The Invention of Russia — Book Review & Quotes

Review

In 2012, Mitt Romney was criticized for pointing to Russia as our biggest geopolitical foe. In the last year or so, people have reevaluated how they underestimated Russia. I remember having conversations with a friend in the summer of 2014, talking about how Putin was playing the Third Reich’s geopolitical game but slower and without the ethnic genocide. In 2016, Russia was catapulted more broadly into everyone’s attention as we acknowledged the age old question: ‘Oh say, what is truth?”

After reading several biographies about some of the founding fathers, the idea of a democracy depending on an informed and educated public has always stuck out to me. I need to compile a list of those quotes. Yuval Harari talks about the idea that all truth is relative, but there is a diabolic craftsmanship in rewriting the reality of the context in which facts are presented. That’s exactly what Russia has done.

“America’s ability to rebuff Russia’s disinformation would depend not on military power, or even diplomacy, but on ‘health and vigor of our own society.’”

I don’t believe, like many Democrats do, that the vast majority of Republicans and Americans writ large are ignorant. But I think in general, as a society, we are less informed, and more importantly, less prepared to inform ourselves when the time comes. “People who are well informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking.”

There were a number of instances where this book outlined the power of the media in spreading hate and frustration in Russia:

“After Nemtsov’s murder, Vladimir Yakovlev, the founder of Kommersant, made a public appeal to everyone who worked in the media. He spoke not just for himself but also on behalf of his father, Yegor Yakovlev. ‘Stop teaching people how to hate. Because hatred is already tearing the country to pieces. People live in a crazy illusion that the country is surrounded by enemies. Boys get killed in a war. Politicians are executed by the walls of the Kremlin. It is not Europe and America that stand on a verge of social catastrophe. The information war is first and foremost destroying ourselves.’”

“Television images work like drugs, creating a sense of elation, destroying judgment and intelligence, lowering moral barriers and suppressing inhibitions and fear. No enemy of Russia could have caused as much harm to the country as has been inflicted by those who have been pumping these images into the bloodstream of the nation.”

Developing the ability to think critically is important. It isn’t a partisan issue. Everyone should better develop the mental dexterity to understand what they should and shouldn’t accept. But there is a machine swirling around each of us, funneling together social media, sensational news cycles, and click bait, and developing a deeper intellectualism isn’t necessarily going to stop those biases from shaping the beliefs you have. I don’t know what the solution is, but I know that acknowledging the problem is an imperative first step.

Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book

“Modern technology has helped widen the scope: the Kremlin now uses ‘trolls’ to spread disinformation through social media and puts out multiple versions of events to create the impression that there are no reliable facts and an endless array of ‘alternative facts.’ What is surprising is that this time America turned out to be more vulnerable and insecure.”

“America’s ability to rebuff Russia’s disinformation would depend not on military power, or even diplomacy, but on ‘health and vigor of our own society.’: World communism is like a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue…Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow…We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” — A mindful, intelligent, well-informed public is critical to a democracy.

“The fact that Russia tried to boost Trump does not mean that it caused his victory, just as Russia did not cause Brexit or create Marine Le Pen. Had Trump lost the election, Russian active measures would have been deemed no more effective than those of the Soviet KGB. It was the failure of liberal elites to hear and address the concerns of people rather than Russia’s active measures that brought Trump to power and caused Britain to leave the European Union. Putin excels in spotting and exploiting existing weaknesses, but he is rarely able to create new ones.”

“The Soviet Union collapsed, not because of American military pressure, but because the values of freedom and the desire for dignity were more powerful than Soviet ideology… It was a victory of values over ideology. And it was a Russian victory as much as it was a Western one.”

“Neoconservatives hailed Western liberalism as the end point of history. This argument inadvertently ascribed too much importance to Soviet ideology, and what seemed like a triumph resulted in complacency and hubris.” — Any time someone claims history is ending, something bad is probably about to happen. Reminds me of John Quincy Adams thinking his father’s generation had done everything and his generation would just sing their praises, but then he had to kick off the fight against slavery in Congress.

