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Russia's President Putin at the military parade in Moscow on May 9
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP
Vladimir Putin's speech at the military parade in Moscow on May 9 gave many observers a sigh of relief.
He was expected to announce a nuclear strike, general mobilization or the start of World War III - instead he just repeated the mantra that the attack on Ukraine was "forced" or NATO would have allegedly attacked Russia.
He also said (again) that there was no Ukraine at all, and that Russian soldiers were "fighting on their own soil."
It was another history lecture by Putin, nothing new.
So the speech wasn't a big deal after all, many will say.
No, because if we'd heard all this a year ago our hair would have stood on end - but in just a year, our idea of what's normal and what's crazy has radically changed.
This shift in the norm is Putin's practice.
He does it masterfully, with the help of other people.
It's like the classic
good-cop/bad-cop
game - apparently the Soviet secret service KGB used this type of role-playing game often and very effectively.
A prime example is the way the Kremlin allegedly fell out with Israel recently and then reconciled.
It started with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying that "Hitler also had Jewish blood," meaning that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can also be a Nazi despite his Jewish ancestry.
"It means absolutely nothing," said the diplomat, "because a wise Jewish people says that the most vicious anti-Semites are usually Jews."
Israeli leaders were outraged, and Israel's Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Lavrov's words "a historical mistake."
But the Russian Foreign Ministry continued to attack.
Lavrov's spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said Israeli mercenaries were fighting "shoulder to shoulder" with the nationalist Azov regiment in Ukraine.
This aggressive attitude of the diplomats was surprising.
After all, until recently, Israel seemed to be one of Russia's most loyal allies, while President Zelenskyy accused Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of offering to surrender to Ukraine.
But then Putin appeared and settled the conflict between Russia and Israel.
He called Prime Minister Bennett and apologized for his State Department's rudeness.
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Have Putin's diplomats failed him?
No, just the opposite.
He's obviously very happy.
He had the opportunity to appear moderate and accommodating and to appear as the lesser evil to Israel.
He's been using this trick for a long time with great success - it shows that everyone around him is worse than he is, more radical, more bloodthirsty, more stupid.
And even if he's not perfect, without him, the implication goes, it's going to be a lot worse.
This is a technique that Putin has used in domestic politics for years.
“If not Putin, then who?” was the slogan that Kremlin propaganda tried to use during the mass anti-opposition protests of 2012, to reassure that there are no sane opposition leaders in Russia.
If fair elections are held in Russia, the fascists will come to power, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote at the time.
At the time, there were two popular discourses in Russia: first, a democratic, pro-Western one with slogans that saw hundreds of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets to protest Putin's reelection for a third term.
Second, a conservative, statist, defended by state propaganda.
Ultranationalist, imperialist radicalism was seen as a rare exception.
But after the mass protests of 2012, the Kremlin began to change the agenda.
Since then, a number of journalists and politicians have taken an ultra-imperialist stance.
While until then only Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a puppet nationalist with the reputation of a clown, had publicly advocated this view, the spectrum widened: the imperialists began to multiply, were constantly invited to state television talk shows, received airtime on radio and got space in newspapers previously considered decent.
Pro-Putin conservatism suddenly became the center, the moderate mainstream, while imperial nationalism and liberal democracy were perceived as flanks.
The farther you get from this center,
Within a decade, the notion of the norm had shifted.
The mood in society also changed.
One of the most important tools for promoting a radical agenda has been and still is social media and the troll and bot factories that are increasingly active there.
They have done an amazing job in vocally and consistently defending views that until recently seemed shameful.
Ten years ago, no sane Russian politician or publicist would have dared to write that nuclear war against the West could be justified in any way.
Only crazy people hiding behind anonymous internet accounts could have done that.
Cannibalistic, inhuman appeals
But they did a good job.
They created a soundscape and taught Russian society that cannibalistic, inhuman appeals can be made out loud without shame.
The trolls have sort of legitimized the hidden feelings.
For ten years, the Kremlin bots have been gradually letting this genie out of the bottle.
The tabloids play a similar role in society.
She typically flirts with the lower interests of her audience, giving in to urges to dig through celebrity dirty laundry, and satisfying the need to delve into people's personal tragedies.
Troll factories flirt with base thoughts - they break taboos and provide supposedly easy answers to difficult questions.
Ten years ago, the annexation of Crimea was not even on the Russian news agenda.
The Russian population was by no means eager to conquer the peninsula;
it wasn't a sore point like Kosovo for the Serbs or Karabakh for the Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
In Russia, there was no public demand for territorial expansion—the annexation happened almost spontaneously, and public warming to it only gradually.
In the years that followed, however, the agenda changed.
The old norm was lost in the chaos of the new radical madness, which many soon no longer considered madness.
Similar processes took place outside of Russia, partly thanks to the same trolls, partly naturally.
Turns out, social media unleashes a horde of demons spreading deadly ideas.
Who is the tougher hawk?
The past two months have been a crushing blow to normalcy.
What is happening in Ukraine seemed apocalyptic to almost everyone in Russia in February.
Even most Russian TV viewers and members of the Security Council, who on February 21, three days before the start of the war, talked helplessly to Putin, trying to guess what he wanted from them, would have found it madness and a nightmare.
But then, after the invasion began, they began a contest about who was the tougher hawk - a contest won by former President Dmitry Medvedev, the man who ten years ago looked like a dove and a liberal.
Medvedev's rhetoric has become so insane that Putin's words seem like the height of moderation by comparison.
Lavrov and Russian diplomacy have long played the same game - making Putin feel like the happy medium.
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In the West, many believe that Putin has already lost this war and that he will not be able to present it as a victory.
But it only looks that way if you look at it from the outside.
From the inside it looks very different.
Putin says he must prevent a NATO attack on Russia - and if there is no attack, he has not already lost.
Because during the war he maximized his internal power.
Until recently, Russia had an imprisoned opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, and his large base of supporters in the country who believed Putin to be a crook and a thief.
Political prisoners and human rights were always addressed in talks between the Kremlin and the West.
But that seems a long way from us now.
Now all that is forgotten, the old agenda has become a side issue, the new normal suggests that Putin's only enemy is not Navalny but Joe Biden.
This means that any internal enemies can be dealt with in peace by the Kremlin.
Against the background of heinous crimes in Ukraine, no one will notice.
Anything less than nuclear war is already the norm.