The killing overnight of an American journalist in Ukraine has grabbed the headlines, but it’s just the latest stage in an increasingly brutal war on independent journalism by the Russian state both in Ukraine and Russia itself.
Coupled with Putin’s “make Russia great again” wartime rhetoric, it’s dragging the country back to a brutal 20th century totalitarianism, but with a dangerous expansive nationalism, not communism, as its ideological core.
Inside Russia it’s the final signal that the invasion of Ukraine is as much about remaking Russia internally — from a kleptocratic authoritarianism to a nationalist totalitarianism — as it is about restoring imperial boundaries.
American reporter Brent Renaud was killed outside Kyiv yesterday when a group of journalists covering the evacuation of Ukrainians were fired on by Russian troops. It’s not the first killing of a journalist of the Russian imperial project.
We can date the beginning of Putin’s crackdown on independent media — along with civil society, NGOs and Putin’s political opponents — to 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for her reporting on the war in Chechnya. Her Novaya Gazeta editor, Dmitry Muratov, was recognised with last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for the paper’s commitment to unflinching journalism.
Now her old paper has been forced to flinch in the face of new laws that threaten 15 years in jail for “dissemination of knowingly false information”. The law bans words like “war” or “invasion”, requiring instead the more anodyne “military operation”.
Independent media in the country like radio station Ekho Moskvy or TV broadcaster Dozhd have opted to shut down. Other digital news media are being blocked by the internet regulator. Novaya Gazeta is, for the time being, continuing to publish but at the price of ignoring the war. Even cautiously apolitical media have stopped publishing rather than risk falling foul of the law, leaving the field to a “nothing to see here” state-owned media.
Most European and North American broadcasters have pulled their bureaus out of the country or have been barred. The big tech platforms, including Facebook, have been banned. (You can find a running list from Columbia University here.)
Banning independent news does more than deny the Russian people the ability to know what’s going on, according to The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, a long-term writer on Putin’s authoritarianism.
It produces, she says, “the impossibility of knowing what people think in a totalitarian society. And like the actual impossibility of it, because it’s not that you can’t find out what people really think. It’s that people can’t really think. And so you can’t find out what they can really think”.
Russia’s totalitarian embrace renders irrelevant the popular question: is Putin nuts or savvy? Based on news out of the country over the weekend, it’s the system that’s pathological, not the leader.
The Times in London reported over the weekend that the head and deputy head of the foreign intelligence branch of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau had been arrested for giving dud advice on the invasion. Looks like telling the boss what he wants to hear (“you’ll be greeted with flowers in the street!”) doesn’t produce the most rational decision-making in Washington or in Moscow.
But perhaps we’ve been looking in all the wrong places for the reasons behind the war. Maybe we should take Putin at his word that the “military operation” is about an internal remaking of Russian society within what it sees as its legitimate borders.
The hunt for some comprehensive rationality is the last trot around the paddock for the so-called “realist” school of analysis — the idea that we should expect nation states to “rationally” throw their weight around, particularly in their own backyard. It’s got a natural attraction for both the unipolar strivings of the US neo-conservatives and the anti-American imperialists on the Stop-the-War left.
Turn on Fox News and you’ll be treated to the popularised version. The school’s guru, John Mearsheimer, is providing the “it’s the West’s fault” take in The Economist.
Problem is it skips over a few hard facts about autocracies. The 20th century taught us that wars of aggression are never rational (or, in fact, successful) but fearful advisers mean autocrats are denied the hard-headed analysis needed for rational decision-making.
I’ve got no time for it. It sacrifices the true heroes of our time, the democratic activists (journalists too) who have shrugged off Russian colonialism and faced down autocracy in their own countries (including inside Russia) to build the emerging democratic space that is now being bombed away.
…the so-called “realist” school of analysis — the idea that we should expect nation states to “rationally” throw their weight around, particularly in their own backyard.
Some of Guy Rundle’s commentary veers in this direction.
Thanks for this. Anna Politkovskaya wasn’t the first journalist murdered in Russia for her reporting, but her murder did reverberate. She had been a brave and uncompromising voice since the days of glasnost, a journalist’s journalist as well as a true heir of the Russian intelligentsia. Her murder, which took place on Putin’s birthday, was likely organised by the thug Putin left in charge of Chechnya, Razman Kadyrov. Kadyrov has reportedly sent his people to Ukraine.
