As of: February 26, 2024, 4:48 a.m
From: Foreign Policy
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Jade McGlynn's books paint a disturbing picture of support for the invasion and occupation of Ukraine by ordinary Russians.
Russian President Vladimir Putin can rely on the support of his own people in the Ukraine war.
In Russia, despite terrible losses on the front, there is little resistance to the war in Ukraine.
There are several reasons for this, some of which lie in the country's history.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on February 21, 2024 .
For years, as Moscow's intent to challenge the West became clearer, the question was whether the country as a whole or its leader was to blame - that is, whether the world had a problem with Russia or a problem with Vladimir Putin.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began two years ago, analysts have repeatedly debated the attitudes of ordinary Russians toward the war.
Do a large majority of Russians really support the crimes and atrocities committed by their country's armed forces?
And if not, why do they appear to do so?
Uncomfortable answers to the question of the reasons for the war in Ukraine
Two books by British historian Jade McGlynn, published in 2023, provide uncomfortable answers.
Russia's War provides one of these answers in its title.
In direct and deliberate contrast to a number of other recent book titles that place blame squarely on Russian President Vladimir Putin, McGlynn concludes that the Russian state, through the deliberate collusion of a portion or majority of its population, has significant and widespread support achieved in their own country for the Ukrainian war of colonial reconquest in Ukraine.
The other book, Memory Makers, explains in more detail how this was made possible by Russia's conscious and long-term program to co-opt history and influence the public's memory by recreating the past to shape the present.
Together they paint a portrait of the alternative reality in which Russians live, created and maintained by the state, and explain how it creates a conducive environment for the state's worst crimes against its own people and its victims abroad.
Russia's war against Ukraine is popular with large numbers of Russians and acceptable to even larger numbers.
Jade McGlynn on the Ukraine War.
Russia's war will anger many people.
Among Russians abroad - or at least among those who do not wholeheartedly approve of the war - there is a sizable group who point out that not all Russians are to blame, trying to pin that blame on Putin personally.
McGlynn, however, strongly rejects the idea that this is Putin's war alone.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is popular with large numbers of Russians and acceptable to even larger numbers,” she writes.
“Putin relied on the people’s approval and took it.”
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There is hardly any resistance to the war in Ukraine in Russia
McGlynn's book is also a direct challenge to those Western journalists, academics and Russophiles who cling to the belief that the country is a frustrated democracy and to the idea that the Russians, if left to their own devices, would form a liberal government who would be less inclined to oppress their own subjects and wage aggressive wars abroad.
This belief was often expressed in conversations with urban, liberal Russians, most of whom are now in exile or prison.
However, there is no reason to believe that conversations in Moscow and St. Petersburg are more indicative of the Russian population as a whole than similar conversations in New York or London, which reflected former US President Donald Trump's 2016 election victory or Brexit predict in the UK.
When the idea of a country is based on such an unrepresentative sample, it can be difficult to come to terms with the fact that the behaviors the world has seen in Ukraine are very much the social norm across much of Russia.
For many in Russia, tolerating the war in Ukraine is the easier option
McGlynn does not rule out the possibility that there are Russians who disapprove of the war.
But in addition to describing a self-preservation instinct that prevents many people from speaking out, she also argues that tacit toleration in their own minds is the easier route.
“Many people believe Kremlin propaganda because it is easier and better than admitting or accepting that you are the bad guys,” McGlynn writes.
In the absence of any apparent public opposition, Russians' attitudes range from complete apathy to a frenetic enthusiasm for the war, promoted by propagandistic "Z channels" on Telegram that call on the military to commit ever greater atrocities in Ukraine.
These channels, used by hundreds of thousands of subscribers and gleefully absorbing images of atrocities, would not be possible in a country where support for the attack on Ukraine is not widespread.
Foreign Policy Logo © ForeignPolicy.com
McGlynn argues that Russia's pro-state propaganda is not aimed at turning everyone into a warmonger.
Instead, it aims to move people along a spectrum: it tries to make the opposition apathetic, to make the apathetic feel attacked and side with their country, whether they are right or not , and getting the quiet patriots to give their full-throated support.
McGlynn points out that we should not assume that the ideal outcome for the Kremlin is widespread pro-war activism.
The Kremlin distrusts any spontaneous political act, even if it supports the regime, she reminds us.
