ABSTRACT
Free speech is meant to be about truth-telling, but Russians have always had a perverse relationship to the truth. When Gorbachev let the KGB float rumours that the United States had created the AIDS pandemic or when Putin claims that the internet is a CIA invention, do they believe these grotesque accusations? Do journalists knowingly violate their professional ethics in channelling them? Does the Russian public fall for it? Deception and falsification run deep in tsarist and particularly Soviet practice, and have plumbed these depths in the Putin regime. When Putin used Kremlin-controlled media to unleash a staggering scale of lies and distortions to annex Crimea and intervene in Eastern Ukraine, NATO declared it needed to find new resources outside conventional arms to combat Russia’s ‘hybrid’ warfare. Lying as a weapon of war had achieved its goals with astounding success. People all over the world lie, and so do politicians. One of the worst lies of
recent history was the assertion by the United States, Britain and their allies that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, a lie with enormous international repercussions. Since then, the leaders of that period have been removed by their electoral systems, and investigations into the war have not ceased. Russia’s situation is systemic and exceptional, as Russians themselves and foreign visitors have observed over the centuries. Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov have depicted the phenomenon in their work, the French traveller Marquis de Custine commented in 1839 that Russians of all classes possessed ‘a dexterity in lying, a naturalness in falsehood’,1 while modern day diplomat Sir Rodric Braithwaite wrote in a secret missive that ‘Russians lie when they feel they need to … But they also lie without reason, by some inner compulsion, even when they know that their listener knows that they are lying’.2
Another strong national trait is Russians’ ability to laugh at their cultural
waywardness. Everyone of a certain age has heard the Soviet anecdote: ‘There’s no news in Pravda (Truth) and no truth in Izvestiya (News)’. I myself am fond of the one about Waterloo. While watching a parade on Red Square, Napoleon turns to Brezhnev and says, ‘If I had tanks like that, I wouldn’t have lost the battle of Waterloo’. Brezhnev replies: ‘And if you had newspapers like we have, no one would have known you’d lost the battle of Waterloo’. The lack of a free press in Russia has made it easy to conceal truth and
dupe people. Lying has been used extensively and effectively as a method of state control. Other communist regimes have also responded to crises in this way because of the vast disjuncture between goals and reality, which they need to justify. But the act of lying in Russia is also deeply entwined with questions of survival, freedom and identity which have evolved over centuries of coercion and tyranny. Fear is the central factor behind the bizarre relationship to lies. Russia’s despotic rulers use lies as a tool because they fear their own people and the consequences of the demands they place on them. People who are unempowered are forced to accept lies and invent their own out of fear and a sense of survival. The grand schemes of despots to modernise Russia has had catastrophic costs on its people: Peter’s Europeanisation, the Bolsheviks’ proletarianisation, Stalin’s industrialisation – all enforced leaps into an unknown future, without much prior rehearsal or organic evolution. Sociologist Yury Levada in his article on Russian ‘cunning’ and doublethink stresses a crucial factor in the relationship between ruler and ruled, that ‘demands imposed on people were almost impossible to fulfil’. In adapting to social reality, the cunning person had to seek ‘loopholes in its normative system, or ways of turning the current rules of the game to his own advantage while at the same time … trying to find a way to get around those rules’.3 Political scientists talk of informal networks, privilege, bribery and the black market as essential ways of getting around a system of arbitrary and personalised rule, selective justice and endemic corruption. In the sphere of information, lies are a useful way of promoting ideology, propaganda and alternative ‘realities’. Glasnost and the transition to democracy were attempts to change this
historical trajectory, to tear down the veil of secrecy and fill in the ‘blank spots’ of the past. The media would create an open society and make the Kremlin accountable. It is true that the transition to democracy was yet another leap into an unknown future, but the significant difference was that it was not enforced. Nor was it built on lies and unfulfillable promises, even if it was misunderstood by the majority to be a quick fix for all woes. As long as pluralism of the media existed, the potential for a fairer life was there and even the dirtiest of lies and machinations were challenged and exposed. Although Putin repeatedly spoke of safeguarding free speech and democracy, by 2003 when the large television stations were in Kremlin hands, the truth that he had usurped the fledgling democracy became clear even to many who had believed his words. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov called Putin a
‘specialist in lying’, a ‘pathological liar’. In this instance he was referring to Putin’s Ukrainian policy which had been built on lies. How could Putin be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and deny that Russian fighters were dying in Eastern Ukraine, when Nemtsov himself had seen their graves in Kostroma, Pskov and Nizhny Novgorod, where he had once been governor?4 Nemtsov said this on the day in 2015 when he was assassinated. As a long-time Putin critic, Nemtsov was a scrupulous researcher in exposing the lies and corruption of the regime. In a 2005 article, ‘The President, Simple and Lying’, Nemtsov and Pribylovsky analysed ten main lying ‘moments’ of promises that Putin had betrayed.5 Putin claimed otherwise. When Chinese journalists asked him for the secret of his popularity, he said:
