Did the [Ukrainians’] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.
I really think this is one of the most important things to have some understanding of. I have friends and relatives who tend to make excuses in Russia’s — or, rather, Putin’s direction. When I mention the Bucha massacre, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. When I explain it, they are merely skeptical. (As far as they’re concerned, Russia withdrew from the Kyiv offensive “in good faith” until the US and UK burned the deal because… military industrial complex, etc. And they have now been listening to that narrative on repeat for nearly three years.)
So as I see it, the first problem is memory. I recently heard Megyn Kelly saying something typically dumb about Ukraine-Russia and she added something like “We [Fox News] covered this [the 2014 Russian invasion and the Minsk Accords] in real time. Why doesn’t anyone remember this?” But what she doesn’t say is that they covered it in exactly the opposite way they cover it now. But she doesn’t have to say that because none of her listeners or today’s Fox viewers remember it anyway. (It’s worth keeping in mind, back when RFK Jr. was picking up steam last year, he sat in front of Sean Hannity and spun the most outrageous and obvious historical lies about the Minsk Accords, with zero pushback from Hannity and nothing but nods from the audience.)
Anne Applebaum, who has worked closely with Pomerantsev, said in her 2003 book Gulag,
If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered—viscerally, emotionally remembered—what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way—which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.
We are not even a little immune, in our own way, from this memory problem.
Beyond that, I have constant questions about how this happens. It’s not just a matter of weighing evidence and determining what we “believe.” In fact, “weighing” hardly ever comes into it at all. It’s more often and more simply about who we are listening to, and occasionally why we listen to them. (If only we all stood outside the local shop and listened to the radio together! 🙂) You can’t weigh evidence that you never hear or don’t remember. And I’ve never been confident about just how consciously any of this takes place.
So yes, the truth may be a treated as a subset of power, but it also ends up a subset of memory, opinion, and whim. Doing things for the sake of power may be in there somewhere, it may even be at the root, but I suspect that when it is, perhaps excepting those few who are extraordinarily vigilant of their own conscience, power may ultimately be a motive that only God can uncover.
In any case, “power” has become another one of those “you keep saying that word” things for me. Especially when we’re talking about the average citizen (i.e., any person I actually know or even have met), it does nothing to explain anything to me, and I suspect that unless we are quite specific about who we’re talking about and why (and no, “the Russian people” is not specific enough), it will only ever prevent anyone from understanding anything about anyone else.