Three points from our new pod on how Russians see the Ukraine war:
Not all Russians, but enough Russians, actually believe they are fighting Nazis and saving Russia from swastika-wielding thugs in league with NATO, all out to destroy their nation.
The Kremlin’s dehumanization of Ukrainians over time has had an effect on Russia’s soldiers, many of whom do not believe those they are fighting deserve to live.
Expect to see more Buchas, more Mariupols. These stories of human cruelty that outrage the west do not play the same way back in Russia.
When will Russia’s war in Ukraine end? Will the Russian people stand up to their leader and overthrow him — payback for beginning an unwindable war and sacrificing their nearest and dearest? We don’t know, but experts like our guest Dr. Ian Garner, expect not. Do the Russian people support the kind of war crimes we saw in Bucha? No, not all. But too many. And understanding how that can happen is key to understanding how dictators can, still in this day and age, manipulate public opinion.
All too many Russians believe they are fighting a just war against an existential aggressor in Ukraine. That they believe that in the face of persuasive facts to the contrary is a testament to the power of propaganda, even in this internet era. More importantly for those governments which support Ukraine and fear other such conflicts (we mean Taiwan here…), we cannot expect that “the people” will not be down for the war. If every message they have ever heard suggests the righteousness of their cause, be it reclaiming and “saving” Ukraine, or reuniting the Chinese motherland, it is unlikely they will revolt. To the contrary, a conflict of this kind can solidify support for the leader. And that’s really bad news.
HIGHLIGHTS
The tweet that started our conversation from Ian Garner, author of the forthcoming “Stalingrad Lives”: “I catalogued Russian's social media responses to Bucha for the Journal of Genocide Research, and what I found was almost unspeakable."
Ian: I conducted this research very rapidly after the events in Bucha, and there was a huge response to what happened on Russian social media feeds. You might have imagined that they would want to not discuss this at all, just kind of gloss over it, move on, pretend it didn't happen. But in fact, it seemed to cause just as much of a stir over there as it did over here. And of course, the message that Russians were getting from their government was completely topsy-turvy
There were lots of contradictory narratives, firstly that didn't make sense. They were obviously untrue and didn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. But when I dug down into what social media users on more highly nationalist and patriotic groups were saying, the messages were really very frightening, and some of those messages were... I would say the majority of the messages didn't merely accept the government's narratives that this was a fake or had been conducted by somebody else, but actually suggested that the Ukrainian victims somehow deserved what had happened, in particular, urging the Russian troops on to carry out more of this sort of atrocity in the future.
Are all Russians on board with war crimes?
Ian: I think we have to be careful with the way we discuss this. We have to not sensationalize this too much in that not all Russians are on board with this. And the language that I'm talking about in that particular study does come from these really extreme nationalist groups. However, it is alarming that there is at least a substantial subsection of the Russian population who are so engaged with the idea that Ukrainians simply shouldn't exist that they're willing to voice these thoughts and they are willing to go beyond the bounds of what we would consider any ordinary source of morality
I think everybody is now probably familiar with the idea that Ukraine is supposedly…filled with Nazis, and that that narrative has only expanded in scope over the course of the war. So on the sort of declaration of special operation speech as it were that Putin made in February, it was only the Ukrainian government that needed to be "denazified." Whereas now we find every day, the media is being filled with stories that ordinary Ukrainians are being discovered to be Nazis. Ukrainian soldiers are leaving behind horror troves of swastika flags, photographs of Hitler and so on and so forth. And of course, there is pictorial evidence showed. But once again, it's flimsy and transparently a setup by Russian media who are on the ground there.
And in tandem with that, the kind of language that is used to describe Ukrainians, …Ukrainians are described as rats, as neliudi, which means unpeople. They're the opposite of people. Ukrainians are described as dirt, as scum, as antichrist, as Satanists. So painted up in the most abhorrent language you can possibly imagine.
National paranoia?
Ian: There is a deeply rooted idea in Russia that Western influence is just inimically out to get Russia, to destroy it in some way. And you can go back to the beginning of the 18th century when Peter The Great tried to Europeanize Russia and he was described as the antichrist and caused a schism in the Russian Orthodox church. And when you plug in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fear that Russia's sort of traditional territory, or what Russia would see as its backyard and its traditional territory, i.e., Ukraine, is somehow drifting away from it and into the clutches of the West, Russia becomes more afraid
And so a Ukraine that is becoming increasingly Western, a Ukraine that is in Russia's backyard and yet is drifting away from Russia and increasingly becoming non-Russian becomes incredibly scary when you view the world in those terms.
What do opinion polls in Russia tell us?
Ian: What's interesting about this particular conflict and the Russian context in general is that we're almost looking for the wrong thing. Public opinion in Russia doesn't really matter to a certain extent. There is not going to be a popular uprising today, tomorrow, or even in the next year or two. The opposition is more fragmented than it has ever been. And of course, that doesn't mean we should be completely cynical and pessimistic and hope for nothing better in the future, but the security services and the government have such control over public discourse, the public space and the population in the physical sense of the word that how much does it really matter whether it's 60% of the people that support the war or 80% or 50%? The answer is, that number doesn't change anything. Russia is going to be able to withstand a whole lot more losses of people and money before anything really substantially threatens the government.
So all the Russian deaths aren’t going to come back and haunt Putin?
Ian: So the key point that we have to understand about World War II is this idea of sacrifice and martyrdom. The war has been interpreted as a religious act, which is strange because we would think Soviet Union, Marxism, they're all atheists, they weren't very religious. But actually the war was always painted as this idea that we were the chosen people who had to die. Those 27 million Soviets who died that we always hear about, they had to be killed. They had to be sacrificed in order that the world should be saved and that the new day should dawn. And that's the way it's most often portrayed in Russian movies and books, the coming of light after the darkness. And of course, Stalingrad, it's the moment, the heart of the war…It's the symbol where everything boils down to this microcosmic little patch of territory of just individual Russians fighting against individual Germans. And that's what makes the story so powerful. And so today, when we talk about losses in the war, in the present, Russians may well again be thinking, hold on. Sacrifice is not that bad. Sacrifice death is not necessarily a bad thing when we interpret the world in those religious terms, if we see this as a holy war. And again, not all Russians will buy into this, but there will be enough Russians who will interpret the world in these eschatological messianic terms
What’s the role of the Russian Orthodox Church?
Ian: I think it's really important to understand that the church and the state have often existed in Russian history in this kind of symbiotic relationship … today what we find is something that I think is a little bit new, and that is a church in which there effectively is no separate church. The church and the state are just completely thoroughly entwined in a corrupt, in the literal financial sense of the word, relationship. But also the church itself has become corrupted in a theological sense. The religion that it preaches is not the religion of the Bible, and this has caused great upsets and a lot of clashes with Orthodox churches abroad that you can go and look at. But the church essentially preaches the state's messages and the state uses the language of religion to wrap itself up in this sense of being on a utopian messianic mission to save Russia, save orthodoxy, save the world.
Could Putin be ousted?
Ian: The heart of the problem is that Putin's in charge and nobody knows what Putin really is thinking. Is there some sort of twisted logic behind this war? Is there a point at which he will pull his forces back? Does he really believe in all of this stuff? Has he really had a turn towards this strange utopian idealism in his later years? Does he want to create this great new empire, leave the world with a legacy? We have no idea. And anybody who says that they know, and all the reports of salacious gossip from behind Kremlin closed doors that you read in the media, it's all guesswork. It's reading shadows.
Read the full transcript here.