“In the Orwellian world of Trump and Putin, ‘truth is lies’ and ‘ware is peace.’ It is telling that less than a week after Trump’s inauguration Orwell’s 1984 — a dystopian novel that best describes the psychology of a totalitarian state — shot to the top of the bestseller list in America. Two years earlier, it topped the charts in Russia at a time when disinformation campaigns conducted by state television played a central in Russia’s war against Ukraine.”

“News programs morphed into TV dramas and produced not facts, but emotions.”

“Both Trump and Putin feed their audiences with promises to make their lives meaningful and noble and to protect them from the threatening forces of globalization. If you have no real vision for the future, nostalgia for an idealized past is more appealing than the reality of the present.”

“This is what George Orwell observed in 1940, in his prescient review of Mein Kampf: ‘Hitler…knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle, self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades.’”

“In this book I have sought an answer to the question of how Russia got here by following its story and its dominant ideas over the past quarter-century, hoping to illuminate key turning points in its history. My main characters are not politicians or economists but those who generated the ‘meaning’ of the country, who composed the storyline, who produced and broadcast it and in the process led the country from freedom to war. They are ideologists, journalists, editors, television executives: people in charge of the message and the media.” — How are we so shaped by the media?

“Russia is an idea-centric country, and the media play a disproportionately important role in it. As Ivan Pavlov, Russia’s Nobel Prize-winning physiologist famous for his work on conditional reflexes, observed in a lecture he gave in the cold and hungry Petrograd of 1918, the task of every mind is to comprehend reality accurately. But in Russia, he remarked, ‘we are mostly interested in words and have little concern for reality.’ He blamed the mind of the intelligentsia — ‘the brain of the country’ — for leading Russia into the Bolshevik Revolution.” — America is also an idea-centric country…

“Alexander Solzhenitzyn, who wrestled with the Soviet system, knew there was only one way to defeat it: ‘Live not by lies,’ he wrote on the day of his arrest. The paradox was that the opening-up of the media could be achieved only by engaging in half-truths. But when reality burst through that opening in the form of live television broadcasts and uncensored publications, the Soviet Union crumbled.” — It used to be physical censorship where the flow of information was blocked; now with the internet, almost everything is available, but we have self-selected our censorship in what we choose to consume and believe.

“Texts by Lenin and Marx were studied in every high school and university: they defined our approach to history and view of the world. The battles on the pages of Soviet newspapers were conducted with the aid of citations from their sacred texts.”

“It is usual for the sons to reject the experience of the fathers… Yegor’s generation lived with Hamlet’s complex: the urge to redeem and carry out his father’s commandments while reconciling his actions with morality.”

“By right of their revolutionary fathers, who had embarked on the socialist experiment, these children were patricians empowered by a sense of entitlement and personal responsibility for their country. They were the Soviet aristocracy. They did not try to escape reality either physically or mentally, and they never considered emigrating. It was their country — they were entitled to it — and they wanted to change it according to their own needs and views of what was right and wrong.”

“The removal of terror opened up space for individual thought and action, and Russian artists, writers and journalists were quick to take advantage of it. Their work shaped the consciousness of those who, thirty years later, would launch perestroika.”

“Journalism transcended the domain of official party ideology and become romantic and fashionable.”

“He wished Zhurnalist to express what people of his own circle ‘talked about in their Moscow kitchens.’ This suggested a new way of organizing the mind: not vertically, where the party dictated what its readers were to think, but horizontally, where a network of like-minded individuals shared views put forward in print.”

“In 1974, after Gulag Archipelago was published in France, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country. As a parting shot, he wrote a letter to the Soviet intelligentsia that he called ‘Live Not by Lies.’ It was a mixture of a scathing reprimand and a sermon. It ended with a commandment in capital letters: ‘DON’T LIE! DON’T PARTICIPATE IN A LIE! DON’T SUPPORT A LIE!’ ‘In our country,’ he wrote, ‘the daily lie is not the whim of corrupt nature, but a mode of existence, a condition of the daily welfare of every man. In our country, the lie has been incorporated into the state system as the vital link holding everything together, with billions of tiny fasteners, several dozen to each man.’”

“The large number of educated, intelligent, and underemployed people in their thirties and forties with little prospect of moving up the career ladder provided a perfect milieu for brewing liberal ideas. With time, they formed a political class. They were not dissidents, and they relied on the state for provisions, but they were fed up with the restrictions imposed by Soviet ideology, and they were critical of the system.”

“The first signs of freedom came not in the form of laws and manifestos but of sensations and impressions.”

“As Gorbachev himself admitted a couple of years after the launch of reforms, ‘There is something that prevents us from moving forward…We have passed more than sixty decrees on agriculture since April 1985. But people don’t believe in these decrees.’ The problem was not the decrees but the shortage of people who could respond to them. The roots of the plants suppressed by the tombstone of the socialist economy had atrophied.”

“The only way to change the Soviet way of life was by opening up the flow of information and altering people’s consciousness. The ‘means of mass information’ (as the media were and still are called in Russia) were far more important in altering the country than the means of production.”

“The liberals and their hard-line opponents fought over the past as if they were fighting for natural resources. In many ways they were, for whoever controlled the past also controlled the present.” — a la Orwell

“Unlike China, which kept its ideology and reformed the economy, Russia changed its ideology but did not reform the economy.”

“In 1990 Nikolai Ryzhkov, the head of Gorbachev’s cabinet, posed a question: ‘Are we building socialism or capitalism?’ By the time the question had long since been answered, not only by the cooperators but also by a large number of the red directors who had begun to transfer state property into their own hands well before the official privatization of the 1990s.”

“The figures cited by Gaidar were devastating. In the period from 1976 to 1985, when the Soviet Union had invested $150 billion in its agriculture, the increase in agricultural production was… zero. Soviet workers mined seven times more iron ore than America and cast three times as much iron, yet they smelted the same amount of steel. The waste was enormous. The Soviet Union made twelve times as many combine harvesters as America did but harvested less wheat. The point of the article, however, was not to lament past losses but to warn of the dangers ahead. By continuing to pour money into an inefficient economy, the country was digging its own grave.”

“A truth searcher and a good speaker, Averintsev wrote, are not the same thing. ‘A prophet does not see the audience in front of himself, he sees what he talks about. Andrei Dmitrievich often did not see what was next to him. His eyes were fixated on the distance; he saw the whole. The way in which he thought about modernity brought him closer to the great thinkers and theoreticians of natural laws and social contracts: his thought moved top down, from great abstractions to specifics, always orientated toward immovable stars. Sakharov was a man of principles, not in Nina Andreeva’s sense of the word, but in its original classical sense: a foundation, a basis, an essence.’”

“At the end, Gevorkyan asked Kalugin why he was undermining the system that he had loyally served for thirty years. In reply he quoted Donald Maclean, a British diplomat who had spied for the KGB. ‘Maclean said: ‘People who read Pravda every day are invincible.’ People who are well informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking,’ Kalugin explained.”

“The fact that the fighting occurred over a television tower was a tribute to the power and importance of television as a way of controlling the minds of the people.”

“It turned out that socialism with a human face was an illusion after all — the only things that could hold the regime together were the violence and lies pouring out from the state television screens.”

“The editorial concluded with an appeal that echoed Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Live Not by Lies’: ‘We particularly appeal to journalists: If you don’t have the strength or ability to tell the truth, at least do not participate in lies! This lie will become evident not tomorrow, not in the future. It is already obvious today.’”

“The turnaround by Moskovskie novosti and its readers made such an impression on Gorbachev that he proposed suspending the media law and putting the print and television media under the direct control of the Supreme Soviet — to ‘ensure its objectivity.’”

“Journalists stuck their leaflets on the sides of the tanks. ‘A tank is the best advertising vehicle,’ someone joked. It was their war: words against tanks. Fear was lifted by the sense of the absurdity of the situation. For every KGB officer who wished to hang journalists on lampposts, there was one who supplied them with information.”

“There was an exception that, once the Communist system was gone, Russia would become a ‘normal’ country, part of the civilized world. It was as if the main problem were ideology rather than a ruined economy, a demoralized workforce, a corrupt and greedy bureaucracy, and a lack of institutions.”

“‘It seems that we are entering an era of politics when any amateurism — however noble, sincere and morally invincible — is inadequate and therefore dangerous,’ [Sergei Averintsev] wrote. ‘This does not mean that moral problems, moral examples become irrelevant — God forbid — but the period which is starting is more prosaic, where political weight is determined not by emotional and ideological criteria, but by the ability to offer particular solutions to particular problems.’ The new era required Aristotle, not Plato, Averintsev argued. The problem was that Aristotles were few and far between.”

“Naturally mistrustful of Gorbachev’s circle of reformers, Yeltsin surrounded himself with people who were twenty or thirty years younger. But the generational shift was even more pronounced and meaningful among those who came to control the media and the narrative of the country.” — We’re seeing a similar thing in the U.S. right now as millennials become more influential within the media.

“The divisions between people and generations at the time of the Soviet collapse occurred not just along political lines — those were simply the most visible. Most people with a brain joined the ‘democratic’ camp, whether they believed in it or not. Far less visible, and in the long term far more important, were the rifts that were opening up along moral and ethical lines.” — Liberals are typically more intellectual in America today, but both sides often side with party over personal ideology, regardless of whether they fully believe it or not.

“Kommersant was the antithesis of Moskovskie novosti and a reaction to it. It rejected its civic pathos, its elevated language, its speaking of the Truth, capitalized and accentuated with exclamation marks, its sense of calling and duty, its political stand. ‘What we did was antijournalism, from the point of view of my father’s circle. Theirs was journalism of opinions. Ours was journalism of facts,’ Vladimir told me. Only a few of Kommersant’s reporters were Soviet-trained journalists. Most were intelligent young men and women who had never written a newspaper article in their life.”

“The tenets of socialism were removed only to reveal a vacuum of morals — in itself the result of the Soviet experiment in breeding a new being. The transition from Soviet to post-Soviety society was accompanied by a change in perception of what makes one succeed in life.”

“‘We were perfectly aware that we were creating a new class of owners,’ Chubais explained, ‘and we did not have a choice between an ‘honest’ privatization and a ‘dishonest’ one. Our choice was between ‘bandit Communism’ or ‘bandit Capitalism.’”

“As a print journalist, Yegor neither understood nor particularly liked television, and he tried to turn it into a version of Moskovskie novosti, appealing to the same audience of liberal intelligentsia. But above all Yegor was hoping to turn television from a means of propoganda and mobilization into a private activity. As he told his staff, ‘My generation lived with the hope of bringing politics and morality together. All the lessons I learned from 1956 persuaded me that this is impossible… Television must help an individual to go back to his own world, to find values outside of politics. Our task is to make politics occupy as little space in our lives as possible.’ But politics kept bursting in, and television soon turned into a battleground.” — Why are we so emboldened by politics and unable to ‘find values outside of politics?’

“For as long as Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and their allies were off air, they were rebels and outlaws shouting their slogans in a megaphone whom no military would support. But as soon as they were on air, they were the power in the country. To ‘take’ the Kremlin you must ‘take’ television,’ Alexander Yakovlev said succinctly a year later.”

“Television screens had never gone blank in the Soviet Union, not even during the August 1991 coup. One of television’s key functions was to show that life just carried on. A sudden blackout was a sign of catastrophe and chaos, the collapse of the state.”

“Chudakova, a biographer of Mikhail Bulgakov, rebutted this nonchalance: ‘Don’t believe those who are trying to persuade you to leave it all to the politicians. If you stay at our home tonight, you will be ashamed of yourselves — in a few hours, in a few months, in a few years!’”

