The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 16

WHAT IS RUSSIAN FOR FAKE NEWS?

For many years, political and media discourse has been founded on an inviolable distinction between fact and opinion: as C. P. Scott, a famous British newspaperman, pointed out, comment is free, but facts are sacred. In the post-truth universe of the twenty-first century, that distinction has been trampled underfoot.

Nowadays, many politicians and journalists treat facts as if they were as inherently malleable as their own personal opinions, fair game to be twisted and moulded to fit the case they wish to make. Donald Trump lived in a different truth-universe from everyone else, believing only the things he wanted to believe and using all methods to force others into agreeing with him. The issue is not the correctness or otherwise of political decisions, but the way that facts are shaped to communicate with society and impose specific views.

But Vladimir Putin trumps even Trump. Putin peddles falsehoods to the Russian people, insisting all the while that his lies are true, that black – despite much evidence to the contrary – is white. When people have the effrontery to stand up for the truth, the Kremlin shows no mercy. A woman whose son died in the Kursk submarine disaster of 2000 tried to criticise the inefficiency of the rescue mission at a Foreign Ministry press conference, only to be rendered unconscious by a hypodermic syringe plunged into her arm in full view of the assembled media.

Disagreeing with the Kremlin’s version of events is dangerously unrewarding. It behoves the West and the democratic opposition to stand up for those who dare to speak the truth. And that applies not only to politicians, but to the Western media, too.

Since I have been living in London, I have been impressed by British television news. The BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky strive for objectivity and impartiality. The BBC is attacked by politicians from both the left and the right, which suggests to me that its reporting maintains a good standard of balance. Despite being owned by the Fox magnate Rupert Murdoch until 2018, Sky News rejects the political bias that has become the calling card of so many broadcasters abroad. In the US, for example, there has been a marked radicalisation of TV networks, with CNN openly supporting the left and Fox equally siding with the right. This has led US politics to become damagingly polarised and people’s prejudices entrenched to extremes. I regret that Ronald Reagan dropped the ‘fairness’ requirement that up until 1987 demanded balance from the broadcast networks. Now that social networks permit people to close themselves off from alternative opinions and live within a monolithic group, sometimes sharing the most radical and often patently erroneous convictions, this is a question that must be seriously reconsidered.

But in Putin’s Russia, the situation is much worse. In the US, there is at least market competition, which ensures most political views are represented by at least one channel. In Russia, the state has a de facto monopoly of the mass media, which guarantees it also has a ‘monopoly of truth’. Boris Yeltsin allowed a brief interlude of freedom in the 1990s, but Vladimir Putin is replacing glasnost with a return to Soviet times. The Kremlin has created a dominant information stream that wages an aggressive and permanent information war. The few remaining independent media outlets are harassed and restricted by the authorities.

A popular joke of the past couple of years in Russia asks, ‘What is the Russian for fake news?’ with the answer being, ‘News.’ It has become a favourite among those who despair at the mendacity of Vladimir Putin’s state media and communications machine. But the truth is more nuanced. People in Russia know what is going on. News is distorted, but it is not always hidden. The insidious thing is the way that Putin’s propaganda operation has got inside people’s heads and the facility with which it has learned how to make people believe in presumptions. If all the available sources of news keep telling you that a fact should be viewed in a certain way, the majority of us will agree that that is the way it should be viewed.

Psychologists have shown that people are relatively easily persuaded to adapt their opinions to the general view. A series of experiments in the 1950s by the US researcher Solomon Asch investigated the phenomenon of conformity, the process by which a person’s opinions are influenced by those of groups. Asch found that people are willing to ignore reality – to disregard the evidence of their own eyes and give an answer they know to be incorrect – in order to conform to the rest of the group. He concluded that individuals have a compulsion to follow the unspoken rules and behaviours of the society in which they live, driven by an innate fear of appearing different, or by a desire to belong.

The Kremlin’s propaganda machine is adept at exploiting those fears and desires, and we in the democratic opposition must learn to combat them. Freedom of speech and societal openness have been, and remain, the most important elements of democracy. We know from psychology that social support is an important tool in reducing pernicious conformity; if an individual knows that others in her social group are willing to resist, she too is more likely to do so. Our task is to provide that support, to furnish the factual reassurances that will lead to a critical mass of citizens willing to reject the Kremlin’s manipulation. Asch suggests that conformity decreases when people are able to respond privately, without the external pressures of the social domain. This has had the perverse effect that many Russians pretend to accept the ‘official’ view of things in their public life – to avoid opprobrium or appearing different – while remaining fully conscious that the official version is a lie. As the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz has pointed out, it can be an uncomfortable mental task to live this double life of knowing and pretending not to know. It is a conflict summed up in another Russian joke about two KGB men who are having a drink after work. The first one, Dmitry, says to his friend, ‘Tell me, Ivan. What do you really think about this regime we live under?’ Ivan replies, ‘The same as you do,’ after which Dmitry thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘In that case, it is my duty to arrest you.’

