Putin’s myth-making glorifies Russia. Ours humiliates the West
When autocrats want to change the course of their country’s future they begin by taking control of the past. By setting their objectives – however outrageous they may actually be – in what appears to be a plausible historical trajectory they create a story (now called a “narrative”) which makes their own ambition justifiable. If this propaganda operation is conducted successfully, it can make even the most appalling crimes seem not just acceptable but necessary.
The mythology that underpins Russia’s new imperialism combines a resurrected medieval mission with 20th-century global paranoia – but neatly eliminates references to Soviet Russia’s own monstrous crimes. The starvation of whole swathes of the Ukrainian population by Stalin and the mass murder committed in the Gulags do not feature at all. The Putin fable is so tortuous and bizarre that it is difficult to believe that any contemporary population could be convinced by it – and yet the majority of today’s Russian population appear to accept it, along with the horrific consequences to which it leads.
Most oddly, much of the belief system that this new national identity involves comes directly from the Orthodox Church whose authority was, within living memory, criminalised in Russia. The saints and martyrs to whom Vladimir Putin now makes ostentatious obeisances were, during his time with the KGB, regarded as ludicrous fictional figures used by a wicked Tsarist tyranny to entrap the masses in superstition. In truth, that supposedly universal rejection of theology by Communist Russia may always have been misunderstood. A friend of mine who visited a major Soviet university in the 1960s told me that, inscribed over its front entrance were the words: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.” What is that, if not a form of displaced religious belief? Communism did not so much discard religion as replace it with a new conception of what was sacred and what was forbidden.
Absolutism remained – along with the idea that Russia as a nation had a unique moral obligation to preserve the nativist integrity of its people. Those who share its blood bond (and particularly its language) must be united with their brethren in the Motherland. If some of them happen, by accident or misfortune, to reside in what is technically another nation state, then that is a problem which must be overcome – by force if necessary.
This Russian revanchism is remarkably similar to Nazi Germany’s claims over the Sudetenland. The reclaiming of territory that once belonged to one country but has since become part of another is one of the oldest sources of war, possibly the very oldest. There is nothing very new here. With territory comes power and wealth. The loss of it – especially to a competitor state – means increased vulnerability, humiliation at home and abroad, and the possible collapse of a ruling regime. And, as it happens, some of the territory that Putin is attempting to seize for Russia is peculiarly useful to its economy and, in the case of Crimea, has played a significant role in Russian history.
This is really a very old kind of story: the sanctification of the history of a people whose collective memory must be reshaped into a tale of heroic resurgence with all the nasty bits left out.
What is – so far as I know – quite unprecedented is what the opponents of this aggressive campaign, our side, are doing to their history at precisely the same moment. While Putin tells the Russians that they have been, for centuries, the blameless victims of the world’s hostility, the West is teaching its young that they have inherited the fruits of evil – that the advantages which their political culture and economic system have provided are inherently tainted, that even their ineradicable genetic traits such as skin colour convey guilt and the need for endless self-abasement.
Instead of editing out the bad chapters in its history as Russia is doing to such spectacular effect, the West is perversely avoiding any recognition of the tremendous contributions it has made to improving the conditions of life through the spread of mass prosperity and personal freedom.
The reach of Western ideas around the world is recounted as an unrelieved story of wickedness, of relentless conquest and exploitation from which no one outside the rich of those imperial nations ever benefited. This is factually wrong and deeply pernicious. But these arguments about the colonial past have been going on for a long time. Now there is a new and more radical version of Western self-hatred. We, who are alive now, are not just responsible retroactively for what our ancestors may have done centuries ago. We are also actively culpable for what is happening right at this moment by living our modern lives – making use of the products and discoveries of industrialisation that are destroying the planet and therefore the futures of other less advanced peoples.
To atone for this, we must move backwards to a pre-modern time when we did not ravage the earth with our desire for unseasonal warmth, plentiful and varied food and travel beyond the narrow bounds of our birthplace, while fully expecting our descendants to lead ever more free and comfortable lives.
We have been ready and prepared to offer the means to achieve these things to less advantaged countries. Now, not only must we accept self-denial for ourselves – we must impose it on the world at large because this Western way of life is too dangerous to be propagated.
Where once the developing world might have expected to graduate to the standard of living we took for granted, it is now being told that the party is over: we will not give them a chance to experience life in the modern era, after all.
Russia, in its mortification at having lost the Cold War, is seeking to revive a myth of past glory, at the same time as the West – having won the great argument – is mired in self-loathing. Where is that going to end, do you think?
Advanced capitalist democracies have much to be proud of. But now we are fabricating lies to denigrate our own successes
The reach of Western ideas around the world is told as story of exploitation. This is factually wrong