Why the Russian regime is always lying

Anyone interested in the current conflict in Ukraine can reasonably conclude that the Putin regime is lying. And it lies not a little, as is expected of a country at war, nor a lot, as is expected of tyrannical regimes, but all the time. In the last 10 months, have we heard the Kremlin clearly and loudly communicate a single truth? Never.

Since the outbreak of the war against Ukraine, Moscow has sent out an endless stream of forgeries, disinformation and untruths, so much so that it seems unable to admit that two and two make four. It is almost a supernatural phenomenon in which historical motives must be identified.

TRUTH… DOES NOT EXIST

Imperial Russia lied. The famous Potemkin villages became a textbook case of statist illusionism. This was only the beginning.

In the 20th century, Russia went through 70 years of hard and unadulterated communism. The intensity of totalitarianism has varied over the centuries, with greater or lesser terror, mass deportations and summary executions, but it has one systemic element that has not changed one iota: the double language. From Lenin’s rise to power until the collapse of the system under Gorbachev, the only official political language, the only permissible and obligatory language, is that language, icy, blind, mechanical, with a rigidity of steel, from which all humanity, all sensitivity, is drained out. Countless innocents who ended up in the Gulag or were executed with a bullet in the nape of the neck because they refused to speak out.

The double language is the language of ideology. As Orwell saw perfectly in 1984, it is the soul of totalitarianism, the demon that possesses you and turns you into a mutant, a zombie. Alain Besançon (1932, historian and Sovietologist, professor at the French School of Social Sciences at Stanford, Princeton and Oxford) has a decisive formulation: “We will not believe the double language, it demands to be spoken.” It does not matter whether you are honest or not, loyal to the regime or a secret opponent, as soon as it comes out of your mouth, you belong to it, you are participating in a fiction that wants to replace reality, you are helping to destroy the world. The Russians have lived for 70 years under the yoke of this linguistic dictatorship. Their mind is deeply polluted with nothing.

In Lenin’s metaphysical vision, truth as we understand it today does not exist: it is only a reflection of matter, which is pure movement and permanent self-contradiction. What is true one day can be false the next and become true again the day after. Universal truth inevitably leads to revolution, but the paths that can lead to the final and salvific conflagration are innumerable. In such a philosophical context, there is no lie in the Christian sense of participation in evil: the Bolshevik who lies to the capitalist is in possession of the truth.

The double language, then, never attempts to get in touch with the truth, not even through it with reality. It is an autonomous space, an abstract one, in which what is and what is not are completely interchangeable. The reversibility that Orwell described so well in the wars between Oceania, East Asia and Eurasia, the combination of which is constantly changing and each of which must be accepted as the only possible and unchanging by the slaves of Big Brother. And let us return to Putin.

He lies all the time for three main reasons. First, because, like Lenin, he does not believe for a moment in the existence of truth. He believes that the propensity for truth is a caprice of the weak, the idiotic and the naive. He was brought up in Brezhnev’s mengele: the double language is his mother tongue. Then, as a very diligent pupil of the KGB school, he learned all the Soviet techniques of the art of disinformation. He is much more than a bearer of lies: he has learnt to incarnate his ego in the pretence that is written under his skin. False identities have shaped his modus vivendi. Finally, he is surrounded by spin doctors who have incorporated the discoveries of Western psychology and marketing into the lectures and practical work of the KGB. The result is a lie factory of miraculous efficiency.

The most lucid French, when it comes to Putinism, tend to treat their compatriots who admire Putin as imbeciles or blatant traitors. For most, they have judged too quickly. Because, in the 22 years that he has been in power, Putin has established a political communication campaign of continental proportions that is extremely effective. In the advertisements about the tree, we judge him by his fruits, and the facts are there: millions of Europeans see Vladimir the Great as a sage, a thinker, a glorious conqueror. To appreciate the strength of his intellectual influence on our country, it is enough to look at the laurel wreaths thrown to him in tears by traditional Catholic circles. Willingly, some hope that he will “save” them. They no longer even see that they are sinking into the idolatry which their Lord rebukes.

Thus a reader of the fundamentalist website Salon beige concludes, “May God bless Vladimir Putin and see him on the path of conversion.” May God send us a man of his calibre here in liberal hell.” And another replies, “May God convert Putin’s heart and strengthen his hand!” Hurrah!” The same website speaks of a “wise Putin” who “proudly takes responsibility for his heritage of Christian primacy, in his speeches imbued with spirituality, because he refuses our Satanic customs”. In short: “A man of prudence for his country, for the world and for Christianity, even if the decadent and apostate West does not understand him!”

As Alain Besançon says: “They believe that they know, they do not know that they believe.” By unconsciously worshipping Putin, they are leaving the orbit of Christianity: this is what the Russian lie is capable of. These poor people are not mentally alienated, but Moscow is capable of driving them completely mad in an instant, as it did the communists in the West throughout Soviet history.

DOESN’T KNOW WHAT KIND OF WORLD HE LIVES IN

The Russian government is addicted to lies. Without it, the masses would see with the naked eye – not only in Russia – the deceit of the “Eurasian power that will save civilisation” and show it their teeth. Without systematic and systemic lies, they would see Putin for what he is: an XXL mafioso, a prominent member of the most murderous secret services of the 20th century and an unforgiving plunderer of his own people and neighbours. The very opposite of the patriot and man of order before whom so many European right-wingers kneel. He is unlikely to survive the fall of his own mask. He is the one who can no longer be alone.

And the final reason, perhaps the most decisive, Putin lies all the time because he does not know what kind of world he lives in. According to experts such as Galia Ackerman and Françoise Thom, he does not read newspapers, he does not know how to use a computer or a smartphone, he follows local and world information exclusively on Russian television, which merely repeats what he thinks, and reports to him by his secret service officers, who are too scared of him to face the facts. He never tells the truth because he cannot see it, he cannot hear it and he is not in touch with it in any way. And if he did happen to hear it, he would punish it, because this old man, megalomaniac, paranoid, multi-billionaire without merit, locked in his bunker, in the heart of an absurd war that he should never have caused and for which he is an exile, can no longer see every day the widening gulf of the gap between his delirium and the verb to be.

We need to get rid of the Russian lie, even more than Vladimir Putin. This will be a long and difficult: a painful mission, to say the least, for a whole generation./Oslobođenje.ba/