Translated material
"Bandera's mongrel"
I went to towns and villages within a radius of 350 kilometers from Moscow to talk to people. I wanted to understand who and why is against the war, and who and why is for it. Report by Evgenia Albats with comments by a psychologist, sociologist and propaganda specialist
"Bandera mongrel," said the rabbi.
At first I did not understand: who is he?
It was the first time in my life that I visited the synagogue at Pushkinskaya 22 in Tver, and I had never crossed paths with Rabbi Rosenzweig before. She came, said hello, introduced herself.
“I withdraw my “Hello,” he continued, “you are burning people in Ukraine, you are pouring water over them with no one knows what, you, you, you…” he said it to me. It was Friday, a couple of hours before the holiday, before Shabbat. My colleagues from Tver, who took me around the city and brought me to this red brick building of the early twentieth century with a seven-candlestick in a crown of forged gates, watched this unexpected spectacle with amazement: they had never been to a Jewish chapel before.
For the first time, a rabbi, not an anti-Semite, reacted in this way to my last name. "Go away," he shouted, "we'll call the guards now." He didn't have any security, of course. But we turned and left.
***
I drove around towns and villages (Tver, Serpukhov, Klin, etc.) within a radius of about 350 kilometers from Moscow, in my car, with one goal - to talk to people. I wanted to understand who and why is against, and who and why is for, supporting a war that turns into a disaster for 190 million people in two countries: in one, entire cities are already being killed and entire cities are being wiped out with bombs and rockets; in the other, a catastrophe has already happened, but many who live inside it still do not understand it, but judging by the hysterics heard from different sides - well, like this rabbi - they already feel it in their guts, it is already shaking, the ground is already shaking under their feet, the archduke has already been killed , Gleiwitz has already happened, but the virtual world of TV obscures reality, blinding, deafening, replacing the facts and life around with a flickering frame and relentless lies.
Of course, I read Shura Butrin’s wonderful material in Meduza*, great minds, as you know, think alike, but because Butrin was ahead of me, I didn’t leave my idea: it’s completely impossible to understand what is happening without feeling the ground with your hands.
I will say right away: my conviction that sociological surveys measure mainly those who support the authorities has been completely confirmed.
Opponents of the war speak only on the condition that you are introduced to them by a reliable person and you guarantee them absolute anonymity. Moreover, assurances at the beginning of the conversation are not enough, after - one, second, third will come up separately and ask again: “Would you name me? Do not indicate the place of work, otherwise the town is small, they will immediately recognize it.
If the conversation is spontaneous, not discussed in advance, in a public place, say, in the market, then opponents or doubters hide behind considerations like “we won’t know the whole truth anyway”, “who will tell us who started it first”, “everyone their own truth” or even advise how Lilya (61), who sells Krasnodar bacon and honey, read the Bible, because it says that you can’t kill, and her husband was in Afghanistan, and her son is a military man, but he has three children, so they won't take it.
(By the way, a friend asked me here, how do I ask questions to people in the market or on the street. I tell: in the market I am interested in goods, what, where, why is it so expensive (always expensive, Moscow prices, although salaries are in Tver, what in Serpukhov is much smaller.) And what will happen next, after all, the war? I say, a journalist, I go, I ask, I want to understand. .
The war again, like the Crimea, divided families, divorced generations. Almost all of my interlocutors aged 50-60 plus are ardent supporters of the “special military operation”. They speak exclusively in phrases from the TV: “What, do you want NATO missiles to stand under our noses here?” (Anya, over 60, artist, sells greenery in the market). To the words: “So this is a preventive war?”, The answer is straight from the training manual, although it is clear that it was not brought to the city market: “Where were you for eight years? 14,000 civilians died in Donbass” (former military man, did not introduce himself, 61 years old). And to say that this is together with the military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, that the data of the Russian Investigative Committee - 2600 dead in the DPR and LPR for 8 years plus 5500 - are injured, that even one dead is already too many, and that according to the Office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Since February 24, at least 3,153 civilians have already died in Ukraine - it is completely useless. They don't listen to arguments.
