that had formed in the early 1990s had undergone a change. Communists were dumped along the way. Nina Andreeva, who wrote the infamous letter ‘I Cannot Forsake Principles’, today lives in a shoebox-sized studio flat near St Petersburg, studying the works of Lenin and ‘commanding’ the Central Committee of the All Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks – a party that consists of her and a few other pensioners. The old communist Viktor Anpilov, who led the siege of Ostankino, nestles on the outskirts of Moscow in a basement that reeks of body odour and sour cabbage, surrounded by portraits of Stalin and old Soviet flags.

The new coalition emerged in 2013 – between nationalists and the party of ‘crooks and thieves’. The annexation of Crimea, performed by an extraordinary sleight of hand, cemented their union. Even Alexander Nevzorov, Russia’s first television stuntman who experimented with Russian fascism in the 1990s but became ‘disillusioned’ by the idea, cringed: ‘If Crimea was taken from a strong, rich and brave country, it would have been an honest and noble victory. But it was taken from a wounded, bleeding and motionless country, and that was looting,’ he wrote.⁷ Yet it was the television techniques that Nevzorov had used in the 1980s which allowed Russia to take Crimea without a battle.

Events on the ground unfolded according to a script created by television, which ran something like this: the Ukrainian revolution brought to power America-sponsored neo-Nazis. The descendants of those who had collaborated with Hitler during the Second World War now vandalized Soviet war memorials and threatened to annihilate the Russian language and history in Crimea. The Russian population of Crimea turned to Vladimir Putin for help, which he duly provided. The plot was enacted on 27 February when the Russian military seized airports, government buildings and broadcasters within hours, blockaded Ukrainian military bases and installed its marionettes in government.

Russian soldiers were portrayed as liberators, rather than occupiers. Videos were uploaded on the Internet showing a Russian soldier in Crimea holding a small child in his arms – a reference to the giant statue of the Soviet Liberator Soldier erected in Berlin in 1949. In Sebastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, local people celebrated their liberation. There was only one thing missing: the enemy.

While the military were at work, Moscow PR men, coordinated by Vladislav Surkov, turned former local crooks and racketeers into the ‘freedom-seeking government’ of Crimea. One of these PR men was Alexander Borodai, the son of an orthodox nationalist philosopher, who had participated in the nationalists’ uprising against Yeltsin in 1993 while studying philosophy at Moscow State University. He was particularly interested in the ideology of the ultra-nationalists who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and had strong sympathy for (and influence over) the rise of fascism in Europe.

As a nineteen-year-old in 1992, Borodai went to fight in Transnistria to defend ethnic Russians against Moldovan ‘fascists’ and a year later turned up at the White House in Moscow. He claims to have led some twenty armed men in the siege of the Ostankino television centre in October 1993. He managed to escape from Ostankino unscathed and continued his studies while also writing for the nationalist Zavtra newspaper. But he made money by consulting private oil companies, both Russian and foreign. He epitomized the union between the party of ‘crooks and thieves’ and the nationalists. While Putin believed he was using the nationalists, the nationalists were convinced that they were using Putin. Crimea was just the start. Russia also planned to create a protectorate in the east of Ukraine that would stop the country drifting towards Europe and the West.

Borodai’s job was to help stir the situation in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine in the hope that it would set off a chain reaction of separatism in the east of the country. They called it ‘the Russian Spring’, analogous to the Arab Spring. Putin promoted the idea of the ‘Russian World’ and Novorossiya (New Russia), an historic term that described the southern part of the Russian Empire that contained the territory of modern Ukraine, including Odessa, though, ironically, not Donetsk, the capital of the region. To help Novorossiya into being, Russia funnelled money, weapons and agents provocateurs into Donetsk, helping a ragtag of thugs, opportunists and jobless to take over the local administration, which quickly turned into an unruly and smelly squat rather than a revolutionary headquarters.

