Читаем The Russia Conundrum полностью

The Mueller Report caused much indignation among the American public – it isn’t nice to learn that a foreign government is sneaking around, trying to mess with your thoughts and opinions. But I do wonder what exactly Putin was hoping to achieve by hacking the US election. It is possible, but unlikely, that he had some sort of pact with – or some means of influence over – Donald Trump. It is possible he thought Trump would be easier to push around, or that he was overcome with hatred for Hillary Clinton, who had called him out on numerous occasions when she was secretary of state. But very few people in Russia would be particularly impressed by or overly interested in Putin achieving that sort of outcome.

Putin may have had another aim in mind, however, when he instructed Prigozhin to stir up trouble, one that would have a big effect on Russian opinion. People in the West tend to think that Putin runs Russia with effortless ease, that he has the whole country under his shiny, platform-soled heel. But he isn’t talented as a manager or hardworking or even a good organiser. And he knows that things in Russia are not going well. The US election allowed him to create the impression that things are going well, a fantasy of pretence and fake claims to paper over the reality. Just like in the times of Catherine the Great, Putin has created his own Potemkin villages – but instead of erecting fake villages on the ground in Russia, he is creating citadels of fake news and history on a global platform, that is online. He projects a mirage of wellbeing to force the Russian people to believe in it and to stave off the day when they finally realise their emperor has no clothes.

But even Putin’s Truman Show falters at times and the parlous state of Russia becomes too big to ignore. At moments like these, he needs a way of explaining to the Russian people why not everything in the garden is rosy. He needs someone to blame. He can’t blame the political opposition, because he cleaves to the image of a powerful president who has dealt with internal opposition and crushed them into irrelevance. So, instead, Putin turns to America. In Putin’s cosmology, America takes the blame for everything. The US is big and powerful, capable of inflicting all sorts of woes on Russia, a most convenient enemy for Putin to have or, perhaps, for him to invent.

Putin’s preoccupation is always with his domestic audience and with how his image will play with the Russian people. Prigozhin’s IRA allowed him to demonstrate to the Russian people that American democracy is corrupt. Putin may not have been overly concerned with backing Trump; but he did want to convince the Russian people that the vote was being falsified in favour of Hillary. He wanted to provoke outrage among Trump supporters, so they would proclaim to the world that the US system was rotten.

And he succeeded in spades.

CHAPTER 16

WHAT IS RUSSIAN FOR FAKE NEWS?

For many years, political and media discourse has been founded on an inviolable distinction between fact and opinion: as C. P. Scott, a famous British newspaperman, pointed out, comment is free, but facts are sacred. In the post-truth universe of the twenty-first century, that distinction has been trampled underfoot.

Nowadays, many politicians and journalists treat facts as if they were as inherently malleable as their own personal opinions, fair game to be twisted and moulded to fit the case they wish to make. Donald Trump lived in a different truth-universe from everyone else, believing only the things he wanted to believe and using all methods to force others into agreeing with him. The issue is not the correctness or otherwise of political decisions, but the way that facts are shaped to communicate with society and impose specific views.

But Vladimir Putin trumps even Trump. Putin peddles falsehoods to the Russian people, insisting all the while that his lies are true, that black – despite much evidence to the contrary – is white. When people have the effrontery to stand up for the truth, the Kremlin shows no mercy. A woman whose son died in the Kursk submarine disaster of 2000 tried to criticise the inefficiency of the rescue mission at a Foreign Ministry press conference, only to be rendered unconscious by a hypodermic syringe plunged into her arm in full view of the assembled media.

Disagreeing with the Kremlin’s version of events is dangerously unrewarding. It behoves the West and the democratic opposition to stand up for those who dare to speak the truth. And that applies not only to politicians, but to the Western media, too.