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Thousands march for and against Russia's policies a day before the referendum in Crimea on whether to join Russia. Nathan Frandino reports.
Reuters tells the world's stories like no one else. As the largest international multimedia news provider, Reuters provides coverage around the globe and across topics including business, financial, national, and international news. For over 160 years, Reuters has maintained its reputation for speed, accuracy, and impact while providing exclusives, incisive commentary and forward-looking analysis.
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Thousands march for and against Russia's policies a day before the referendum in Crimea on whether to join Russia. Nathan Frandino reports.
Reuters tells the world's stories like no one else. As the largest international multimedia news provider, Reuters provides coverage around the globe and across topics including business, financial, national, and international news. For over 160 years, Reuters has maintained its reputation for speed, accuracy, and impact while providing exclusives, incisive commentary and forward-looking analysis.
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MOSCOW — As Russia and the United States drifted last week toward a rupture over Crimea, the Stalinist writer Aleksandr A. Prokhanov felt that his moment had finally arrived.
“I am afraid that I am interested in a cold war with the West,” said Mr. Prokhanov, 76, in a lull between interviews on state-controlled television and radio. “I was very patient. I waited for 20 years. I did everything I could so that this war would begin. I worked day and night.”
Mr. Prokhanov is an attack dog whose career has risen, fallen and risen again with the fortunes of hard-liners in the Kremlin. And it is a measure of the conservative pivot that has taken place in Moscow in Vladimir V. Putin’s third presidential term that Mr. Prokhanov and a cadre of like-minded thinkers — a kind of “who’s who of conspiratorial anti-Americanism,” as one scholar put it — have found themselves thrust into the mainstream.
For centuries, Russian history has been driven by a struggle between ideas, as reformers and revanchists wrestled over the country’s future. Mr. Putin keeps a distance from the ideological entrepreneurs clustered around the Kremlin, leaving his influences a matter of speculation.
But it became clear last week, as the United States threatened to cut off Russian corporations from the Western financial system, that influential members of the president’s inner circle view isolation from the West as a good thing for Russia, the strain of thought advanced by Mr. Prokhanov and his fellow travelers. Some in Mr. Putin’s camp see the confrontation as an opportunity to make the diplomatic turn toward China that they have long advocated, said Sergei A. Karaganov, a dean of the faculty of international relations at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
“This whole episode is going to change the rules of the game,” Mr. Karaganov said of Crimea, which is holding a referendum on secession on Sunday. “Confrontation with the West is welcomed by all too many here, to cleanse the elite, to organize the nation.”
Russia flexed its muscle in the United Nations Security Council on Saturday, using its veto power to quash a resolution proposed by the United States that declared the referendum illegal, with China, its traditional ally, abstaining. As a permanent member of the Council, Russia has the right to reject any council measure.
When he took power in Russia, Mr. Putin seemed intent on balancing the voices of strong-state nationalists and promarket liberals, among them the tycoons entrusted with Russia’s corporate empires. That balance flew out the window in 2012, and with the Crimean crisis the space for liberal dissent has been melting away, a process that accelerated Thursday when the Russian authorities blocked websites used by prominent opposition figures.
Mr. Prokhanov, for one, was flush with victory. His dingy office and tiny, extremist newspaper belie ties to Russia’s security services, which have long employed “agitators” to whip up support for their initiatives. His writing about the invasion of Afghanistan earned him the nickname “nightingale of the General Staff.” In 1991, he co-wrote the manifesto that was published to support an attempted coup by hard-line Communists who were opposed to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
His views have been more or less consistent for years: that the Soviet Union should be restored, by force if necessary; that America “consumes country after country” and must be prevented from devouring Russia. As recently as 2003, his newspaper received a government warning for publishing material deemed “extremist.” But Mr. Putin’s recent return to the presidency, he said, has been accompanied by “a strong ideological mutation.”
Mr. Prokhanov, who speaks in rich, metaphorical Russian and has the slightly disheveled look of a beat poet, contrasted the present government with that of Boris Yeltsin, the president in the 1990s. “In Yeltsin’s time I was seen as a monster by the regime, a character out of hell,” he said. “I was under threat of arrest, and now I am regularly invited to Kremlin events.”
Though he said he has met the president only a handful of times, “The intelligence officers around him pay much more attention to ideology, and for them it is clear that ideological war is an important instrument.”
If Mr. Putin himself decided to make an ideological change, Mr. Prokhanov said, it was in December 2011, when tens of thousands of urban liberals, angry over ballot-stuffing and falsification in parliamentary elections, massed on a city square, Bolotnaya, chanting “Putin is a thief!” and “Russia Without Putin.”
“During the time of Bolotnaya, he experienced fear,” Mr. Prokhanov said. “He felt that the whole class which he had created had betrayed him, cheated him, and he had a desire to replace one class with another. From the moment you got back from that march, we started a change of the Russian elite.”