On the contrary, in the age group of 30–40 years, the vast majority of interlocutors are horrified by everything that is happening. “I drank for ten days, then I collected myself piece by piece”, Stas, IT specialist, 46 years old. “I walk across the bridge and think: can I jump? What is the point of living now”, Sonya, artist, 34 years old. “This will lead to the disappearance of the country,” Andrei, 40, an employee of a state financial institution. “My friend and I, he is also a reserve officer, agreed: if they mobilize, we will immediately surrender. We will not shed blood for this *****, ”Aleksey, in his forties, technical director of a commercial structure, a supporter of Navalny. Those who have children are primarily afraid of what the new principles of teaching at school will do with their brains: “In the informatics lesson, my daughter was taught how to recognize fakes.” - And How? “If there is no fact or figure on the website of the Ministry of Defense, then this cannot be trusted.” (Lyuba, former journalist, 40 years old).
And almost everyone complains about conflicts with their parents.
“Father has been in the army all his life, well, you yourself understand” (Aleksey). “I put normal telegram channels on him, but he still watches TV, says that the country is finally rising from its knees” (Andrey). “Parents listen to nightingale droppings all day long – beyond Putin’s mountain” (Aleksey). “My mother is a soldier, she speaks to me with phrases from the TV.” - For example? - "Do you want NATO to come and attack our house?", "You support the Nazis." Mom Katya (36 years old, creative worker) - 65 years old. “But Lyuba,” says Katya, “is even worse. Her mother tells her that the Americans are paying her for her (volunteer) project.” “It is difficult for the Pope to admit that the organization with which the best years of his life, the Soviet Army, are connected, has become a criminal organization” (Yevgeny, a former television broadcaster, 40 years old).
I never get tired of being amazed at this: how much the Soviet principle that the team is more important than the family, the close person, is firmly planted in the minds of people, like a chip that has been inactive for thirty years, and then the program was launched and it - click - immediately switched to a propaganda wave: yesterday there were parents, grandparents, and today they became soldiers of an unknown party - not one of the interlocutors even remembered United Russia. At one of the markets I got into a conversation with a former military man, he himself turned out to be from near Vinnitsa - mine are nearby, from Derazhnya, that is, almost neighbors. He: "There are Nazis everywhere." Me: “It’s not true, in 2017 I drove from Odessa to Khmelnitsky by car, drove into almost every small town: not once a glance, not a harsh word.”
Him: “What are you telling me? I have an older brother there!” “And what does your brother say about the Nazis?” He: "Brother himself became a Bandera." That is, the brother of the Nazis near Vinnitsa did not find and therefore he himself became an enemy. By the way, my interlocutor was not from poor pensioners: he sat on a white Lexus SUV.
Opponents of war often find themselves alone, and suffer even more because of this, especially if the work is somehow connected with the state. Financier Andrey says that out of 18 people in his white-collar office, he is the only one against the war, although his colleagues are the same (40+) age. "Aren't you afraid of losing your job?" “I'm afraid I have a family. But I continue to argue, to prove, although I understand that it is useless. The situation is similar for a doctor at a regional hospital (Stas, 39) and a teacher at a local university (Ilya, 34). But Aleksey, in his private company, has a small team of eight people, but all of them consider the “special operation” to be insane, and Stas, an IT specialist, has no problems with his colleagues.
A separate and, I must say, surprising me story with young guys plus or minus twenty years old. They don’t watch TV, they sit on the Internet, in telegram channels, however, when asked by your correspondent near the city shopping center (they didn’t go inside, there was no money, they hung out on the stairs), what do they think about the “special operation”, they answered: “Putin - cool, I should have shown Ukrainians a long time ago.” Why "should"? No, unlike the girls in the hairdressing salon, who repeated the duty “they were going to attack us”, here the motivation turned out to be different: “What do they allow themselves to do? They yell: "who does not jump, he is a Muscovite." In other words, all Slavs are equal, but Russian Slavs are more equal than their Ukrainian brothers.
Psychologists, anthropologists, specialists in the effects of propaganda and the digital world have explanations for many of your correspondent's observations described above. I dedicated a program to this on my Youtube channel, transcript here .
