RUSSIAN WORLD Russia’s psychological-spiritual warfare

The recent NATO summit in Lithuania unequivocally sanctioned Russia’s defeat in its special military operation, the goal of which was to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. The “Jewish Nazi” Zelenskyi, as the Kremlin calls him, received the solemn guarantee of NATO membership, the maximum possible remilitarization, accompanied by Finland and even Sweden, and over the objections of Erdogan’s Turkey, the friendly “mediator”. of Putin who sent back to Kiev the commanders of the Azov battalion, the most “Nazi” thing imaginable in these latitudes.

Putin achieved the exact opposite of the reason why he mobilized the entire country, with tens of thousands of fallen in combat and hundreds of thousands of citizens on the run – the youngest and most prepared – to stay with a resigned, impoverished and disoriented people. , especially after the “Prigozhin uprising” psychodrama. Beyond the tiresome and repetitive battles for position and the constant bombing of all Ukrainian cities, it will already be a miracle if Russia manages to keep the positions and regions occupied and annexed, including Crimea, where everything originated. The war is already transcending the front line and opening up to dimensions that still need to be explored and defined.

This is evident from a minor fact, related to the “propaganda plant” that inevitably accompanies the war actions. In Nizhny Novgorod, a large city on the Volga 500 kilometers from Moscow – where in World War II reserves of arms, soldiers and heavy industry were kept for fear of Nazi invasion – the forum for young political scientists entitled ” Digoria”, the old name of Ossetia. The name evokes the war against Georgia 15 years ago, when Putinism’s “war turn” began and the possibility of creating a “Russian space” beyond the official borders of the Federation. The forum was inaugurated by Putin’s first deputy in the presidential administration, former prime minister Sergej Kirienko, a Yeltsin dauphin turned pro-Western liberalism and currently on the front line in the search for suitable motivations for the apocalyptic conflict.

Kirienko invited to look ahead, advising “young political scientists” that “those who sit apart today should not be offended if they have no place in the future.” He explained that the current war has three levels, contemporary and at the same time successive: the “hot” level of weapons, the economic level – which imposes the “turn towards the East” – and the “ideological, or rather informational-psychological: the war of meanings”. If the first two already have quite defined contours, between borders to defend and sanctions to evade, the great “battle of meanings”, the smyslovaja bitva, is the one that will occupy young political scientists from now on and forever.

The first front line must be the opposition to the “meanings” imposed by Western countries -explains Vice Putin- responding “with ours, which are based on Russian values”. It is striking that the forum was held in the Mayak cultural center, which bears the name of Andrei Sakharov, Nobel laureate and leader of the anti-Soviet dissidence, creator of the hydrogen bomb and prophet of Russian liberalism, who lived in these lands. the confinement imposed by Brezhnev. The choice is not accidental: one of the “meanings” with which one must commit, according to the Kremlin, is that of “freedom”, which is opposed to “liberalism” and is not based on individualism, but on communion of shared traditional values.

The forum is held annually and, with the euphoria of the invasion, in the last edition it recommended supporting the feelings of pride of the population for the successes of arms and politics, while today it is about presenting battle in the new dimension . “The West attacks the values ​​of the Russians, so that they renounce their own history – explains Kirienko – and fall back into the stereotypes, according to which people in Russia are lazy and indolent, and in this way they end up passively assuming civilization western”. On the contrary, we must react: “To win this war, to be able to face this challenge, we cannot accept anything from them, we must recover our tradition, our history, our culture… This is the real front line, where political scientists, writers and artists should line up, that is, all socio-cultural operators.” The former prime minister clarified that “polit-technologists” were necessary before, experts in electoral and political campaigns, which today are superfluous, because today political science means “being able to think with the categories of the global war of meanings, to project meanings and ideas into the global competition of a rapidly changing world.”

