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http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/07/22/peter-pomerantsev/in-moscow-2/
In Moscow
Peter Pomerantsev 22 July 2014
‘When the news came in about the plane going down I couldn’t tell
whether it was real. There have been so many fake pieces of news in the
Russian media this week you can no longer tell what’s true and what
isn’t,’ B said, as we sat in a Moscow café the weekend after Malaysia
Airlines flight MH17 had been blown out of the sky over Donbass. ‘Just
this week there was a story about Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a
Donbass child. Then there was a story about how the White House
instructed the Ukrainians to depopulate Donbass so that the US can get
control of its shale gas. And since the crash, there have been stories
about Americans trying to down Putin’s plane but getting the Malaysian
one by accident, or the plane being filled with corpses before it took
off to fake the tragedy, or the US blowing up the plane to pull Putin
into a war in Ukraine to distract from their economic problems.’
You can spot the cultural influences: the crucified child is from Game
of Thrones, the plane with corpses is from Lost. The borders between
fact and fiction are not just blurred: they’re irrelevant. When the
deputy minister of communications, Alexei Volin, himself а former
journalist and occasional scriptwriter, was asked if the crucifixion
story was true, he said that it passed journalistic standards – and
anyway what really mattered were ratings.
The nation must be kept hooked. As a plot turn the Malaysia Airlines
crash is useful. Except that it’s real. Which is inconvenient. As the
whole Donbass war is inconvenient. Putin would much rather have a film
about a war to sell his audience. In the early 1990s reports about
atrocities (sometimes fabricated by PR companies) were used to persuade
Americans to go to war over Kuwait: here the reports are the end goal. A
war set up to have a movie about a war. The cameras of the tabloid
channel Life News are called to military action before action has taken
place. Though in such cases reality can intervene too. On 29 June rebel
leaders sent a cortège of Russian journalists to film Ukrainian troops
surrendering: the rebel leaders had even provided extras to impersonate
soldiers’ mothers for the ‘news’ piece. But when the Ukrainains saw the
coach they opened fire, killing a Russian cameraman. ‘The Russian TV
people killed in the Donbass are buried as heroes,’ Anna Kachkayeva, an
academic and television critic, remarked. ‘While the Russians who fight
there with guns are buried secretly. The TV people are the real troops.’
I met Mark Galeotti, an NYU professor who has been teaching in Moscow,
in a Pain Quotidien inside a business centre. ‘The Soviet Union used to
reinvent reality too but they still kept to a single version of the
truth. Pravda would telegraph the party line so everyone knew what to
say,’ he told me. Now, instead of a single truth, the TV spits out
contradictory conspiracy theories. The effect is to leave the viewer so
confused and he is demoralised that he gives up on trying to find a
‘real’ version. This is effective in keeping people both paranoid and
passive, but it means, Galeotti said, that ‘everyone has to improvise
their own version of the truth.’
I heard different improvisations during a week in Moscow. There were
those who were calm and succinct, like the man who said that Google was
curated by the CIA and that WikiLeaks was a CIA operation to spark the
Arab Spring, and how Russia needs to create a sovereign internet to
defend itself (the man just happens to design and market internet filter
programs). But there were also hour-long emotional monologues, with no
logical connections between the sentences, which just repeated the words
‘them’ and ‘us’ over and over, intimating but never quite clarifying who
was behind some great anti-Russian plot.
The younger generation, a teacher told me, were the worst: those who had
Soviet experience were aware of the TV fibs, but not the 20-year-olds.
When I worked in Russian TV during the Noughties I could see how the TV
was breeding conspiracy theories, breaking down critical language year
after year, making pseudo-logical constructions a normal form of speech,
cultivating the ideal Putin citizen. ‘The point isn’t whether or not
they really believe it or not,’ Galeotti said when I asked him how many
of his students he thought actually believed the new line (or lines).
‘The point is they feel intimidated enough to repeat it.’
Journalists who haven’t been shut down are shrivelled or co-opted,
reporting on ‘different versions’ of the Malaysia Airlines crash and
skating over the evidence against the Russian-sponsored, Russian-led and
Kremlin-armed rebel army. ‘I’m leaving journalism to work in corporate
PR,’ a friend who works for one of the ‘independent’ media outlets told
me. ‘It’s cleaner.’
When you read the polls which claim that 80 per cent support Putin, it
could just as easily read 80 per cent fear Putin. The fear that was lost
in the protests of 2011-12 has returned. And Putin’s 80 per cent peak
coincides not only with the popular annexation of Crimea (always
described in terms of a patriotic sporting victory: ‘we won the
Olympics, the hockey, took back Crimea’), but also with all the new laws
against swearing, against arguing for the break-up of Russia, against
‘extremism’ – laws whose power stems from their absurdity, from the
sense that the rules are unclear and therefore you can be attacked for
anything at any time.
And if previously the point of giving experts and academics oases that
allowed them to speak honestly and on-the-record was to show that the
Kremlin was at least basing its decisions on what was really happening,
now you’re left with the feeling that decisions are being made on
fictions, which means you can’t predict how the Kremlin will behave and
all the rules are gone and anything, even the impossibly bad, is possible.
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