Great to see you note Masha Gessen, always insightful on Putin’s Russia and a highly original and powerful thinker in her own right on a range of issues.
On the nature of the regime and the problem with dealing with it, I recommend this article by Andrey Movchan in The Guardian. It’s a bit dated now (Feb 28) in its recommendations but it does a very good job explaining how Putin’s Russia in a different sort of a system and speaks well to your points about the conversion to a nationalist totalitarianism. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/02/28/western-reaction-to-war-in-ukraine-plays-into-vladimir-putins-hands-a76644
Yes, these are all helpful analyst and analyses. For an additional one that explains why, hopefully Putin is not totally insane but has deluded himself, this article by the editor of Meduza, Maxim Trudolyubov, is very enlightening:
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/04/putin-s-last-stand
Unfortunately, while it explains why Putin deluded himself into starting this war, it gives no help in predicting how or when it will end. Even if he becomes fully aware of his catastrophic folly, he is now, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
” in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er”
Sad and disturbing but also stimulating, thanks. It’s also using that analytic concept of totalitarianism, where the system closes down autonomous activity and thought and attempts to either make reality conform to its purpose or point of view, or at least creates an alternate vision of reality. Stalinism was closer to the former, Putin the latter. Neither terror, nor full economic control were his game until now. Authoritarianism at the service of kleptocracy was sufficient.
However both Trudolyubov and Warren are raising the question that this may now no longer be enough. The sanctions are driving him toward economic autarky, for which Russia is poorly equipped, and the war itself is driving in the direction of completely shutting down autonomy and expanding the state’s dominance of communication. Stalin used the Party, the state bureaucrats and the secret police, Putin is reliant on bureaucrats drawn from the security services. Whether they will be enough, or reliable, is the question.
Liked the Macbeth quote.
Just as disturbing is the link of Putin with the white religioous right as seen in this article:
https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-u-s-christians-who-pray-for-putin/
On this ‘It’s that people can’t really think. And so you can’t find out what they can really think”’ it’s quite difficult dealing with whole cohorts, if not populations, of supposedly (often highly) educated people, but cannot analyse their way out of a paper bag…. includes locally too.
Warning to liberal democracies as there are many ‘powers that be’ who would also prefer the people to be under equipped on higher level skills, and simply trust authority of leader, approved media and church (‘traditionalism’?).
No coincidence that US fossil fuel and climate science denial linked think tanks (Koch Network) promote dumbing down of education, while attacking ‘elites’ and ‘experts’, via indirect jabs at ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’ i.e. knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, evaluation and synthesis or creativity.
Like locally, powers that be prefer the bottom three skills for employment and ‘following orders’, but have strong antipathy towards higher levels skills and empower citizens.
> “The head and deputy head of the foreign intelligence branch of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau had been arrested for giving dud advice on the invasion.”
I have seen a Twitter thread by a translator purporting to be Igor Sushko (so information quality could be low) that the FSB before the war was asked to run through various hypothetical scenarios not related to an attack on Ukraine. As check-boxes for bureaucrats the result had to be positive for Russia. They were NOT told there would be war – it was concealed from everyone, so they could not prepare any significant intelligence. The FSB is of course being blamed for the lack of accurate intelligence.
Additionally, the Chechnyan leader Kadyrov was angry with Putin because his team sent in to kidnap/ kill Zelenskyy was “absolutely demolished before they even had a chance to fight and they got blown to pieces“.
Furthermore, even if they kill Zelenskyy, occupation would be difficult at best and a regular puppet government would be dismantled as soon as most Russian forces withdrew. There would even be difficulties choosing a puppet governor, with no clear candidate being satisfactory.
Further issues are
Read the same, was interesting and plausible in that it was more about the longstanding and ingrained dynamics of the bureaucracy, authority, information and decision making, without making many explicit claims of the moment.
LOL, when we close down RT, it is good. When Putin close media outlets financed by the West, it is bad. Do you know why? Because we are the good guys, and we have the right stuff. Hoo-ha!