From Republic.ru, Aug. 13, 2024, https://republic.ru/posts/113324. Complete text:
Ukrainian troops have been in Kursk Province for a week now. Despite threats and public promises, every day news channels are publishing new reports and clips adding up to the same general picture: “The fighting is continuing.” The reaction to the invasion – which is what this is – of Russian territory by foreign troops has been astonishingly indifferent.
The sudden action by the UAF confused analysts and bloggers. They have been tripping over each other to put forward various versions of what happened, trying to understand what the enemy is up to and what it wants, but they haven’t had the chance to check any of these versions yet, and they also haven’t been able to provide a clear answer to the question of what’s going on. News stories contradict each other, are refuted, then refute the refutations, and it becomes difficult to swim out of this whirlpool. On their public pages, the Russian Armed Forces are sometimes liberating and clearing localities of Ukrainian troops, where, according to posts on the same public pages several hours previously, there never were any Ukrainian troops to begin with.
The only thing we can say with certainty is that Ukrainian soldiers are continuing to attack Russian villages and settlements. We can only judge the scale of these attacks by reports on the number of residents evacuated from border areas – already almost 120,000 from Kursk Province and over 11,000 from Belgorod [Province].
Five days ago, head of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported that the UAF units that crossed the border were comprised of up to 1,000 troops. According to Gerasimov, of these, over 300 had been killed or wounded at the time of the report. Since then, as is customary, the number of soldiers killed and equipment burned in the reports has grown every day. Meanwhile, the evacuation continues.
The official figures are, of course, designed to please the audience.
Many Russians, especially from the older generation, who are not used to social media and messenger services, still may not be aware that anything out of the ordinary is happening in Kursk Province. There was an attempt to break through the border, it was prevented, and that’s the end of it for this category of citizens. The column that went up in flames in Oktyabrsky – where would they have seen that?
Other citizens whose lives are not as simple or innocent are experiencing dissonance.
For the first time since the Great Patriotic War, the regular troops of another state are invading the country, and everyone’s acting like nothing’s going on.
Naturally, political talk shows devoted some time to the event, and the president convened a [Russian] Security Council meeting, but in general, the invasion is getting as much attention as it would if it were any other episode of the special military operation [in Ukraine]. The enemy invaded. So what? After all, that’s why they’re the enemy, to invade! That’s their nature.
Even though it’s not Shebekino [Belgorod Province] that’s being shelled [see Vol. 75, No. 22, pp. 3‑9], but Kursk, the fact that the invasion has not been cause for a new mobilization or an address to the people by the head of state, even to demonstrate the predatory nature of the enemy, is confirmation that, as we feared, the enemy really is trying to seize our lands. The invasion has not led to soaring enthusiasm and lines at enlistment offices – yes, I know, Putin said that the number of people who want to sign a contract for [military] service has grown in recent days – but there are no other signs of this yet, and this might have been due to recent increases in contract payments (under an order from Putin, beginning Aug. 1, federal payments doubled to up to 400,000 rubles, and the regions are also doing their part – now contract military personnel are entitled to a lump sum of 1.5-2 million). And, in theory, territorial defense militias aren’t supposed to need a contract to defend their homeland.
In general, it doesn’t resemble 1941 at all.
There are no rousing speeches by the national leader. There are no notices along the lines of “the district committee is closed, we’ve all gone to the front.”
This all seems strange – it would seem that the pretext is there, but there’s no response that’s to be expected by all canons. Is this to avoid panic? And when should we start to worry? When the Ukrainian Army reaches Khimki on the outskirts of Moscow? Near the antitank Czech hedgehogs? Or is that still too early?
There hasn’t even been a patriotic meeting, for crying out loud. The invasion of Russia seems to be considered a less significant event than when YouTube blocked the channel of the singer Shaman and he organized a concert under the windows of the American Embassy.
The dissonance arises, first of all, because state propaganda makes too much use of metaphors that raise the status of the current conflict, comparing it to no less than World War II. The government does not want to go down in history with another “war in Afghanistan,” since that is too lightweight – the cliché is now to describe the conflict as a confrontation with the global West and all of NATO. For some, this is still not enough – at most, we are talking about a cosmic battle between good and evil, in which we are literally fighting Satan himself. At the same time, the policy of the “memory of war” has been vigorously promoted – every episode of the Great Patriotic War is being thoroughly studied, dissected and served up to the audience, and the government is subtly comparing itself with the leaders of this war and all of us – with the soldiers.
As a result of this reinforcement of associations, citizens are expecting a literal remake of 1941-1945, nothing less. In other words, an invasion should mean hundreds of divisions marching surefire into Russia in a broad front and capturing one city after the other. But the UAF’s incursion into certain districts of a certain province or even two provinces does not fit into the stereotype that has been hammered in – and, as a result, does not require action.
By blurring and obscuring concepts, propaganda ends up shooting itself in the foot: When action is required, it proves quite difficult to rally the masses, and the government doesn’t seem to know any other way to do this than by raising [contract] salaries. A year ago, the Prigozhin mutiny showed that the degree of Russian unflappability is practically limitless – everything earthly looks insignificant on the scale of anticipated cosmic battles. The value of concepts like “protection of the homeland” and “internationally recognized territories” over recent years has paradoxically not increased, but been devalued as a result of the special operation. What can you expect if borders have become impermanent dotted lines?
At the same time, citizens take their cue from the authorities, who in a vertical system of command appoint themselves as reference points, but do not behave entirely consistently in this sense. Projecting an exaggerated, grandiose rhetoric onto the country as if it were the dome of a planetarium, they modestly step aside at the moment when they should be moving from words to actions. People who just threatened lightning strikes in response to the crossing of “red lines” are now starting to pretend that there were never any “red lines” to begin with. This is not a splitting, naturally, but the actor’s normal transformation into Hamlet and back again.
When pronouncing speeches about a “holy war,” the Kremlin introduces a counterterrorism operation in Kursk Province and, in the opinion of analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, is apparently putting Federal Security Service (FSB) head Aleksandr Bortnikov in charge instead of a military official, meaning that the raids by Ukraine are not even a war at all. In the Kremlin’s optics, this is logical, because these raids do not in any way fit into the framework of the special operation, but they must be labeled somehow. However, in so doing, pathos must be sacrificed.
And how is the audience behaving? In exactly the same way. Sitting in the front rows, they seem to have tacitly agreed to believe what is happening on the stage. It’s important to stress that the theater is not in any way a false representation. Neither the actor nor the audience is lying here. Anyone who tries in the middle of the production to expose the performer by saying, “that’s not Hamlet, people, or even a prince at all, but Ivan Petrovich Sidorov” – which is what the Russian opposition has tried to do – will hear nothing but hissing directed at them. The audience sincerely hates Claudius at this moment, but is naturally not going tear down his house on their way out of the theater. The audience will accept the sharp drop in pathos as a natural part of the rules, even though they just applauded and believed. And the person who takes everything too literally will be just as easily escorted out of the hall and taken to the precinct. Therefore, if the Kremlin announces mobilization and makes fiery appeals, it may simply not be believed.