The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

by Arkady Ostrovsky

“I told him he was an idiot to write to Putin like that,” Dorenko later recalled. “I said, ‘You don’t understand—Putin is a Russian tsar, not a European leader. In Russia a tsar is not a leader, a tsar is a high priest. You can’t write letters to a high priest. You need to crawl, kiss the carpet and kneel before the throne. Because he is not Volodya—he is the throne of the Russians, a mystical, ancient throne.’”18

As a professional KGB man, he believed in conspiracies, not in people’s free will.

After all, free speech does not automatically imply objectivity or even quality, merely the right to say something different without fear.

The attraction of highly paid jobs, celebrity status and influence turned out to be stronger than the desire for free expression. “Ten years ago Russian journalists thought they were the fourth estate, but they have now been told by the president that they are the world’s oldest profession,” Petrovskaya told me at the time.29

However, the element of dolce vita dominated, and when Namedni’s correspondents traveled to the depths of Russia, it seemed like an exotic travelogue feature about the life of an indigenous population.

Liberalism, he used to say, was found not in political slogans but on the Internet, in coffee shops, in fashion boutiques, in trips abroad and on pedestrianized streets.

In one memorable episode of Matador, Ernst told the story of the creation of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. Dressed in a US Air Force uniform for effect, he seemed intoxicated by the energy of the scene where US helicopters bomb the Vietcong to the soundtrack of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Coppola seemed a natural role model for the young Ernst.

Ernst’s first big hit as a producer was Old Songs About Important Things, which seamlessly connected the Soviet past and Russia’s present.

While Putin restored the Soviet anthem as the country’s “most important song,” Ernst restored Vremya, with its familiar Soviet-era tune, as the most important prime-time news program.

As Lenin said, “of all the kinds of arts, the most important for us is cinema.” Images could get through to people’s consciousness in a way that words could not. They could also sell in a way that words could not. The ability of a film to influence the minds of its audience in Russia was far greater than in America, simply because there was less noise in the marketplace. Ernst did not set out to sell an ideology—he did not really have one—but he used ideology to sell the films he produced.

Just as people swapped imported goods for domestic equivalents, they substituted locally produced dramas for American soap operas. “Russia” became a brand.

“The ‘dark’ are much freer, they let themselves be as they want to be. The ‘light’ are more frustrated, they have too many duties, and feel responsible for a lot of people. The ‘dark’ have eschewed constraints, they live for themselves, while the ‘light’ are like neurotics who are trying to be good to everyone.”36 Ernst identified himself with the dark ones.

In an interview after the film, Ernst lamented the inability of Russians to live in the present moment. “Our people live either in the past or in the future,” he said.37 Ernst, who descended from an old German family that had settled in Russia in the nineteenth century, lived in the present and shaped it.

Strictly speaking, Vremya did not report news. It created a virtual reality modeled on the wishes of the state with Putin at the top. As a state news program, Vremya did not allow itself any scorn, irony or ridicule.

“If news works like a constant nerve irritant—as it did in Russia in the 1990s—it is a sign of instability rather than of freedom of speech.”38

As one high-powered Russian official and former FSB general explained, this deluge of graphic violence was not a response to high spectator demand but a conscious policy formed in the upper echelons of the Russian power structure, to create the impression that only the strong state portrayed in the news could protect a vulnerable population from the violence on the screen.

People whose incomes kept going up because of the increase in the price of oil, rather than because they had worked harder, had plenty of free time for entertainment and demanded a display of Russia’s greatness to explain and supplement their improving fortunes. In the mid-2000s, this demand was largely satisfied through sport, entertainment and parades.

At first glance, it seemed like a copy of European soccer events, but while in Europe sports have long turned into a substitute for war, in Russia they were only a starter.

The rumors spread by Russian television—of Georgian troops targeting women and children and performing genocide—were later proved to be untrue, but at the time they inspired the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages by South Ossetian irregulars.

At the center of the show’s narrative was a history of the empire and the state—not of its people. Rather than celebrating the diversity of the country’s population, as the Olympic rules prescribe, it celebrated unity under the state flag.

For all its technological modernity and scenes of the avant-garde scaffolding, Russia’s present was its past. There was no sign of perestroika or the 1990s or the 2000s. It was as though the Soviet Union had never collapsed.

Three days after the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics—also staged by Ernst—Russian “polite green men” in unmarked military uniforms staged a coup in Crimea.

“Tell me, American,” he then says, putting his gun on the table, “do you think power lies in money? I think power lies in truth. He who has the truth is stronger.”

“Brotherhood” was established through blood rather than ideology or values.

Russians are strong because they have truth behind them, while Americans are weak and hypocritical because they are all about money. Russians who were sucked into America, like Konstantin’s twin brother, were corrupted morally. Just like the old Soviet maxim “The teaching of Marx is all-powerful, because it is right,” this axiom required no further proof. Russians were better simply because they were.

At the time of its release, however, the country was in the grip of a postmodern malaise, in which nothing was real, particularly politics, and the film was not taken as the prophecy that it turned out to be.

