This article starts with a video shot on August 9, 2024, in the Russian city of Magadan. It was shown on Russian TV and republished by many on the Internet. It is a military demonstration, where a commander orders:
“For Belgorod and Donbas, for Crimea and Sevastopol,
for Kursk and Kherson
we take the U.S. in the crosshairs until Russia wins.
We demand the introduction of commemorative assignments
into our strategic nuclear missiles
and target cities in the United States of America.
Yars, Sarmat, and Poseidon, (Russian missiles)
We’re taking aim at Washington DC.
To Washington DC!
To Washington DC!
To Washington DC!”
This video doesn’t look shocking to a Russian. Some of the most popular anchors on Russian TV permanently make speeches close to this one.
Practically all the independent Russian journalists and politicians were either imprisoned or left Russia.
People get imprisoned just for a public expression of their anti-war opinion.
On July 28, a pianist Pavel Kushnir died in prison after a hunger strike. He was detained in May and accused of public calls to terrorism because of anti-war videos on a YouTube channel with five subscribers.
Among the recent verdicts by the Russian court, the most shocking is the verdict of Ksenia Karelina.
In 2014, Karelina married an American and left Russia. She received her U.S. passport in 2021 while retaining her Russian citizenship as well. On January 2, 2024, Ksenia traveled to Russia to visit her parents for the first time in three years. When crossing the border, her cell phone was confiscated and FSB officers found information about her transfer of $51.80 to the Ukrainian foundation “Razom for Ukraine”. The fund’s website says that the collected money goes to humanitarian needs, for example, to help children affected by the war. Based on this information, the Russian court found Ksenia Karelina guilty under the article on state treason. She was sentenced to 12 years in a general regime colony and fined 300 thousand rubles.
The only sources of true information still available for Russians are on the Internet, mostly on YouTube. It is broadcast from abroad by people who are officially considered enemies.
Many experts claimed that the Kremlin would not dare block YouTube, the country’s most popular video platform for fear of mass discontent. More than 95 million Russians watch YouTube videos monthly (this does not include children under 12).
The blocking of YouTube in Russia has been long awaited. At the end of December 2020, there was news about a Duma bill allowing platforms to be blocked for discrimination against Russia. A couple of days later, users in Russia created a poll “Will YouTube be blocked by the end of 2021?” In the first six months, the probability of the event (according to the community) did not exceed 25%, then – as the new year of 2022 approached – began to rapidly decrease.
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in a similar survey in March, users estimated the probability of YouTube’s closure by the end of the year at 85%. The Kremlin, which in March 2022 brutally cleaned up the media field (many representatives of the independent media were either imprisoned or left Russia), for some reason, delayed the seemingly obvious next goal. And in 2023, the Russian authorities appeared to have forgotten about YouTube altogether.
But in August 2024, the prognosticators found something to do again. This time, they discuss whether YouTube will be blocked entirely by October.
Meanwhile, Russian authorities make it more difficult for the users of YouTube in Russia, by technically distorting (“slowing”) broadcast.
Using Facebook and other foreign social networks is even more difficult in Russia. Those Russians, who use them do it with the help of VPN servers. With a VPN application, one can connect to a server in a foreign country, bypass blocking, and watch content one otherwise couldn’t access.
The interesting thing is that Russian public opinion about the war with Ukraine has been strikingly inert. Throughout more than two years of fighting, including successes and defeats at the front, rising casualties, economic hardship, Ukrainian shelling of Russian cities, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny, and the growing political repressions, the gap between the highest and lowest levels of support for the war in surveys by the Levada Center (an independent organization listed as a “foreign agent” in Russia) is only 10 percentage points. (80% in March 2022 and 70% in August 2023).
The share of Levada respondents who believe that the country is “moving in the right direction” in early 2024 increased by 10 percentage points compared to the previous peak in 2014 (during the seizure of Crimea).
What is the reason for it?
The style of life in Moscow and other big cities is not influenced by the events connected to the war in Ukraine and even by the current invasion of the Ukrainian army into Russian territory. Theaters, galleries, and restaurants are crowded and people in the street may express a sincere surprise: ”Why did Ukrainians invade Russian territory? What do they need?” It seems it doesn’t matter if these people agree or do not agree with the government’s politics. it seems they don’t see any personal connection with the war and don’t think that Ukrainians even have a reason to have any negative feelings toward them. There is a Russian proverb that can be translated as: “Masters are fighting, but serfs get hurt”, meaning “the master’s fight is not our business.”
I heard this proverb lately from many Russian acquaintances, who couldn’t understand why this war worries me. They still consider themselves “serfs” to their government and try to avoid getting hurt in the “master’s” fight.
Several days ago I had a conversation with my very old and close friend in Moscow. She is a very educated woman, a known filmmaker. We spoke through Facebook Messenger, she used VPN, which showed she is a brave person.
Usually in my conversations with Russians I rarely touch political questions, understanding that it may be dangerous for my conversation partner.
Subconsciously I suppose that my Russian friends share my political attitudes, as these attitudes seem to me obviously correct. This time the woman started the political conversation herself and shocked me tremendously.
Unexpectedly her attitudes turned out to be close to the attitudes of Magadan officer, demanding a nuclear attack on Washington DC.
First of all, she believes that Ukrainians are just puppets of the USA, who fight Russia by American order. “Why, why do Americans hate us and want to kill us? Why do they think that the entire world is their business?” – she demanded me to answer these questions.
Second, she believes that most Ukrainians are real Nazies and that the denazification of Ukraine is Russia’s duty.
And finally, she tried to make me believe that Putin is the best and wisest political leader in the world and that the worst Russian problem is that he is getting old and unfortunately there is no younger man in Russia, who is good enough to replace Putin.
Shocked I finished our conversation. In only a minute I thought, that maybe I was wrong in getting mad at my old friend. Maybe she just cared about her safety and security and her speech was made not for me but for security service workers listening to our conversation online.
Unfortunately, I also think that the most probable explanation is: that my friend like most Russians subconsciously prefers to convince herself that the government propaganda is right, because not believing the propaganda is dangerous. It ruins the normal life of the ordinary person. Multitudes of Russians who support Putin’s politics don’t want to know the truth, because this RUSSIAN knowledge is deadly. They just don’t believe that the government’s business is their business. They would support any politics of any government of theirs. That is their way of survival in any situation.
It reminds me of a story of the “denazification” in 1945 Berlin’s Russian zone of occupation. I don’t remember the details, but it happened more or less like that: One of the leaders of the German Communist Party (who spent the entire wartime in Russia) was speaking to the huge crowd gathered in East Berlin: “Everyone, who’ll enlist now into the Communist Party, will never be asked if he was ever a member of Nazi Party”. After that speech, the Nazis of this huge crowd honestly turned themselves into Communists. And then all of these new communists voted for the Communist regime in Eastern Germany.
While finishing writing this article I unexpectedly discovered an opinion close to mine on the American website Russia.Post.
“Political scientists Bryce Hecht and Graeme Robertson, and sociologist Sam Greene offer a new interpretation of Russians’ attitude to the war. While they don’t disagree that Russians generally support the war, they suggest that researchers would be better off asking a different question: Do Russians care?”
