Memes Once Powered Putin’s Rise But Now are Running Against Him, Shomova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 5 – As more people go on line, memes, the epithets or phrases they apply to others, are playing a growing role as a reflection of how people view them and also whether they are prepared to give them support, Svetlana Shomova, a media specialist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, says (ridl.io/ru/car-prosto-car-putin-kak-obekt-memotvorchestva/).

That is gradually being recognized by elites, she says. Three years ago, an exhibit was organized in Moscow under the title “Putin as a Meme.” Organizers said that Putin himself long ago outgrew the status of president and was transformed into a well-known international meme” whose image is comparable to Superman (ria.ru/20171005/1506249955.html).

            That exhibition provides indirect evidence that memes are recognized as important, Shomova says. But if such a display were organized today and relied on fresh content rather than material of several years or even decades earlier, “it would be probably not so simple” to find positive examples because the views of people as expressed in memes have changed.

            Communications specialists, the Moscow scholar continues, “have ceased to view Internet memes exclusively as a variety of Internet play and instead see in them a form of political participation and a guide to political attitudes, values and ideas and even an instrument of forming collective identity and a commentary on the day’s agenda.”

            That is certainly the case of memes about Putin, “one of the most popular heroes of the Russian memosphere.” When he first appeared on the political scene, memes cast him as “action man,” boldly doing things that previous leader did not and in many cases could not possibly have done.

            Such memes, Shomova says, “not only represented an ironic commentary on the insistent construction of a positive image of the politician in official propaganda but were even used as documentary slides for the additional promotion of the leader of the nation, as an individual willful and embodying in himself a multitude of male qualities.”

            But even early on, Putin did not generate only memes he would be pleased with but those which carried more than implicit criticism of his actions. When he responded to a question about the Kursk submarine but saying, “it sunk,” Russians turned that into a meme about his attitudes toward far more things.

            With the passing of time, memes about Putin changed and took on new characteristics, Shomova says. Increasingly, they have focused on his long time in office and his supposed irreplaceability, sometimes with humor – “if you missed the latest inauguration, there’ll be another” ran one – but often with clear hostility to the Kremlin leader – “they voted for Putin but they didn’t know that they had.”

            More recently as conditions have deteriorated with the decline in the price of oil and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the scholar suggests, the tone has become ever more critical. For example, one current meme has it that “as a result of the quarantine, Putin has been forbidden from leaving his post as president” where he had to fight Pechenegs and Polovtsians.

            This trend “is not too good a sign for the president,” Shomova says. “In the absence of significant and serious decisions which the nation expects, the trigger for meme formation become chance events” which often have the effect of denigrating the president and costing him “a significant portion of his charisma.”

            And that is at a time, she continues, when as “political psychologists have long warned, the electoral attractiveness of Putin ever more depends on conditions in the country and ever less on his ability to make an impression on the audience.”

            One very recent meme shows just how negative this form of political communication has become. Putin is showing in a Soviet-style poster holding a book entitled “Human Rights in Russia.” He’s looking at it askance and asking rhetorically “Why all this need for formality?” No one who sees or reads this will fail to get the point.

            Memes today, Shomova says, are like a litmus test that measures how things are viewed by the population rather than by propagandists. Judging from most of them, they don’t have a very positive view of the situation or of the president who has been in office 20 years and has led them to this situation.