Putin on the throne of Ivan the Terrible ("Rzeczpospolita", Poland)
After the West introduced the so-called third-level sanctions, the enthusiastic commentators began to prophesy the beginning of the end of Vladimir Putin. However, this optimism is unfounded. The pillars on which Putin’s power rests seem, at least for now, unshakable. These are: his personal popularity, complete control over the media (primarily television), a loyal suppression apparatus and (last but not least) Russian homo sovieticus.
Pentacle
In late July, 86% of Russians approved the actions of the President of the Russian Federation and about the same number of people supported the aggression against Ukraine. Thanks to the annexation of Crimea, Putin has reached a peak of popularity, comparable to what he had after the war with Georgia in 2008. Where did this enthusiasm come from?
According to Alexei Levinson, an employee of the Levada Center, the only independent Russian center for sociological research, Putin enjoys such support, since he wants Russia to be a great and respected power. According to the sociologist, the Russians put the improvement in the position of their state in the international arena in the first place before the relative increase in well-being that they have seen in recent years. They understand their great power in a specific way: they do not care whether they will love their state abroad. On the contrary, in their understanding, Russia will be a truly great power when others become afraid of it. Therefore, the deterioration of relations with America and Europe was perceived by the Russians as evidence of the strength of their country.
At the same time, public opinion studies show that Russians do not harbor illusions about the nature of the modern regime. According to them, Putin is primarily the spokesman for the interests of the so-called siloviki (special services and the army). So says 46% of respondents. Further, the interests of oligarchs and officials are mentioned (33%). Thus, Russians are convinced that Putin’s government primarily serves the interests of a small minority, but despite this, the president supports the majority. In addition, the people of Russia are well aware that the current ruling team is corrupt through and through.
Levinson explains this paradox by the fact that Russians need "a symbolic unifying center."
Meeting-concert "We are together!"
Putin is becoming not a normal living politician whom society can value, but a symbolic and even magical figure personifying the dreams and hopes of the people. And this magical component determines the stability of his power.
Levinson declined to answer the question about the end of the regime, but added that there was no direct connection between the economic situation and Putin’s public support.
Therefore, it is erroneous to believe that the deterioration of the economic situation in Russia will lead to a fall in Putin’s popularity.
According to the sociologist, there is an inverse pattern: the experience of other countries shows that poor people in a poor country often have a particular inclination to support the leader. So it was, for example, in the case of Hugo Chávez and Venezuela. This is also the case in Russia: primarily because there is no alternative leader or center of power.
Consequently, in order to understand the Putin phenomenon, one should forget about the schemes of Western political science, especially the one that points to the direct link between the deterioration of the economic situation of the society and the fall of confidence in the government.
Power over minds
To retain the support of the majority, Putin skillfully uses techniques for the so-called brainwashing. It would not be a great exaggeration to say that political technologists responsible for propaganda play an equally important role in supporting the regime as security officers and the army. Their task is to invent all the new ways of autocratic management of the Russians.
The most recent of them was described in the series of his articles by the former Kremlin political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky. He notes that for a non-democratic government, conviction in the support of the “majority” has a special meaning: this is one of the ways to legitimize it. Such a majority does not arise as a result of an electoral act, but as a result of propaganda campaigns. The public is convinced that the leadership enjoys the support of the majority, regardless of whether it really is.
Until recently, the slogan "Putin's majority" was implemented, which was one of the elements of the so-called managed democracy. Its essence was to maintain the distance between the leaders and the masses, as well as to suppress political emotions. Political technologists 90-s decided that the Russian policy should "freeze". It was decided not to publicly demonstrate neither emotions nor their sources (that is, not to pursue an open policy). A peculiar political theater appeared in which decisions about the content of the play, the roles and the direction were taken in the Kremlin.
Now political technologists are seeking to achieve, as Pavlovsky calls it, “the overwhelming majority”. In this case, political theater and imaginary elections, that is, all this pretense within the framework of a managed democracy, lose their meaning. A new concept is to identify or construct a minority (for example, homosexuals, non-believers, opposition traitors of a great power idea, etc.), which will be called the enemy of the Russians. Power, stigmatizing a minority, artificially creates a social conflict. As a result of this conflict, an “overwhelming majority” arises, which is supported by the authorities.
