Russian State TV replaces entertainment with war propaganda
The hysteria on Russian state TV has reached a new level.
“Europe, you need to understand one thing: you will get a nuclear war! Yes – there will be a nuclear war,” screamed a commentator into the camera of the state Rossiya-1 channel this week.
Millions would have tuned in to hear the rant, in which Sergey Mikheev, a political scientist, argued that the West is preparing for a big war and is leaving Russia no choice but to go with the nuclear attack option.
Rants like Mikheev’s are easy to dismiss but Carl Bildt, former Swedish foreign minister, argues that we can no longer afford to ignore what is happening on Russian television.
Historian Timothy Garton Ash agrees. Paying attention to what goes out on Russian TV and what is being said to the domestic audience, he argues, is key to understanding the scale and nature of the threat that Putin poses to the world.
The Russian army is looking weak and humiliated in Ukraine, but at home the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has been put on steroids: independent channels have been shut down and main state television channels have replaced (link in Russian) all entertainment programming with political talk shows for the “duration of the military operation.”
Having banned the use of the word “war” in relation to Ukraine, Russian television is pumping out an unprecedented amount of war propaganda, all in the name of “denazification” — and not only of Ukraine.
“Brave Poles, there will be nothing left of your Warsaw in 30 seconds,” Mikheev screamed into cameras. A couple of days later, an editorial in Pravda called for “denazification” of the “hyena of Europe”: Poland.
“Of course, we have to be careful with extreme comparisons with Adolf Hitler, but for the first time I am comfortable making it,” Garton Ash told me. “If you had read Mein Kampf and taken it seriously, you would have been warned.”
FOOTSOLDIERS OF RUSSKIY MIR
But is Russian State TV Vladimir Putin’s Mein Kampf?
The concept of a "Russkiy Mir" (the Russian world) is the closest thing that Vladimir Putin has to an ideology. Sergey Mikheev, who is now calling for nuclear war with Europe, has been proselytizing it for years.
For most people in the West, Mikheev is a little known figure, dwarfed by the A-list propagandists like Margarita Simonyan, Vladimir Solovyov and Dmitry Kiselyov, who have spent years spewing hatred of the West at millions of Russians. But it is people like Mikheev, the footsoldiers in Putin’s propaganda army, that the Kremlin has relied on to push the messages of “Russkiy Mir.”