“As Kommersant wrote at the time, ‘The only thing that citizens want from big politics is the possibility of calmly making money and as calmly spending it to their hearts’ content.’”

“The liberals, and particularly the media, bore a large share of responsibility. The media did not try to educate or engage the majority of the country in politics. Despite being owned by the state, they performed no public duty. They kept ‘Lenya Golubkov’ on a diet rich in Latin American soap operas (whose main heroine even made an appearance in one of Golubkov’s pyramid scheme’s commercials) and game shows.” — Does our media inform? Or entertain?

“What Yakovlev had dreamed of at the beginning of perestroika, he wrote, was that once people were given freedom, they would elevate themselves and start arranging their lives as they saw fit.”

“Dobrodeev had an unmistakable sense for news and trends; he sensed the mainstream and knew how to put himself at the head of it. His intellect and his work ethic set him way above everyone else at Ostankino, and he quickly became one of Yegor Yakovlev’s favorites. Malashenko, Dobrodeev’s boss for many years, said he was a workaholic: ‘Nothing interested him apart from work. He read every text, watched every news bulletin. When he went on vacations abroad, he made his secretary put a telephone receiver next to a TV set, so that he could at least listen to the news, if not watch it.’”

“Like many smart, energetic and ambitious people in the Soviet Union, Malashenko was faced with a problem: how to use his energy and talents without losing his self-respect. A talented mathematician or Latinist could carry on their studies with the minimum of sacrifices — the state did not interfere unless they tried to challenge it politically. But what if your energy and talents were in politics, media or public relations? ‘I understood very clearly that either I would waste my life or the system had to change.’”

“Malashenko did not believe in ideology. He believed that individuals valued dignity and freedom. Perhaps it was his studies of midieval and Renaissance philosophy that infected him with this idea that individual will and self-respect lay at the base of European civilization.”

“The slogan Malashenko came up with was simple and powerful: ‘News is power. Power is in truth.’”

“Marietta Chudakova, also a scholar and a Yeltsin supporter, had argued against those who thought it was the job of the intellectual to attack government. ‘There are plenty of reasons to be disappointed,’ she wrote, ‘but I insist that it is the democratically oriented journalists and publicists who are shaping this disappointment, putting it into talented formulations, without much thought about their aims and consequences.’”

“But if Russia had freedom of speech in the 1990s, it was not because there was an inbuilt tradition or craving for it but because Yeltsin allowed it.”

“Malashenko later recalled, ‘I knew this could not last. If Yeltsin was the only guarantor of our freedom, then we would be finished sooner or later.”

“‘Reality’ was not something that occurred in real life, but something that television portrayed, which could therefore be edited and improved.”

“The conflict between Chubais and Berezovsky was about political power rather than democracy: neither side believed that ordinary people should be trusted with important decisions. In a poor country like Russia, democracy would always lead to populism and ultimately to authoritarianism. Only the rule of the few — who had resources and intellectual power — could launch the country on the right path. The question was who would be the ruling minority.”

“But as Maxim Sokolov sarcastically wrote at the time, television channels thrived on election campaigns just as the military-industrial complex thrives on war. ‘A war guarantees demand for arms. Election campaigns create the same demand for information weapons.’ By constantly hyping up the subject of rating, NTV was reminding the politicians of its powers.”

“Powerful media magnates behaved not like the elite they claimed to be but like small-time cooperators with sophisticated weapons in their hands. They dressed like a Westernized elite, spoke like one, sent their children to Western schools, but they lacked the most important attribute of an elite — a sense of responsibility for, and historic consciousness of, their own country. They behaved like caricatures of capitalists in old Soviet journals.”

