Russians know what their military is doing in Ukraine

The atrocities that Russian troops have committed in Ukraine raise two questions about Russians at home: Do they know their military is doing these things? And if they do, are they OK with it? The answers are almost certainly “Yes” and “They’re working on it.”
The degree of civilians’ ignorance may not matter much for Russia’s redemption, should that ever become possible. It didn’t matter in post-World War II Germany. Although Germans used to refer to the end of that war as the zero hour, nothing was nullified by Hitler’s suicide and his armies’ capitulation. When “peaceful” Germans told their allied occupiers they hadn’t known what the Nazis were up to, they were sometimes taken en masse to see the death camps. Many were, or acted, astounded and horrified. Whether or not those
emotions were real, by expressing them, “innocent” Germans only provoked the allies to rub their noses in Hitler’s terrible heritage.
Yet even if Putin’s Russia is not defeated militarily, let alone occupied and forcibly de-Putinised, the question — did you know? — will be asked of Russians when they apply for visas, interview for foreign jobs or just get into casual conversations with Ukrainians or Westerners. Will they use the same defense that Germans used? Will they claim that the Putin regime had cut off their access to all information except propaganda and force-fed them the idea that the executed unarmed civilians were in fact victims of Ukraine’s false-flag atrocities?
I’m sure some will, and they’ll have some evidence to offer. Ostensibly, the Putin regime has done its best to starve Russians of truthful information.
Independent news outlets have been closed outright or blocked on the internet. Those still active cannot be reached without a virtual private network. Search in Russian for Bucha, the Kyiv suburb on which Russian troops unleashed horrible violence, on the Russian search engine Yandex — and you’ll get the twisted Kremlin version of events.
But is this information blockade really effective?
In Russia in March,
the four most-downloaded apps for both MacOS and Android were VPNs. One could argue that people are using these applications only to retain access to Netflix and other entertainment services that have quit the country since the war in Ukraine began. But the fifth most in-demand app was the encrypted messenger Telegram, probably the best available source of uncensored news about the war.
I, for one, am using Telegram to access news from a wealth of Russian and Ukrainian sources.
According to a poll taken in March, TV is the main source of information for 50% of Russians, and 45% trust it. But then that’s just what people living under an autocratic regime tell pollsters — not necessarily what they actually think. And even if the poll data reflect reality, there is a large age gap in TV viewing: Younger people watch little TV, and more than a quarter of adult Russians don’t watch it at all, instead relying on the internet for news.
They are the ones who use VPNs to access independent news sources
and subscribe to unfiltered Telegram channels. They also know that Google is a better search engine than Yandex.
Even Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, openly admits using a VPN to access the banned Western social networks: The official policy is that such use is
not punishable. And indeed there have been no reprisals so far for using Facebook or Instagram, both declared “extremist” organisations. It’s extremely difficult for the secret police to track such use on a grand scale while VPNs remain legal.
And even if one assumes that a TV-only audience of older, technology-shy people really exists, it cannot be isolated from direct communication with other people whose horizons aren’t as limited. Older Russians with their unbreakable TV habit still hear about the executed Ukrainian civilians from their younger friends and relatives.
The social networks are full of stories of well-informed children calling their parents or older friends to tell them what’s going on — and running into a stubborn disbelief. But do people really trust their TV more than their own kids or other people they know personally? I seriously doubt it. I know, however, that older Russians are extremely cautious on the phone (and now also on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram or any other means of remote communication). They will not
endanger themselves by blabbing heresy — too many people suffered for it in the Soviet Union, a country that modern Russia increasingly resembles. Even in the privacy of our apartment, when I was a kid, my mother avoided criticising the Soviet order in my presence — for fear that I’d blurt it out at school.
The surviving Soviets may not have their children’s technology smarts, but they beat them hands down in the kind of street smarts required for survival in a police state. They also have plenty of experience reading between propaganda lines. The assumption that these people, who laughed privately at the Soviet ideological fodder, have suddenly lost their ability to take state discourse with a bucketful of salt, seems less plausible to me than the idea that they’re reverting to oyster mode as their familiar environment returns.
Yet Navalny’s thread lays bare the flimsiness of the ignorance defense: Persuasive as the TV lies might be, Navalny clearly isn’t falling for them; his brain rejects them. There is, of course, only one Navalny — but it would be arrogant in the
extreme to assume that his visceral reactions are unique. Why would others buy the Goebbels-like Kremlin narratives after years of living in a much freer information environment than the one that
exists today?

—Bloomberg

Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He was
previously Bloomberg Opinion’s
Europe columnist. He recently
authored a Russian translation of George Orwell’s “1984”