HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

From the mid-fifties, when the era of “the great terror” had passed, the main responsibility for maintaining the stability of the Soviet system lay with the state’s propaganda machine. The repressive structures assisted in this, by weeding out those who, for one reason or another, were immune to the propaganda. But such people were relatively few, and so the state’s repressive machinery didn’t have to be kept permanently active. It was working behind the scenes, only occasionally removing those who “thought in a strange way”. Most of the dirty work was done by the “masters of the Party word”.

The state’s propaganda machine was unprecedented in its power and operated at every level of society. Because of this, the population was kept from any true information about what was happening in the country and in the world. It was this that naturally formed the principal front line of the struggle against the regime both inside the USSR and from outside. What annoyed the vast majority of people most in the final years of Soviet power wasn’t the organs of repression, it wasn’t the militia or the KGB, with whom the overwhelming majority of the population had no direct contact, it was actually the Party propagandists, who’d been telling the nation tales that simply didn’t fit in with their own everyday experiences.

We didn’t have to wait long to see the logical conclusion to such a situation. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, effectively the main demand from those at the top and those at the bottom of society was to know the truth. In answer to this political demand, voiced loudly and clearly, the leadership under Gorbachev came up with the slogan of glasnost, openness. Of course, glasnost was a purely Soviet euphemism, reflecting a vague and mythologized view of the Soviet party elite about the related ideas of such liberal values as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, open discussion and so on. It was indeed an extremely inconsistent, limited and internally contradictory ideological concept. But at the same time it’s important to understand that it was the most fundamental, the very first, and the harshest example of perestroika. It was the pinnacle on which everything else was then hung.

Psychologically, from the outset glasnost was seen as the principal achievement of Gorbachev’s revolution, and that opinion remains to this day. It was seen as a focussed response to Soviet totalitarianism, as witnessed by the last generations of the Soviet period. That was why, when the regime began its attack on democracy, and all of the achievements of the revolution brought about by Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were thrown out, glasnost was seen as the last unsinkable bastion of “Communist liberalism”.

For many people, this has created the illusion that some sort of freedom of speech has survived in Russia. In reality, the situation has been much more complicated. Even before the war began there was no freedom of speech in Russia. But the authoritarian, and to some extent even neo-totalitarian, regime partially learnt to co-exist with the remains of Gorbachev’s glasnost, which even brought it some benefits.

Of course the start of the war and the regime’s switching to all-out mobilisation could not but affect this area of life. All of the influential independent and semi-independent media, journalists and bloggers came under unprecedented pressure, as a result of which they had either to stop working, leave the country or go over to the service of the regime.

However, this is the final stage of the development of a dictatorship. We have to understand that we cannot allow this to evolve.

In order to correctly build a strategy to democratise Russian society in the future, it’s essential that we understand the secret of the strange and sometimes unnatural coexistence of the two mutually exclusive beginnings of the life of society: the birth of the truth and the birth of the lie.

The basis of this phenomenon is the regime’s ability to hold the commanding heights of information. It all began when the basic channels of information were taken over by the state and people and structures affiliated to it. The significant moment in this process was the destruction of the old NTV television channel, and the establishment of full control over Channel One by the Presidential Administration. At this point, Channel One became a public broadcasting organisation in name only. Today, the information market in Russia is one of the biggest monopolies.

What’s more, the state directly or indirectly controls not only the pro-government media, but even the bulk of the media that is meant to be on the side of the opposition.