To ‘Normalize Being at War,’ Kremlin Plans to Re-Establish Soviet-Style Control over Russia’s Cultural Life, ‘Dossier’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 24 – Having first worked to suppress opposition to the war in Ukraine and then sought to heroize Russians fighting there, the Kremlin has now decided to make the war a normal part of the life– and to do that, it has concluded it must revive Soviet-style control over the arts and demand complete obedience by those getting state funds, the Dossier Center says.

            According to the center’s investigative journalists, Sergey Novikov, the had of the Presidential Administration office for social programs, reached that conclusion at the end of 2023 as the war lengthened and has been authorized to put his ideas into practice in the arts sphere (dossier.center/svo-culture/).

            Novikov, a longtime ally of Sergey Kiriyenko has been called “a hunter of ideological enemies” (https://meduza.io/feature/2024/07/08/ohotnik-na-ideologicheskih-vragov), who has long been responsible for compiling “black lists” of artists who fail to hew to the Kremlin line about the war and other issues.

            But now, Dossier says, he is pursuing a much large goal – “the introduction of the Putin war in Ukraine into the lives of Russians” so that that war and war in general will become part of their lives and thus be viewed by them as inevitable and natural rather than something out of the ordinary that might be changed.

            The only way to achieve that, the investigative journalists say Novikov has concluded is to restore the system of carrots and sticks that the Soviet government used to ensure that its messages were repeated by writers and other artists to the population. The Putin regime has taken some steps in that direction, but now Novikov promises to take additional ones.