When any content on the web is considered a threat, no matter how real that risk is or how effective the measures to contain it are, the important thing is to give the impression that “everything is under control”, that “we are not nothing escapes” from the bad intentions of the people.
One of the most bombastic claims of Putin’s speech in Red Square on May 9 during the Victory Day celebrations – which was generally rather weak and repetitive – was the justification of Russia’s war against “international terrorism”. . In the last twenty years this expression has signified the danger that Islamic extremism from Al Qaeda or Isis poses to the entire world – which are already ghosts of the past – while now terror is evoked, and at the same time provoked, precisely by the Putin’s Russia.
Many in the West would like to brand the infamous Wagner company as the “new Al Qaeda”, putting Putin and Prigozhin on the same level as bin Laden and Mullah Omar. For their part, the Russians claim that the Ukrainian drones against the Kremlin towers would be a replica of the planes against the Twin Towers in New York, with a decidedly ridiculous and paradoxical effect. And above all, the Russians define as “terrorist acts” the attacks against several highly exposed figures of Putin’s propaganda that have been taking place for months.
On August 20, 2022, in the Moscow province, the car of the “Eurasian” ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, in which his daughter Daria, another active protagonist of propaganda, was found, was blown up. On April 2, 2023, voenkor Maksim Fomin, aka Vladlen Tatarsky, voennij korrispondent (“war correspondent”), one of the leading and most aggressive blogger-propagandists, disintegrated with an explosive-laden figurine. On May 6, near Nizhny Novgorod, another car was blown up, that of the well-known and talented writer Zakhar Prilepin – who bragged about the number of Ukrainians killed during his participation in the conflict – along with his driver, who died in The explosion. These three episodes were branded as Ukrainian and Western “terrorism” against Russia.
On the same day as the attack on Prilepin, the director Ženja Berkovič was arrested in Moscow together with the screenwriter Svetlana Petrijčuk, accused precisely of “justifying terrorism”. Certainly not for having approved in any way the attacks or the drones, but for the play Finist, the luminous falcon, on stage since 2021, which talks about Russian women who emigrate to Syria to become wives of Isis terrorists. This is the favorite terrorism of Russian investigators, the one that can be “unmasked” comfortably sitting at the keyboard of the office computer, from where they observe theatrical and literary works, or simply posts on social networks. “Public support for terrorism” is defined as “the direct or covert expression of sympathy for terrorists,” including in “documentary or artistic films, or in literary or advertising works.” This support can be contained in the author’s words or expressed through the protagonists of the work, without even analyzing the logic of the script. In short, it is enough to have manifested it.
Terrorism is then the ultimate definition of “Nazism” and “globalism”, from which Russia is called upon to defend itself, Ukraine and the whole world. This is a broader version of the term, encompassing not just bombings or air raids but any form of politically justified violence, depending on the point of view of the complainant. On the other hand, the numerous massacres caused by Russian bombs in Ukraine, such as the recent one in Umani, are now not only considered “war crimes” like those in Bucha and Mariupol, but genuine acts of international terrorism.
The ambiguity of the term has dragged on since long before the war in Ukraine, qualifying as terrorism both the repressive policies of the States and the more or less violent actions of protest against the States that are considered illegal or repressive. The “Putinian terror” of recent years, continuously escalating since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, evokes both the “Red terror” of the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution and the “Stalinist terror” of the 1930s. , which exterminated with the Gulag archipelago all forms of internal dissent in the USSR. The term derives from the Jacobin terreur after the French Revolution of 1793-94, which aimed to instill this sentiment in the souls of the enemies of the revolution.
Terrorism later received new applications in the 1970s, and was used to describe the subversive actions of the Palestinians against Israel but also those of European radical groups of the right and left, especially in Germany and Italy. In the post-Soviet 1990s he referred particularly to “Chechen terrorism”, and to quell it Vladimir Putin was elected as the new prime minister. In his first public statement he promised that “we will go looking for the terrorists wherever they hide, including in the toilet”, inaugurating the new era of “strong Russia” with his typical street language.
As researcher Liza Stampnitsky observes in Meduza’s “Signal” column, the new meaning of “terrorism” is an “invention of politicians and experts in the field of security.” Calling someone a “terrorist” is equivalent to “declaring them irrational, amoral and bloodthirsty, as well as doomed to defeat in the fight against the state.” They are not definitions to try to understand the facts, but only to build the image of the enemy.
The category of terrorism has become indispensable for all contemporary States, above all to justify the monopoly of violence, which according to the classic definition of Max Weber is the “original function of the State.” For the sake of “security”, the State itself exercises, within a sphere of legality, some methods of political struggle that are not necessarily violent, such as blocking the streets or prohibiting access to buildings of power – as happened in Moscow during the May 9 parade – alleging that it detected threats to its sovereignty. The most authoritarian states describe all their opponents as terrorists, and are the first to resort to typically terrorist actions against them, from kidnapping to poisoning, including torture and endless sentences.
In the last decades, more than eighty States have included in their legislation specific articles and measures against terrorism, and the Russian war is further increasing this practice, especially by highlighting the limitless dimensions of “virtual terrorism” of messages and online narratives that generate extremist tendencies and, therefore, “terrorists”. When any content is considered a threat, no matter how real that risk is or how effective the measures to contain it are, the important thing is to give the impression that “everything is under control”, that “nothing escapes us” of the bad intentions of the people.
Not to mention that Russia is one of the countries with the greatest historical experience of terrorism. In the 19th century, after the “liberation of the peasants” decided by Tsar Alexander II, organizations determined to subvert the state order sprang up like mushrooms, among them the infamous Narodnaja Volja, the “People’s Will”, the mother of all the revolutionary associations up to Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who after more than sixty attempts managed to assassinate the tsar in 1881. His supporters, the narodovoltsy, believed that the violence was justified, because the lack of freedom in Russia (which had been granted to the peasants was considered insufficient) did not allow other means of political struggle. All this was admirably described by Dostoevsky in “The Demons”, a prophecy of the 1917 Soviet revolution.
The insurrections of the 19th century, in Russia and in many other countries, then received a romantic aura that is at the base of the 20th century revolutions. Today only the effect remains, and terrorists are all those who do not correspond to the dominant ideology, being therefore simply “Nazis”, “fascists”, etc., reducing geopolitical, social and economic differences at times to take sides. Russia increasingly imposes on the entire world the annulment of any idea of State and society, talking about “defending values” without any real content and only in the interest of its own side, using all the means at its disposal and instilling terror in the soul of all human beings.
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