Since the start of the war, Russian authorities have been in a state of permanent crisis and chaos.
The state has had to constantly reorganize and perform tasks it was never designed for, week after week -
all while dealing with a lack of funding and expectations of miracles from those in charge.
This situation is made even more difficult by the fact that many citizens, who were not supportive of the government
even before the war, would rather see all these officials in their graves.
Today, we will explore what the Russian government expects from its state officials during a war.
What happens when these expectations meet reality?
What they can handle and what not so much. And what it means for us.
PEOPLE’S WAR
In the Moscow suburbs, the Sberbank campus hosted a seminar for state officials on the topic of public opinion
management, instead of the usual meeting of IT specialists to discuss improvements to the bank's mobile app.
The seminar was organized by the NGO "Dialogue" - an organization that specializes in propaganda
and public relations for state agencies.
The keynote speaker was Sergei Kirienko, the deputy head of the presidential administration and the person responsible
for Russia's internal policy and handling of annexed territories. “So what”, you may ask.
What’s so important about this event?
There must be something for all those assistants, organizers, referents and heads of public relations of all shapes to do.
The seminar was special for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the recording was leaked to journalists, not just any journalists, like Komsomolskaya Pravda or something,
but to the Wall Street Journal, who published an article about it.
Secondly, the speech given by Sergey Kirienko was particularly noteworthy.
In the beginning of his speech he expressed hope that the “special military operation” will end relatively soon.
It’s not quite clear what “relatively soon” was supposed to mean.
At what scale? At normal human scale or historical one, the one in which our supreme commander thinks?
The scale of Vladimir the Baptizer and Peter I. In their times, “relatively soon” meant five to seven years to end a war.
According to Kirienko, the most important war is the war for people's minds - a war that must be fought
on the battlefield of children's minds, including those of preschoolers.
“If you think of it, we have 18 million school-aged children alone in our country.
And don’t forget that they have parents” — this is how Kirienko lectured his subordinates.
Indeed, every child is a potential soldier or the mother of a soldier,
and must be guided onto the right path before they are lost to vodka or a car accident.
We can go even further: there are at least 2.5 million state officials in Russia.
And don’t forget that they have sons and brothers.
How many loyal soldiers of the motherland could be mobilized without involving the rest of the country!
But according to Kirienko, they have a more important role to play.
The war in Ukraine will end, but the war for minds will continue. And state officials are the special forces of this war!
He actually said that. According to the Wall Street Journal, not all participants liked that comparison.
Maybe they were aware of the unenviable fate that the special forces faced in the first weeks of the war.
To make it easier to swallow and to stop giving an impression of a sergeant from Full Metal Jacket,
Kirienko decided to give them some practical advice.
One of the pieces of advice was to provide society with "an endless stream of good and reliable news."
However, the deputy head of the PA's idea of good and reliable news does not include our channel.
For example, he recommended "showing how what was once blast craters have now turned into flower beds."
Kirienko didn’t specify how many of such flower beds are right now in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Mariupol.
He also didn’t reflect on whether it is worth telling the audience about the blooming cities, factories,
or world-class airports and stadiums that the Russian army has turned into ruins.
Kirienko’s speech happened some time ago, but apparently, later events didn’t change much in the party line.
Since September 1, there are now historic enlightenment classes in schools as a part of “talks about what matters”.
Fortunately preschoolers are still not being told about how to enlist as a volunteer.
But according to the manuals for the "talks," older kids are already being taught that loving the motherland
means protecting it with weapons.
The same manuals also contain the old-fashioned theses about denazification, demilitarization,
and confrontation against the cruel NATO.
And in October, Sergey Kirienko repeated some of his theses on a all-Russian forum of class teachers —
a place where he had no business being.
But no, he spoke and said that Russia will win both the hot war, the economic war,
and the psychological war if it truly becomes a people's war!
They’ve been long waiting for the people’s wart and various fans of the special operation have been calling for it,
from propagandists from TV to Pax Russica philosopher. But somehow it’s not starting.
And in the same way that Russian people aren’t eager to enlist as volunteers and are fleeing the mobilization,
Russian state officials too don’t want to become special forces of this war either.
We’ll talk about them now, but first, a commercial.
ADS
Since almost the very beginning of the war Meduza, Farida Rustamova,
and other independent journalists regularly publish insider reports about how Russian civilian officials
don’t share the militant moods of their superiors. In this sense, the highest state officials in ministries
and in regions aren’t that much different from common Russians.
They were not aware of the upcoming war and weren’t dreaming of Pax Russica from Lviv to Kamchatka either.
In the end, information about alcohol abuse among officials surfaced.
Even the president had to intervene and quite transparently hint at excessive drunkenness
at meetings with regional governors.
Another trend among civilian elites is preparing escape plans.
Those without a second citizenship are now working on getting one,
and those whose children weren't abroad are sending them out of the country.
The situation worsened after the start of mobilization, causing prices for private flights to skyrocket.
It wasn't just wealthy businessmen trying to avoid conscription; officials were also in a hurry to move their brothers
and sons away from danger.
The only reason they aren't fleeing en masse is the threat of repression against those deemed to be traitors,
such as Skripal or Litvinenko, state officials too had plans and dreams, their countryside houses to spend vacations on.
