Krivichi vs Rabinovich

Why Russia is starting a new cold war

The Olympics did not stop the growing political insanity inside Russia. She even unwittingly threw firewood on the fires of the moral inquisition, which are increasingly kindled by Kremlin propagandists. As a result, we learned that the liberal journalist Andrei Malgin, who lives in Italy, collapsed the ruble with one post on LiveJournal (how powerful the Russian currency is!) And the refusal of the American referee (in fact, Canadian and completely correct) to count the puck of the defender of our team Fedor Tyutin in the group stage match of the hockey tournament with the US team is another act of undisguised American aggression against Rus'.

However, this insanity has quite rational grounds. Putin's Russia has hopelessly lost the "Olympiad" in economics and is now trying to win in our traditional sport - the ideological brainwashing of its own citizens.

Komsomolskaya Pravda found the true reason for the collapse of the ruble, which has fallen in price more strongly since the beginning of the year than in the entire past. Andrey Malgin, a journalist, has been declared the gravedigger of the Russian currency, having written a post saying that it is quite logical to withdraw money from present-day Russia, and that he himself is going to come to Moscow and close his accounts with Sberbank. Moreover, Malgin is just a part of the fifth column of the West, which decided to take revenge on Russia for its new unprecedented toughness.

“KP” generally likes to ascribe truly magical powers to liberals who have no influence on Putin’s politics: directly, if you don’t sew lampshades out of them, our great power will fall apart.

It is enough to look at the size and origin of the capital withdrawn from Russia in recent years, at the composition of the largest Russian entrepreneurs and the degree of their proximity to the regime, at the accounts in foreign banks, the availability of real estate and the place of residence of the children of our political elite, and it will instantly become clear that the money from the country evacuated mainly by representatives of the authorities themselves. And they are doing the right thing: they are much better than 62% of Russians who do not have a penny of savings (data from VTsIOM), they understand that it is dangerous to trust their hard-earned money to the country they built. That is, according to the logic of KP itself, our government is the fifth column that is now attacking the Russian ruble.

Russian coaches and hockey players, including team captain Pavel Datsyuk, honestly admitted that Tyutin's puck in the match with the US team was not counted absolutely correctly. But it was already commented on by President Putin himself (“judges can also be wrong” - and he did not say this about the Basmans), and his main propaganda brain-twist, a freshly baked holder of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, IV degree (the merits turned out to be not even third-rate) Dmitry Kiselev. He even began to brand the liberal games of the Shenderovich-Rabinovichs, remembering the real name of the poet Igor Irtenyev. Naturally, along with hockey referee Brad Mayer, Russian liberals play along with the hated West. And yes, for a long time we have not had any Rabinovich among the official enemies of the prosperity of the Fatherland. Are you bored? Get it!

Anti-Western rhetoric and the search for external enemies is nothing new for Russia - for at least ten years it has been the cornerstone of official propaganda. But now, it seems, we are moving to a new quality of good neighborly relations with the outside world - from confrontational defense on specific occasions to an all-out ideological war.

The opening of a full-fledged anti-Western ideological front was a direct consequence of the collapse of the foundation of Putinism - relative economic stability in the country with a constant increase in incomes of the population.

It is the widening crack in the economic foundation, with the apparent inability of the current government to pursue a sane domestic policy, that is generating, perhaps, the most powerful confrontation between Russia and the rest of the world in the entire post-Soviet history. Liberals and the West will be presented by Russian propaganda as enemies and a total obstacle to our country's path to a brighter future, precisely because without the liberalization of economic and political life in Russia itself, it is impossible to ensure the sustainable growth of the Russian economy. Not to mention turning the country into something other than a trader in oil, gas and modified Soviet weapons. Putin has lost the economic race to these same "Western values", but he will never admit defeat.

The Russian government deliberately initiates a new cold war with the West. It is necessary to distract people from the growing and, in principle, insoluble economic problems in the current political paradigm. We must keep the herd in a state of ideological mobilization, patriotic orgasm. From the last rhetorical forces, try to convince that part of the public that buys into such rhetoric: it is not we who have failed, but we, the great and powerful, are trying to overwhelm external opponents who envy our inescapable greatness. It is they who bring down the ruble and do not count our goals.