Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 23 – Russians are
angry at the authorities for impugning their dignity and are ready to protest,
but they do not see any leaders who can channel such protests and make them
effective, Lev Gudkov says. As a result, protests are likely to increase in the
coming months but remain diffuse rather than focused on the powers that be.
At the Yeltsin Center in
Yekaterinburg this week, the Levada Center director says popular anger has been
growing more or less constantly since 2015 as Russians have concluded that the
regime has no intention of trying to keep its part of the social contract (znak.com/2019-05-23/terpeniyu_lyudey_nastupaet_predel_protesty_budut_rasti_intervyu_lva_gudkova_levada_centr).
“The number of local protests is
already extraordinarily large,” Gudkov says, and “Putin’s high rating is
accompanied by the most profound conviction in the totally corrupt nature of
the entire system. By my crude estimate,” he continues, “every day appear three
to five reports about corruption scandals.”
As a result, there is an equally
profound conviction among the population that “there is money in the country
but that it has been seized by an egoistic and greedy bunch among the powers
that be. And there is nothing that can be done about this,” even though it is
increasingly hard to put up with.
People are thus protest for
individual reasons but “possibilities for the expression of group interests
have been suppressed,” Gudkov says. The number of strikes has gone up by 70
percent over the last three years, but this kind of protest isn’t being transformed
into “a democratic and responsible movement.”
A major reason for that failure is
that such events “do not appear on the federal television channels and thus do
not become the focus of public opinion. They are consciously sterilized and
kept out of public view.” And this highlights an important difference between
Putinism and Stalinist totalitarianism.
The rule of the current powers that
be “is based not on direct force as was the case in the times of the totalitarian
system … [it] is based on the manipulation of mass consciousness,” something that
has become possible using information technologies and the government’s control
of television.
Only eight to ten percent of all
media are beyond the regime’s direct control, Gudkov continues; and as a
result, “people cannot get out of the system of propaganda.” The content of
that propaganda, he points out, is remarkably similar to what Stalin used.
Thus, arguments about Crimea repeated arguments about Finland in 1940.
With regard to re-Stalinization, the
sociologist says, the regime has proceeded extremely cleverly. But it is important to remember that “recognition
[by respondents] of a positive role for Stalin does not mean a desire to live ‘as
under Stalin.’” And consequently, there
is no need for the regime now to deny
that there were mass repressions and terror.
Instead, Gudkov says, the current
powers that be “say that ‘each country has its dark spots, we have nothing to
be ashamed of, and nothing must obscure the positive in the figure of Stalin
and his achievements as the organizer of Victory.” That is “one argument,” the
pollster says; but there is another.
The current powers that be want it
to be accepted that “only with an iron hand was it possible to transform a
peasant country in to a most powerful nuclear superpower. In other words,
modernization and Victory serve as justification after the fact of all crimes.”
But the authorities do seek to minimize the number of Stalin’s victims.
Twenty years ago, most Russians said
Stalin killed millions; now, thanks to propaganda, most say that he killed “about
a million.” And many are ready to reduce
that number still further or even deny that he killed more than a handful.
The Putin regime has been helped in
this by the rise of a generation for whom Stalin is no more part of
contemporary life than Chingiz Khan or Ivan the Terrible. They thus don’t
understand the talk about him that dominated their parents’ conversations and
don’t recognize what this shift in opinion opens the way to.
There has also been a fundamental
change in popular expectations, Gudkov says. At the end of 2013, three out of
five Russians in major cities said “they were tired of waiting for Putin to
fulfill his promises and 47 percent said that they did not want to see him
continue as president for another term.”
“But the anti-Ukrainian wave, the
wave of propaganda about and confrontation with the West restored Putin’s
rating and raised it back to its earlier levels,” Gudkov says. But the pension debacle
drove it partially back down to what it is now, about 61 to 66 percent. And
that figure shows that once again Russians have concentrated all their hopes on
a single figure.
What is going on, the sociologist
says, is the working out of the old principle of “the good tsar and the bad
boyars.” People may be angry and
dissatisfied but they are expressing it less about Putin than one might expect
but rather at Medvedev, ministers, and officials of a lower level, one more
reflection of the weakness of Russian institutions.
