Moscow’s Propaganda Fails Because It Assumes the Fundamental Antagonisms in Ukraine are Like Those in Russia, Shvetsov Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, January 5 – Ukrainians and others have been talking so long about the supposed successes of Moscow’s propaganda effort that they have ignored that in many cases it is failing precisely because it assumes that ethnic relations in Ukraine are like those in the Russian Federation, according to Svyatoslav Shvetsov.

 

            But despite Moscow’s claims, Shvetsov says, Ukraine has never shown the kind of “ethnic contradictions” Moscow media claim or that exist in Russia itself where “the level of ethnic confrontation is several orders of magnitude higher than in Ukraine” (hvylya.net/analytics/politics/ukraina-kak-ideologicheskaya-lovushka-dlya-putina.html).

 

            Among the post-Soviet states, he writes, Ukraine in general has been distinguished by a high level of tolerance,” and those who insist otherwise, as Moscow invariably does to justify its intervention, typically suffer defeat “except among the entirely lumpenized Russian-language residents and paid agents of the Kremlin.”

 

            At the same time, Moscow’s line is generating disgust in the West. People there are not idiots, and the media is providing “a quite objective” treatment of events in Ukraine and in Russia, Shvetsov says. People don’t view Moscow as objective and “aren’t interested in the opinion of the Kremlin’s talking head of even – o, horrors! – that of Putin.”

 

            Having had the experience of World War II, he writes, “Western society is extremely negative about propaganda of ethnic antagonisms,” correctly understanding just what it can lead to.

 

            Russian aggression against Ukraine started “the process of the self-establishment of a political nation in Ukraine, something that for Russian political myth makers turned out to be completely unexpected” and led some of them “even to declare ethnic Russian Ukrainians ‘traitors to the Russian world.’”

 

            Many Russians, even those supposedly well-informed, cannot understand how it is possible to “form a nation” on any basis other than “a community of blood and language.”  The average Russian simply “cannot understand in principle the bases of a political nation and a civil society.”

 

            And he or she “cannot understand that in the name of personal freedom, the opportunity for self-development and self-realization in the future, a citizen of Ukraine is ready to tolerate deprivations and defend his country from the well-fed ‘Russian world’ regardless of his nationality, native language of belief.”

 

            The clash that does exist in Ukraine, Shvetsov says, is not between ethnic groups but between “opposing systems of value,” between one, the Ukrainian, which views the individual’s rights and freedoms as most important and another, the Russian, which sees the state as the highest value and denigrates the status of the individual.

 

            “In essence,” he continues, Moscow has not moved beyond the Soviet approach, and “the Kremlin elders have not been able to think up anything new since ‘For Faith, Tsar and Fatherland!’” Sacrificing the individual to the state remains at the center of the Russian understanding.

 

            This is both a mistake and a trap for the Kremlin, the Ukrainian commentator argues, because “using in the 21^st century such a mix of ideologies of religious fanaticism, Medievalism, and Nazism will not withstand competition with more progressive ideologies.” Even the “pale” embodiment of the system of freedom and liberalism in Ukraine explains why “a large and what is most important developed part of the world has supported Ukraine.”

 

            “Contemporary Russian Nazism does not allow Russia or permit the Kremlin leadership to pull back from the line it has chosen. It is very easy to fall into fascism, but to get out of this discourse with the destruction of the elites involved in its support and advancement is practically impossible.”

 

            That is all the more the case in a state “which cannot conduct a discussion within its own elites” or between them and the population, and such a state “sooner or later is condemned to destruction.” Just how long that will take depends on the patience of the Russian people, and that patience is “not infinite.”

 

            Quite clearly “what is now taking place in the Donbas is a picture of the future territory called Russia,” Shvetsov says. The protests at the end of December in Moscow show that, and Ukraine must take advantage of this, pointing out the gap between what Moscow says and what are the facts on the ground in Ukraine to everyone.

 

            That will work to further undermine Moscow’s propaganda about Ukraine, he says. But at the same time, Ukraine must advance its own ideological vision, one based on the unity of the civic Ukrainian nation, the absence of Russian-like Nazism in Ukraine, and the attachment of Ukrainian society to freedom and Western values.

 

            That will require real actions, of course, but in the first instance, it will require the development of an ideological campaign drawing on the best specialists available rather than on a clutch of bureaucrats who, as has been said, will seek the best only to discover that things will turn out like always.