Another person who has been swept into the mainstream is one of Mr. Prokhanov’s former protégés, Aleksandr G. Dugin, who, in the late 1990s, called for “the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism — borderless as our lands, and red as our blood.”
Virulently anti-American, Mr. Dugin has urged a “conservative revolution” that combines left-wing economics and right-wing cultural traditionalism. In a 1997 book, he introduced the idea of building a Eurasian empire “constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy,” which he identified as Atlanticism, liberal values, and geopolitical control by the United States.
Building a Eurasian economic bloc, including Ukraine, became a central goal for Mr. Putin upon his return to the presidency. His point man on the project was the economist Sergei Glazyev, an associate of Mr. Prokhanov’s and Mr. Dugin’s.
In an interview, Mr. Dugin was evasive when asked about his personal contact with Mr. Putin, saying only that he has been “in close contact with the Kremlin, and with those in the Kremlin who make decisions,” for the last 15 years. But he said the president, whom he described as a Henry Kissinger-style “pragmatist,” had embraced a version of his ideology because it served his interests domestically.
“It is popular, it is populist, it helps to explain all the processes which are going on in the country, and gradually — just by the logic of things, pragmatically, he becomes closer and closer to this ideology, just by the logic of events,” he said. He also offered a more human reason: that Mr. Putin had been stung by Western leaders’ apparent preference for his predecessor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and then by the antigovernment protests that he believed were backed by the West.
Though a number of high-ranking officials around Mr. Putin have argued strenuously against this ideological shift, Mr. Dugin said that their influence had been waning steadily, and that the Crimean crisis left them no option but to “be quiet, or gather up their suitcases and leave Russia.”
“Anti-Americanism has become the main ideology, the main worldview among Russians,” he said. “Now, after Crimea, we have passed the point of no return. There will not be another Medvedev. There will never be another ‘reset,’ ever.”
Ideological mouthpieces have been used to send signals since the Soviet days, — as a warning to adversaries or domestic dissenters — and it would be foolish to assume that Mr. Putin subscribes to their views. But there are important stakeholders who, faced with the threat of sanctions last week, have advocated that Russia cut itself off from the West. The most obvious among them is Vladimir I. Yakunin, president of Russian Railways and one of Mr. Putin’s trusted friends, who in a recent interview with The Financial Times described the struggle against a “global financial oligarchy” and the “global domination that is being carried out by the U.S.” On Tuesday, Mr. Yakunin presented plans for a Soviet-style megaproject to develop transportation and infrastructure in Siberia, a move toward “an economics of a spiritual type,” he said, that would insulate Russia from the West’s alien values.
He compared the project to monumental endeavors from the past: the adoption of Christianity in ancient Rus; the conquest of Siberia; electrification of the Soviet Union; the Soviet space program; and the Olympics in Sochi.
A shift in planning to Siberia, Mr. Karaganov said, “has already been proclaimed, and is happening,” in part to weaken the Western influence on Russia’s elites, who are seen as “too dependent on their holdings in the West.”
Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, said he saw the rise of people “who have very different views about the Russian economy.”
“Hard-line people, more nationalist people, they are being energized, they think this may be their moment,” he said. “You can also say that this is the tip of the iceberg. These are people who are more visible, more obvious, but there is a lot behind them that is potentially more serious and more ominous.”
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PARIS — One of the fixtures of Cold War propaganda was a map flashed across television screens depicting menacing arrows moving toward the borders of an endangered homeland. The cutaway would be to newsreel footage of missiles being fired, marching soldiers or scenes of devastation from past wars.
In the past week, as the crisis in Crimea deepened, similar images have been running on Russia’s state-run television. Even for the Kremlin’s master propagandists, it is a tenuous stretch — but that’s of no matter. The enemy has been identified: It is the West, allied with “fascist mercenaries” inUkraine.
The scale of Russia’s propaganda effort in the current crisis has been breathtaking, even by Soviet standards. Facts have been twisted, images doctored (Ukrainians shown as fleeing to Russia were actually crossing the border to Poland), and harsh epithets (neo-Nazis) hurled at the demonstrators in Kiev — who President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia belatedly acknowledged had legitimate gripes against a corrupt and failed government.
If he weren’t the boss, such an open contradiction of the official line, made at a televised news conference, might have been censored.
Like so much about Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the massive propaganda onslaught seems strangely anachronistic in a time when access to the Internet was supposed to undercut the influence of state-controlled media.
It’s all the more puzzling since Russia boasts one of the world’s most active and creative blogospheres, not to mention a thriving community of independent hackers drawn from the same top math schools that feed the ranks of the modern-day successor to the K.G.B.
