Russia's Titanic

The disaster involving the Moskva warship evoked a similar fiasco from the Russo-Japanese War, and fell on an unpleasantly revealing anniversary

The Moskva

Boris Kagarlitsky

The day after the death of the cruiser Moskva, the event was compared with the Tsushima disaster of 1905. Indeed, since the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian fleet has never lost a flagship. The damage in terms of military, material and moral is huge. And the consequences of this event will still affect the battlefield. In one gulp, the Ukrainian coastal defense withdrew the entire Black Sea Fleet from the war, which now has been ordered to stay in the bay of Sevastopol until the causes of the disaster are clarified and methods are established to counteract enemy anti-ship missiles.

The sad symbolism of the event is not limited to the coincidence with Tsushima. The accident with the Russian cruiser occurred exactly on the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. The crew that controls our Titanic is categorically unwilling to acknowledge the existence of icebergs. And if they exist, then our ship will certainly break them all and will sail on as if nothing had happened. We have complete order in the engine room, and wise leadership on the captain’s bridge. Where we go is not important. The main thing is that nothing threatens us and nothing will stop us.

I must admit that this calms a fair number of the passengers.

However, the fact that all of us, even those who understand how everything will end, feel like passengers, without even thinking about the need to prepare to save both ourselves and the ship, speaks for itself. Judging by the events of the last month and a half, the only thing that works well in Russia is propaganda. It must be admitted that we were indignant in vain at the fabulous sums that the monsters of our television receive. They deserve their fees: such a monstrous mess has formed in the minds of the audience that people are unable to navigate in the real world. At least, in the world of social phenomena.

This state of affairs is by no means due to the unique talents of Vladimir Solovyov, Olga Skobeeva, Margarita Simonyan and Dmitry Kiselev. On the contrary, the appearance of these monsters became possible due to what has happened over the past 30 years to our mass consciousness. We’re talking about current events. The references to the legacy of Tsarism, the remnants of Soviet ideology or imperial consciousness, beloved by our intellectuals, have almost nothing to do with this.

Neither in the official ideology, nor in the consciousness of the modern mass Russian, is there any empire or Sovietness left. Imperial thinking presupposes dignity (alas, passing into arrogance), quiet confidence, and, most importantly, a vision of mission. Russian, British, and French officials and military officers in the 19th century not only imagined themselves to be bearers of enlightenment and high European culture, but to a large extent they were. Everything Kipling wrote about the “burden” of imperial rule was true. It’s another thing that it was only half, even a quarter, of the truth. The bearers of the imperial mission preferred to hide or ignore the unpleasant parts.

The Soviet consciousness partly replaced and partly supplemented the imperial mission of progress and “civilization” with a new social mission, the idea of ​​emancipation and equality, even if it’s equality under the supervision of a rigid party dictatorship. But the ideas of progress and the liberation of the individual have not gone away, and this is precisely what undermined Soviet propaganda from the inside, provoking even completely loyal, completely Soviet people to ask questions that are inconvenient for the authorities.

There is no order and there are no positive ideas in the ideological loft of modern Russian power. There are really no intelligible concepts at all. There are, as in any landfill, only fragments and scraps of the ideas of the past. You can use Soviet banners and refer to imperial traditions, but this is not even eclecticism, but a fussy attempt to drag any rubbish into which the cultural heritage of Russia and the USSR has been turned over the past years. Nothing is whole, nothing is complete. The use of old symbols will not replace the historically lost content, just as an empty bottle of brandy, even the best, will not replace a noble beverage that was drunk or spilled a long time ago.

If the modern Russian government, which is a sterile, almost ideal embodiment of social reaction, is pathologically incapable of offering anything positive and brings only destruction with it, what is the secret of the effectiveness of propaganda? Alas, it is in the very process of destruction. Even later Soviet society, despite the rhetoric of the official ideology, was characterized by extreme individualism, weak social ties, and a lack of solidarity. The market reforms of the 1990s and Putin’s paternalistic authoritarianism not only failed to solve the problem but, on the contrary, exacerbated it. Modern Russian society is distinguished by an extremely low level of mutual trust among people, and distrust of the state and its institutions. People only trust their family and closest friends. And the big world, which is outside the circle of current concerns, is not only incomprehensible, but also not interesting. The TV tells the viewer that they do not understand, and, by and large, they don’t want to understand.

This state of affairs suited both the authorities and a significant part of society for a long time. But wars are not won by propaganda alone. Even informational ones. Political reality breaks into the small world of the private life of the layman and destroys it. This causes people to discover the big world that is right outside their window.

This discovery will be unpleasant and even shocking. Many will have a painful withdrawal. Most will be scared, many are already disgusted. But this is the same shock therapy (having nothing to do with the crazy recipes of liberal economists-ideologists of the 1990s), without which collective recovery is impossible. To take responsibility for your own future, you must first break out of the trap of petty-bourgeois individualism and realize: whether we like it or not, we are a society.

