How the Kremlin is militarising Russia

It has even raised the possibility that the country might again have to defend itself as it did against the Nazis in World War II. Now, as Russia masses troops on the Ukrainian border, spurring Western fears of an impending invasion, the steady militarisation of Russian society under President Vladimir V. Putin suddenly looms large, and appears to have inured many to the idea that a fight could be coming. “The authorities are actively selling the idea of war,” Dmitri A. Muratov, the Russian newspaper editor who shared the Nobel Peace Prize this year, said in his acceptance speech in Oslo this month. “People are getting used to the thought of its permissibility.”

Speaking to Russian military leaders on Tuesday, Putin insisted that Russia did not want bloodshed, but was prepared to respond with “military-technical measures” to what he described as the West’s aggressive behavior in the region. While there is no surging war fever taking hold, there are plenty of signs that the government has been nurturing a readiness for conflict. A $185 million four-year program started by the Kremlin this year aims to drastically increase Russians’ “patriotic education,” including a plan to attract at least 600,000 children as young as 8 to join the ranks of a uniformed Youth Army. Adults get their inculcation from state television, where political shows — one is called “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.” — drive home the narrative of a fascist coup in Ukraine and a West bent on Russia’s destruction. And all are united by the near-sacred memory of Soviet victory in World War II — one that the state has seized upon to shape an identity of a triumphal Russia that must be ready to take up arms once more.

Aleksei Levinson, the head of sociocultural research at the Levada Center, an independent Moscow pollster, calls the trend the “militarisation of the consciousness” of Russians. In the center’s regular surveys, the army in 2018 became the country’s most trusted institution, surpassing even the president. This year, the share of Russians saying they feared a world war hit the highest level recorded in surveys dating to 1994 — 62 percent. This does not mean, Levinson cautioned, that Russians would welcome a bloody territorial conquest of Ukraine. But it does mean, he said, that many have been conditioned to accept that Russia is locked in an existential rivalry with other powers in which the use of force is a possibility. Celebration of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II — referred to as the Great Patriotic War in Russia — has played the most important role in that conditioning. Rather than promoting only a culture of remembrance of Soviet heroism and 27 million lives lost, the Kremlin applies the World War II narrative to the present day, positioning Russia as once again threatened by enemies bent on its destruction.

In his annual Victory Day speech this year after a monumental military parade, Putin tore into unnamed present-day enemies of Russia who were redeploying the Nazis’ “delusional theory of their exclusivity.”

On state TV last week, a news show host ridiculed sanctions threats against Russia from those “who have no idea how to scare a people that lost more than 20 million of its men, its women and its elderly and kids in the last war.” A popular World War II bumper sticker reads, “We can do it again.” “There’s a transposition taking place of this victory” — in World War II — “into the present-day confrontation with the NATO bloc,” Levinson said. In Moscow recently, more than 600 people from across Russia gathered for a government-sponsored forum aimed at promoting patriotism among youth. Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s powerful deputy chief of staff, praised the attendees for doing “sacred work.”

The writers are journalists with NYT©2021

The New York Times