Yes, they are much different from what common Russians have. But it was their life, which ended on February 24.
They wanted to fly to expensive ski resorts and tropical islands, not to go on working trips to rebuild Melitopol.
To the UAE and the US, not to the DPR and LPR.
They wanted to relax in their foreign houses, not to read European news, waiting for their house to be occupied
by some political activists, or have sanctions imposed on them and then they will never be able to go there again.
They wanted to send their children to Europe to study, not to hide from the risk of mobilization to the collapsing front.
The war turned their plans upside down. In addition, their carefree working life is over.
Before, their job was to wisely distribute the financial flows, so that there was enough for them, for their boss,
and a little bit left over to paint the curbs or to fix a roof of a school.
There were clear conditions: known salary and known bonuses, a car from the state,
plus you could always invent additional bonuses for yourself.
And now they have to be fixing huge holes in the budget and solving tasks when there’s no imports and when many
of their employees have fled, and they also must be promoting patriotism, self-sacrifice, and fighting spirit.
And not only our officials don’t know how to do it, they don’t actually want to, rather have vodka.
The war that Russia has started is unique in a sense that it benefits no one.
No one from top to bottom of the Russian leadership.
WHAT WILL COME OF ALL THIS
Thus, the government started the war without even caring not only about setting achievable goals for it,
but also about making sure that people responsible for carrying them out are prepared.
Now they want these exhausted and demoralized people to raise the fighting spirit of the population
and win the information war. This situation has a good side, and a bad side.
The good thing is that they will not win an information war, they will not turn the war against Ukraine into a people’s war,
and they will not mobilize society. And not just because officials do not want to do any of it.
But simply because our state does not know how to mobilize the population and involve large masses in its projects.
For twenty years, it has learned to lie, demoralize, and exclude the people from any action.
And it has learned to do this well and successfully. It has selected the appropriate personnel
and developed the rhetoric.
Furthermore, the system doesn’t have high-quality executors capable of fulfilling a task that doesn’t involve
stealing from the budget and making records sum up nicely. Capable of doing a truly good job.
It didn’t need such people before, it actually didn’t want them. And now there is nowhere to find them.
It is impossible to turn a war of conquest into a people’s war.
Yes, militarist Japan and Nazi Germany managed to do just that. But those were totalitarian states with clear ideologies.
The Russian system has no such ideology.
Yes, a war of ideology cannot be won without an ideology itself.
The system is trying to invent an ideology now, but it hasn’t been successful so far.
It lacks the experience to do it, and the reality to which it must adapt is changing twice in a week.
That’s how we got land grabbers from fighters against world fascism. Very useful for the largest country in the world.
So what, yesterday we heroically liberate Kherson and declare it a part of Russia,
and today we report that we successfully bombed it.
First we talk about flowers growing in craters left by our bombs, and then we denounce these flowers
as anti-Russian propaganda, claiming that blast craters are closer to a Russian man’s heart.
Yes, the ideology of the Soviet Union too didn’t connect well with reality.
But that ideology had a serious scientific basis for the time, which was being taught to everyone in the country.
It explained real successes, like the victory in war or Gagarin’s flight to space. Communism could be made believable.
Especially till mid-70s. But no one would believe in the ideology of the Russian government even if they try really hard,
because it itself hasn’t decided yet what it wants to believe in.
As a result of all this we get such a nonsense that can't be watched without shame,
which no one would believe, here take a look at this video which was published recently on Russia 24,
no sane person regardless of their political views would be able to watch it without indignation.
Looks like it will get increasingly more difficult for Ukraine to generate media content,
because you need electricity for this, at the very least, and there’s a problem with that.
Daily life in Ukraine in general looks like this: charging phones in stores, dinner at candlelight - almost romantic,
but it takes about an hour to warm food like this. A man has to be shaving next to an ATM;
people make jokes on social media: “when the date is in 30 minutes”.
Another example — you can lose hair if you dry it over a gas stove,
and that's the best case scenario, more and more messages are coming about carbon monoxide poisoning.
Journalists write about a girl who used a generator incorrectly.
She is now at a hospital — the generator cannot be left on for a night, especially in a basement, where there’s no air flow.
I’d call them death generators.
Talking with such a grin about how people don't have electricity or heat because Russia has bombed their energy
and heat plants, and finding joy in it, it's some total degradation, no one would be convinced by it,
it only causes disgust.
So don’t worry too much about children — they won’t be turned into Z-fascists and won’t be forced to love the “great leader”.
If you tell the entire country a new "ultimate truth" every day that must never be doubted, only to change it the next week,
you won't earn anyone's trust in that "truth." Instead, you will only succeed in conditioning people to never believe anything.
Children in school will hear that Luhansk is now and "forever" a part of Russia,
only to see news reports that celebrate its "heroic" loss because it was tactically disadvantageous.
This will only serve to condition them to accept hypocrisy and lies as the norm.
People who experienced the USSR as adults often tell how they had to unlearn doublethink for years.
And now it’s getting back and being imposed on the new generation.
We will have to not just be winning the informational war by spreading the truth about what’s happening every day.
We have a lot of work ahead of us to eradicate doublethink from the minds of our citizens and to rebuild trust in truthful
information and state institutions, as well as trust in each other.
See you tomorrow.