Paul Goble
Staunton, May 29 – A group of specialists on Russian public opinion says that as a result of the effective working of Kremlin propaganda, most Russians to this day do not view what Vladimir Putin is doing as a war but rather as an effort by him to counter a larger war the West has already unleashed against their country.
Speaking at this year’s Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Moscow wrier Alisa Ganiyeva, Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastyev, Levada Center expert Andrey Levinson, and Riga-based Russian historian Sergey Medvedev made that argument, Vadim Shtepa says (region.expert/ru-doomsday/).
According to these experts, the editor of the Region.Expert panel reports, the sources of this Russian view lie less in the Kremlin’s banning of the use of the word “war” to describe what it is doing than in the cult of the Great Victory in 1945 that Putin has promoted as the virtual founding date of Russian statehood, one “far more significant than 1917 or 1991.”
In Alice in Wonderland fashion, that view turns history on its head, they say, ignoring the fact that in 1945, Russia was allied with the Western democracies against fascism, while now it is promoting the Russian dictatorship and its aggression against those very same governments in order to keep itself in power.
According to those taking part in this discussion, Shtepa says, “the Kremlin powers have put Russia on the bring of ‘the end of the world,” one they said could involve either the use of Russia’s nuclear weapons to prevent a loss in Ukraine or the death of Putin himself, something beyond which Russians find it difficult to think.
But there is a third variant of this vision of doom, the Russian regionalist says, one that today “is completely taboo and banned from being discussed in Russia. That is the disintegration of the empire. Such an end, of course, will be a new beginning, just as the collapse of the Roman Empire was, Shtepa says, although few appear to recognize that reality.
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