“As Kommersant wrote in 1997: ‘The search for a national ideology has become the Kremlin idee fixe. This is understandable. In the election of 2000, you can’t attract voters by saying ‘vote, or things will get worse.’ …The hitherto foggy wish of the rulers of our vast and muddled country to gain, at last, a national idea is starting to take practical shape. There is nothing objectionable in this wish. Any citizen would welcome a nice, clear and truly unifying idea. But in an enlightened state such an idea is not an object of first necessity. Quite the opposite — it is a luxury, and it would be nice to be able to afford it.’”

“Throughout the 1990s journalists had enjoyed a highly privileged position and status. Primakov eschewed journalists whom he thought to be untrustworthy and antagonistic. As a statist, he naturally relied on the old-style Soviet nomenklatura: the security services, bureaucracy and diplomats. He instantly made the government less accessible to journalists and gave a dressing-down to television executives for distorting and blackening its image, telling them what and how they should report. Journalists found this more of a snub and a humiliation than a threat.”

“The bombing of Serbia crashed the dream itself. The West ceased to be an anchor. It turned out that there was no one happy post-Soviet space, that Russia was on its own. America turned into a scapegoat for all the troubles that the Russian people had experienced over the previous decade.”

“America might have lost a sense of reality and acted arrogantly, Itogi asserted, but this did not warrant the anti-American hysteria unleashed by Russia.”

“The Soviet Union killed people where it wanted and how it wanted. Is America guilty of this? Of course it is. It is guilty that it lives better than us, that it has become richer than us and works harder than us, which makes it stronger than us. We have spent all our energy looking for a third way — and we have found it in our boundless, vicious love for Serbia.”

“Presenting the Vremya program in 1997–98, Dorenko transformed it into a show of damning revelations, a sermon turned inside out. It lowered the tone, agitated and inspired outrage and hatred, but most important, it captivated its audience and removed taboos. He did not appeal to reason, as Kiselev did. He penetrated people’s minds through sensations, repeating evocative words and phrases, heavily rolling his R’s when talking about ‘Russia’ and ‘betrayal,’ modulating his voice in bemusement, juggling words and showing images that conjured up associations even if they had no direct relevance to the subjects. Facts were irrelevant.”

“People believed what they saw, not because they were persuaded by factual evidence but because it confirmed what they thought anyway: that everyone was a liar and a thief. ‘I did not ‘program’ anything,’ Dorenko said. ‘I simply whispered what people wanted to hear.’”

“If anyone was watching Kiselev’s Itogi, it was certainly time to switch over to Dorenko’s show, Kiselev, with his slow, deliberate manner, was no match for Dorenko’s circus. It was like using a sword against a machine gun.” — How can you respond to intrigue with more information?

“At the beginning of Dorenko’s anti-Luzhkov and anti-Primakov campaign, Primakov’s rating was 32 percent. Fifteen episodes later, it had fallen to just 8 percent. Luzhkov’s rating fell from 16 percent to 2 percent. Putin’s rating rose from 2 percent to 36 percent.”

“Even in April 2000, when he had been elected as president, two-thirds of the Russian population said they knew little about him, despite his around-the-clock presence on the television screen. He could be ascribed any qualities. Putin was a man with no features, a perfect spy.”

“Victories have many parents.”

“While the oligarchs, the media and the political technologists fought battles, claimed victories and engaged in cunning projects, thinking they were the prime players, real events were taking place in the country that were outside their control but not beyond their ability to exploit. As a politician, Putin might have been a media invention, but the events that turned him into a president were not.”

“Russia did not need state ideology, the manifesto argued. Its ideology, its national idea, was the state. Personal rights and freedom were all well and good, but they could not provide the strength and security of the state. Russia, he asserted, would never become a second edition of Britain or America, where liberal values had deep historic traditions. Russia had its own core values. These were patriotism, collectivism, derzhavnost — a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries — and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.”

“An opinion poll conducted in January 2000 found that 55 percent of the Russian population expected Putin to return Russia to the status of a great and respected country and that only 8 percent expected him to bring Russia closer to the West.”

