Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 24 –Over the course of the four years of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, a segment of Russian liberals, both in the emigration and at home, have gradually shifted their views about that conflict in the direction of accepting an interpretation of that conflict close to Kremlin’s, Mariya Snegovaya says.
The Russian post-doc at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. argues that this has happened because the liberals involved want to preserve their civic identity as Russians as well as out of the conviction that “we Russians can’t be wrong about everything” (echofm.online/opinions/chetyre-goda-vojny-i-transformacziya-liberalnogo-diskursa-v-rossii).
According to Snegovaya, this adaptive process has gone through nine stages beginning with denial about the war through expectation of popular resistance to personalization of the issue, acceptance of a variety of false equivalences to a rationalization of what has occurred as being the fault of the West even though Russia was the side that took action.
She argues that this evolution can be explained as “a mechanism of identity-protective cognition, that is, an inclination to interpret reality so as to preserve a positive view of one’s own group” even though it requires the acceptance of the notion that Russian society at present lacks any ability to influence the situation.
For many liberal Russians, Putin remains “the instigator of the war” but “the West is increasingly held responsible for its continuation,” even as Russian society is depicted as virtually incapable of influencing events. Thus, the question of whether Russians coud have changed the course of events is not even raised!”
“As a result,” Snegovaya concludes, “a narrative is formed that simultaneously acknowledges the fact of the war and minimizes the degree of collective involvement of Russians,” a point of view that “over time … facilitates a convergence with narratives close to the Kremlin.”
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