A year into war, Putin crafts the Russia he craves
The grievances, paranoia and imperialist mindset that drove President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war — a broad, if uneven, societal upheaval that has left the Russian leader more dominant than ever at home.
Schoolchildren collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from “aggressors who seek world domination.”
Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, their anti-war performers and artists expunged. New exhibits put on by the state have titles like “NATOzism” — a play on “Nazism” that seeks to cast the Western military alliance as posing a threat as existential as the Nazis of World War II.
Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that have sprung up in the first 30 years of postSoviet Russia have met an abrupt end, while nationalist groups once seen as fringe have taken center stage.
As Friday's anniversary of the invasion approaches, Russia's military has suffered setback after setback, falling far short of its goal of taking control of Ukraine. But at home, facing little resistance, Putin's year of war has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.
“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultraconservative business tycoon, bragged in a phone interview on Saturday. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society is cleansing itself from liberalism and the Western poison.”
That the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia's transformation go far deeper, he said, than it would have had Putin's hopes for a swift victory been realized.
“If the Blitzkrieg had succeeded, nothing would have changed,” he said.
The Kremlin for years sought to keep Malofeyev at arm's length, even as he funded pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to be reformed into an empire of “traditional values,” free of Western influence. But that changed after the invasion, as Putin turned “traditional values” into a rallying cry — signing a new anti-gay law, for instance — while styling himself as another Peter the Great retaking lost Russian lands.
Most important, Malofeyev said, Russia's liberals have either been silenced or have fled the country, while Western companies have left voluntarily.
That change was evident last Wednesday at a gathering off the traffic-jammed Garden Ring road in Moscow, where some of the most prominent rights activists who have remained in Russia came together for the latest of many recent farewells: The Sakharov Center, a human rights archive that was a liberal hub for decades, was opening its last exhibit before being forced to shut under a new law.
The center's chair, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, once a Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that “what we just couldn't have imagined two years ago or even a year ago is happening today.”
“A new system of values has been built,” Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, said afterward. “Brutal and archaic public values.”
A year ago, as Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility; Putin, after all, had styled himself as a peace-loving president who would never attack another country. So after the invasion started — stunning some of the president's closest aides — the Kremlin scrambled to adjust its propaganda to justify it.
It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing “Nazis” who took power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message went, and the goal of Putin's “special military operation” was to end the war the West had started.
In a series of addresses aimed at shoring up domestic support, Putin cast the invasion as a near-holy war for Russia's very identity, declaring that it was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being forced upon it by an aggressive West.
The full power of the state was deployed to spread and enforce that message. National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, dropped entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were directed to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; police hunted down people for offenses like anti-war Facebook posts, helping to push hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.
“Society in general has gone off the rails,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, said in a phone interview. “They've flipped the ideas of good and evil.”
At the same time, he argued, daily life has changed little for Russians without a family member fighting in Ukraine, which has hidden or assuaged the costs of the war. Western officials estimate that at least 200,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, a far more serious toll than analysts had predicted when the war began. Yet the economy has suffered much less than analysts predicted, with Western sanctions having failed to drastically reduce average Russians' quality of life even as many Western brands departed.
“One of the scariest observations, I think, is that for the most part, nothing has changed for people,” Chernyshov said, describing the urban rhythm of restaurants and concerts and his students going on dates. “This tragedy gets pushed to the periphery.”
In Moscow, Putin's new ideology of war is on display at the Victory Museum — a sprawling hilltop compound dedicated to the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany. One new exhibit, “NATOzism,” declares that “the purpose of creating NATO was to achieve world domination.” A second, “Everyday Nazism,” includes artifacts from Ukraine's Azov Battalion, which has far-right connections, as evidence for the false assertion that Ukraine is committing “genocide” against Russians.