I'll offer mine. It seems to me that the generational gap in relation to the catastrophe of February 24 is connected primarily with personal experience of humiliation. People of pre- and retirement age were formed under the conditions of Soviet power, when any resistance was fraught, and it was impossible to influence the decisions and actions of the authorities. Conformism was a condition for survival, adherence to the principle "don't lean out of the window of the tram" was the key to a more or less tolerable existence, which made it possible to buy sets and raise children. The current generation of thirty-forty-year-olds grew up in fundamentally different circumstances: success was achieved by individualists, elections, protest rallies (“when Navalny returned, our entire central street was filled with people - those who never went out came out”), volunteer projects, when with politics there was already a seam, the conviction that they have rights - all this formed a completely different relationship with the state. At the very least, they are used to feeling that they are part of civil society, independent workers of their lives, and not just a dumb mass, which is thrown handouts in the form of benefits and pensions. Twenty-year-olds who don’t know any other boss but Putin have no fear of the return of the scoop, no experience of freedom at all, only complexes that are compensated by the idea of belonging to a prime nation, well, like prime food, they don’t even distinguish between roasts yet.
For thirty-forty-year-olds, the introduction of troops into Ukraine, the rupture of relations with all the outside world, of which they are already accustomed to feel themselves to be a part, the closure of independent media, censorship, arrests, wild fines, the impossibility of protesting, and finally the fear that they will be thrown out of work - all this is perceived by them like a catastrophe, like the collapse of their life projects, like the impossibility of the future. Not for myself. Not, especially for your children. “Maybe we would somehow adapt, but to imagine that our girls will have to live in this is unrealistic” (Evgeny).
Therefore, eight out of ten do not see themselves in Russia. "I'm scared. I’m just scared to be stuck here,” Sonya says. “It’s also scary to emigrate, but it depends on you: you can or you can’t. And here nothing depends on you.”
So I learned that not only a Jewish grandmother, as it was in Soviet times, but also a Polish grandmother, a Latvian grandfather, German great-grandfathers - this is not just a fact of your personal history, but now the most important means of transportation. Active, active, capable of surviving without a state, Russia - this Russia is running. For a while or forever - who knows.
***
I returned to Moscow earlier than expected: it became clear that for many, the consequences of the disaster are still little felt. Yes, prices have risen (“I used to pay 1,100 rubles for dog food, and now 16 thousand”, “I just calculated: my monthly expenses have tripled, although I buy exactly the same as two months ago”), yes , the repertoire of radio stations has also changed - veterans are protesting against Loboda, “why are you putting traitors in?” (employee of one regional radio), but in the stores and products, and almost all the goods were as they were. Unless McDonald's closed. In other words, the attitude of fellow citizens towards the war will be adjusted - how, in which direction, when the refrigerator will win (if it wins) the TV - it will become clearer in the middle of summer, when, as the head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina warned, stocks will run out and “structural restructuring of the economy will begin.” To my surprise, I almost never saw the same letter “Z” either in the towns or on the highways: three times in cars, once on a building, it cannot be compared with the patriotic fury when Crimea was taken away. Still ahead...
* The Russian authorities have added Meduza to the list of "media-foreign agents"
How propaganda works and why it is so effective in fooling people - I turned to scientists for an answer. NT questions are answered by: Alexander Asmolov, Doctor of Psychology, Head of the Department of Personality Psychology, Moscow State University; Maxim Alyukov, Investigator of the Public Sociology Laboratory of King's College London; Grigory Asmolov, specialist in the field of communications in the virtual sphere, King's College.
Full conversation here
Video version here
Yevgenia Albats: State propaganda works amazingly - I was convinced of this during my trips. But - how does it work?
Maxim ALYUKOV: Firstly, propaganda does not exist in a vacuum, it appeals to already existing identities, in particular, to the Soviet identity. (After the collapse of the USSR) the older generation feel humiliated, and the Putin regime is like a way to put Russia back on the world map.
When the war began, Mikhail Sokolov, a sociologist, based on the data of VTsIOM and FOM, that is, pro-regime pollsters, made a quick analysis that showed that if you live in a big city, if you are under 30, if you do not watch TV, there is a chance that you will have a positive attitude towards the regime and support the war at a minimum - 10-20%.
If you live in a small town, watch TV and are over 60, then with a probability of 80% you will support the war.
Fractured Society
But propaganda not only convinces people of something, it shows a very cynical image of the world, according to which no interpretations can be trusted. That is, propaganda also demotivates and demobilizes people: it makes no sense to do something, to protest.
