Human Resources

The Russian state plays its people cheap

Anna Ochkina

Translated by Dan Erdman

A new propaganda video has appeared online: an elderly man is stands sadly hunched over in a grocery store and rummaging through his wallet. The wallet is empty, the man with a sigh puts back a pack of sausages from the shopping basket and wanders dejectedly to the checkout with only a loaf of bread. The old man of this ad isn’t doing very well –– he later tries to sell his favorite car, an old Lada model that is extremely unpopular today, but in some ways still legendary as a legacy of the Soviet era. The ad is showing us a desperate person selling his dear memories, in fact his very youth, just to survive. Very dramatic. The grandson, apparently also not a very lucky guy, helps in the sale of a relic dear to the grandfather’s heart. The unfortunate family is also humiliated by a rude potential car buyer. But everything changes miraculously when a young man appears in uniform and announces that the sale is canceled because he signed a contract with the army, and now they will be fine. The happy grandfather hugs his grandson and looks with touching tenderness first at him, then at the Lada. This is an advertisement for military service under contract.

Advertising, in principle, does not flatter human nature: in one video, a grandson steals chips from a granny, simply because the chips are incredibly tasty; in another, the family forgets their various grievances at the sight of a brand new car driven by the father; a girl in a jewelry advertisement holds out her hand to a man with a brand new ring under the slogan “If you love me then prove it.” The heroes of commercials are thrilled by the softness of the shampoo, and come into ecstasy from the sight of clean linen washed with the advertised product. This peek into the human mind is not very inspiring, to be honest. But to insult the whole country in a single video, both its people and its army all at once, is impressive even for a Russian ad.

The elderly man in the video looks very kind and intelligent, he is clearly not a marginal, not a loafer; this, according to the idea of the advertisers, is a typical Russian pensioner. Proud, hard-working, having once earned his keep, and now impoverished in old age. There is a sense that the state is well aware of the poverty of its elderly citizens, will do nothing to alleviate it, but will carefully offer a way out — to hand over the grandson to the army.

It sneakily follows from this advertisement that small pensions are not the result of a failed social policy, but merely a trademark of Russia, a mark of which one can even be proud. True, this mark is only carried by some, the same ones who offer to send children to war in order to avoid poverty. That poverty is a creation of the Russian government, just as much as is the war that it has started and is losing. This massacre stubbornly continues, with the help of an army composed, by the logic of the video, of mostly desperate losers. Brave Russian soldiers, advertising hints to us, are ready to die for money, but not for themselves — for their families. To die for the sake of the family is noble, look how happy the grandfather was that his grandson saved his car! He, the grandfather, will now be able to buy sausages, and even real meat. The grandson will not die in vain. Or maybe if the grandson still survives he will get to ride the Lada himself, and eat plenty sausages of his own. The country which, according to official propaganda, is waging an unequal battle with all the world’s evil for justice and the happiness of all peoples, seems to even boast of the poverty of its citizens. Moreover, the state is ready to use the hopelessness of that poverty as a valuable means of mobilizing for its “holy wars.” The poor, incidentally, are a renewable, almost inexhaustable resource thanks to our state’s unwillingness to fight poverty.

It’s disgusting that the creators of this propaganda are sure such motives will resonate in the hearts of people — both the guys who are ready to die just to provide for their family, and their families who are so desperate that they are ready to accept such a sacrifice. We have to admit that many people going to this war today have such motives. The motivation to help the family, to get out of financial difficulties, or to get rid of suffocating debts is much more common than the heroic desire to die for the Motherland. Apparently, propaganda analysts caught this and inspired such a masterpiece.

Many opposition telegram channels have begun to resent the narrowness of the lower classes, who will send children to war for a cheap car and sausages. Of course, a state that tries to cash in on the despair of its citizens, without hiding it, even boasting of its ingenuity, disgusts me more than oppositional thinkers who are indignant at a narrow-minded and selfish people. But after reading these lamentations, it still began to seem to me that the opposition, which despises its people for the coarseness of feelings caused by poverty, and the government, which seeks to cash in on the desperation of the poor, deserve each other.