On the face of it, Russia had all the trappings of democracy: it had political parties and elections. But most parties were controlled by the Kremlin, and the elections—which are supposedly a tool for the orderly transfer of power—turned into a mechanism for retaining power. It was like a house of mirrors. Those trying to challenge the Kremlin ended up fighting their own distorted reflections.

If the new Russian elite had money, it could buy itself a Western lifestyle and the loyalty of the population, without bothering with all those “values,” which it considered to be no more than fancy wrapping.

Whereas Yeltsin’s era bred the oligarch, Putin’s introduced a far more dangerous type—the bureaucrat-entrepreneur who used the powers of the state for personal enrichment.

“Entrepreneurs” who work for the security services or the police have done especially well in Russia over the last fifteen years, because they have the ultimate competiti...

Putin’s people portrayed themselves as great “patriots” who served the interest of the state. And since they were the state, helping themselves to its riches seemed only fair. The public, which resented the oligarchs, approved.

For all his authoritarianism, Putin derived his legitimacy from popular support, and while he did not believe in fair elections, he paid careful attention to public opinion.

While the Kremlin pumped people with anti-Western tripe, its close friends, who had enriched themselves, shopped in Milan, vacationed in France, kept their money in Switzerland and sent their children to the top private schools in England.

For much of the 2000s this creative class had eschewed politics for the make-believe world of fashion. Now politics became the fashion.

Navalny was born in 1974 into a military family and grew up in the semiclosed garrison towns around Moscow.

Having lost the loyalty of the middle class, Putin tried to cement his core paternalistic and traditionalist electorate. He moved toward a personalized Franco-style rule, sidelining the elites whom he deemed opportunistic and unreliable and appealing directly to the people.

that “Russia and the West are at war. . . . There is a growing feeling that most Western people belong to a different humanoid group from us; that we are only superficially similar, but fundamentally different.”2

As part of their Soviet-era military service, many Russian television executives had been trained in “special propaganda,” which sought to “demoralize the enemy army and establish control over the occupied territory.”

In 1999 Kiselev had moralized about journalistic ethics: “People will, of course, swallow anything. But if we keep lowering the bar and dropping morals, we will one day find ourselves splashing in the dirt like pigs and eating each other, along with this dirt, and then we would not be able to sink any lower.”5 Kiselev’s programs had now reached that state.

While the military was at work, back in Moscow PR men coordinated by Vladislav Surkov turned former crooks and racketeers into the “freedom-seeking government” of Crimea.

Unmet hopes of personal fulfillment were assuaged by a symbolic victory for the state. The annexation of Crimea gave people a sense of purpose without their having to make any effort. Crimea has long been the nerve center of Russia’s imperial nostalgia, and its annexation had been an idée fixe of Russian nationalists ever since the end of the Soviet Union.

While it was Prince Vladimir the Great, the tenth-century ruler of Kievan Rus´, who had been baptized in Crimea, it was President Vladimir who brought the region back into the Russian fold.

The true symbolism of the annexation of Crimea was that Putin was reversing the course of history and elevating Russians to their past imperial glory—something that the nationalists and Communists had been dreaming about ever since 1991.

The old Communist Viktor Anpilov, who led the siege of Ostankino, nestles on the outskirts of Moscow in a basement that reeks of body odor and sour cabbage, surrounded by portraits of Stalin and old Soviet flags.

While Putin believed he was using the nationalists, the nationalists were convinced that they were using Putin. Crimea was just the start. Putin also planned to create a protectorate in the east of Ukraine that would stop the country from drifting toward Europe and the West.

Had it not been for Russian television, the war probably would not have started. The notion of television as a weapon lost its metaphorical sense. It was the real weapon causing real destruction.*

The Russian media did not just distort reality—they invented it, using fake footage, doctoring quotes, using actors (sometimes the same actor would impersonate both the victim and an aggressor on different channels). “Our psyche is set up in such a way that only an artistic form can explain the time [we live in],” Ernst, head of Channel One and Russia’s most successful TV producer, once said.

By planting stories about children crucified or tortured by Ukrainians, Russian propaganda deployed the same time-tested mechanism of arousing hatred as the one used in Jewish pogroms in prerevolutionary Russia.

Russian television worked like a psychoactive agent, a hallucinogen. As Nevzorov wrote, “Patriotic hallucinations are aggressive, hysterical and persistent. . . . One must remember the ideological drug [of patriotism] is injected into the country’s veins for one main purpose: so that, at the first click of the fingers of any idiot in military stripes, crowds of boys voluntarily agree to turn into burned and rotting meat.”

Russian television exploited their weaknesses and lured them into a fight for a country that had ceased to exist nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Russia’s “hybrid” war lifted them from their miserable, anonymous and hopeless existence onto the television screen, told them they were victims and heroes, provided them with weapons and pointed to an enemy. Russian propaganda also mobilized thousands of Russian volunteers, who flocked to take part in a bloody battle against “fascism” in Ukraine.