Armageddon Fighters
A resident of the village of Frunze, Omsk Region, is watching a TV broadcast of the press conference of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Managing society through conflict would not have been possible without mass media, television, which is reaching for all Russians. It was tested during the aggression against Ukraine. The Russian sitting in front of the TV screen is not only an observer, but thanks to him he is symbolically present at the scene of the conflict and can feel himself, as Pavlovsky puts it, “Armageddon fighter”. Television creates a new reality in which the Russian, as a member of the emotional majority, fights with a pre-known outcome. For a message to be effective, it must be populist and primitive.
An example is the story of a refugee from Slavyansk shown on state television, who allegedly witnessed how Ukrainians crucified a three-year-old child in front of her mother. Russians believe in this because they cannot verify messages of this kind and do not have access to alternative sources of information. They are defenseless against television propaganda, because, as the Moscow political analyst notes, the only way to effectively defend against it is to throw away the television.
Soviet man alive
Therefore, it is not surprising that the Russians are completely brainwashed. This is proved, for example, by a survey conducted by the Levada Center in early August. When asked who was primarily responsible for the death of passengers of the Malaysian Boeing, 50% of Russians responded that the Ukrainian leadership, 45% - the Ukrainian military, 20% - the US and only 2% called the perpetrators of the so-called separatists, and 1% - Russia (in the survey it was possible to choose several answers).
Sociology teaches that for effective management of people there is little power and propaganda. Full readiness or even public approval for the use of these funds by the authorities is necessary. In the case of Russians, we can talk about the mentality of the Soviet man.
For the past 20 years, political correctness has ordered us to distinguish between a Russian person and a Soviet person. She instilled in us that Russians who are good in their essence fell victim to a separate Kremlin elite or an impersonal system. The reaction of the Russians to the aggression against Ukraine showed that this dichotomy is controversial.
This judgment is also confirmed by studies that were carried out in Russia by the Russians themselves (and therefore they are difficult to attribute to Russophobic). At the end of 1980, Levada Center launched the Soviet Man project. His goal was to document the transformation of Russian society after the collapse of the communist regime.
Sociologists assumed that the totalitarian system created a special type of person, which later became the basis and prerequisite for its existence.
Homo sovieticus appeared in 20-ies of the XX century, that is, when the most important institutions of the communist regime were already formed. After the collapse of communism, the Soviet generations would eventually lose their influence on the Russian identity, which would be increasingly determined by young people - more liberal, democratic, valuing a free market, etc. Thus, the purpose of the study was to document the process of withering away of a Soviet person.
Meanwhile, to the surprise of Levada Center’s sociologists, already in the 90 of the 20th century, it turned out that the assumptions on which the research was based were erroneous: the Soviet people were not at all going to go stories. This happened because the institutions of the communist state (state administration, judicial system, political police, schools and armed forces) were left in a practically unchanged form. They continued to reproduce the Soviet man.
According to Lev Gudkov, head of the Levada Center, an essential feature of homo sovieticus is its moral decay. Sterilization or the destruction of morality is a condition for maintaining a state of apathy and indifference in the population, without which authoritarian regimes, like Putin's, cannot exist. ”
No competitor
Should Putin fear for his power with a system so designed? If we discard the natural causes (illness or death), the change of the Kremlin leader can occur in two ways: either as a result of an internal putsch within the power group, or as a result of a public riot.
The first option can now be ruled out: Putin has no real competitor, and several hundred people close to him governing Russia are completely uninterested in getting rid of him. After all, their power and huge amounts of money depend directly on Putin, and together with his departure, the whole structure would have collapsed into oblivion.
A social riot is also unlikely. Now Putin is supported by the overwhelming majority, which is ready to endure poverty for the sovereign-imperial mirage. Therefore, until there are significant shuffles at the top of the government or tectonic shifts in society, Putin can be confident that the Monomakh's cap in the Kremlin and the throne of Ivan the Terrible will remain in his personal possession.
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