Therefore, it is not a question of conquering territories or defending one’s own, but of fighting for the “meaning of the world”, and this explains the whole dynamic of the “special operation”, which is not limited to the warlike, technical or economic aspect. . Kirienko refers to the 2020 constitutional amendments, the ideological container of the great “meanings” such as “family values”. And indeed, the Russian meaning of the family is extremely original: to defend at all costs an institution in which very few believe, considering that the Soviet past had totally disintegrated the very concept of the family nucleus (the true family was the State or, at most, the Party). After all, even the Orthodox Church allows second and third marriages, with “comforting blessings” when previous unions fail. The country that practices the most abortions in the world today hides behind false decrees against abortion, pretending to eliminate it from the public health system when the whole world knows that the only health system that works in Russia is the one that is paid for, even in public clinics – probably under the counter. The “family” is also the bulwark against “homosexual propaganda”, when gay communities have always been so active and numerous in Russia that each city knows perfectly well its reference areas (in Moscow, behind the Bolshoi Theater).

In reality, “moral values” are just smoke in the eyes of a Russia dominated by oligarchs who are champions of immorality, beginning with the leaders of the Kremlin. Indeed, Kirienko insists on what is really the strong point of the war of meanings: the “true interpretation of history”, where morality has very little to do with it and everything is referred to the reference ideology. “We have to make sure that they don’t come to tell us that Alexander Nevsky was a highwayman who robbed honest Swedish merchants,” adds the dean of Moscow’s Faculty of Political Science, Andrei Shutov. The holy prince of the thirteenth century is a particularly heartfelt fixed idea, which turns a minor figure into the hero of national reference. From his city of Novgorod he won a couple of skirmishes against the Swedes and Teutons, later dubbed “epic battles” (this is the origin of secular polemics with the Balts), and then agreed to a servile compromise with the invading Mongols, who rewarded him with the title of prince of Kiev. Only kyiv had been razed to the ground and Aleksandr moved to Vladimir, where the foundation of Moscow came from. For this reason, the “little prince” became the “great savior”, who humiliates the West and forms a league with the East. Among other things, he returned a couple of cardinals sent from Rome with the offer of a “holy alliance” between Orthodox and Catholics to help Russia not succumb to the Tatars; Nevsky replied that “we have the true faith, you are heretics and we do not need you.”

The Patriarch of Moscow Kirill, the supreme champion of Russian “polit-theology”, also never misses an opportunity to pay homage to the great saint of victories on the Neva, as he did a few days ago in the message he sent on the occasion of the unveiling of a monument to Aleksandr in the Kazakh city of Almaty, as Kazakhstan could be the next Ukraine. The patriarch recalled that fundamental and decisive pages of Russian history are associated with the name of the prince: “With his diplomatic skills he allowed the formation of a unique model of an interreligious and interethnic world in the Eurasian space”, and, therefore, “his laudable ideas today are in line with the policy of the leaders of the republic of Kazakhstan to strengthen multicultural and multireligious unity.” Kirill does not cease to emphasize that “his heroic deeds inspired many people in the terrible years of the Great Patriotic War to courageously and firmly defend national sovereignty, spiritual freedom and moral ideals”. For this reason the celebration offers the opportunity to “raise prayers to Aleksandr Nevsky, so that today, too, before the Lord, he will defend us from all evil and external hostility , and of all the possible deviations of the spirit”.

Immediately after the glorification of the prince, the patriarch greeted the participants in another ceremony – the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the battle of Prokhorovka, the largest confrontation between Nazi and Soviet tanks during World War II in the Belgorod region, which today is again involved in the war against Ukraine. On July 12, 1943, after being expelled from Moscow and Stalingrad, the Germans were withdrawing from the invasion “trying to destroy our armies,” recalls the patriarch, “the enemy was eager for revenge, but the ardor of our soldiers It was stronger, because they were willing to die for their country, to give their lives for their friends, with an unbreakable strength of spirit and an irrepressible desire for victory.

The patriarch concludes his reflections by speaking of the past but also looking towards the future: “Historical events have occurred, today we are witnesses that the country lives a new time, a new era, and its sacred symbols are returned to the Church, the treasures of our culture and the greatness of our history.” Kirill is welcoming the return of the icon of the Rublev Trinity, solemnly decreed by the Ministry of Culture, and the sarcophagus with the relics of Aleksandr Nevsky, in the hope that the medieval saint can stop today also the “desire for revenge” of the West against Russia.

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