Fabulists: Putin Win Exposes ‘Reset’ Media
Reporting by the MSM on the recent Russian presidential election cycle is one of the lowest moments in its history.
The MSM reported that a “White” or “Snow” revolution was taking place led by blogging attorney Aleksei Navalny, one that would oust dictator Vladimir Putin from power just like dictators were ousted throughout the Middle East. At the very least, the MSM promised Putin would be forced by a massive groundswell of popular opposition into an embarrassing runoff election. A Google search for “Putin 2012 runoff” yielded half a million hits.
This was never remotely true.
Putin was swept back into office essentially as president for life with no significant opposition or outcry, and before the votes had even been counted he’d shamelessly declared himself president for life. The public demonstrations against him were limp, disorganized, frivolous affairs more likely to make Putin smile than worry. He won in a landlside.
Between Putin, a proud KGB spy, and Gennady Zyuganov, an avowed Communist, 75% of the Russian electorate was accounted for.
The MSM trumpeted its hysterical, breathless lie for two reasons: to gin up ratings with a compelling narrative involving drama in Russia, and to support Barack Obama’s reelection by trumpeting the success of his so-called “reset” with Russia.
According to French firm Semiocast (Russian-language link), Russia has five million users of Twitter, ranking 20th in the world for number of users and 7th for frequency of use (on par with Great Britain).
But on March 4, 2012, election day in Russia, only a little more than 200,000 (less than 5%) of all Russian Twitter accounts were following Navalny. In contrast, more than one million were following current “president” Dmitry Medvedev. That’s one fifth of all Russian Twitter accounts, five times more than Navalny, and likely close to all of the active accounts in the country. Medvedev’s alternate account — in English — has nearly as many followers as does Navalny in Russian. Navalny has a pathetic total of less than 1,000 followers in English.
From the beginning, Navalny had focused on utilizing Internet resources to bolster his movement, so these statistics are particularly damning and telling.
The data indicate he has failed miserably in achieving his central goal. Even if you focus on just “active” Twitter accounts, which reduces Russia’s tally by 75%, you are still left with 1.25 million Twitter users and a mere 15% of them following Navalny, assuming all of his followers are active. You can’t assume that, of course.
It had always been perfectly clear just by looking at Twitter that Navalny was not any type of serious force on election day in Russia. Given that, it was hardly surprising that Navalny did not even try to register himself as a candidate on the ballot opposing Putin, nor did he even try to endorse any of Putin’s rivals for office. He didn’t create a political party, he didn’t generate any significant fundraising, he didn’t try to run advertisements, he wasn’t interviewed much, and he didn’t give a single memorable speech in the entire election cycle. Just before the election, a Time magazine cover referred to Putin as “The Incredible Shrinking Prime Minister.” He wasn’t; Navalny was shrinking.
Navalny promised he would force the Kremlin to redo the parliamentary elections, then forgot about that promise when it fizzled. He promised crowds of ever-increasing size at public demonstrations; they got smaller. He promised Putin would be forced into a runoff election and humbled; Putin won in a first-round landslide.
None of this fit the MSM’s juicy narrative, so they ignored it.
In the run-up to the election, Putin launched a wave of crackdowns on independent media outlets, threatening a leading newspaper with bankruptcy and pulling the plug on a popular MTV talk show. Navalny did nothing. Putin arrested protesters and even used the old Soviet trick of sending them to mental wards. Navalny did nothing. His story was best summarized when a crowd at the famous Bolshoi Theater started booing a man they spied in the Imperial Box, believing him to be an infamous Putin cohort. In fact, he was a famous Polish composer.
There never was any sort of fearless, concerted mass political movement capable of challenging Putin for power.
If there is a recognizable political opposition movement in Russia, it is the same movement that existed in the USSR, and it has only one guiding principle: Flee Russia, as fast and as far as you can.
Navalny’s plan was flawed from the inception in every way imaginable. Even if he had managed to galvanize Russia’s entire Internet, more than half the country has no access to the Internet so he would still have come out behind. Even if the Internet held sway over a majority, Navalny’s “cult of personality” strategy undercut his ability to promulgate serious political ideas. People who attended his rallies said they felt more like parties than political campaigns.
But the MSM didn’t report any of this. Instead, it gushed and swooned as Navalny called his supporters into the streets, and about a third of his Twitter following showed up, bolstered by larger numbers of Communists and Nazis. They showed for Navalny because rather than create his own party or run, Navalny’s “strategy” was to call upon Russian voters to vote for anybody except Putin. This big tent included Communists and Nazis.
In some way now Russia is even more dangerous than the old Soviet Union. At least in the Soviet Union the leader had to answer to the Politburo. Putin is more like a king and doesn’t have to answer to anybody. He can crush any opposition at will and destroy any political leaders that get in his way. Smells more like a monarchy than anything else. Only this monarchy is loaded with nuclear weapons.
At least in the Soviet Union the leader had to answer to the Politburo.
