Moscow.- The grievance, paranoia and imperialist mentality that led President Vladimir V. Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war: a broad, if uneven, social upheaval that has left the leader Russian more dominant than ever in his home.
Schoolchildren collect empty tin cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from “aggressors seeking world domination.”
Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, and their anti-war artists removed. The new exhibits presented by the state have titles like “NATOzism,” a play on “Nazism” that seeks to present the Western military alliance as as existential a threat as the Nazis of World War II.
Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that emerged in the first 30 years of post-Soviet Russia have come to an abrupt end, while nationalist groups once considered fringe have taken center stage.
As the one-year anniversary of Friday’s invasion approaches, Russia’s military has suffered one setback after another, falling short of its goal of taking control of Ukraine. But at home, facing little resistance, Putin’s war year has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.
“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultra-conservative business magnate, boasted in a phone interview on Saturday. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society cleanses itself of liberalism and Western poison.”
The fact that the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia’s transformation much more profound, he said, than it would have been if Putin’s hopes of a quick victory had been realized.
“If the Blitzkrieg had been successful, nothing would have changed,” he said.
For years, the Kremlin tried to keep Malofeyev at arm’s length, even as he bankrolled pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to reform itself into an empire of “traditional values” free of Western influence. But that changed after the invasion, when Putin turned “traditional values” into a rallying cry — signing a new anti-gay law, for example — while casting himself as another Peter the Great reclaiming lost Russian lands. .
Most importantly, Malofeyev said, Russia’s liberals have been silenced or fled the country, while Western companies have left voluntarily.
That shift was evident last Wednesday at a gathering outside Moscow’s congested Garden Ring, where some of Russia’s most prominent human rights activists who have remained were gathering for the latest of many recent farewells: the Sakharov Center. The archive, a human rights center that was a liberal center for decades, was opening its last exhibition before being forced to close under a new law.
The center’s president, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, once a Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that “what we could not have imagined two years or even a year ago is happening today.”
“A new value system has been built,” Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, said later. “Brutal and archaic public values”.
A year ago, when Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility; After all, Putin had presented himself as a peace-loving president who would never attack another country. So after the invasion began, surprising some of the president’s closest aides, the Kremlin was quick to adjust its propaganda to justify it.
It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing the “Nazis” who seized power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message said, and Putin’s “special military operation” was aimed at ending the war that the West had started.
In a series of speeches aimed at bolstering domestic support, Putin portrayed the invasion as a quasi-holy war for Russia’s very identity, declaring that he was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being imposed by a aggressive west.
The full power of the state was deployed to spread and enforce that message. National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, abandoned entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were ordered to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; Police went after people for crimes like anti-war Facebook posts, which helped drive hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.
“Society in general has gone off the rails,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private secondary school in the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, said in a telephone interview. “The ideas of good and evil have changed.”
Mr. Chernyshov, one of the few Russian school principals to have spoken out against the war, described the narrative of Russian soldiers fighting in defense of their nation as so easy to swallow that much of society actually came to believe it, especially since the message fit. perfectly in tune with one of the most emotionally evocative chapters in Russian history: your nation’s victory in World War II.
A national campaign urging children to make candles for soldiers has become so popular, he said, that anyone questioning it in a school chat group could be called a “Nazi and a Western shill.”
At the same time, he argued, everyday life has changed little for Russians without a family member fighting in Ukraine, which has hidden or mitigated the costs of the war. Western officials estimate that at least 200,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, a much higher number than analysts had predicted when the war began. Yet the economy has suffered much less than analysts predicted, as Western sanctions failed to drastically reduce the quality of life for average Russians, even as many Western brands left.
“I think one of the scariest observations is that, for the most part, nothing has changed for people,” Chernyshov said, describing the urban rhythm of restaurants and concerts and dates from his students. “This tragedy is pushed to the periphery.”
In Moscow, Putin’s new war ideology is on display at the Museum of Victory, a sprawling hilltop complex dedicated to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. A new exhibit, “NATOzism,” declares that “the purpose of creating NATO was to achieve world domination.” A second, “Everyday Nazism,” includes artifacts from the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which has far-right connections, as evidence for the false claim that Ukraine is committing “genocide” against the Russians.
“It was scary and creepy and horrible,” a patron named Liza, 19, said of what the exhibit had shown her, declining to give her last name because of the political sensitivity of the subject. She said that she was distraught to learn of this behavior of the Ukrainians, as portrayed in Russian propaganda. “It shouldn’t be like this,” she said, signaling her support for Putin’s invasion.
Hundreds of students were visiting on a recent afternoon, and elementary school children marched in green army caps as their chaperone chanted: “Left, left, one, two, three!” and he addressed them as “soldiers.” In the main room, the studio for Victory TV, a channel started in 2020 to focus on World War II, was filming a live talk show.
“The framework of the conflict helped people to accept it,” said Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. “The West is against us. Here are our soldiers, here are the enemy soldiers, and within that framework we have to take sides”.
Weeks after launching his invasion, Putin declared that Russia faced a much-needed “self-purification of society.” He has flippantly wished “all the best!” to Western companies that left the country, saying their departures created “unique development opportunities” for Russian companies.
But in Khabarovsk, a city on the Chinese border in Russia’s Far East, Vitaly Blazhevich, a local English teacher, says locals miss Western brands like H&M, the clothing retailer. When it came to war, he continued, the dominant emotion was passive acceptance and the hope that things would end soon.
“People are nostalgic for what turned out to be good times,” he said.
Blazhevich taught at a Khabarovsk state university until he was forced to resign on Friday, he said, for criticizing Putin in a YouTube interview with Radio Liberty, the US-funded Russian-language news outlet. They were the kind of comments that probably wouldn’t have been punished before the war. Now, he said, the government’s crackdown on dissent “is like a steamroller,” “the whole world is being pushed onto the asphalt.”
Malofeyev, the conservative tycoon, said Russia still needed another year “for society to be completely cleansed of the last fateful years.” He said that anything short of a “victory” in Ukraine, complete with a parade in kyiv, could still undo some of last year’s transformation.
“If there is a ceasefire in the course of the spring,” he said, “then some liberal comeback is possible.”
In Moscow, at the farewell event at the Sakharov Center, some of the older attendees pointed out that in the arc of Russian history, a Kremlin crackdown on dissent was nothing new. Yan Rachinsky, president of Memorial, the rights group that was forced to disband at the end of 2021, said the Soviets banned so much “that there was nothing left to ban.”
“But you can’t stop people from thinking,” Mr. Rachinsky continued. “What the authorities are doing today does not guarantee them any longevity.”