According to a government-sponsored survey conducted last January, almost half of Russia’s adult population uses the Internet; for those younger than 34, it is the most used medium, ahead of television. Internet penetration in Russia is proportionately lower than in Europe: The same survey found that 38 percent of small towns had no Internet access at all. Still, Russia now ranks among the top six countries in the world for Internet use.
And yet the propaganda campaign seems to be working. Russian public opinion has been whipped into a nationalist fervor over the fate of Crimea, a patch of territory that most Russians regard as rightfully theirs, even after its administrative transfer to Ukraine in 1954. A poll taken on March 1 and 2 by the state-sponsored VCIOM agency showed that 71 percent believe that it is necessary to protect Russian-language speakers in Crimea more vigorously.
The main vehicle for the government’s message is still the main television news, loyally watched in areas at the core of Mr. Putin’s electorate.
Nor is the government ignoring the Internet: Access to 13 Ukrainian websites was blocked this week on VKontacte, Russia’s popular social network. Russia’s top opposition blogger, Alexei A. Navalny, now under house arrest, has been ordered not to use the Internet for two months.
The Internet itself is hardly a guarantor of healthy debate or accurate information. Users often go online to confirm their own views — only to have them amplified by a steady spewing of paranoid and xenophobic diatribes.
Some attitudes, steeped in history, predate the current crisis. A poll taken in 2009 found that 73 percent of Russians endorsed a more vigorous defense of Crimea’s majority Russian population.
Still, Boris Akunin, one of the country’s most popular writers and a member of the opposition with his own blog, is counting on the Internet to loosen the Kremlin’s grip on public debate.
“One shouldn’t confuse two different Russias: telerussia and internetrussia,” he said in an email. “The former is largely uninterested in politics; they eat what they are fed but they are passive politically. The latter Russia is predominantly anti-Putin — precisely due to the free flow of opinions and information on the net.”
He cited a poll, taken in early February, when state-controlled media were just warming up, which showed that 73 percent were against Russian intervention in Ukraine. The question now is how many of those have changed their minds, and why.
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MOSCOW — As Russia and the United States drifted last week toward a rupture over Crimea, the Stalinist writer Aleksandr A. Prokhanov felt that his moment had finally arrived.
“I am afraid that I am interested in a cold war with the West,” said Mr. Prokhanov, 76, in a lull between interviews on state-controlled television and radio. “I was very patient. I waited for 20 years. I did everything I could so that this war would begin. I worked day and night.”
Mr. Prokhanov is an attack dog whose career has risen, fallen and risen again with the fortunes of hard-liners in the Kremlin. And it is a measure of the conservative pivot that has taken place in Moscow in Vladimir V. Putin’s third presidential term that Mr. Prokhanov and a cadre of like-minded thinkers — a kind of “who’s who of conspiratorial anti-Americanism,” as one scholar put it — have found themselves thrust into the mainstream.
For centuries, Russian history has been driven by a struggle between ideas, as reformers and revanchists wrestled over the country’s future. Mr. Putin keeps a distance from the ideological entrepreneurs clustered around the Kremlin, leaving his influences a matter of speculation.
But it became clear last week, as the United States threatened to cut off Russian corporations from the Western financial system, that influential members of the president’s inner circle view isolation from the West as a good thing for Russia, the strain of thought advanced by Mr. Prokhanov and his fellow travelers. Some in Mr. Putin’s camp see the confrontation as an opportunity to make the diplomatic turn toward China that they have long advocated, said Sergei A. Karaganov, a dean of the faculty of international relations at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
“This whole episode is going to change the rules of the game,” Mr. Karaganov said of Crimea, which is holding a referendum on secession on Sunday. “Confrontation with the West is welcomed by all too many here, to cleanse the elite, to organize the nation.”
Russia flexed its muscle in the United Nations Security Council on Saturday, using its veto power to quash a resolution proposed by the United States that declared the referendum illegal, with China, its traditional ally, abstaining. As a permanent member of the Council, Russia has the right to reject any council measure.
When he took power in Russia, Mr. Putin seemed intent on balancing the voices of strong-state nationalists and promarket liberals, among them the tycoons entrusted with Russia’s corporate empires. That balance flew out the window in 2012, and with the Crimean crisis the space for liberal dissent has been melting away, a process that accelerated Thursday when the Russian authorities blocked websites used by prominent opposition figures.
Mr. Prokhanov, for one, was flush with victory. His dingy office and tiny, extremist newspaper belie ties to Russia’s security services, which have long employed “agitators” to whip up support for their initiatives. His writing about the invasion of Afghanistan earned him the nickname “nightingale of the General Staff.” In 1991, he co-wrote the manifesto that was published to support an attempted coup by hard-line Communists who were opposed to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
His views have been more or less consistent for years: that the Soviet Union should be restored, by force if necessary; that America “consumes country after country” and must be prevented from devouring Russia. As recently as 2003, his newspaper received a government warning for publishing material deemed “extremist.” But Mr. Putin’s recent return to the presidency, he said, has been accompanied by “a strong ideological mutation.”
