By Andreas Umland The Russian Federation is currently and will remain, for the foreseeable future, the country that possesses th...
By Andreas
Umland
The Russian
Federation is currently and will remain, for the foreseeable future, the country
that possesses the second largest number of nuclear warheads. This highly armed
state has, like the Soviet Union before it and the US today, an overkill
capacity. As their communist predecessors in the Kremlin, the political leaders
of post-Soviet Russia command enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy humankind
several times. Russia’s current rulers, moreover, act within a political system
in which parliamentary control of the armed forces, checks and balances between
branches of power, civil society monitoring of officials, or investigative
journalism on top politicians are either absent or underdeveloped. Russia’s
political system represents a form of electoral authoritarianism in which power
holders are only dependent on the integrity of their command chain, and of
their public support constantly regenerated by the government’s information
policies.
In view of these
circumstances, Russia's more and more neurotic collective mind represents a critical
challenge to the integrity of the European and even world security system. Russian
electronic mass media has turned from a platform of relative pluralism of interpretation
and opinion, in the 1990s, into a dangerous propaganda and manipulation
instrument. Over the last 15 years, Russia’s major TV channels, radio stations
and newspaper have been resolutely re-designed to prolong as long as possible
the rule of the kleptocratic clique around Vladimir Putin. Kremlin-controlled
mass media achieves this aim through purposeful inception and radicalization of
a fortress mentality among the Russian population. The Russian people are told,
on a daily basis, that Russia is under a deadly attack from the US and its
underlings across the world, ranging from far-away Australia and Canada to
neighboring Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. The propaganda machine’s constant
repetition that NATO, the EU and their allies are after Russia’s lands and
resources has made, for many Russians, the idea that they have to stick
together for securing the physical survival of their nation a common place
beyond dispute.
So far, the West
has largely failed to address the core issue in its confrontation with Moscow –
the deeply poisoned Russian public opinion. It does not systematically counter-act
the constant spread of Manichean, conspirological and rabidly anti-Western
misrepresentations of international affairs, by the skillful manipulators of Kremlin-controlled
mass media. For instance, the English-language RT (Russia Today) state TV
channel has, since 2005, been allowed to become a noteworthy factor in the
formation of North American as well as West European public opinion, on the
Wests contemporary domestic and foreign affairs. RT’s largely unchallenged pseudo-pacifist
stance has only started to loose cloud, even among political radicals, with the
start of the all-to-obvious Russian "hybrid war" against Ukraine.
Especially, the downing of Malaysian flight MH-17, by a Russian rocket on 17
July 2014, has dealt a blow to RT’s and various other Russian outlet’s international
propaganda campaign strategies designed to muddle the waters of Western public
opinion on the escalation in the Donets Basin. The Kremlin’s project to subvert
the integrity of the West from within has largely failed.
Yet, a far more
consequential and complicated challenge remains unmet – the ever stronger
anti-Western infection of public opinion, inside Russia, by state-directed domestic
television. Ordinary Russians are bombarded, around the clock, with
half-truths, conspiracy theories, defamatory allegations, and plain lies via the
news programs, historic documentaries and political talks shows of the large TV
channels ORT, RTR and NTV. These lavishly funded and peculiarly professional “myth
engines” are misinforming, agitating and stirring up the Russian public, on a
scale and with vengeance difficult to imagine for somebody not understanding
Russian language and watching these shows. The Kremlin’s pseudo-journalists use
rhetorical and psychological methods far more crude than RT's leftist attacks
on certain pathologies of Western capitalism and liberal democracy. Instead of
the human rights and universal justice rhetoric employed by RT, Russian
domestic broadcasting is manifestly anti-liberal and, sometimes, radically right-wing.
It uses an eclectic mix of ideas and arguments drawn from Christian-Orthodox
fundamentalism, 19th-century European conservatism, 20th-century
Russian émigré nationalism, integral traditionalism, Bolshevik dualism, and
post-war Soviet triumphalism, to pursue a rearchaization of the Russian
collective mind.
As a result of
this grave psychological transformation, the population of one of the world’s
most deadly armed country is currently suffering from collective neurosis.
Russia’s thinking about the West and especially the US has become dominated by
feelings of existential fear, deep resentment, manifest insecurity and profound
mistrust. Most Russians today understand the world as consisting mainly of intransigent
enemies of Russia who are engaged, at best, in a zero-sum games or, at worst,
in a hidden war against their motherland the only protection of with its
patriotic political leadership in the Kremlin. Russia’s present state of
national paranoia means that humanity may have, without realizing it, entered
one of the most dangerous moments in its history.
Given its
irrational, if not psycho-pathological aspects, this challenge can neither be
overcome by better diplomatic engagement with the Kremlin, nor be met through an
increase of Western military capacity vis-Ã -vis the Russian army. Neither the
West’s foreign or defense ministries, nor its security organizations like NATO
or the OSCE are designed to solve problems like the above. Instead of engaging
in ever more diplomatic activism and higher arms spending, the leaders and
thinkers of the West should think more deeply about how and what to communicate
to the Russian people living both in- and outside Russia. Which opportunities
do we have to reach as many as possible Russians, and which message should we
send them? How can we tell them, and how can we make them believe us, that we
are not their enemies? Where should we put our money and direct our energy to
tackle not the symptoms, but the root of our problem with Russia? Finding clear
answers and workable instruments to tackle these issues
will make the Earth not only a better, but – more importantly – a safer place,
for all of us.
About The Author:
Andreas Umland, Dr. phil., Ph. D., is Senior Research
Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv and General
Editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and
Society“ published by ibidem Press at Stuttgart. A somewhat
different version of this text was published before in the “New Atlanticist” blog
series of the Atlantic Council of the United States. Thomson Reuters ResearcherID : I-5395-2015
