Mindless, but with Putin in heart

The Putin-era teenagers’ ideas of Russia and the rest of the world are rather peculiar – they have very little or even nothing to do with reality but willingly follow the main stereotypes of official propaganda. For example, here is the remarkable post of an ardent admirer of today’s Russia, who introduces herself as “four times world champion, absolute record holder in the teenage girls’ barbell bench press”:

“Hi, I’m Maryana Naumova!

Greetings to my American friends! I wish Donald Trump to win!

I invite Donald Trump to come to Moscow. Donald, you must come here. Russia and America are the strongest countries that must be friends!

The territory of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries is a territory of Russian interests, and I am sure America must respect this.

Donald, I wish you’d win!

Hillary, scram! Go to kitchen and make hamburgers for your hubby!

Trump is president!

Kindest regards from Russia!”

(http://echo.msk.ru/blog/m_naumova/1870302-echo/)

This is in no way a prearranged propagandistic post to mark Trump’s victory in the elections. On the contrary, the Russian propaganda machine was psyching itself up for the victory of Hillary Clinton, which the vast majority of Russian, American, and other sociologists and political scientists had predicted. For this reason, on the election night and on the first day of the vote count, Russian TV channels and other pro-Kremlin media were going to beam a lot of programs that would call the US election system dishonest, unfair and opaque, just ascribing to the US elections all the vices inherent in the present-day Russian election system. At the same time, they were to brand Hillary as a weak, corrupt, mendacious, and anti-Russian president. Some of these materials had already appeared on websites just when reports on Trump’s victory began to flow in and, therefore, looked very funny. So the post is really the result of Maryana’s own painstaking efforts, and it fully reproduces the styles of both Putin and Trump.

So what is the Putin-style girl telling us about? That the two superpowers, Russia and the US, should be friends and partition the world together. Moreover, the US must nobly cede all the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine, to Russia, as it is a sphere of Russian interests (terminology from the notorious secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet-German Treaty on Friendship and Borders). The girl is also firmly convinced that Trump is dreaming to reconcile with Russia and make friends with Putin as soon as possible. In general, Putin’s young people view Trump as their president’s American double who shares the same ideals and principles with Putin. I can well imagine how bitter the upcoming disappointment may be. As is known, the US president-elect is never at a loss for words. And now that he will have, ex-officio, to deal with the foreign policy, he may well say something outlandish and politically incorrect about the guarantor of the Russian Constitution – for example, about his stature, hair, or policies. Then friendship between Russia and America will finish without having begun. All the Kremlin’s propagandists will begin to vie with each other in breathing fire and fury at Trump, in comparison to which all the tough propaganda campaign they have been waging against Hillary Clinton in the past few weeks will seem to be a light warm-up. So, Maryana and other young Russian Trumpophiles will have to urgently change their preferences. And they will undoubtedly do so. What is more, they will restructure quite sincerely, without a command or considerations of expediency, for they are convinced that their leader always says the truth and takes right actions and their duty is to follow him and obediently vary according to his general line.

And, judging by the way Maryana swears at the unfortunate Hillary, what awaits women in the Putin young people’s reference frame is the notorious three Ks – Kinder, Kueche, Kirche – the traditional ideal of the woman’s social role in the German conservative system of values that was, incidentally, fully adopted by the Nazis. ‘Putinjugend’ and Putin’s young pioneers have not gone too far from their spiritual fathers. As a matter of fact, Putin’s young pioneers were created quite recently – just a year ago, in October 2015. In that month, the president decreed the establishment of a children’s and teenagers’ organization, the Russian Movement of Schoolchildren (RDSh), whose guidelines precisely copy those of the Soviet pioneer organization – of course, without mentioning the name of Lenin and with the substitution of blue neckties for the erstwhile red ones (maybe, now, looking at Trump, they will bring back red neckties to please the new US president if he really chooses to visit Russia – as is known, red is the color of the US Republican Party). Yet the progress in establishing Putin’s pioneer organization, which is supposed to attract children and teenagers aged at least 8, does not impress so far. To lure teenagers into the new organization, the authorities have in fact to resort to coercion by conducting special campaigns. Officially, the RDSh is supposed to unify the existing children’s movements and standardize their programs of education in the spirit of patriotism and devotion to the Leader. However, the fact that the RDSh is largely a bureaucratic organization and it will be perhaps no more effective than the Soviet pioneer organization in the last decade of its existence must not set us at ease. There are more and more teenagers in Russia, who love Putin, and they should not necessarily be part of a single organization. The authorities will be able to draw from their midst new cadres for both United Russia and, what is more, for the United Popular Front that is going to replace the latter.

Boris Sokolov is a Moscow-based professor