Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 13 – Russians in
focus groups organized by the Levada Center say that “we have already entered
World War III but are still at its initial ‘cold’ phase,” a judgment that has
sparked an upsurge of patriotic confidence that Russia will win and fears that
the price of that victory for individual Russians will be very high, Lev
Gudkov, the Center’s director says.
In a wide-ranging interview with
Dozhd journalist Lola Tagayeva, the sociologist says that “mobilization and
confrontation with the West has generated an upsurge in patriotic adrenalin”
but also has sparked “a diffuse and inarticulate fear, especially among older
people (tvrain.ru/articles/glava_levada_tsentra_rossijane_chuvstvujut_chto_vhodjat_v_tretju_mirovuju-461694/).
Russians remain
quite supportive of Putin’s foreign policy successes but most feel he has not
been successful domestically and are quite critical of where the country is.
Nonetheless, they overwhelmingly support the Kremlin leader and displace more
of their unhappiness on the government or subordinate officials, largely
because of the Kremlin’s propaganda effort.
“Why is propaganda so effective?”
Gudkov asks rhetorically. “Because it doesn’t dream things up but says what
people want to hear.” Consequently, “the mass ideas about the system of Putin’s
rule describe it not simply as a construction of an authoritarian regime but as
a kind of recidivist totalitarian system.”
According to the pollster, “’Democracy’
today is not something valued by Russians. They largely do not know what it is,
cannot imagine how it works or how a democratic society and state would be
organized.”
Gudkov devotes particular attention to
Russian attitudes about the future. He says that any idea about the future has
largely “disappeared,” and “the time horizon of the absolutely majority of the
population except for the youngest is very short, several months at most,” a
reflection of Russians’ focus on their immediate lives rather than anything
larger.
They understand their own lack of
power and their real dependency, “and these emotions form a constant backdrop
to their daily lives. The level of aggression or asthenia can change somewhat,
but on average, the combination of frustration, depression, aggression without
an object and dissatisfaction is typically about 60 percent.”
That is quite high and leads to a situation
which psychologists call “’the prisoner’s syndrome,’ a mixture of apathy and
aggression, sometimes connected with the phenomenon of so called ‘learned hopelessness,’”
Gudkov continues.
“We are returning to a certain
variant of secondary totalitarianism,” he says, one in which the authorities
have imposed “a new old system of control and organization” of the lives of the
population.” The rules are imposed from above “in the complete absence of any
resistance from below.”
According to Gudkov, “totalitarianism
is not a political system but a system of institutions which try to seize all
areas of life and to manipulate the consciousness and morals of people. This
sets it apart, for example, from despotism or authoritarianism which don’t
interfere in personal life.”
“And we see,” he continues, “how a new state
ideology, the ideology of state patriotism, has arisen … This is not the construction
of communism and of a bright future; this is an effort to construct from above
a utopia of ‘a bright past.’” And within
the population, this exacerbates “a fear of changes, a phobia of the new.”
Gudkov says he “does not see any
demands for new people or a new elite. There is social dissatisfaction: it is
clearly expressed. But this dissatisfaction exists in two social milieus,” the
conservative and poor depressed periphery of pensioners and the poor and the
middle class which sees that the regime is driving the country toward disaster
but won’t act to oppose it.
The chief demands of the population thus
are limited to raising incomes and providing social guarantees, something which
“arises from the fear of losing the present-day way of life” and falling back
into the impoverishment and chaos of the 1990s. People define themselves as
consumers rather than citizens.
“Political and ideological views
have been erased,” Gudkov says. “More than half of the population says that they
have no political or ideological views. Approximately 30 percent say they don’t
care what kind of state system exists in the country as long as they are able
to live well.” And that in turn means that they don’t see liberals and United
Russia as that different.
For that to change and for the protests
that are occurring to become political, the sociologist says, the opposition must
speak about concrete things and not engage in rhetorical flourishes about
democracy, freedom and human rights.
Those things simply don’t resonate with the Russian people.
Of course, “man does not live by
bread alone,” and thus, when “Putin says that we are a great power and must strive
for improvement, he is responding in the way that people want to hear.”
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