The grievances, paranoia and imperialist mindset that led President Vladimir V. Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war, leaving him more dominant than ever at home.
Children in schools gather empty tin cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian Army has always liberated humanity from “aggressors seeking world domination.”
Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, and their anti-war performers and shows eliminated. New state-mounted exhibits have titles like “NATOzism” — an echo of “Nazism” that seeks to portray the Western military alliance as as existential a threat as the Nazis of World War II.
Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that emerged in the first 30 years of post-Soviet Russia have come to an abrupt end, while nationalist groups once considered fringe today come to the fore.
On Friday, the first anniversary of the invasion, Russia had not achieved its goal of taking control of Ukraine. But at home, Putin’s war year has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.
“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultra-conservative business magnate, boasted in a recent telephone interview. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society cleanses itself of liberalism and Western poison.”
The fact that the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia’s transformation much more profound, he said, than it would have been if Putin’s hopes of a quick victory had been realized.
“If the blitzkrieg had been successful, nothing would have changed,” he said.
The Kremlin tried to keep Malofeyev at arm’s length for years, even as he bankrolled pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to reform itself into an empire of “traditional values” free of Western influence. But that changed after the invasion, when Putin turned “traditional values” into a rallying cry — signing a new anti-gay law, for example — while casting himself as another Peter the Great reclaiming lost Russian lands.
Most important, Malofeyev said, is that Russia’s liberals have been silenced or have fled the country.
That change was evident on February 15 at a meeting in Moscow, where some of the most prominent human rights activists still in Russia gathered for the latest of many farewells. The Sakharov Center, a human rights archive that was a liberal center for decades, was opening its last exhibition before being forced to close under a new law. Vyacheslav Bakhmin, the center’s president and a former Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that “what we could not have imagined two years or even a year ago is happening today.”
Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, later said: “A new value system has been built. Brutal and archaic public values”.
A year ago, when Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility; After all, Putin had portrayed himself as a peace-loving President who would never attack another country. So after the invasion began — surprising some of the President’s closest aides — the Kremlin was quick to adjust its propaganda to justify it.
It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing the “Nazis” who seized power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message said, and Putin’s “special military operation” was aimed at ending the war that the West had started.
Putin portrayed the invasion as a quasi-holy war for Russia’s very identity, declaring that he was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being imposed by an aggressive West.
National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, abandoned entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were ordered to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; and police went after people for offenses like anti-war Facebook posts, helping to drive hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.
“Society in general has gone off the rails,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, said in a telephone interview. “They have inverted the ideas of good and evil.”
A national campaign urging children to make candles for soldiers has become so popular, he said, that anyone who questions it in a school chat group could be called a “Nazi and a Western shill.”
At the same time, Chernyshov argued, everyday life has changed little for Russians without a fighting relative in Ukraine. That has hidden or mitigated the costs of the war. Western officials estimate that at least 200,000 Russians have been killed or injured in Ukraine, a far more serious number than analysts had predicted. However, the economy has suffered less than analysts predicted, as Western sanctions failed to drastically reduce the quality of life for average Russians, even as many Western brands left.
In Moscow, Putin’s new war ideology is on display at the Victory Museum — a sprawling hilltop complex dedicated to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. A new exhibit, “NATOzism,” declares that “the purpose of NATO’s creation was to achieve world domination.” A second, “Everyday Nazism,” includes artifacts from Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which has far-right ties, as evidence for the false claim that Ukraine is committing “genocide” against the Russians.
“It was scary and creepy and horrible,” a visitor named Liza, 19, said of what the exhibit had shown her. She said that she was distraught to learn of this behavior of the Ukrainians, as portrayed in Russian propaganda. “It shouldn’t be like this,” she said, signaling her support for Putin’s invasion.
“The framework of the conflict helped people to accept it,” said Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. “Here are our soldiers, there are the enemy soldiers, and within that framework you have to take sides.”
A Kremlin crackdown on dissent is nothing new. Yan Rachinsky, president of Memorial, a rights group that was forced to disband in 2021, said the Soviets banned so much “that there was nothing left to ban.
“But you can’t stop people from thinking,” he said.
By: Anton Troianovski and Valerie Hopkins
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6585530, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-24 16:50:07
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