Nothing is true and everything is permitted! What is the secret of the success of Russian propaganda

Ivan Zubov

In recent years, Western analysts and Russian oppositionists have very often asked the question: what is the secret of modern Russian propaganda? Why, despite all the seemingly obvious weaknesses, is it so effective that the country's authorities have practically no problems with the support of their policy by the vast majority of the population - those same sacramental 87%? Network analyst Semyon Kogan posed this question to his readers in a historical and international context:

“Have you thought about the fact that under Brezhnev, Soviet propaganda aimed at the countries of the West caused only laughter there.

No one in the 1980s would have thought of jamming the State Television and Radio Broadcasting in English or Vladimir Pozner from the Main Editorial Board of Radio Broadcasting to the USA and England, as RT is now pressuring, because the influence of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company or Pozner was zero.

And especially in the USA.

And now the successful subversive influence of Russia and its media on the internal political processes of America and Western Europe is being talked about at every turn!

The fact that Putin's propaganda is a thousand times more successful than Brezhnev's inside the country can still be explained by the processes that took place in the Russian public consciousness after Perestroika.

But how to explain her success among Western audiences?”

Russian propaganda is strong only against the backdrop of extremely weak Western

Among the many responses, we highlight the answer of Vladimir Gumovsky, who owes his success to Russian propaganda not to his own strength, but to the weakness of the West:

“I would rather pay attention to something else.

This is not Russian propaganda in itself, some kind of super effective - it is just the most primitive, and with the facts in hand it is refuted at once. Its effectiveness rests on three pillars:

1. Very poor awareness even of the "experts" of the West about the real state of affairs in Eastern Europe in general and in the Russian Federation in particular (in principle, the same is true in general for any region outside of Europe and America).
2. A growing number of Western people have a total distrust of their own deceived and degraded media and the establishment, which is already outside the purely right-wing camp, which is traditionally accused of Putinism.
3. Actually, the desperate desire of a certain part of Western people to see some alternative to the swamp into which the West is plunging, to believe that somewhere in the world there is still a country where the white conservative lives freely, where there are no ubiquitous LGBT people, and so on.

These points intersect somewhere, somewhere they give rise to derivative factors, but I would single them out as the main ones.

P. _ S. _

And I would also add to this the important considerations of the benefits of the Western establishment from the current state of affairs and the absence of any opposition to the conditional RT for many years.”

Analyst Klim Tuev , on the contrary, considers the effectiveness of domestic propaganda to be quite natural, and here's why:

“There is a suspicion that modern Russian propaganda, until recently, was relatively freely formed in a competitive environment, had feedback from society, responded to social demands, appropriated successful ideas, etc. This is what made it possible to create universal compositions: such as a white, international traditional progressive katechon (from the Greek ὁ κατέχων - “holding” - a theological and political concept, a historical subject, as a rule, this or that state, which has a mission to prevent the final triumph of evil in history and the arrival of the Antichrist, approx.ed ) and others. What can you think of in the process of searching for a national idea.

Soviet propaganda was formed stupidly from above and was always limited by the framework of ideological patterns ... "

Modern propagandists successfully got rid of chimeras of conscience

However, the most reasonable answer was given by the network analyst Konstantin Kim , comparing modern, essentially postmodern Russian propaganda with Soviet modernist:

“Because Soviet propaganda, like the entire Soviet project, was a product of the Modern: centric-hierarchical structure, logic with dialectics, the legacy of the founding fathers - all this imposed severe restrictions. Soviet agitprop, by virtue of them, was supposed to be:

1. pacifist;
2. optimistic;
3. at least in words to carry high morality;
4. as far as possible, look scientific and based on objective reality given in sensations;
5. in case of any fluctuations in the exchange rate, observe the unity of this course itself. All this greatly embarrassed him, and as the material base deteriorated, it made him completely ridiculous in the end.

But the Russian regime is just like the modern Western regimes, a product of postmodernism. And in the postmodern there is no hierarchy of information, logic is declared a opportunistic social construct, and the deliverance from the chimera called conscience was successful. And this means that you can:

1. work for any Western and foreign audience in general with mutually exclusive discourses - at the same time presenting itself to conservatives as "a good traditional white nation-state, single-handedly resisting all liberal frenzy", and to progressives as "an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial force that rebuffs Western cultural, economic and militaristic hegemony »;
2. seeing the vulnerable points of the Western post-modernized project, to hit directly on its sore topics (demographic replacement, anti-white racism, discrimination against men, etc.), for which proud Westerners no longer have the courage - again, within the framework of any approach, even national, even class, even identitarian;
3. side with any disaffected from any political flank and give them resources;
4. taking advantage of the fact that in postmodernity not only words, but also the basis does not mean anything - to inflate one's significance in every possible way, portray oneself as a superpower with 2% of world GDP, threaten with nuclear torpedoes from cartoons, pathetically call one's fleet of Soviet aircraft with cast-iron bombs "air- COSMIC forces "... And so on.

Nothing is true everything is permitted.

And on the other side they understand that it can be very effective. Since they are not at all in the position that they were at the peak of their form during the years of the collapse of the USSR ... "