I've sung the blessings of NYU's All the Russias blog on this site before, but they've sadly been slow to update over the past few weeks (the contributors, who are all academics, are likely on their summer research junkets at the moment.) Fortunately the site moderator, Eliot Borenstein, is back with an excellent discussion of recent events, with something of a rebuttal to fellow contributor Stephen Cohen.
Though it's more casual and reflective than excessively linked, I encourage you to read the whole thing - which is both insightful and cautious in the way that good academic work usually is - but I want to highlight a few points below:
Most of Borenstein's article involves a literary academic approach to current events: look for the narrative. Of course there are weaknesses to this approach (which the author acknowledges), but it helps us understand why we see particular themes and approaches trotted out again and again, seemingly without any explicit coordination. For Borenstein the telling narrative goes deeply into a Slavic sense of sacrifice/salvation, repeated over and over again in these countries' histories. e.g. Russia saved Europe ("a particularly ungrateful damsel in distress") by absorbing the Mongol yoke, and since suffering is close to godliness, then Russia's sacrifice highlights its sanctity, even as it bears the slings and arrows of foreign invasion.
This centuries-old framework was recast during Russia's tumultuous post-Soviet period:
The narrative of the Aggressive Victim is the perfect distillation of 1990s post-imperial melancholia and post-Yeltsin jingoism: once brought to its knees, Russia is rising up against all the forces that would push it back down. Including the very forces that feel threatened by it.
Nearly a year ago I
made similar points vis-a-vis Russia's homophobia campaign, which Borenstein also highlights as an example of this reactionary nationalism. Here's what I said in August:
The collapse of the Soviet Union sent this [moral destiny] ideology into a tailspin: its secular premise was undermined, its religious roots long dormant. The nationalist backlash has reawakened a sense of the Russian mission, and the Russian mission, whatever it may be, is singular, native, and deaf to outside appeals.
I repeat this only to show that this interpretation of recent Russian history and politics is commonplace to the point of banality. Russian politicians invoke it directly when appealing to the public - not unlike the United States' obsession with the word "exceptionalism". So how does Ukraine figure into this?
Here the crusade against LGBT rights fits perfectly with Russia’s expansionism into the territory of a neighbor it never quite believed was sovereign: no competing claims of victimhood can be tolerated.
Two things to note here: the first is the pointed observation that the Russian attitude toward Ukraine has never been one of "one nation to another", but a sense that an historically Russian area of the world has broken away with a novel and unconvincing claim of cultural independence. We maybe overstate the extent to which Ukrainians were once called "Little Russians" in the same way that Russia cast itself as the "big brother" to the fellowship of Slavic peoples, but add that information to the idea that Ukraine has sought protection from the
West, and you can see why this activated some two centuries' worth of resentment.
The second is the idea of "victimhood", a touchy concept at best (Borenstein notes that the United States has played this particular card in its own dealings), but one that's become widespread in the much-aggrieved Russia. Borenstein lists off examples of various slights - the homosexual agenda, insufficiently patriotic media, etc. - and how the official responses have been, by and large, homogeneous in their angle. I don't think it's an accident that the central strategy of Russian media in discussions of MH17 has been the world's unfairness to Russia.
Of course unfairness to Russia can only be due to Western media brainwashing, but I admit I pumped my fist when I read this:
And so I ask myself, on a regular basis, whether or not I’m just brainwashed by an American media bent on demonizing Putin. But, to be blunt, I don’t need the American media to make me loathe Putin—that’s what the Russian media are for.
I can't highlight this comment enough. Western readers have been mostly shielded both from the reality of Putin's policies, but also from the increasingly unstable media sphere in which conversations about those policies take place. (Be thankful that most of you never heard the saga of the crucified boy that played out on Russian television over the last month.)
This is also the oblique response to Cohen. Before today, the last article published at the blog was Cohen's accusation that American opinion has been driven exclusively by western and pro-Kiev sources:
In a democratic political system, the establishment media are expected to pierce the official fog of war. In the Ukrainian crisis, however, mainstream American newspapers and television have been almost as slanted and elliptical as White House and State Department statements, obscuring the atrocities, if reporting them at all, and generally relying on information from Washington and Kiev. Most Americans are thereby unknowingly being shamed by the Obama administration’s role. Those who do know but remain silent—in government, think tanks, universities and media—share its complicity.
Not all of this is wrong: the problem of unidirectional and biased sourcing is naturally a concern to anyone who wants to understand what's "really" happening - Cohen is right that we have, at best, an "incomplete" picture of what is happening in Ukraine, especially in the east. At the same time, Cohen's article is a mishmash of allegations about Ukrainian atrocities sourced - exclusively, ridiculously - to a Russian media that's yet again been caught passing around fake stories to rile up their viewers. Far from a voice of reason on this issue, Cohen's been blinded by motes in
both eyes. Borenstein offers a corrective, nearly mimicking Cohen's formulation:
A healthy government can be relied on to reject conspiracy theories. An unhealthy government helps disseminate them.... The competing truth claims about all the recent events in Ukraine, but about the Malaysian jetliner in particular, show one of the great epistemological dangers in the postmodern condition: no document, no footage, and no testimony can retain the status of unequivocal evidence.
In other words, where Cohen would fault Western observers for not researching more broadly, Borenstein would fault Russia for encouraging a kind of epistemological free-for-all, where no hypothesis is too crazy, provided it advances the state's goals - and not by accident making more conscientious research difficult to impossible. If, as in the case of MH17, the evidence is overwhelmingly not in our favor, then we might as well muddy the waters as much as possible.
This is one of the paradoxes of our conversations here: because the fact can always be dismissed, recontextualized, and pundited to death, the arguments built on them can never be defended adequately. (This should give some comfort to those who prefer to ride the skepticism train into the horizon.) The defensive stance of Russian media could be a case study for this: faced with a mountain of evidence linking the separatists to the shooting, the Kremlin's media arm has focused almost entirely on doubt: what if Ukraine is lying? What if they had military planes in the region? What if they had BUK launchers in the area at the same time? What if Kiev thought it was Putin's plane? What if the bodies were dead already? Because these are just questions, there's no harm in asking, right?
No surer sign of the failure of these strategies is the way they're dwindling into meta-discussions about the coverage itself: why aren't Western observers being more objective?* Why do they want to use this for political gain? What if we can never know the truth? This is propaganda clutching at the last available straws, but given the right audience and right circumstances (e.g. Russia's well-known love of conspiracy theories), the total destabilization of the event is all one needs.
If our contemporary understanding of the world has rendered verification of fact something beyond our reach - especially when we insist on giving those facts weight by their narrative usefulness - then we have to be equally attuned to the way that various players are building (and selling) their versions of events. On this issue, whatever one may say about Western saber-rattling and overzealous accusations, the more considerable length of rope has been given Putin by his own media. Whether he'll hang himself by it remains to be seen - I'm not optimistic on that point. But casual observers from the West should know this: just because the version you're getting of Putin's Russia is slanted doesn't mean that it's wrong.
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* Note that the "objective" criticism usually comes with a long list of reasons why Kiev could be the guilty party here: in other words, be objective, but only if you're looking for a certain conclusion. Cohen has been guilty of this, as well.