Grandstand. “Do the Russians want war? Thus begins a famous Soviet song, which has become a symbol of pacifism in the country which suffered the greatest human losses during the Second World War. However, if the conflict that Vladimir Putin is waging in Ukraine horrifies some Russians and pushes some of them to protest or flee abroad, many seem to support it.
What fibers of the Russian soul did the master of the Kremlin manage to touch to arouse support for his bloody adventure? Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian population has been bathed in fierce propaganda. Omnipresent in the Russian information field, Ukraine has been the object of contempt and hatred of countless commentators in recent years.
Many Russians today only accept the narrative broadcast by national public channels, even in the face of testimonies from close relatives or videos of Russian prisoners in Ukraine, whom they consider to be victims or vectors of enemy propaganda. As for Russian propaganda, it plays on several sensitive strings.
The quest for lost greatness
First of all, the nostalgia for the USSR which has never really faded: thirty years after its disappearance, 63% of Russians continue to miss the Soviet Union; the majority blames its collapse on the “betrayal of the elites” and at the “treachery of the West”. To preserve social peace, the Russian state has never officially condemned the Communist Party. Lenin still lies in his mausoleum in Red Square and Stalin remains the most admired historical figure.
There was no lustration in Russia, and former KGB agents now hold all the reins of power. Work on historical memory has mainly been carried out in urban intellectual circles, in particular by the Memorial association, which was recently dissolved. The Russian population is aging: among the 37 million pensioners, many are those who remain very attached to the Soviet past and even manage to convert some of the young people to their quest for a lost era of national greatness.
This greatness also depends on influence in the former Soviet republics, whose aspiration to sovereignty and rapprochement with Euro-Atlantic structures is neither understood nor accepted. Then, a real cult of the “great patriotic war” (Soviet, then Russian, designation of the Second World War) settled in Russia under Vladimir Putin.
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