Mr. Prokhanov, who speaks in rich, metaphorical Russian and has the slightly disheveled look of a beat poet, contrasted the present government with that of Boris Yeltsin, the president in the 1990s. “In Yeltsin’s time I was seen as a monster by the regime, a character out of hell,” he said. “I was under threat of arrest, and now I am regularly invited to Kremlin events.”
Though he said he has met the president only a handful of times, “The intelligence officers around him pay much more attention to ideology, and for them it is clear that ideological war is an important instrument.”
If Mr. Putin himself decided to make an ideological change, Mr. Prokhanov said, it was in December 2011, when tens of thousands of urban liberals, angry over ballot-stuffing and falsification in parliamentary elections, massed on a city square, Bolotnaya, chanting “Putin is a thief!” and “Russia Without Putin.”
“During the time of Bolotnaya, he experienced fear,” Mr. Prokhanov said. “He felt that the whole class which he had created had betrayed him, cheated him, and he had a desire to replace one class with another. From the moment you got back from that march, we started a change of the Russian elite.”
Another person who has been swept into the mainstream is one of Mr. Prokhanov’s former protégés, Aleksandr G. Dugin, who, in the late 1990s, called for “the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism — borderless as our lands, and red as our blood.”
Virulently anti-American, Mr. Dugin has urged a “conservative revolution” that combines left-wing economics and right-wing cultural traditionalism. In a 1997 book, he introduced the idea of building a Eurasian empire “constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy,” which he identified as Atlanticism, liberal values, and geopolitical control by the United States.
Building a Eurasian economic bloc, including Ukraine, became a central goal for Mr. Putin upon his return to the presidency. His point man on the project was the economist Sergei Glazyev, an associate of Mr. Prokhanov’s and Mr. Dugin’s.
In an interview, Mr. Dugin was evasive when asked about his personal contact with Mr. Putin, saying only that he has been “in close contact with the Kremlin, and with those in the Kremlin who make decisions,” for the last 15 years. But he said the president, whom he described as a Henry Kissinger-style “pragmatist,” had embraced a version of his ideology because it served his interests domestically.
“It is popular, it is populist, it helps to explain all the processes which are going on in the country, and gradually — just by the logic of things, pragmatically, he becomes closer and closer to this ideology, just by the logic of events,” he said. He also offered a more human reason: that Mr. Putin had been stung by Western leaders’ apparent preference for his predecessor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and then by the antigovernment protests that he believed were backed by the West.
Though a number of high-ranking officials around Mr. Putin have argued strenuously against this ideological shift, Mr. Dugin said that their influence had been waning steadily, and that the Crimean crisis left them no option but to “be quiet, or gather up their suitcases and leave Russia.”
“Anti-Americanism has become the main ideology, the main worldview among Russians,” he said. “Now, after Crimea, we have passed the point of no return. There will not be another Medvedev. There will never be another ‘reset,’ ever.”
Ideological mouthpieces have been used to send signals since the Soviet days, — as a warning to adversaries or domestic dissenters — and it would be foolish to assume that Mr. Putin subscribes to their views. But there are important stakeholders who, faced with the threat of sanctions last week, have advocated that Russia cut itself off from the West. The most obvious among them is Vladimir I. Yakunin, president of Russian Railways and one of Mr. Putin’s trusted friends, who in a recent interview with The Financial Times described the struggle against a “global financial oligarchy” and the “global domination that is being carried out by the U.S.” On Tuesday, Mr. Yakunin presented plans for a Soviet-style megaproject to develop transportation and infrastructure in Siberia, a move toward “an economics of a spiritual type,” he said, that would insulate Russia from the West’s alien values.
He compared the project to monumental endeavors from the past: the adoption of Christianity in ancient Rus; the conquest of Siberia; electrification of the Soviet Union; the Soviet space program; and the Olympics in Sochi.
A shift in planning to Siberia, Mr. Karaganov said, “has already been proclaimed, and is happening,” in part to weaken the Western influence on Russia’s elites, who are seen as “too dependent on their holdings in the West.”
Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, said he saw the rise of people “who have very different views about the Russian economy.”
“Hard-line people, more nationalist people, they are being energized, they think this may be their moment,” he said. “You can also say that this is the tip of the iceberg. These are people who are more visible, more obvious, but there is a lot behind them that is potentially more serious and more ominous.”
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Meeting with Irish PM Enda Kenny, US President Barack Obama said Friday he continues to hope for a diplomatic solution on Crimea, but warned of "consequences...
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