We watch television a lot and focus on that, all those horrible narratives about the nuclear bomb and so on. But in reality it is a huge hybrid rich media environment, and the same narratives are repeated in search engines. For example, we know that Yandex provides 30% less sources that are critical to the state. The news aggregator Yandex.News aggregates news only from pro-government sources. There are bots that raise some stories, some sources in the search engines a little higher so that it is the pro-state position that comes up, and trolls do the same. This results in a homogeneous system where the same narratives are repeated online.
I really like the term that Grigory Asmolov has recently introduced into the discourse - a disconnected society, a disconnected society. This is a broader term. His research shows that when the name is alone, the narrative he hears first goes on TV, then he sees it on Yandex, then on the blog - repetition enhances the sense of authenticity. People conclude that it is easy to control one source, and if all sources repeat the same version at once, it is difficult to control them all, and therefore it is true. That is, television propaganda is repeated through the online medium.
Grigory ASMOLOV: There is such a concept introduced by the remarkable British sociologist Anthony Giddens ( Anthony Giddens https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/people/tony-giddens ) - ontological security. When people begin to feel that the world around them begins to crumble, when they feel they cannot influence it, they look for different lifelines to recreate the stability of the world. From this point of view, the success of Russian propaganda is not only its effectiveness, but also the demand for this propaganda in the context of the crisis, the tragedy that is taking place today.
People, the younger generation, they can still do something. They can leave, somehow take life into their own hands. The older generation feels insecure. And in order not to completely break this picture of the world, not to crumble into pieces, they grab onto this propaganda picture as the very lifeline that gives them at least some, albeit imaginary, but subjective sense of stability. .
You have noted a very important aspect, which concerns the fact that propaganda separates a generation. Precisely because the main danger for propaganda is that the younger generation will be the very alternative source, the very counterattack, which, perhaps, will mitigate the influence of propaganda.
Therefore, propaganda tries to single out, isolate its audience from sources of alternative information. Thus, a double effect: on the one hand, the demand for propaganda as a defense mechanism, on the other hand, the separation of generations through propaganda.
This song is almost a real archetypal anthem of Russia: "From the taiga to the British seas, the Red Army is the strongest of all." This is literally a hymn to greatness
And the last. Who are our parents for us, who are our children for us? These are our significant people. And now propaganda is trying to replace our close significant ones through the formation of other significant ones. TV presenters, celebrities are trying to displace relatives as a source of information, to replace them with themselves.
Alexander ASMOLOV: We were brought up in the spirit of the complete glorification of the war. Remember the song that was written during the civil war, which is almost the real archetypal anthem of Russia: "From the taiga to the British seas, the Red Army is the strongest." Written at the request of the People's Commissariat of Education of the Kyiv Military District in the 1920s, this song was later taken both in Germany and in Yugoslavia in different versions. But this song, beloved by many of Russia's leaders, is literally the national idea of Russia, not only of Russia, but of the Soviet Union as well. It is literally a hymn to greatness. And this is coming from the screens today. And if we remember another song written in a small town near Kherson, which is called "Kakhovka" ... "Kakhovka, Kakhovka, native rifle" and also - "Our armored train is standing on a siding."
Evgenia ALBATS: Do I understand correctly that you think that an ideology has appeared in Russia, and this is the ideology of militarism, the ideology of war?
Alexander ASMOLOV: I would call it a little differently. In Russia for the past 20 years, the key value ideal has been the ideal of security, by accepting which you accept the idea that it is due to this that stability is provided. And pay attention, if you look at the most demanded professions, their number has grown in Russia - these are security-related professions.
Evgenia ALBATS: Returning to how propaganda works. I have heard that there is a law of advertising: if every 100 meters a person who rides in a car is shown a poster: “Drink Coca-Cola!”, Then after 10 kilometers a person who does not want to drink Coca-Cola knows that it can be bad for the stomach, nevertheless go and drink Coca-Cola. Does propaganda work on the same principle of constant repetition?
Maxim ALYUKOV: This is just one mechanism, but there are quite a few of them.
