Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 10 – The majority of
Russians support the annexation of Crimea but do not understand the
implications of that action and are “not willing to suffer the consequences,”
according to Lev Gudkov, the head of the Levada Center, the leading independent
polling group in the Russian Federation.
In a report issued this week, entitled
“In What Land Do We Live: Russian Society from November to March (docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Iule0NCK7oNHdNd1hlczlvcm8/edit?pli=1) and summarized by Elena Vlasenko in
Grani (grani.ru/Society/m.227547.html),
Gudkov says that Russians view Crimea the way they view the Kuriles, as Russian
even though many of them could not find the latter on a map.
Russia’s intellectual elite, the
sociologist says, have not been willing to try to understand why Russia’s
population feels this way. Indeed, he
suggests, that failing is a major shortcoming of the country’s intellectuals. But now its members need to make sense of why
so many Russians are encouraged by the annexation of Crimea and why so few are ashamed
of it.
“The majority of people have become victims” of the
government’s propaganda since 2002 and especially since 2007 when Vladimir
Putin gave his Munich speech, Gudkov says.
But not everyone has been affected in the same way or even in the way
that the Kremlin has intended.
Given the coverage of coverage of
corruption between 2010 and the end of 2013, many Russians had concluded that
the regime was falling apart and according to polls, “a majority (!) of people
ever more frequently refused to recognize it as legitimate.” Indeed, in January
2014, polls showed that Russians viewed the regime and Putin in almost entirely
negative ways.
It was thus “not surprising that the
first reaction to the mass protests of 2011 was approval” by the population,
and the regime’s harsh approach to those protests had the effect of producing
greater fear among Russians that mass repression lay ahead. But the events in
Kyiv ‘s Maidan and the Kremlin’s presentation of them changed how people viewed
protest as such.
When the Maidan began, Russians had “no
illusions” that Ukrainians were protesting against a regime that resembled in
many respects that of Putin. And as of October 2013, Russians “did not consider
interference in Ukrainian affairs a correct move,” the pollster says. But everything changed after the forced dispersal
of the Maidan in December.
At that time, Gudkov argues, “Russian
state propaganda began to work more intensively than even had been the case in
Soviet times.” Moreover, the Kremlin shut down most “alternative channels of
information.” As a result, he says, “the
population remained one on one with [state-controlled] television.”
One “detail” is especially
important, Gudkov continues. Fear of repression had not only reached its
highest point in recent years but so do had levels of mass xenophobia and
nationalism. In October, polls showed
that these were at the highest levels at any time over the last 25 years.
A sense of being surrounded by
corruption and being defenseless against the authorities generated in people a
sense that there was a need for “’the defense of Russians’” abroad. Kremlin
propaganda seized on this and suggested that “all protests” were an effort by
the West to “weaken Russia and push it out of its traditional zones of
influence.”
That led the Russian population to
approve of what Putin has been doing in Ukraine, but a closer examination of
the data shows, Gudkov insists, that very, very few Russians were paying
extremely close attention to what was taking place and evaluated everything in
terms of slogans about defending Russians and returning Russian lands.
Large shares of Russians were thus
ready to accept the idea that Ukraine was a failed or failing state, that it
was about to or had already slipped in conditions of civil war, and that Moscow
had an obligation to come to the aid of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, even if
that involved annexing territory.
But while they may be pleased with the idea that
annexing Crimea returns to Russia the status of a great power, the majority,
Gudkov continues, are “not ready to pay for what is taking place.” They are
willing to see force used – but only on condition that no one will respond to
Russia’s use of force with its own.
Other scholars, Vlasenko says, agree
with Gudkov’s assessment. Sociologist Boris
Dubin says that the Kremlin has managed to convince Russians that what is going
in Ukraine is “’not about us.’” Historian Nikita Sokolov says that the Russian
regime now is playing on the old idea of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality,”
something that contributes to a loss of a sense of reality.
And philosopher Aleksandr Rubtsov points out that the Russian authorities are trying
to use history but not in an appropriate way.
“In fact, the authorities do not know history and do not want to. Thinking they are invoking history, they are
in fact appealing to historical ideological treatments.”
That gets them into trouble, he says, as
the discussion of the different between ethnic Russian and civic Russian
identities shows. An opposition figure
like Navalny, Rubtsov suggests, can talk about that, “but at the state level,
it sounds like a provocation.”
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