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But as the old state clings on, a sort of parallel, civil-society government has been self-organising. It feeds and equips the army, provides legal and social services to internally displaced refugees, brings medical aid to those who are stuck in war zones both on the Ukrainan and the rebel-held side. For all the bad news there appears to be some sort of social miracle taking place. ‘We’ve had our February Revolution – we’re still to have our October Revolution,’ a magazine editor I met joked. There is talk of a ‘third Maidan’, but even serious political analysts are wondering whether the next one would be orchestrated by Moscow: having calculated that they can’t suppress the Ukrainian talent for revolution, Moscow might instead try to control the next Maidan from within.
And it’s in Moscow that the main counternarrative to the revolution has been developed. There are many geopolitical dividends Putin might hope to draw by sponsoring, arming and manning the rebellion against Kiev in east Ukraine, but there is an important narrative trick the Kremlin is trying to pull off too: revolution is meant to equal chaos and war, framed not merely as pointless but as downright bad. Kremlin spin doctors put Maidan in one line of disasters along with Syria and Libya (all organised by the CIA), and ultimately question whether the fall of the Berlin Wall was such a great thing after all. The idea is to undercut any desire for revolution at home, which also means policing the stories that are told. On 30 December, Teatr.doc, Moscow’s first documentary theatre in a tiny cellar off the Patriarch Ponds, screened a Ukrainian film about the Maidan which didn’t fit with the Kremlin’s preferred picture. The theatre was immediately raided by the police and the intelligence services.
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n04/peter-pomerantsev/diary _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
