When she was very young, the Moscow-based journalist Ulyana Skoibeda read a biography of Margaret Mitchell. “Gone with the Wind” has always been popular in Russia. The detail that stuck in her memory was that Mitchell, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, said she felt that she had grown up in “a conquered country.”
Last week, Skoibeda published a column in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the most popular daily in Russia, called “I No Longer Live in a Conquered Country.” Of the countless Russian articles, podcasts, and television clips that I’ve absorbed in the past few months of crisis, none strikes me as more emblematic of the emotions of the moment—Vladimir Putin’s moment—than Skoibeda’s exercise in fevered nostalgia and nationalist revival.
Skoibeda’s taste in metaphor is vile. Last year, in another column, she wrote, “Sometimes you’re sorry that the Nazis didn’t turn the forebearers of today’s liberals into lampshades.” Skoibeda came of age in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, and in her recent column she portrays herself as the parent of an innocent child who is confused by the defeat of the Motherland. Why, her son asks, has the United States “attacked” Syria? Why are Russians so interested in the value of the dollar? And why did the U.S.S.R. collapse? Did you actually live in the U.S.S.R.? The child’s grandmother talks with pride about the glories of Soviet industry, “and now …” And all those questions, all those despairing statements of fact, she writes, lead to one humbling certainty: “They conquered us!”
Yes, things began to change for the better in the aughts, after the resignation of Boris Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin, Skoibeda writes. But, she says, it was not until the invasion of Crimea, and Putin’s triumphant, resentful speech in Russia’s defense that followed it, that she and the country could feel truly emboldened and transformed: “When I heard Putin’s Crimea speech, I hugged my son and told him, ‘You will remember this for the rest of your life.’ ” Suddenly, with this burst of pride, her column takes on a martial tone, bristling with a desire to go back a generation, if not more, and to embrace old values under an old banner: in her terms, the U.S.S.R. stands for everything decent, self-denying, and magnificent:
Confrontation with the whole world for the sake of our own truth and our interests—this is the U.S.S.R….To be ready to live in poverty—this is the U.S.S.R….When all the people are ready to wear peasant boots for the sake of saving the Crimea, when it is more important not to forsake our brothers than to have thirty different kinds of sausage in the refrigerator, when we have the disgrace of perestroika past us and the people are unafraid of the Iron Curtain…. It may be sad that Russia was expelled from the G8, but this is how—in isolation—the U.S.S.R. always lived.
It turns out, Skoibeda tells the reader, that the Russian Army and its intelligence services have not collapsed. The country that was once great and powerful is great and powerful once more. “The Soviet Union, like the phoenix, has been reborn,” she writes. “It is not Crimea that has returned. It is we who have returned. Home. To the U.S.S.R.”
Skoibeda apologized for her “lampshade” column last year, but her most recent effort is in tune with the times and with the demands of power. Her “Gone with the Wind”-style nostalgia may sound parodic to an American ear, but it is not—it is only a somewhat heightened example of the rhetoric in Russia’s loyal media (i.e., almost all of it), in the letters of “support” to the Kremlin from various cultural organizations, and at state-organized demonstrations.
All winter, Putin has been tightening his hold on the few remaining media outlets that have not fallen into line—TV Rain, Echo of Moscow radio, and Internet news sites like Lenta.ru. He dismantled the relatively professional RIA Novosti news agency and replaced it with a new entity, Rossiya Sogodnya (Russia Today), headed by Dmitri Kiselyov, the host of a program called “News of the Week.” Kiselyov is an unforgiving propagandist. When talking about the Maidan—the square that was the scene of the main anti-government demonstrations in Kiev—well before the Crimean crisis, Kiselyov said, “And what is Maidan? A very small dot on the body of Ukraine. If you burn it with a soldering iron, it will hurt. But if you apply the correct political technology—bring it to the point of overheating, then show it through the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet to create the impression that the whole country is now supposedly like this—it may prove to be fatal. In fact, Ukraine is more complicated than Maidan.”
One nationalist journalist who has recently enjoyed a kind of renaissance is Aleksandr Prokhanov, who was so close to the old Soviet power structures that he was known as “the nightingale of the General Staff.” Prokhanov’s message has never changed: the West, particularly the United States, worked with Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin to destroy the Soviet Union—part of a centuries-long crusade to undermine the greatness of the Russian state. For decades, Prokhanov published a string of articles and edited newspapers, such as Dyen (The Day) and Zavtra (Tomorrow), which were filled with anti-Western, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Recently, he joined with Skoibeda in the rejoicing about the recapture of Crimea and Putin’s speech.
Prokhanov, who has been a frequent guest on Russian talk shows, seems unchanged from when I first met him, a generation ago. When I visited him after the collapse of the K.G.B.-led coup against Gorbachev, in 1991, and the subsequent fall of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, Prokhanov looked at me, the American, and said, “You did it! And how do I know? I have friends at Langley, at the State Department, and at the RAND Corporation. The general concept was yours—the C.I.A.’s. I am sure of it. The process was regulated and designed by your people. The so-called leaders of the coup were pushed forward and then betrayed. They were left to be torn to pieces by public opinion…. In this whole drama, only the C.I.A. was smart.”
For a generation, Prokhanov carried this message, and, often enough, he was either ignored or condemned. Now, as he operates in the enclosed universe of Russian state media, in a moment of resentful nationalism encouraged at the highest level, the nightingale sings a mainstream tune.
Above: Vladimir Putin meets the newly promoted top officers from various branches of the Russian armed forces and Interor Ministry; Moscow, March 28, 2014. Photograph by Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty.http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/04/putin-and-the-russian-media.html
