The atrocities Russian troops have committed in Ukraine raise two questions about Russians at home: Do they know their military is doing these things? If they do, are they OK with it? The answers are almost certainly “yes” and “they are working on it.”
The degree of civilians’ ignorance might not matter much for Russia’s redemption, should that ever become possible. It did not matter in post-World War II Germany. Although Germans used to refer to the end of that war as the “zero hour,” nothing was nullified by Adolf Hitler’s suicide and his armies’ capitulation.
When “peaceful” Germans told their allied occupiers they had not known what the Nazis were up to, they were sometimes taken en masse to see the death camps. Many were, or acted, astounded and horrified. Whether or not those emotions were real, by expressing them, “innocent” Germans only provoked the allies to rub their noses in Hitler’s terrible heritage.
Illustration: Constance Chou
Even if President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not defeated militarily, let alone occupied and forcibly de-Putinized, the question — “did you know?” — would be asked of Russians when they apply for visas, interview for foreign jobs or just in casual conversations with Ukrainians or Westerners. Will they use the same defense that Germans used? Will they claim that the Putin regime had cut off their access to all information except propaganda and force fed them the idea that the executed unarmed civilians were victims of Ukraine’s false-flag atrocities?
Some will, and they would have some evidence to offer. Ostensibly, the Putin regime has done its best to starve Russians of truthful information. Independent news outlets have been closed outright or blocked on the Internet. Those still active cannot be reached without a virtual private network (VPN).
Search in Russian for Bucha, the Kyiv suburb on which Russian troops unleashed horrible violence, on the Russian search engine Yandex — and you’ll get the twisted Kremlin version of events.
Is this information blockade really effective?
In Russia last month, the four most-downloaded apps for both MacOS and Android were VPNs. It could be argued that people are using these applications only to retain access to Netflix and other entertainment services that have quit the country since the war in Ukraine began. Yet, the fifth most in-demand app was the encrypted messenger Telegram, probably the best available source of uncensored news about the war. I am using Telegram to access news from a wealth of Russian and Ukrainian sources.
According to a poll taken last month, TV is the main source of information for 50 percent of Russians, and 45 percent trust it, but then that is just what people living under an autocratic regime tell pollsters — not necessarily what they actually think. Even if the poll data reflect reality, there is a large age gap in TV viewing: Younger people watch little TV, and more than a quarter of adult Russians do not watch it at all, instead relying on the Internet for news. They are the ones who use VPNs to access independent news sources and subscribe to unfiltered Telegram channels. They also know that Google is a better search engine than Yandex.
Even Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, openly admits using a VPN to access banned Western social networks: The official policy is that such use is not punishable. Indeed there have been no reprisals so far for using Facebook or Instagram, both declared “extremist” organizations. It is extremely difficult for the secret police to track such use on a grand scale while VPNs remain legal.
Even assuming that a TV-only audience of older, technology-shy people really exists, it cannot be isolated from direct communication with other people whose horizons are not as limited. Older Russians with their unbreakable TV habit still hear about the executed Ukrainian civilians from their younger friends and relatives.
The social networks are full of stories of well-informed children calling their parents or older friends to tell them what is going on — and running into a stubborn disbelief.
Do people really trust their TV more than their own kids or other people they know personally? I seriously doubt it.
However, older Russians are extremely cautious on the telephone (and now also on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram or any other means of remote communication). They would not endanger themselves by blabbing heresy — too many people suffered for it in the Soviet Union, a country that modern Russia increasingly resembles. Even in the privacy of our apartment, when I was a kid, my mother avoided criticizing the Soviet order in my presence — for fear that I would blurt it out at school.
The surviving Soviets might not have their children’s technology smarts, but they beat them hands down in the kind of street smarts required for survival in a police state. They also have plenty of experience reading between propaganda lines. The assumption that these people, who laughed privately at the Soviet ideological fodder, have suddenly lost their ability to take state discourse with a bucketful of salt, seems less plausible than the idea that they are reverting to oyster mode as their familiar environment returns.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s arch-enemy who is held in a penal colony, definitely has no access to any sources but state TV. He on April 5 wrote on Twitter through an intermediary.
“I’m telling you, the monstrosity of lies on federal channels is unimaginable. And, unfortunately, so is its persuasiveness for those who have no access to alternative information,” he said.
Yet Navalny’s thread lays bare the flimsiness of the ignorance defense: Persuasive as the TV lies might be, he clearly is not falling for them; his brain rejects them. There is, of course, only one Navalny — but it would be arrogant in the extreme to assume that his visceral reactions are unique.
Why would others buy the Kremlin’s Joseph Goebbels-like narratives after years of living in a much freer information environment than the one that exists today?
Of course, never underestimate people’s ability to ignore the news. Days after the Russian authorities banned Meta and its services — Facebook and Instagram — as “extremist,” and set out to block access to them, many Russian users were still posting negative reviews in app stores, complaining that Meta’s apps have stopped working. These users appear to have successfully insulated themselves from any information coming from outside their cozy bubbles — their handmade cosmetics businesses, their coaching practices, their dog or baby-focused communities.
Such isolation takes effort — and even those who managed it have probably gotten the memo by now.
Ordinary Germans did know what the Nazis were up to, research has shown. Even with that era’s relatively limited media and communications, the Nazis’ crimes were impossible to miss, no matter how they might have tried. They could refuse to fess up to their knowledge; they could even convince themselves of their own ignorance.
That, too, takes quite an effort, I realize as I read some fellow Russians’ social network posts or listen to Moscow acquaintances say things such as: “Not everything is black and white” or “We will never know the whole truth.” I have a sense that, if pressed, some might burst into tears or lash out in anger.
The strain is ever-present, and I am not sure whether it is rooted in fear or an instinct for self-preservation: My own family struggles to cope with knowing that the Russian atrocities are being committed in our name, too.
It is a burden we have to bear — probably for the rest of our lives. Those who insist they had been fooled by propaganda would not be free of it. In these brutal weeks, only the openly complicit are able to avoid the weight that is bending Russians to the ground.
Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He recently authored a Russian translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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