Russia's War

"The very title of the book is provocative in that it poses a certain point of view. There has been a dispute going on since the beginning of the war about whether this is Putin’s war or Russia’s war. I’m in Germany, and the quasi-official position here is that it’s Putin’s krieg . It’s not a war that the Russian nation is waging against the Ukrainian nation—it’s a campaign led by the Russian authoritarian leadership. What the author of this book is trying to do is analyze the state of mind of the Russian people. She focuses on public opinion trends. Like Matthews, she is very into information and disinformation and the Russian propaganda machine, which is a fascinating subject. I used to admire Peter Pomerantsev’s book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014) . He’s more of a Vladislav Surkov fan than suits my fancy—I think he overromanticizes our presidential administration and its internal policy department—but that’s a very good book on this riveting subject. “This is a war that cannot be won—and should never have been waged in the first place” Russia’s War is about the official public narratives that are produced and used by this propaganda machine. It tries to address a very difficult question—which I don’t think has an answer—which is whether this pro-war, aggressive narrative peddled by Russian propaganda has been developed by the system or not. Is it the system that produces meanings, taking messages from the Kremlin and transforming them into something which is consumable for the public? Or, and this is the darker version, is the system capturing and transmitting messages from the people and weaponizing them? Does the system say what the Kremlin orders it to say, or does it say what the public wants to hear? The author does not provide an answer, at least as I read it. It’s a difficult question because in an autocratic environment you do not answer demand, you create it. Then you can spread the blame by saying, ‘This is what the people wanted! You see how well the audience consumes it!’ But how can it not consume it, if it’s the only offer on the table, if you have killed off and silenced all the other voices? These are some of the complications that are addressed in the book. That is what makes it so interesting. And I, as a Russian, am glad the author reaches no definite conclusion: the title is more decisive than the book."