Big 🧵: We constantly hear that Putin is a master media strategist, but here’s a thread on WW2, national heroes, myth, and why he cannot win the media war at home.
In short, enthusiasm for the war is going to crater because Putin's propagandists have an impossible task.
The key way in which Soviet writers - I've written an entire book on this - created a hugely popular myth of national self-sacrifice in WW2 was by focusing on people, not events. The papers were filled with stories of ordinary people laying down their lives for the greater good.
This was a hugely effective approach even as the country was in the depths of torment.
In short, readers connect with humans, not with tactics, strategy, or even which towns and cities are under attack.
It takes a lot to make people *really* care about cities in the way they care about people (and, in my book, I explain how one of the ways this was done with Stalingrad was by personifying the city...but that's a digression...).
The problem Putin has today is twofold. One relates to internal media. The Russian media is under strict instructions to call the invasion a "special operation." This bland term sounds like something out of a Soviet bureaucrat's dictionary. It has no emotional resonance.
State outlets aren't reporting on casualties or heroic incidents. Look @ the front page of Argumenty i fakty, one of Russia's largest papers, today. Dark, black pictures. A handful of balaclava-covered faces. Some historical nonsense about imperialism/the west.
The few remaining independent media outlets have been threatened with reprisals for calling the invasion what it is. But the problem is that, if you don't call the war a "war," and you can't cover the troops fighting it, how can you create national heroes?
How can you create enduring and appealing myths? The answer is that you can't.
That leads us to the second problem Putin has: Ukraine is absolutely nailing the propaganda war. I don't need to reiterate the point, because you ALL know it by now.
Heroic, brave Zelensky defending his city against an overwhelming invader vs. crazy grandpa Putin in his bunker; "Russian ship, go fuck yourself"; cheery Ukrainians welcoming Russians to hell; citizens singing the national anthem on the streets of Kyiv.
But that's not just a media war Ukraine is winning in the West and on Twitter: that stuff is going to seep through into the Russian infospace too. Why do you think Putin is moving to shut down access to FB, Twitter, etc. in Russia? Because they're screwed.
Putin's propagandists can't win if they can't make heroes. And this is just the beginning. Wait til the bodies start arriving home, for the videos of Russian grandmothers wailing in the streets over lost boys conscripted & sent to die for a war of nothing, a war without purpose.
Just over a decade ago, I taught English to Misha, a boy from Moscow. An oversized pair of Sony headphones were constantly clamped over his ears. His hands were always busy tapping away on the smartphone his father, a wealthy businessman, had given him.
Misha travelled abroad, spoke English, and had the best of everything. When I could tear him away from the siren call of social media and video games, Misha was desperate to hear about life in Canada. He peppered me with questions about everything from hockey to hamburgers.
In 2022, I glanced at Misha's VK profile. The boy I know had gone. His feed was flooded with news from the war: gruesome war porn depicting bombs dropping on Ukrainian towns and troops, conspiracy theories from extremist groups, and viral clips of Solovyev's televisual tantrums.
It's Thursday. It's 6pm. It's Tucker Time! I hope you're ready for this shambles... ⬇️
It's TWO HOURS LONG. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Carlson claims Putin's sincere about his country's "historical claims" to Ukraine. Then he asks why Putin thinks America will attack Russia. He giggles wildly as Putin tells him he never said that.
The UN is often slow and impotent, but destroying international liberal institutions is exactly what Moscow wants. Change the system from within. Don’t destroy it from without.
The “fuck the UN” discourse reminds me of soft Brexiteers in the UK: “We share EU values but think it’s beyond reform, so we’re going to destroy ourselves instead of working with our partners.”
An anti-Russia alliance without the UN will be like the UK without the EU: powerless, humbled, and unnecessarily sidelined.
🧵 Russia's war on Ukraine is a spiritual-messianic crusade, exhibit #978234: the tale of a Putin-loving "military priest" and his acolytes at the front, who are undergoing a symbolic political-religious conversion by fighting.
Nice unit badge, which both soldiers and their priest wear. Putin + religion + war = good. Putin placed on a pedestal alongside traditional saints as an icon (vital to Orthodox belief).
The priest isn't just there to provide moral or spiritual support. He expressly declares that part of his role is to "accompany [troops] into battle."
According to Levada Centre polling, Russians approve of the country's general direction (chart on the left) in massive numbers - higher in recent months than in the past decade - and Putin is hugely popular.
Putin is winning the war at home.
You might say that in an authoritarian/totalitarian society, people are afraid to criticize the state in these polls. Maybe, but at the very least the polls are telling us that massive discontent is not about to bubble over into widespread revolt.
If Russians don't dare to offer vague criticism of the state or leader in an opinion poll, they're probably not about to cast off their shackles and charge into the streets to overthrow them either.