And he succeeded in spades.
CHAPTER 16
WHAT IS RUSSIAN FOR FAKE NEWS?
For many years, political and media discourse has been founded on an inviolable distinction between fact and opinion: as C. P. Scott, a famous British newspaperman, pointed out, comment is free, but facts are sacred. In the post-truth universe of the twenty-first century, that distinction has been trampled underfoot.
Nowadays, many politicians and journalists treat facts as if they were as inherently malleable as their own personal opinions, fair game to be twisted and moulded to fit the case they wish to make. Donald Trump lived in a different truth-universe from everyone else, believing only the things he wanted to believe and using all methods to force others into agreeing with him. The issue is not the correctness or otherwise of political decisions, but the way that facts are shaped to communicate with society and impose specific views.
But Vladimir Putin trumps even Trump. Putin peddles falsehoods to the Russian people, insisting all the while that his lies are true, that black – despite much evidence to the contrary – is white. When people have the effrontery to stand up for the truth, the Kremlin shows no mercy. A woman whose son died in the Kursk submarine disaster of 2000 tried to criticise the inefficiency of the rescue mission at a Foreign Ministry press conference, only to be rendered unconscious by a hypodermic syringe plunged into her arm in full view of the assembled media.
Disagreeing with the Kremlin’s version of events is dangerously unrewarding. It behoves the West and the democratic opposition to stand up for those who dare to speak the truth. And that applies not only to politicians, but to the Western media, too.
Since I have been living in London, I have been impressed by British television news. The BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky strive for objectivity and impartiality. The BBC is attacked by politicians from both the left and the right, which suggests to me that its reporting maintains a good standard of balance. Despite being owned by the Fox magnate Rupert Murdoch until 2018, Sky News rejects the political bias that has become the calling card of so many broadcasters abroad. In the US, for example, there has been a marked radicalisation of TV networks, with CNN openly supporting the left and Fox equally siding with the right. This has led US politics to become damagingly polarised and people’s prejudices entrenched to extremes. I regret that Ronald Reagan dropped the ‘fairness’ requirement that up until 1987 demanded balance from the broadcast networks. Now that social networks permit people to close themselves off from alternative opinions and live within a monolithic group, sometimes sharing the most radical and often patently erroneous convictions, this is a question that must be seriously reconsidered.
But in Putin’s Russia, the situation is much worse. In the US, there is at least market competition, which ensures most political views are represented by at least one channel. In Russia, the state has a de facto monopoly of the mass media, which guarantees it also has a ‘monopoly of truth’. Boris Yeltsin allowed a brief interlude of freedom in the 1990s, but Vladimir Putin is replacing glasnost with a return to Soviet times. The Kremlin has created a dominant information stream that wages an aggressive and permanent information war. The few remaining independent media outlets are harassed and restricted by the authorities.
A popular joke of the past couple of years in Russia asks, ‘What is the Russian for fake news?’ with the answer being, ‘News.’ It has become a favourite among those who despair at the mendacity of Vladimir Putin’s state media and communications machine. But the truth is more nuanced. People in Russia know what is going on. News is distorted, but it is not always hidden. The insidious thing is the way that Putin’s propaganda operation has got inside people’s heads and the facility with which it has learned how to make people believe in presumptions. If all the available sources of news keep telling you that a fact should be viewed in a certain way, the majority of us will agree that that is the way it should be viewed.
Psychologists have shown that people are relatively easily persuaded to adapt their opinions to the general view. A series of experiments in the 1950s by the US researcher Solomon Asch investigated the phenomenon of conformity, the process by which a person’s opinions are influenced by those of groups. Asch found that people are willing to ignore reality – to disregard the evidence of their own eyes and give an answer they know to be incorrect – in order to conform to the rest of the group. He concluded that individuals have a compulsion to follow the unspoken rules and behaviours of the society in which they live, driven by an innate fear of appearing different, or by a desire to belong.
The Kremlin’s propaganda machine is adept at exploiting those fears and desires, and we in the democratic opposition must learn to combat them. Freedom of speech and societal openness have been, and remain, the most important elements of democracy. We know from psychology that social support is an important tool in reducing pernicious conformity; if an individual knows that others in her social group are willing to resist, she too is more likely to do so. Our task is to provide that support, to furnish the factual reassurances that will lead to a critical mass of citizens willing to reject the Kremlin’s manipulation. Asch suggests that conformity decreases when people are able to respond privately, without the external pressures of the social domain. This has had the perverse effect that many Russians pretend to accept the ‘official’ view of things in their public life – to avoid opprobrium or appearing different – while remaining fully conscious that the official version is a lie. As the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz has pointed out, it can be an uncomfortable mental task to live this double life of knowing and pretending not to know. It is a conflict summed up in another Russian joke about two KGB men who are having a drink after work. The first one, Dmitry, says to his friend, ‘Tell me, Ivan. What do you really think about this regime we live under?’ Ivan replies, ‘The same as you do,’ after which Dmitry thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘In that case, it is my duty to arrest you.’
Forcing people to believe in lies is not new in Russia. Joseph Stalin rewrote reality on an epic scale, bigging up his own importance by excising former rivals from the historical record, airbrushing their faces from photographs. ‘Who controls the past controls the future,’ wrote George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; ‘who controls the present controls the past.’ The Bolsheviks regarded history as a resource to be reinvented at will to suit the Kremlin’s present objectives and justify its promise of an ideal socialist future. ‘Communism has made the future certain,’ ran another joke, ‘but the past completely unpredictable.’
Stalin was punctilious in telling Soviet historians what to write about him. He dictated his own entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the official version of the country’s history. ‘Everyone knows the shattering force of Stalin’s logic,’ Stalin modestly opined, ‘the crystal clarity of his intellect, his steel will, his love for the people. His modesty, simplicity, sensitivity and mercilessness to enemies are well known to everyone…’
Putin is the latest Russian autocrat to mould history to suit himself. In February 2013, he ordered Russian historians to come up with guidelines for new school history books that suggested a portrayal of the past – and the present – more in line with his version of autocracy. Part of his motivation was the fear that gripped him following the widescale protests of 2011 and 2012 and the need to shore up his image before the impending presidential election. But it was also a vanity project. The guidelines were to make no criticism of the president, no reference to any protests against him and no mention of the confrontation over his crushing of Yukos. ‘It was a simple political order,’ wrote the independent Russian historian, Vladimir Ryzhkov, ‘to justify the ruling authorities, to explain that they are doing everything right’. The guidelines reaffirmed the myth that Russia needs strong autocratic rule to protect the nation against its foes and credited Putin with providing it. ‘During his first and second presidential terms, Vladimir Putin managed to stabilise the situation in the country and strengthen the “vertical of power”,’ the guidelines conclude, adding that Putin had fostered stability, economic growth and ‘the restoration of Russia’s position in international affairs’.