Protests Against War in Ukraine 059 – Three Tyrants Stalin Putin Hitler, by Amaury Laporte, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia

Time Magazine‘s Washington correspondent Philip Elliot, in an interview with Nobel Prize-winning human rights activists,  reveals why Russia tolerates Putin’s brutal dictatorship and the propaganda behind that. Excerpt:

To appreciate the power of a myth, let’s take a quick visit to post-Soviet Russia.

 

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“The majority of Russians still see their glory in the forcible restoration of the Russian Empire,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, who runs a major human rights group in Ukraine, the Center for Civil Liberties, tells TIME. “The success of Ukraine will provide a chance for the democratic future of Russia, because it will provide the push for people to reflect that maybe it’s not OK in the 21st Century to invade other countries and kill people to erode their identity. Maybe it’s better to find our glory in something else.”

 

Matviichuk visited TIME’s Washington Bureau this week, sitting alongside two other representatives of groups co-honored with a Nobel Peace Prize last year.

 

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Adds Matviichuk, whose organization has documented 45,000 examples of war crimes Russia has committed in Ukraine—and counting: “Now, we are in the situation where Russia wants to return us to the past. But the future plays against Russia. That is why Russia will lose, sooner or later.”

 

She is right, at least when it comes to invented legends. Myths are fickle beasts. In a parallel reality of his creation, Putin is a popular and decisive leader determined to restore glory to Russia. In another reality—one closer attuned to the real world—Putin is presiding over a fragile autocracy that survives only because his pact with oligarchs allows them to share the spoils of a kleptocracy. (Oh, and nukes.)

 

“The propaganda has roots in the imperialistic culture of Russia,” says Matviichuk. “People in Russia still need to provide a reflection of their imperialistic culture.”

 

Thanks to an unmatched propaganda machine—described in detail by TIME’s Vera Bergengruen here—Putin has mostly prevailed in sparking that invented and often perverted memory, at least at home. (After his invasion of Georgia in 2008 fell flat, Putin learned the lesson of trying to spin on the cheap and he almost tripled the propaganda budget over the three years that followed. …

 

But Putin’s war in Ukraine may be testing that perceived glory more than at any time in living memory.

Glory to Ukraine!