Now that Putin has graciously accepted the public’s faith in returning him to power, let us shake out the sham. Throughout the process, anyone half-way sentient was agog at the danse macabre of the Russian election. What a lot of effort and expense. Why go to so much trouble to pretend, creating phony challengers, acting as if you need to campaign intensively, to appear on television interviews and lobby the Russian people, when they knew and you knew the entire thing was rigged? One could argue that versimilitude is important. After all, during Stalin’s show trials, prosecutors got intensely fired up, judges looked on gravely and remembered to nod, to shake their heads and look appalled at all the right moments. And this was the election equivalent of those trials: if everybody concerned knows it’s theater, including the public, it better be gratifyingly well-produced – the leader you’re voting for cares enough to make you comfortable, even proud, of the pretense.
Doubtless there’s some substantial truth to that argument, however bizarre the world it reflects. But it’s far from the whole truth, because the closer one looks the more densely convoluted grows the picture. Putin has twisted the populace into infinitely tortuous braids of complicity. Perhaps, some segments of the population needed persuading that their vote mattered, or at least enacting the process mattered as a kind of ceremony of communal bonding, all ritual with no practical effect. Astonishingly, at farflung voting centers around the country festivities and entertainment abounded to attract punters, kitsch beyond belief under the circumstances, featuring inter alia costumed welcome committees, popular singers, local heroes and celebrities – plus women were offered free gynecological services after voting, and elsewhere free groceries, lottery tickets, sausages. Government workers being forced to go en masse. Here’s a fuller list.
One could argue that with detachments of Russian opposition tanks invading from Ukraine and oil refineries bombed by drones as far as 1000 kilometers into Russian territory, Putin needed the positive propaganda of large turnouts at polling stations. Sounds plausible at first but stop a moment and scrutinize the idea. Large turnouts by people who know it’s a fraudulent exercise,,,being watched on television by people who also know? By all accounts no such pro-voting hysteria took place but even so,,,consider the idea itself. The layers need teasing out. First off, those watching get a condign lesson in the state’s power that their fellow citizens in sufficient numbers could be pushed to join the fraud. And could be pushed, as in North Korea, to show celebration, impersonate joy, when called to do so. Nobody believes any part of it, a gigantic performance piece nightmare impossible to escape. Under such conditions, stay-at-home apathy becomes a radical gesture of dissent. But not necessarily a liberating embrace of truth – because, in the end, apathy is the Kremlin’s intended outcome anyway.
Let us probe a little further – remember that since the advent of Putin, the very nature of truth, even of reality, has been under attack. Multiple TV channels spew contradictory disinformation about, say, the shoot-down of civilian airliner MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, killing all on board. First it was a Ukrainian air force, then it was pilot error, then it was Ukrainian air defenses,,,the conspiracies on Russian TV/social media multiplied. In the end, Russians gave up caring for the true explanation. Anything was possible, but ultimately none of it mattered to the addled Russian mind – the incident itself became etiolated, ungraspable, the suffering of victims’ families unreal. In the end, a strong leader to impose reality, guide the confused flock through crepuscular shadows – is all that comes to matter.
And so with this election. None of it is real and the average citizen of Yakutia doesn’t get to decide if it is, if it matters, what real means, wherein resides the truth if it exists anymore. During the Soviet years, monolithic news organs bombarded citizens with the Soviet version of events, one version of the truth, alternate to the West’s. In the Putin era, multiple opposing truths from multiple state-controlled media destroy the very idea of ‘a true version’, indeed of reality itself. And with it goes any sense of moral clarity.
And here, viewing these elections, we arrive at the extra-cynical lowest layers of induced Putin-era brain-fogging. The kitsch, risible, lurid comedy at voting centers celebrate but also slyly mock attendance, intending as much humiliation as exultation. It is a matter not just of photos of forced laughter and dancing with costumed characters but forced laughter at one’s own degradation and enslavement to power, a sort of compulsory slave-dance in clown-face, especially if you consider that a large swath of the voter-participants hail from subject nationalities and ethnic groups from Siberia to Tatarstan. Not for nothing do the Ukrainians call the meat-wave suicide attackers they face orcs, slaves, zombies. But there’s a crucial nuance: they are the product not of brainwashing so much as brain-paralyzing, befogging, creating apathy unto death.
Finally, the spectacle of electoral humiliation is intended not just for domestic consumption but also for foreign audiences, especially in the West. Here look at this, Putin is saying, look, this is your hallowed democratic legitimacy, the sacred due process, the infallible voters whose ability to choose we must apparently respect. Look at them, look at the charade, what a joke. He is making two points. One to show us how grotesque, inherently farcical and manipulable it all is. Two, that those people will soon be us, if he can manage it.