Dmitry Glukhovsky
I DON'T WANT TO BELIEVE IT Dmitry Glukhovsky, April 11, 2022 https://www.facebook.com/glukhovskybooks/posts/i-dont-want-to-believe-itthe-russian-army-is-conducting-a-special-operation-to-d/5514937391883909/
The Russian army is conducting a special operation to de-Nazify Ukraine, liberating Kharkov, Mariupol, and Nikolaev from Nazi battalions. The operation is going according to plan and would already have been brought to a victorious conclusion if the Nazi fighters hadn’t taken peaceful citizens hostage. They are blowing up apartment houses and hospitals along with Ukrainian women and children so that they can lay the blame for everything on Russian troops—because otherwise the flow of money and arms into the country from the West will stop. And, by the way, Russia did not attack Ukraine. Russia was forced to make a preemptive strike because another six hours and Ukraine would have attacked first. Not only that, Kiev was developing an atom bomb to use against Moscow, and in secret laboratories in Ukraine, Americans were creating military strains of a coronavirus that would hit only Russians and be distributed by migratory birds. And in general, Ukraine is nothing but a battlefield between Russia and the United States where the fate of the future world order is being decided.
How can anyone believe ravings that completely distort reality, passing black off as white? How can anyone call the obvious aggressor a peacemaker when there are thousands of documentary testimonies to the aggression?
Nonetheless, these are exactly the ravings that constitute Russia’s official position. And yes, many in Russia have chosen to believe it.
A rupture has passed through millions of families. The older generation accepts what looks like a photographic negative of the world, arguing until they’re hoarse and quarreling with their young relatives, for whom the deceit and lies are obvious. Putin’s propaganda, which is responsible for the psycho-emotional preparation for and justification of the fratricidal and annexationist war against Ukraine, has again proven incredibly effective, even when its lie seemingly is a blatant affront.
How do we explain this? Is it just down to the gullibility of the Russian TV viewer? Ultimately, Russia still does have the Internet, where anyone can find the truth about the war in Ukraine and anyone who wants to can look the truth in the eye, right?
But the truth about the war is being eradicated by every means possible. If you search for news about Ukraine in Russia, you will never see the word “war” at all. The problem is that, like any information about the situation at the front that differs from the propagandists’ statements, that word is henceforth a criminally publishable act. Fifteen years in prison for “spreading information that impugns the actions of the Russian army.” Three years for antiwar appeals. Even Novaya Gazeta, which was just awarded the Nobel Peace Price for its honesty and steadfastness, has been forced to strike the word “war” from its headlines. All the other critically inclined mass media and social media not under state control have simply been banned and blocked over the course of the war. Russian citizens are increasingly being sealed up in a hermetic environment where there is no access to the truth.
But this is not the only problem, naturally. Videos of bombings and photographs of the wounded and dead are seeping through the censorship membrane. However, the facts, photos, and witness videos turn out not to matter. It turns out, they can be ignored, doubt can be cast on them, or they can be given another explanation—by being placed in a diametrically opposite narrative. It’s the narrative that is of primary significance. The imagined world has much more power over people than the reality does.
My country hasn’t had a triumph since the victory in the Great Patriotic War (as we call that part of World War II that affected the Soviet Union) and Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space. People have had no reason to take pride in their Homeland.
The victory in the Great Patriotic War came to the Soviet people at horrific sacrifices: at least 20 million people perished, and there were victims in literally every family. Paid for with the blood of their near and dear, the war and Victory became sacred. Putin’s ideologues and PR men decided turn it into the source of their legitimacy, depicting Putin and his circle as the victors’ heirs.
