His name was Sergei Molodtsov. Died on the Ukrainian front, this 46-year-old Russian was buried on January 5 in Serov, an austere mining and industrial town lost in the foothills of the Urals. He had joined the Wagner mercenary corps, while he was serving a long prison sentence for having brutally killed his mother. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Sergei Molodtsov is not an assassin, but a hero. Because he chose to fight the “Ukrainian Nazis”, the state absolved him of his crimes – the local administration even spoke of an “honest man” with a “creative” soul. And granted him military honors.
Like him, more than 30,000 prisoners would have signed this Faustian pact with the power. “Leave for six months on the front line. If you come back, you will be extolled by society!” Glory to the “best sons of Russia”, even dares the sulphurous Evgueni Prigojine, leader of the Wagner group, who also experienced prison for fraud and incitement of minors to prostitution. It would even be a question of opening the doors of universities to them and offering them… deputy positions.
Former murderers to train the nation’s elite? An example, among others, of the deleterious drift of Russia. The declarations of its leaders who, a few years ago, were welcomed with open arms in European chancelleries, make one dizzy. They reveal the extent to which power has locked itself in a parallel world – populated by Nazis, in which Moscow is attacked by a decadent West that wants its destruction. This victimization justifies the most absolute cynicism. Like when Vladimir Putin, glass of champagne in hand, claims, during a medal ceremony in the Kremlin, the strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure which plunge millions of civilians into the cold and the dark. “Yes, we do, he said quietly. But who started it?”
To relay, and even amplify, his rhetoric, the Russian president can count on his zealous servants. His predecessor Dmitri Medvedev, long considered by Europeans as a reassuring liberal, multiplies apocalyptic diatribes. “The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war could trigger a nuclear war,” he asserts. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, swears that Russia “has never attacked anyone”. And the veteran Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov compares Western actions against his country to the “final solution” employed by the Nazis against the Jews…
While the rumors of a new mobilization worry, the question arises every day a little more: how the country of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy could sink to this point? “We Westerners are frightened by what the war reveals about Russians: the propensity for violence, the embrace of hate speech, the incitement to genocide, the low value placed on human life or the inability to “collective action, lists Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, director of the Russia Center at the French Institute of International Relations. But it is in a very different mirror that the Russians look at themselves.” That of a society where values have become blurred, to the point of being reversed. By attacking Ukraine, the Russian power is sowing misfortune, but it blames the West for it, while granting itself an almost divine mission of “liberation”. “A transformation from evil to good has taken place in people’s minds, observes historian Galia Ackerman. Worse than moral degradation, we are witnessing a total travesty of the truth.”
And to get the message across, what better support than the Orthodox Church, whose ties with power are more than porous? Didn’t Patriarch Kirill of Moscow exhort his faithful to die in Ukraine, “this sacrifice washing away all the sins that a person has committed”? A message that is more reminiscent of Daesh than that of Christ… “The Orthodox hierarchy anchors the idea that the country is launched in a war against evil, that it defends traditional values, ‘true values’, in the face of to a West perverted by the gay pride and the affirmation of LGBT rights”, notes Kathy Rousselet, researcher at Sciences Po.
The army has no limit either. During the liberation of Ukrainian territories, the world witnessed, bewildered, the despicable acts (torture, executions, rape) in which Russian soldiers had committed themselves. This degradation comes from afar. “The Red Army was based on violence. The old ones saddened the young recruits, it was institutionalized, recalls the historian Françoise Thom. This violence against the conscripts continues and they in turn pass it on to the occupied populations.”
This moral degradation became widespread during the communist era, with Stalinist terror, denunciations and the obsession with survival, which forced the worst compromises. It has increased under Putin. As soon as he came to power at the end of 1999, the head of the Kremlin based his power on violence, with the wars in Chechnya, Syria, Georgia, then in Ukraine, and by entrusting key posts to “siloviki” (former KGB, FSB and other security forces). To legitimize his crimes, he revived the nationalist ideology, brandishing the moral superiority of Russia, necessarily on the side of good since it defeated the absolute evil, Nazism, during the Second World War.
But unlike the Soviet era, the current regime holds no ideals. “Putin’s project, dark and deadly, wants to restore the power of the Soviet Union, points out Galia Ackerman. But since the country no longer exercises the same influence, it only offers society a cult of death and sacrifice, a blind patriotism” which sends a whole youth to the slaughterhouse.
The state media, which for years has been preparing Russians for war, also bears a heavy responsibility. “The militarization of consciences began in 2012, traces continues the historian. And, always, this antiphon: our immortal and invincible people are attacked by the perfidious West, it must be fought.” With this threat: if Russia loses, it will disappear.
One of the architects of this manipulation is called Oleg Dobrodeev. This journalist had largely contributed to the rise of independent journalism in the 1990s, then he put himself at the service of Putin. Silver ? Ambition ? Fear ? “He was one of the first to understand that the KGB was taking power, says Zhanna Agalakova, former star presenter of the first Russian channel, which she left on February 24. , he runs the largest public media group, including RT. All hate messages on his channels must have his approval.”
Hammered in from morning to night, the propaganda has brainwashed a good part of the population. But to thrive, it needed fertile ground. “There is, in Russia, a total absence of critical reflection on the Soviet past, on Russia’s quasi-imperial relations with its neighbors, considered inferior, on the failure of economic, political and social modernization and on the lack of democratic culture”, notes Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean.
The truth being unbearable – Russia is attacking a free people and martyring its population – some Russians prefer to believe the official version. “It’s a great classic of totalitarian regimes. People accept the ambient discourse out of conformity, but also because it is very difficult to accept the horror”, underlines Galia Ackerman.
Who to revolt? Most of the opponents have been eliminated and the most open-minded Russians have left the country. “Those who remain are so miserable that they think they can take advantage of the war to earn a little money or are ‘zombified’ by television”, sums up Françoise Thom.
The future looks painful, whatever the outcome of the conflict. “Putin is a cancer and there are metastases all over the country. It will take a long collective therapy to assume our guilt”, sighs Zhanna Agalakova. In the meantime, it would take a shock to wake up the Russians. “A defeat of their way of thinking”, suggests the writer Iegor Gran, author of Z as zombie (POL). Like the defeat of their country, launched into an unjustifiable war.