We are doomed to be a society and to live in a society. The moment we realize this, the TV haze will dissipate like smoke.

The psychological effect produced by the death of the cruiser Moskva turned out to be very strong. It’s not just another defeat. This is a turning point, after which the supporters of the war for the first time had doubts about the possibility of victory.

Such doubts usually begin to arise at the moment when the war has already been objectively lost. They signify not only the fall of support, which is beginning to be felt in the government, driving the soldiers to the slaughter, but these mass doubts also are already launching a new psychological mechanism that is changing the ideological and political situation.

Advocates of aggressive war cannot be persuaded by moral arguments. Despite the impossibility of a military victory, and therefore the inevitability of defeat, which became obvious by the fourth day of the war, such a possibility was simply not present in the minds of the layman until recently. And it was possible to simply dismiss any unpleasant information, not even because they don’t believe in it, but because it doesn’t fit into the success story, and interferes with the main plot. In the depths of his soul, the layman, of course, guesses that “not everything is so simple,” but it does not matter. Victory does not so much justify everything as it allows you to not think about anything. The price of success, its costs, and even the very meaning and goals of the war can be discussed later, as a last resort, but now it is premature.

But the picture changes when, first, doubts about the inevitability of success creep in, and then the understanding of the inevitability of defeat begins, which is also predetermined not by the ratio of good and evil, but by the banal balance of forces, military and economic. This, however, forces us to take a different look at the problem of good and evil. For evil can be ignored, justified and even glorified in the name of victory, but it is pointless to support it in the face of its defeat. It is immoral, but practical, to join the triumphant evil. To hold on to the defeated evil is simply stupid.

In such a situation, the philistine, who was the most zealous champion of cruel massacres and ruthless bombardments, can suddenly turn into a consistent moralist, demanding not only just punishment of war criminals, but also the most ruthless reprisal against them. Taking this position, the philistine separates and saves himself from the evil he has just approved. Moreover, he puts himself in the position of a judge and a fighter for good.

Tsushima in 1905 brought down the ideology of jingoism, showing that there would be no victory. Since the victims and crimes were meaningless, then the criminals are the ones who started the war.

The death of the cruiser Moskva weakens the position of Russian troops near Kherson. But it is even more dangerous for the authorities that this event makes the layman ask a question that had not previously occurred to him: “What if we lose?”

Leading Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov of state-owned Russia-1 says he is “furious about what happened to the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet.” But what exactly happened? If you believe the official version, then on the cruiser Moskva there was an accident that had nothing to do with military operations. And Solovyov, on the contrary, claims that Ukrainian missiles sank the ship.

The question is not who is lying (this is more or less obvious). It was not even that Solovyov, according to the current “law on fakes,” should now at least be fined. The question is what new propaganda task our television monster has begun to solve. It wasn't his signature tantrum, after all. This time the journalist didn't yell, didn't grimace, didn't make faces, and looked unusually adequate. So much so that everyone immediately noticed it.

The answer must be sought, of course, not in propaganda, which works according to manuals sent from the presidential administration. Television, of course, is also a weapon, often even lethal, but it does not determine the course of the conflict. And events are not developing in the most favorable way for those who started and are conducting the notorious “special operation”. Little by little it becomes clear what I mean.

I wrote from the very beginning: there are no resources and opportunities to complete the whole thing with success. And never was. And if now the thought creeps into the heads of some people that this whole story may not end very well, then this only reflects the objective state of things.

The media strategists in the administration know what's going on. Propaganda is forced to prepare the public for the rising tide of bad news. And she will have to answer one single question: who is to blame? Solovyov's speech in this sense leaves not the slightest doubt. The guilty will try to appoint the middle and may be part of the upper echelon of the Armed Forces. Not those who decided to launch the operation, not the politicians, not the president and his inner circle, who made an irreparable and self-evident strategic mistake at the very moment when they gave the first order, but the executors. The military will be appointed switchmen.

Whether this will work or not is a completely different question, the answer to which must be sought no longer from propagandists and even from political scientists. It all depends on how the shock of failures will be experienced by the mass philistine consciousness. People who today support the “military solution” (but are already starting to guess something) will have to admit they were wrong. Not because they will feel the moral burden of what is happening, but because it will become clear: “ours” did well or badly, consider them heroes or villains, but in any case, everything was in vain.

Atrocities can be justified in terms of the “state interest.” But failure, no. Talleyrand’s formula “this is more than a crime, this is a mistake” very well reflects this way of thinking. But if mistakes are to be punished, then everything else will have to be held accountable. And the loudest demand for reprisals against the guilty will be precisely those who today call for reprisals against the innocent.

The list of those who will be asked depends, of course, not on the degree of real guilt, but on political circumstances. But it will grow and vary in such a way that the authors of its first editions are likely to end up in the second or third themselves. Who will stop at what, history will show. However, it is more than likely that in one of the later editions of this list, we will see Solovyov himself.