But while the region smouldered, it did not burst into flame. To set off a big fire, a generous helping of petrol and a firelighter were needed. Enter Igor Girkin, an old friend of Borodai, who arrived in Crimea shortly before the annexation. Girkin, who went under the pseudonym Strelkov (Shooter), first fought in Transnistria in the early 1990s, then in Bosnia – on the side of the Serbian army – and finally in Chechnya, where he was responsible for the ‘disappearances’ (secret executions) of several alleged rebels. He claimed to have served in the Russian security services. Far more important, though, was his passion for reconstructing past wars. A graduate of the Institute of History and Archives, he belonged to a group of aficionados who dressed in historic costumes and staged theatrical re-enactments of famous battles. Strelkov was particularly keen on the Russian Civil War of 1917–22, in which he would dress as a White Army officer. The scripts of his most recent military historic games concerned the actions of the Russian volunteer army in the south-west of Ukraine in 1920. In the summer of 2014, Strelkov got the chance to re-enact the Russian Civil War with real weapons.

In April 2014 Strelkov, with a group of men backed by the Russian military, stormed the town of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine. The first thing they did was to seize the television transmitters. Ukrainian channels were taken off the air and replaced by Russian state channels. Within a few days fierce fighting was raging across the region.

Had it not been for Russian television, the war probably would not have started. The notion of television as a weapon lost its metaphorical sense. It was the real weapon causing real destruction.[1]

Wars have been televised before. But never before have wars been conducted and territory gained primarily by means of television and propaganda. The role of the military was to support the picture. The Russian media have not just distorted reality – they invented it, using fake footage, doctoring quotes, using actors (sometimes the same actor would impersonate both the victim and an aggressor on different channels). ‘Our psyche is set up in such a way that only an artistic form can explain the time [we live in],’ Ernst once said.

On 12 July 2014, Channel One ‘interviewed’ a Ukrainian woman with a heart-wrenching story. The woman said she had witnessed the public execution of a three-year-old boy, who was crucified in the crowded main square of Slavyansk when Ukrainian forces retook it. She provided the gory details: the Ukrainian ‘animals’ – descendants of the fascist collaborators during the Second World War – cut into the little boy’s flesh and made him suffer for an hour before he died. The woman added that the boy’s mother was then tied to a tank and dragged along until she too was dead. The story was a fake. By planting stories about children crucified or tortured by Ukrainians, Russian propaganda deployed the same time-tested mechanism of arousing hatred as the one used in Jewish pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Russian television worked like a psychoactive agent, a hallucinogen. As Nevzorov wrote, ‘Patriotic hallucinations are aggressive, hysterical and persistent… One must remember the ideological drug [of patriotism] is injected into the country’s veins for one main purpose: so that, at the first click of the fingers of any idiot in military stripes, crowds of boys voluntarily agree to turn into burnt and rotting meat.’⁸

The point of the information war unleashed by Russia was not to convince someone of Russia’s point of view, but to ignite the fighting and draw the civilian population into the conflict, and this is what it achieved. Many of those who joined the fight were jobless and disenfranchised, some were paid pittances in illegal coal mines, many were former Soviet soldiers who felt abandoned by their Soviet motherland when the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian television exploited their weaknesses and lured them into a fight for a country that had ceased to exist nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Russia’s ‘hybrid’ war lifted them from their miserable, anonymous and hopeless existence onto the television screen, told them they were victims and heroes, provided them with weapons and pointed to an enemy. Russian propaganda also mobilized thousands of Russian volunteers who flocked to take part in a bloody battle against ‘fascism’ in Ukraine.

Those who produce Russian propaganda are not driven by the idea of the notional ‘Russian World’ or empire rebuilding – they are too pragmatic for that. They acted not out of conviction or a sense of reality but out of a disrespect for it. The hallucinations they produced took on a life of their own and started to behave in an unscripted way, unaware they were only part of a television show. Five days after the airing of the story about the crucified boy, the Russian-backed separatists brought down Malaysian flight MH 17, killing all 298 passengers on board.

For the vast majority of Russians, however, the war in Ukraine was just a show provided by television. For most of 2014, news programmes, often twice as long as usual, were entirely dedicated to Ukraine, as though life in Russia itself stopped. The war was ‘serialized’ into hour-long episodes filled with blood, violence and suspense. News programmes used cinematic devices and special effects: clips, dramatic flashbacks, montage, music. Television channels competed for the largest share of the audience (and advertising market) by selling the war drama, which they had staged. For the first time in Russian history, news programmes consistently topped the viewing tables, overtaking soap operas and serials. As ever, Channel One and its Vremya came first.

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:

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.