fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Monster Putin Created

David Remnick writes about a recent talk he had with former Putin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky, who believes the president he served until 2011 has tindered a fire he cannot easily control. Excerpt: When I met Pavlovsky in Moscow a couple of weeks ago, he seemed especially concerned about the lack of strategic thinking by […]

10421443_412241185580660_2618690230605025909_n

David Remnick writes about a recent talk he had with former Putin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky, who believes the president he served until 2011 has tindered a fire he cannot easily control. Excerpt:

When I met Pavlovsky in Moscow a couple of weeks ago, he seemed especially concerned about the lack of strategic thinking by Putin, and about the consequences of the feverish anti-Ukrainian, anti-American, and generally xenophobic programming on state television, from which nearly all Russians derive their news and their sense of what is going on in the world.

Putin’s incursion into Crimea and his manipulation of the situation in eastern Ukraine, Pavlovsky said, “was an improvisation, though the logistics and plans existed a long time ago.”

Since returning to the Presidency, Pavlovsky said, Putin has “created an artificial situation in which a ‘pathological minority’—the protesters on Bolotnaya Square [two years ago], then Pussy Riot, then the liberal ‘pedophiles’—is held up in contrast to a ‘healthy majority.’ Every time this happens, his ratings go up.” The nightly television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced “spectacle,” he said, expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks.

“Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public opinion and the collective political imagination.

“How can Putin really manage this?” Pavlovsky went on. “You’d need to be an amazing conductor. Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”

Pavlovsky posted this to his Facebook page earlier today:

“Without knowing it, with the beginning of the war we lost autonomy. We have become a subject of an object. But once this unfortunate war started, we could not stop her.. ” — Count Czernin, the Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary [during World War I — RD]

Pavlovsky also posted that image at the top of this post, from a 1914 drawing by Russian artist Natalia Gonchorova, titled Angels And Airplanes. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now