Among the Tsar’s propagandists are Dmitry Kiselyov, director of the Rossiya Segodnya news agency; Margarita Simonyan, CEO of Russia Today, Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, and Olga Skabeyeva, another pro-Kremlin TV host
In an effort to contain Russia and its unwarranted attack on Ukraine, the West has imposed sanctions of various kinds on the people who support Vladimir Putin’s regime. On this list are ministers and deputies, oligarchs and personal friends of the Russian president, military commanders and leaders of state companies. There are also well-known propagandists. The paranoid hawk Vladimir Solovyov, among other things, the owner of a villa on Lake Como; there is Dmitry Kiselyov, director of the Rossiya Segodnya news agency; there are Margarita Simonyan, CEO of Russia Today, and Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the foreign ministry, and Olga Skabeyeva, another pro-Kremlin TV host. The sanctions then hit less important figures such as Artyom Sheinin or Sergei Brylyov.
One may or may not agree to sanction the most blatantly pro-Kremlin journalists, essentially punishing them for their words. Yet one cannot fail to notice that there is a whole group of people – intellectuals, who also work with words and ideas – who have almost completely escaped the Western sanctioning perimeter. This was noted by an editorial published recently in the Moscow Times, an online newspaper which was based in Moscow and moved to Amsterdam after the February 24 invasion. Vladislav Inozemtsev, the author of the article, writes that “sanctions, focusing on mere propagandists, have forgotten much more important objectives. Those who created modern Russian ideology and actively spread it for years have not been touched. “
They are international relations experts and political scientists. Putin is not a crazed amateur, Inozemtsev rightly points out, but a leader who follows the plot drawn up by this group of intellectuals in a fairly consequential way. One of the best known is Sergey Karaganov: a close advisor first to Boris Yeltsin and then to Putin, dean of the Faculty of Economics and International Affairs of the University of Moscow, he was also part of the international board of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most influential think tanks Americans of foreign policy.
There is no doubt that many of the ideas with which Moscow justified the invasion of Ukraine belong to Karaganov. First, according to Karaganov, the collapse of the USSR would have left the peoples around Russia, including the Ukrainians, without a true sense of nationality and therefore unable to establish themselves as sovereign states. Hence the Kremlin’s mission to build a Eurasian union centered on the dominance of Moscow (also to protect the rights of Russian speakers scattered in the region). To do this, Karaganov says, Russia would be allowed to rewrite the world and European security order, if necessary using force. “Today we have entered a rather acute period, I believe, of ten years of active demolition of the rules of the game created by the West after the collapse of the USSR,” Karaganov said in a recent interview. And he added: “If you asked me what I would like to achieve in the end, I will reply that I would not even like to reproduce the Yalta system, but the ‘concert of the great powers’ that was created following the outcome of the Napoleonic wars”.
The other ideologues indicated by the Moscow Times are Fyodor Lukyanov and Timofei Bordachev. This trio – writes Vladislav Inozemtsev – together with Dmitry Suslov, Andrei Ilnitsky and Andrei Sushentsov glorified Russia’s eastward turn for years, “claiming that Moscow’s alliance with Beijing would put an end to America’s supremacy”. These intellectuals are the creators of the so-called “Putin doctrine”, which – according to Foreign Affairs – implies “the reversal of the consequences of the Soviet collapse”, and consists in “dividing the transatlantic alliance and renegotiating the geographical structure that ended the Cold War “.
Among the instruments of ideological propaganda, explains the Moscow Times, the Moscow forum and think tank Valdai Discussion Club played a decisive role. For years this club has maintained relations with Western academics and politicians, “influencing them – writes Inozemtsev -” and bringing them into Russia for ‘scientific debates’ culminating in annual meetings with Sergei Lavrov, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin ”. It must be said that these meetings could also have been useful, if only the politicians and academics in question had taken the ideas of their Russian colleagues seriously. The Moscow Times notes that “none of these brilliant visionaries and thinkers have ever been banned from traveling to Europe and are still frequent guests of the Western media today.” In some cases – continues the Moscow Times – these Russian intellectuals would be trying today to reposition themselves in Western academia, “if Putin’s efforts were to fail.” But there is at least one political scientist to whom this change of coat is certainly precluded. He is the ultra reactionary Alex Dugin, the most radical and flashy of the group, hit by sanctions in 2015 for fomenting violence in Donbass. It is not clear how much the Russian leadership really listens to him, also because the Moscow University has turned him away. In the aftermath of the invasion, Dugin explained the war in Ukraine in these terms: “It is not just a question of denazifying the country and protecting the Donbass, it is a battle against the West, that is, the Antichrist”.
In fact, the question posed by the Moscow Times is quite legitimate: what is the point of sanctioning people like Maria Zakharova (spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry), if the professors who instructed her in that way are left undisturbed? At Moscow State University for International Relations, according to the Moscow Times, rector Anatoly Torkunov and professors such as Alexei Podberyozkin “are doing their best to transform the university into a factory that produces more and more ‘Zakharova’ graduates who insist on Russian supremacy and the power of force, not of rules, in global politics ”.
Striking intellectuals for their ideas is always delicate and highly debatable, but this is not the real question either. The Moscow Times article reminds us that underpinning Putinism is a body of doctrine that has developed in the open over the past 25 years. “The war is explained by decisions matured within the Russian state”, explained the historian Andrea Graziosi, professor at the University of Naples Federico II, author of essays on the Soviet Union translated all over the world. “It is really superficial not to read that the Russians say why they started it. They don’t say they did it for fear of NATO, which is mentioned in some documents; they say they did it to change the world order born in 1991 and that this was the right time to do it”.
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