Forcing people to believe in lies is not new in Russia. Joseph Stalin rewrote reality on an epic scale, bigging up his own importance by excising former rivals from the historical record, airbrushing their faces from photographs. ‘Who controls the past controls the future,’ wrote George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; ‘who controls the present controls the past.’ The Bolsheviks regarded history as a resource to be reinvented at will to suit the Kremlin’s present objectives and justify its promise of an ideal socialist future. ‘Communism has made the future certain,’ ran another joke, ‘but the past completely unpredictable.’

Stalin was punctilious in telling Soviet historians what to write about him. He dictated his own entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the official version of the country’s history. ‘Everyone knows the shattering force of Stalin’s logic,’ Stalin modestly opined, ‘the crystal clarity of his intellect, his steel will, his love for the people. His modesty, simplicity, sensitivity and mercilessness to enemies are well known to everyone…’

Putin is the latest Russian autocrat to mould history to suit himself. In February 2013, he ordered Russian historians to come up with guidelines for new school history books that suggested a portrayal of the past – and the present – more in line with his version of autocracy. Part of his motivation was the fear that gripped him following the widescale protests of 2011 and 2012 and the need to shore up his image before the impending presidential election. But it was also a vanity project. The guidelines were to make no criticism of the president, no reference to any protests against him and no mention of the confrontation over his crushing of Yukos. ‘It was a simple political order,’ wrote the independent Russian historian, Vladimir Ryzhkov, ‘to justify the ruling authorities, to explain that they are doing everything right’. The guidelines reaffirmed the myth that Russia needs strong autocratic rule to protect the nation against its foes and credited Putin with providing it. ‘During his first and second presidential terms, Vladimir Putin managed to stabilise the situation in the country and strengthen the “vertical of power”,’ the guidelines conclude, adding that Putin had fostered stability, economic growth and ‘the restoration of Russia’s position in international affairs’.

The man Putin engaged to implement his revision of history was Sergei Naryshkin, a former Kremlin chief of staff and senior representative of the president’s own United Russia party. Like so many of Putin’s enforcers, Naryshkin had been with him at the KGB Academy and would go on to become the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. As the head of the Orwellian-sounding ‘Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests’, Naryshkin was instrumental in moves to whitewash some of the most shameful aspects of Russia’s past, including Soviet cooperation with the Nazis and the treatment of ‘liberated’ peoples after war. Another of Putin’s Siloviki advisers, the FSB director, Alexander Bortnikov, made clear that the rehabilitation of Stalin was official Kremlin policy when he declared that ‘a significant proportion’ of the executions carried in the Stalinist purges were justified, because they were based on ‘objective’ evidence. Leading academics at the Russian Academy of Sciences warned against the dangers of such baseless revisionism; the Kremlin was rewriting history that it considered ‘detrimental to Russia’s interests’ by besmirching the memory of millions of innocent people murdered by a tyrannical regime.

Glorifying the Soviet past and refusing to express regret for the crimes of the Stalin era appeal to many, mostly elderly, Russians, who wish to look back with pride on the years of Soviet rule. By reviving the Soviet anthem, reinstating Soviet-style military parades and reintroducing Soviet tactics against political dissent, he has won the gratitude of those who felt themselves demeaned by the post- perestroika mood of repentance for past crimes; but to do so, he has had to distort the facts.

At a televised meeting with history teachers in 2007, Putin issued instructions for how his new version of the past should be taught to the young generation whose beliefs will determine Russia’s future. ‘There is nothing in our history for Russians to be ashamed of,’ he told the audience. ‘No one must be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt upon us.’ The responsibility of teachers was to make students ‘proud of the Motherland’. To help them with their task of creating this alternative history – one which overlooks unfortunate episodes in favour of Russia’s achievements – the presidential administration produced a handbook of instructions. A Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006; A Manual for History Teachers explains that Stalin’s purges of the 1930s were necessary because of the need to prepare for war with Germany, while the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991 was a historical tragedy. ‘The Soviet Union was not a democracy,’ the handbook somewhat understatedly concedes, ‘but it was an example to millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.’ The reigns of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, in which the Soviet vassal states of Eastern Europe and then the Soviet republics were granted independence, are presented as a cause for regret, while Putin himself is lauded for pledging to restore Russia’s ‘greatness’.