We're doing a little research right now. We collect interviews with different people, including those who support the war, in order to understand how their narratives, thinking and arguments are arranged. And very often you can see that the war has begun, people, as it were, are already inside the war, on the one hand. On the other hand, they live in an authoritarian regime. They know they can't do anything. They feel helpless. Something terrible is happening. How do you explain this to yourself - this inaction and this horror? You, defending yourself from this horror, borrow these clichés from TV, because you do not need to think, they are already ready - take it, use it.
Evgenia ALBATS: That is, people choose for themselves as an explanation for something terrible some arguments that they understand: there are Nazis in Ukraine, so we are forced to fight there. I'm afraid of war, but there the Nazis are even more terrible. Do I understand you correctly?
Maxim ALYUKOV: Some people just openly believe it. But, most likely, there are not so many of them. But here a different process takes place: a person hears about Bucha, sees photos of Mariupol, and says to himself: I can’t figure it out, but here, on TV, they explained everything to me. In other words, there is a delegation of responsibility to the state, which will sort it out.
Complicity propaganda
Yevgenia ALBATS: Okay, but how then to explain twenty-year-olds who don’t watch TV, don’t talk to their ancestors, but they enjoy war?
Alexander ASMOLOV: Look, there is an older generation - everything is more or less clear with them, there is a generation of thirty-forty-year-olds who grew up in the 90s, and there are these twenty-year-olds, who for the most part were born already under the current president of the Russian Federation.
The fact is that it is wrong to oppose, as is often done, social networks and TV. They create a single hybrid ecosystem of communicating vessels: a laptop on its knees, but a TV is playing in the background.
Researchers have recently introduced another very important concept, which sounds like "propaganda of complicity." The fact is that propaganda today seeks not only to convince of something, but also to turn people into agents of distribution. Those who grew up in the 90s developed some kind of immunity and some experience with alternative sources. The generation that has grown up now, apparently, does not have these informational skills of working with alternative sources and a request for an alternative point of view.
A very tragic situation has arisen, causing deep fears that the new generation that grew up under Vladimir Putin is a generation that has very advanced skills in using various kinds of social networks and technologies, but at the same time this generation does not have sufficient critical thinking skills and work with alternative sources of information. . And due to this, they, perhaps, are more actively involved in this propaganda of complicity and turn into propaganda dissemination agents, thereby connecting and turning TV and the Internet into a single system.
Compromise with reality
Evgenia ALBATS: Why do people trust propaganda, even when people close to them - a brother, for example, say the opposite?
Alexander ASMOLOV: An absolutely wonderful article has now been published on the psychology of the whistleblowing epidemic, which is now beginning to flourish. The author is Maria Tendryakova. It says that such faith is in the state today, because the state is perceived as a parent, as a father, as a parental authority.
Maxim ALYUKOV: Your question is related to the problem of the status of a fact. People do not deal with facts, but with stories, with interpretations - this is how the human psyche works.
What does propaganda do? It offers a person many interpretations. For example, when the Malaysian Boeing was shot down, Russian television began to offer different versions: either the Boeing was shot down by a Ukrainian attack aircraft, then there were already dead people on the plane, then the rocket was, but completely different and hit another part of the plane. This multitude of versions completely confuses a person, he begins to doubt even what he was previously sure of. Distrust is cultivated, propaganda says, "Don't trust me, don't trust any interpretation at all." And people begin to suspect that no facts can be trusted. And this applies even to personal experience: it seems to us that it was, and psychology shows well that in hindsight we begin to interpret our personal experience in a different way.
Grigory ASMOLOV: On the one hand, people are rather lazy in search of information. On the other hand, it is a defense mechanism.
Because if you agree that a criminal war is really taking place, if you agree that really terrible crimes took place in Bucha and in other places, it is very difficult to live with this, especially when you are inside Russia. Therefore, some kind of protective mechanism is probably being created when people choose for themselves a compromise with reality, including when everything is questioned. This is the post-truth - everything is so unsteady and incomprehensible, and perhaps everything is not quite right.
Alexander ASMOLOV: Ukhtomsky, a remarkable classic of our science, said: “Fact is a fool. Whoever wants to use it will use it.” Hear the words of Ukhtomsky, the author of the concept of attitudes, the author of the concept of the dominant, which acts as glasses through which we see and do not see the world. This is an illusion. We construct the world every time. And in this case, who will be a participant in this construction - that is the question.