In private life, the absolute majority of Russians have been utterly stripped of rights and are helpless in the face of the state, and so they have been inculcated with the consciousness not of a citizen but of a loyal subject. People have a tremendous need for elementary self-respect, for a sense of their own worth, but the Putin regime rests precisely on suppressing human worth, precisely on political apathy and a sense of learned helplessness. Instead, they foist on people imperial chauvinism, which they pass off as patriotism. The regime is incapable of improving the life of Russians, which has been deteriorating for many years running, becoming poorer and poorer, shorter and shorter. The people are unhappy and embittered, poor and scared; and apart from everything else, they are tormented by a sense of their life’s lack of purpose or future, a life that gets worse with every passing year. Even if deep down people understand who is responsible for their woes (in fact, it isn’t Zelenskyy or Biden shitting in their elevators!), they lack the courage to admit it even to themselves.
The propaganda offers a comfortable and inspirational myth that allows them to make peace with their existence. You just have to reject the facts, you just have to believe that the Great Patriotic War never ended and continues to this day, that Russia’s present generation is also connected to the great deeds of our ancestors, whose memory we cannot betray. This sense of a universal connection to a great historical mission has an incredibly important psychotherapeutical function, especially in a country where almost no one seriously believes in God. For the long eight years since the annexation of Crimea, all the regime’s propaganda efforts have been aimed at convincing people that the seizure of Ukrainian territories is justified by the war against the Nazis.
A few photographs of Ukrainian nationalists carrying banners with a swastika and frames of torchlight parades in Kyiv ten years ago were enough to make the Russian TV viewer believe that Nazis were running all of Ukraine. The election of a Russian Jew, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by a decisive majority in a direct popular vote turns out not to matter. Facts turn out not to matter in general. What matters more is something else.
People now have a sense of purpose to their life. Finally they have the chance to feel pride in their country. This has become an important ersatz feeling of self-respect in their daily routine. They don’t even have to get off their couches. Already feeling a decline in their standard of living due to Western sanctions, it’s as if they, too, were waging a war for their truth and were even sacrificing something in this war. Moreover, propaganda is ripping the West’s consolidated response to the Russian invasion out of context and serving it up as aggression by the United States and its allies, who want to weaken and bring down Russia—just as Putin has been telling us all those years.
No, this is not reality, it’s a heroin daze, but heroin also bestows euphoria and oblivion, heroin takes away the pain.
Attempting to change the minds of people who have decided to believe in the truth of the “special operation” in Ukraine is incredibly difficult. After all, in order to admit that Russian troops are bombing Ukrainian cities and destroying hospitals and schools, that Ukrainian women and children are perishing at their hands, and that they are facing not just one nationalist battalion but the entire Ukrainian people means admitting that you yourself are complicit. It means losing nearly the only buttress keeping you from falling wholly into existential darkness, from losing yourself. Admitting the reality means losing the confidence that you are a good person—the cornerstone feeling absolutely essential simply for life—and accepting guilt and responsibility for your complicity in an unjust war. And then, you see, you have to call your own side the side of evil and your own ruler a tyrant. But this requires courage of a completely different level, because it either pushes you out of your home into a desperate and most likely doomed struggle or else forces you to admit your own cowardice.
Putin’s propaganda has lured us into a dreadful trap. Having snagged us on the hook of resentment and imperial nostalgia, having given us a sense of participation in a great historic mission, that propaganda is in fact making my people complicit in war crimes. And the more the blood flows, the more difficult it will be for people to believe the truth without losing themselves completely.
Nonetheless, I am confident that moment will come. This is what the Kremlin fears, too, otherwise why did it have to ban all information sources that simply call the war a war?
In the modern world, though, you can’t block the truth. Sooner or later, the thousands of Russian soldiers killed in the Ukrainian war will return home in zinc coffins. Tens of thousands will arrive from the front and tell their families that they weren’t fighting Nazis, they were fighting a people we once called our brothers. One day, millions of Ukrainians who have fled their homes and those who have lost loved ones will call their relatives in Russia and tell them how it all was.
A terrible price for simply believing the reality. But I want to believe that one day we will find the strength in ourselves to look the truth in the eye.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