A pensioner sheds a tear at Stalin’s tomb in Moscow on the 63rd anniversary of his death

In seeking to deploy the past as validation for his own brand of autocracy, Putin is following in Stalin’s footsteps. Stalin commissioned his 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course in order to enshrine a (fake) version of history, in which he played the central role in the 1917 revolutions, while other Bolsheviks deferred to his leadership. To underline the veracity of the Short Course, Stalin obliged the Soviet historical establishment to declare him a great historian, whose judgements were infallible. Putin, too, has set himself up as a scholar of history. At a press conference in December 2013, he praised two historical figures who embody many of the attributes to which he aspires. ‘What is the difference between Cromwell and Stalin?’ he asked the audience, before demonstrating his historical expertise by answering his own question. ‘I’ll tell you. There is none. Our liberal politicians think these men were both bloody dictators. But Cromwell was actually a smart man who [like Stalin] played a controversial part in history. And his statue is still standing in London. Nobody is tearing it down. We, too, should treat our history with that sort of care.’ The comparison is deeply stretched, and Putin’s historiography is alarmingly selective, but his purpose is clear. By excusing Stalin’s excesses and rescuing his memory, Putin is placing himself in a tradition of strongman autocrats who saved their nation from chaos.

It is not a narrative that chimes with everyone’s view of the past. The human rights group, Memorial, was founded in the Gorbachev years to document the crimes of the Stalin era, honour the victims of political repression, and use education and remembrance to ensure that such abuses never happen again. But to Putin, Memorial was an inconvenience, an unwelcome voice pointing out that historical reality cannot be erased simply to suit the wishes of today’s leadership. Instead of listening to the message, Putin attacked the messenger. In December 2008, Memorial’s St Petersburg offices were raided by the security forces and archives chronicling hundreds of thousands of individual cases of people repressed or murdered under Stalin were confiscated. Memorial’s director, Irina Flinge, said they had been targeted because their work contradicted the ethos of ‘Putinism’, a strident nationalism that draws strength from the autocratic past. ‘The official line now’, Flinge concluded, ‘is that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country. And if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims … Russians are told to be proud of their history, not ashamed, so those investigating and cataloguing the atrocities of the past are no longer welcome.’ In December 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the closure of Memorial for breaching recently promulgated laws on ‘foreign agents’ – a catchall instrument of censorship to which I will return later.

By rewriting history, Putin wishes to create a narrative of continuity between the eras of tsarism, communism and the present day, in which Russia appears as an imperial power, equalling and rivalling the West, exerting strength and influence across the globe. That would allow him to place his own imperial dreams in a historical context of heroic expansionism, a narrative attractive to the conservative elements of the Russian electorate and bolstered by the reinvention of the external enemy myth. In the past, it was the Mongols, Napoleon or Hitler; today it is once again the West that fills the role of menacing foe, in the face of which Russian society must forget its differences and unite behind its strongman leader.

More recent times have also been rewritten. The 1990s experiment with market democracy is portrayed by Putin’s textbooks as a modern ‘Time of Troubles’, in which chaos, poverty and violence outweighed any benefits; while the era of communist rule is remembered for its subsidised prices, free housing and education, rather than the political repression, shortages of consumer goods and persecution of free speech. Deploring the ‘wild’ liberalism of the Yeltsin years allows Putin to make the leap to a blanket condemnation of democracy and pluralism, while the mirage of a glorious autocratic past helps him silence dissent, political opponents and critics.

When, in 2019, the European Parliament issued a resolution condemning the Kremlin for ‘whitewashing’ the facts of Soviet collaboration with the Nazis, Putin responded angrily. In a lengthy essay published on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, he defended the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Moscow and Berlin agreed they would invade and divide up Eastern Europe between them. The real guilt, Putin wrote, belongs to the Western powers who acquiesced to Hitler’s demands to annex the Czech Sudetenland. ‘Britain, as well as France … sought to direct the attention of the Nazis eastward so that Germany and the Soviet Union would inevitably clash and bleed each other white.’ As for Poland, the country that would suffer more than most from the secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet pact, Putin argued that Warsaw was to blame for its own misfortune. ‘It is clear from examining the archive documents,’ he claimed, ‘that the Polish leadership of the time was colluding with Hitler … Maybe there were also some secret protocols in there, too.’

Most alarmingly, Putin rewrites the brutal Soviet invasion of the Baltic states, describing it as a peaceful unification of nations. ‘In autumn 1939, the Soviet Union, pursuing its strategic military and defensive goals, started the process of the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Their accession to the USSR was implemented on a contractual basis, with the consent of the elected authorities.’ Such an explanation is completely false. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were subjected to a violent occupation that involved repression and mass murder. His contention that they joined the USSR ‘voluntarily’ and ‘with the consent of the elected authorities’ is a fiction that has alarmed other former Soviet states that the Kremlin might once again seek to annex.

For his domestic Russian audience, Putin’s manipulation of history has had the desired effect. In a 2012 poll asking Russians to nominate ‘the greatest ever Russian’, Stalin came top and he has retained his title ever since. In that initial poll, Vladimir Putin finished in fifth place, behind Peter the Great, Yuri Gagarin and Alexander Pushkin; but by 2017, he had risen to second, only a few percentage points behind the man he has striven so hard to rehabilitate and, perhaps, imitate.