Therefore, he sets clear boundaries about what is and is not an acceptable way to show his loyalty, and is satisfied if the support shown is nothing more than lip service.
Nevertheless, criticism of war, if it exists, focuses primarily on the competence with which it is waged, rather than whether it should be waged at all.
Putin relies on old traditions in Russia
Many of the state narratives that surround the West and Ukraine are not Putin's inventions, but rather excuses for Russian state crimes that date back to the Soviet and tsarist times.
By tapping into the familiar tropes of Russia's manufactured history, the Kremlin provides the basis for new and still-evolving fictions about the world outside, brought together in what McGlynn calls a "time-honored ritual in which Russian media and... Politicians slowly dismantle the truth and then replace it with a fake.”
This ritual is examined in detail in Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia.
Memory Makers appears later than Russia's War, but still lays the groundwork and examines how Russia rewrote its history to justify its present.
Russia has always defined history as a battlefield
In Russia's national security strategy and other doctrinal documents, history is explicitly defined as a battlefield.
But as always in Russia's perverse Newspeak, goals such as "defending historical truth", "preserving memory" and "fighting historical falsification" mean the construction and defense of a fabricated version of Russian and Soviet history, accompanied by the denunciation of news and information from abroad as fake, all intended to protect and strengthen Russia's alternative reality.
As McGlynn explains, Russian historical reappraisal creates a narrative that “distracts from the government’s failures, promotes government policy, and reinforces the Kremlin’s view of current events.”
The two books together provide an understanding of how Russia fostered the mentality that makes war possible.
Memory Makers explains how this happened, Russia's War describes the impact.
Russia celebrates the capture of Avdiyika in the Ukrainian War.
(Archive image) © IMAGO
In both books, McGlynn examines the role of state propaganda in forging the attitudes she describes and the cumulative effects of more than a decade of bombardment with relentless wartime propaganda that dehumanizes Ukrainians and sells the idea of a hostile West.
Their conclusion is that war propaganda fell on fertile ground.
Russians readily accepted state-sanctioned attitudes that were consistent with many of their preconceptions about the world and Russia's place in it.
Despite terrible losses, Russia's soldiers continue to fight
And that had practical and tragic consequences.
McGlynn helps explain why the horrific number of Russian casualties - estimates vary widely but run into the hundreds of thousands - had less impact on popular support for the war than was widely and optimistically expected, and why Russia's soldiers, despite the still struggling due to their leadership's apparent indifference to the extent of the carnage.
The dehumanization of Ukrainians, an integral part of propaganda, has made atrocities in Ukraine not only likely but also inevitable.
In contrast to the numerous books about Russia that were published quickly after February 2022, both Russia's War and Memory Makers were a long time in the making.
They are based on almost a decade of research, including data analysis of television, print and social media, in-depth interviews and - while it was still possible - first-hand investigations in Russia itself.
Perhaps inevitably, this means that neither book offers easy answers.
Optimists among academics, journalists and even government officials cling to the belief that the Russians would turn against their leadership if only they could be told the truth about the outside world, including the atrocities committed in their name in Ukraine.
However, McGlynn's books and a variety of research show that a much deeper and more radical social change within Russia would be necessary to reverse the effects of two decades of state propaganda.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, initial hopes that new generations could embrace democracy and liberalism have faded into invisibility.
Instead, social development in Russia is accelerating in the opposite direction.
McGlynn's research refutes the claim that this is being done to the Russians against their will, revealing instead an attitude that ranges from complicity to enthusiasm.
The result is that Russia looks almost exclusively to the past to define its vision for the future.
Ukraine war can only be ended in Russia
The tragic consequence is that Russia's war against Ukraine cannot be ended in Ukraine or through Ukraine.
Its roots lie in Russians' political and social conception of what their own country is and what it must be.
This idea, McGlynn shows, was encouraged and facilitated - but not created - by a generation-long propaganda campaign.
Jade McGlynn has assembled the evidence for a conclusion that will worry optimists hoping for a better Russia: the campaign would not have succeeded without a willing and complicit population, and too many ordinary Russians are perfectly content to stop their cruelest machinations to support the country.
To the author
Keir Giles
is an author and commentator on Russian affairs.
His latest book is Russia's War on Everybody.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on February 21, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.