Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 16 – In scathing
terms, Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina denounces the ways in which the Putin
regime has promoted Russian national pride in order to conceal the way in which
those near the throne are stealing the country blind and to suppress any
concerns about human rights and individual dignity.
In a commentary in “Moskovsky
komsomolets” yesterday, the Moscow commentator says that those who “are ashamed
of the present and fear the future” take refuge in being “proud of the past. Moreover, she continues, “not
being in a position to change their own lives, they destroy others” (mk.ru/politics/2015/03/15/patriotizm-s-petley-na-shee.html).
And Aleksandrova-Zorina says, “in
Russia, the people have been separated from the state,” whose “narrow ruling
class treats the resources of the country as if they owned them and the state
budget as their personal money bag.” The
only way to maintain this is to promote national pride in place of dignity and
war instead of the struggle for individual rights.
“Why have people in Russia so easily
forgotten that the Ukrainians are a fraternal people?” she asks. The reason is
that “today it doesn’t matter who one hates.” It is only important that one
does because those who hate others won’t pay attention to the ways in which
they and their rights are being suppressed.
The “ideological triad” in Russia
today is “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Television,” Aleksandrova-Zorina says, all
of it devoted to promoting unquestioning loyalty to “us” by playing up hatred
of “them.” The former includes patriots,
Putin, and Russia’s “special path;” the latter includes them, national
traitors, Europe and America, and the rotting West.
That in turn has involved “a witch
hunt” for liberals and foreign agents, who just happen to be found “exclusively
in the opposition,” even though the regime itself is carrying out “to their
logical conclusion,” the liberal reforms begun in the 1990s, leaving the country
with destroyed industry, educational system and medical system.
The Russian people are told to hold
America and “the fifth column” responsible for all of this. But “where is
America – in the Kremlin? Is ‘the fifth column’ in the government?” she asks
rhetorically. But the regime knows what it is doing, the more “external”
enemies Russians believe in, then the “more strongly” they “unite around the
oligarchic higher ups.”
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What is going on, the “Moskovsky
komsomolets” commentator says, is simple displacement, the kind people see in
everyday life. A boss who has fought with his wife takes it on his
subordinate who can’t respond and so goes up at the end of the day and takes
it out on his wife.
When the Russian people can’t affect
what their government does, it is much easier and more comfortable to direct “all
their hatred” against the American president, and “when the resident of a
dying little town where the factory, hospital and school are closed can’t do
anything about that, he can be sent off to the Donbas.”
Russia is
drowning “in a national-depressive psychosis,” she says, one for which its
residents take as medicine “television, narcotics and war.” Each year, cities
and towns are disappearing from the map, “young people have no prospects,
adults have no work, and the elderly do not have decent pensions.”
“In the
provinces, millions of people live without plumbing” and have to make do with
outhouses just as their great-grandparents did. And they have to rely on wood
stoves even though they live in what the authorities are proud to call “an
oil and gas empire.” For many of them,
a gas connection to their homes is “an unachievable dream.”
But there is
one part of modern civilization which has not passed even these places by:
every home in every village has a television disk, and every evening they
listen to people on TV tell them that “the entire world Russians only because
they are Russians” and that they must understand “patriotism” to include “blind
support for the powers that be.”
The talking heads on Moscow television
love to speak about the achievements of the past, largely because there are
not very many achievements now. They talk about Soviet triumphs in space but “minimize
the fact that today our satellites fall out of the sky like stars.” They talk
about education and science and industry but again about the past not the
present.
The Russian
people are pleased to accept this “hypocritical ‘patriotism’” because it is “psychologically
comfortable” for those who are “the most denigrated, without rights, and poor
in spirit” and who want to have “a sense of superiority over the residents of
other, considerably more well-off countries.”
US President
Richard Nixon one observed that every dollar spent on propaganda was worth
ten spent on arms because weapons might never be used but “propaganda works
every second of the day.” Vladimir
Putin and his regime have very much taken this idea to heart,
Aleksandrova-Zorina says.
The only
defense against such propaganda, she continues, is “a critical view and
healthy skepticism,” values that the Kremlin seeks to destroy by attacking
everyone who “tries to rip off the rose-colored glasses” many Russians
wear. Critics remain but they are
relatively few because “it isn’t easy to be a depressed realist; it is much
more pleasant to be a happy idiot.”
And
she concludes: “Russians are without rights in their own country. [Their]
elections are without a choice; [their] protests are only possible with the permission
of the authorites … The criminal code works according to the principle ‘all
peole are equal but some are more equal.’”
A few in Russia do live well, and
“they have accounts in Swiss banks and villas on the Atlantic coast.” As for
the rest, they are to “’Love the authorities with all your heart, all your
soul and all your mind’” and be reassured by “the false ‘patriotism’” the
regime offers, “hating everything you are told to so as not to go out of your
mind with despair, horror and longing.”
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