“The central and simple message of Putin’s rule was, We will give you security, stability and a sense of pride, shops full of goods and the ability to travel abroad without bothering you with ideology. It was the dream of the late 1980s come true. All the Kremlin asked in return was for people to mind their own business and stay out of politics — something they gladly did. Lifestyle changes were more interesting than politics. The first IKEA store opened in Moscow, and middle-class Russians, like everyone else in Europe, were too busy assembling their Scandinavian-style homes to care about politics.”

“Putin had a TV remote control on his desk. That remote control was to become one of Putin’s tools, the scepter of his power. Unlike Yeltsin, who rarely watched himself on television and simply turned off the channels he disliked, Putin developed an obsession with television. At the end of each day, he watched how the different channels covered him. Having observed the role played by television in his own coming to power and in the destruction of Primakov and Luzhkov, Putin knew that the power of the oligarchs lay in their control over the media, and he did not wish to leave it in their hands.”

“As Gaidar warned back in 1994, a bureaucrat is always a greater source of corruption than a businessman. ‘A businessman can enrich himself honestly. A bureaucrat can only enrich himself dishonestly.”

“In fact, NTV opposed the war in Chechnya both in 1994 and in 1999, based on the premise that a state that kills its own people would break any law.”

“A full record, secretly taped by one of Kommersant’s journalists, showed that Putin was more furious about the television coverage than he was about attempts to cover up the incident. He saw the role of the media not as informing the audience but as keeping things from it.”

“After reading a list of accusations that seemed to have come straight from Primakov, Berezovsky’s old nemesis, Putin told him, ‘I want to run ORT… I personally am going to run ORT.’ Berezovsky retorted, ‘This is ridiculous, at a minimum. And second, it is unrealizable.’ Putin told him, ‘ORT covers ninety-eight percent of Russian territory, of Russian households,’ and left the room.”

“In fact, the conflict with NTV was more about freedom of speech than people realized. After all, free speech does not automatically imply objectivity or even quality, merely the right to say something different without fear. What NTV provided was not objectivity but pluralism. Had Russia had ten other powerful private news channels with the same reach, the fate of NTV would have mattered less. But Russia had only two state or quasi-state channels whose finances were far murkier than NTV’s. By taking over NTV, the state was not just disposing of a defiant oligarch; it was disposing of competition.”

“The people who realized this were not NTV’s young audience but the ‘relics’ of the Soviet intelligentsia, who had seen it all before. A group of Russian intellectuals — poets, artists and journalists — published a letter in defense of NTV under the headline IT IS TIME TO GET WORRIED. ‘The political motive of the persecution is clear: suppression of dissent in the country…Meanwhile, Russian society watches everything that is going on with cold detachment, creating the impression that defending freedom of speech is a private problem for NTV. This is a dangerous misconception. We have no doubt that the political consequences of NTV’s passing over to state control will affect everyone.”

“The 1960s generation that NTV had come to replace was the one that rushed to its defense, while its target audience — the young, smart, energetic, self-sufficient capitalist crowd — ‘kept their cool’ and watched the conflict as if it were a reality show. This was what NTV had taught them to do over the years. After all, this was ‘normal television’ for a ‘normal country.’”

“Regardless of what people thought of Gusinsky, public opinion was not ready for an overt clampdown on the media, and the Kremlin did not try to force it. On the contrary, it used NTV as its calling card, proof of its economic liberalism, safe in the knowledge that it had ultimate control over it.” — playing the long game

“Standing in front of Russia’s powerful TV executives, Parfenov told them what he thought about the state of their industry. ‘Our television is getting more sophisticated at exciting, enticing, entertaining and making [the audience] laugh, but it can hardly be called a civic or public political institution.’ Parfenov, ‘top bureaucrats are not newsmakers but his boss’s bosses.’ This meant that ‘journalists are not journalists at all but bureaucrats, following the logic of service and submission.”

“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.” — We have a lot of noise in the U.S. Are there any ideologies getting through?

“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. The tone of the presenter was always stern and serious. Its aim was to assure viewers that they could sleep peacefully in the knowledge that the country was being governed and guarded by a wise and caring president who would make the right decisions; that criminals and terrorists would be punished and champions of labor rewarded. ‘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.’”