That may have been true in the later years of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev for example, but it was not nearly so true under Lenin and Stalin.
His fellow leaders of the Bolsheviks often disagreed with Lenin, sometimes very strongly, but they always obeyed him even against their best judgement. For example, the coup by which Lenin seized power was ordered by Lenin for a particular day. To a man, the rest of the senior leadership opposed the move but Lenin insisted and they gave in to him. The coup went ahead on the day scheduled and was successful.
In 1922, when Lenin had the stroke that incapacitated him and forced his retirement from active leadership of the Soviet Union, Stalin was only one of several men roughly equal in rank. But over the next several years, Stalin carefully formed alliances with first one faction and then another to outflank and eliminate the other potential leaders. None of his rivals survived their encounters with Stalin although Trotsky survived longer than most. (Trotsky was initially exiled but then Stalin realized he was still dangerous to him even outside the country and started a hunt that ended in Trotsky’s murder in Mexico in 1940). By 1929, Stalin was effectively undisputed within the Politburo. Even still, he harbored many old grudges against the Old Bolsheviks over past disputes so he gradually cornered all of them and eliminated the last ones in the purges of the 30s, even though they had all become docile bootlickers. Even Lenin’s widow, who had long been on the Politburo and survived Lenin by some years, was threatened when she dared to oppose something Stalin wanted: he told her that she could be replaced as Lenin’s widow by an actress if she gave him any more trouble! Perhaps his most serious rival in the 30s, Sergei Kirov, had the bad luck to receive fewer disapproving votes than Stalin did at one meeting. (The Party sometimes allowed its top people to cast secret ballots indicating approval or disapproval of individual Politburo members. On one occasion, that voting showed almost 200 top leaders (a lot but still a minority of those voting) disapproving of Stalin and only 3 disapproving of Kirov. Stalin smelled a rival and had Kirov assasinated. Stalin’s role in the killing was VERY carefully covered up and then Stalin had the audacity to use the assasination as an excuse to launch the purges that eventually killed virtually all of the Old Bolsheviks and much of the general population.
In short, from 1929 until his death in 1953, the Politburo had no signficant power to curb Stalin.
I don’t know how Putin manages to make everyone in Russia dance his tune but it certainly looks as if he can do whatever he wants, just as Stalin did in his day.
Putin is loved in Russia. America is quietly jealous that they get a leader like Putin, but we’re stuck with fools like Obama and Bush. Our vice presidents are even more terrifying.
Could it be that Putin is a colossal idiot and the Russians love him because they even bigger idiots?
I have seen no evidence that Putin brings anything good into this world. He seems to be on the wrong side of almost every issue from Iran to Syria to Georgia. And what’s the purpose of his constant animosity to the US? It makes NO sense. Every time I read interviews with common Russians they say mindless things like “we need a strong leader”.
The reason why Russians prefer a strong leader is because of their experiences during the Yeltsin era. We tend to think of Stalin as the worst leader of the erstwhile USSR but the nightmare for most Russians is Yeltsin. Stalin’s depredations are faint echoes of the past but Yeltsin’s gangster mafia state is etched into the memories of a lot of people. As Spengler of PJM put it, the fear of most Germans is strong leadership while that of Russians is the absence of leadership. They prefer a strong leader who is authoritarian to the bumbling liberals of the 90s.
There is also the fact that a fair amount of Russians, because of their longing for national sovereignty, dislike the universality of liberal interventionism. In the west, revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine are thought of as people attaining their freedoms whereas in Russia, they are considered as the encirclement policies of liberal democracies. George Soros is resented because of his funding of these types of revolutions and he is often called an American agent (and Zionist agent) even though Soros thinks of himself as a “world citizen”. When Putin criticizes NGOs and opposition protests as “American funded”, he is expressing his actual thoughts.
Good article by PJM highlighting the incompetence of NYT. The truth is that anti-americanism and anti-semitism have a flourishing currency in Russia. We can recognize this reality or keep deluding ourselves that Russia is full of liberal democrats( like the “Arab Spring”).
Conservatives are trying to debate ideas in the public square with overt media adversaries as our mouthpieces.
Old Media complicity with numerous leftist/ progressive causes, programs and policies seems to be one of the biggest stories of this young century. In an ironic twist there are no commercial broadcast news outlets to report this.
They have acted as public relations for the liberal world view — relentlessly parroting party lines and commiting outrageous sins of omission on stories they choose to report on – or not (Climategate, voter fraud, Fast and Furious, etc).
I know there has long been a leftward tilt within media reportage but it seems much more activist, coordinated and one-sided these days…
How far could any of the left wing causes have advanced in the last 10-12 years without Old Media ? If the answer is – not far — then that is as big a story as any I’ve been reading about.
Leftist media`s permanent mistake: they are searching for the leftists-brothers in Arab world and Russia-the places of far right fundamentalists and nationalists.Russian recent candidates are all right-wingers excluding the loser-Mironov.