“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.”

“In December 2011, after the Kremlin rigged the parliamentary elections, tens of thousands of Muscovites took to the streets. It was the biggest protest since the early 1990s, and it marked not a revolution but the transformation of the middle class from consumers to citizens. They demanded to be treated with the same respect by the state as they received as consumers.”

“The protest was driven not by opposition politicians — they were largely caught by surprise — but by civil activists, journalists, writers, and internet bloggers. They set its agenda and articulated its demands and slogans. They spread the ideas through social networks, mainly Facebook.”

“None of this would have been possible without Russian television, which broadcast into Crimea. It created a narrative that was then ‘enacted’ on the ground. The image came first, the reality followed. The narrative changed depending on the Kremlin’s needs and intentions.”

“In April 2014 he stormed the town of Slavyansk, in eastern Ukraine, with a group of men backed by the Russian military. The first thing they did was to seize the television transmitters. Ukrainian channels were taken off the air and replaced by Russian state channels. Within a few days fierce fighting was raging across the region. 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.”

“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.’”

“Those who produce Russian propoganda are not driven by the idea of reestablishing a notional ‘Russian World’ or rebuilding the empire — they are too pragmatic for that. They act not out of conviction or a sense of reality but out of cynicism and disrespect for this reality. The hallucinations they produced took on a life of their own and started to behave in an unscripted way, unaware they were only part of television show.”

“‘The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. People are set off against each other. This hell cannot end peacefully.’”

“After Nemtsov’s murder, Vladimir Yakovlev, the founder of Kommersant, made a public appeal to everyone who worked in the media. He spoke not just for himself but also on behalf of his father, Yegor Yakovlev. ‘Stop teaching people how to hate. Because hatred is already tearing the country to pieces. People live in a crazy illusion that the country is surrounded by enemies. Boys get killed in a war. Politicians are executed by the walls of the Kremlin. It is not Europe and America that stand on a verge of social catastrophe. The information war is first and foremost destroying ourselves.’”

“Television images work like drugs, creating a sense of elation, destroying judgment and intelligence, lowering moral barriers and suppressing inhibitions and fear. No enemy of Russia could have caused as much harm to the country as has been inflicted by those who have been pumping these images into the bloodstream of the nation.”

“The vast majority of Russians now contemplate the possibility of a nuclear war with America, and 40 percent of the younger ones believe that Russia can win, as if war were a video game in which people have lives in reserve. Few Russians are prepared to pay for the real cost of this game.”

“Just like any drug, television propaganda exploits people’s weaknesses and cravings. The main reason Russian propaganda works is that enough people want to believe it. Many of those who crave it are not poor and ignorant but affluent and well informed. They are deceived because they want to be deceived. Opinion polls show that almost half the Russian population knows that the Kremlin is lying to the world about the absence of Russian troops in Ukraine, but it approves of these lies and sees them as a sign of strength. More than half think it is right for the media to distort information in the interest of the state.”

“Support for Putin depends on television’s ability to keep people in front of their screens and to draw them into his agenda. Some who previously distanced themselves from politics have been mesmerized by the dramatic imagery, martial music, and well-staged and edited action. Russian television does not cover wars in order to reflect on foreign policy. It takes these foreign adventures as raw material from which to generate footage that will stoke domestic passions and reinforce the government’s narrative.”

“From Chechnya to Syria, Russia under Putin has killed more people than the Soviet Union did under any leader since Stalin. The media, which brought down the Soviet system, has helped build a new authoritarian country.”

“Of course, the balance of power is unequal. The Kremlin has the money, the police, the army and the television. The young have only words, ideas and values. Their main advantage is their age. In March 2017 they came out onto the streets in some one hundred Russian cities to protest against corruption — both moral and financial — of those who have monopolized power and resources in Russia, including the biggest resource of all — the narrative of where the country is going, and why.”