One night, while I was delaying sleep and scouring the Internet for something that might sedate my mind, I found a video of Russian President Vladimir Putin giving a speech.
If you go and find the same video, or any of its kind, you will notice something. No, it is not how he uses emotional pulls that are utterly devoid of proper logic to pull his audience in — although that is telling in its own right — rather it is what happens after the speech, when the audience begins to applaud. At first it looks and sounds like any applause at the end of any rousing political speech filled to bursting with rousing nationalistic fervor. The clapping is erratic, nothing more than white noise. Yet, wait a moment, and the sound begins to alter ever so slightly. The sea of hands change pace, motion and feeling. It becomes more deliberate, more unified, and if you listen closely you can no longer hear the white noise that typically comes with a rousing applause. Instead, you hear a pulsating noise, the sound of a mass moving as one. You hear the sound of a disciplined mob falling into step with itself.
Over the last decade and a half that Putin has been in power, the Russian Federation has evolved (or devolved) into a nation that has been made, and continues to be made, in the image of the old USSR. Gone are the chaotic days of Russia’s experimentation with its new-found freedom in the early 1990s. While the Putin government may claim that the Russian state is a free democracy, the reality of the Russian Federation could not be further from the truth. Almost every news organization in the country is controlled directly by the Kremlin, and they continuously spout forth nothing but nationalistic fervor — largely devoid of all fact and reason — into the airways and through the presses. The free press has been virtually eliminated, by fear or by anonymous contract killings. The legislature has lost a considerable amount of political sway. It currently counts a present porn star and a former tennis champion among its ranks, making it more akin to a regularly meeting theater troupe than anything resembling a competent parliament. This has been a theme in Russia, where celebrity has come to outweigh substance. Even as the economy falls apart around him, Putin’s approval rating has soared because he has given the Russian people an enemy to fight against. Patriotism is currency, and those in power, and those who desire it, crave the glory days of the USSR.
I know many Russians — to some I can count myself as a friend — and I can say with limited certainty that the Russian people are as good, kind and curious as any on this earth. We must never forget that the people of a nation and a nation’s government are not one and the same, especially when the government in question is as rigid as the government of Putin. Yet a people can be silenced, so long as a government is willing. The Russian government is willing and certainly able.
The Russian people are being forced to fall into step behind the government just as they were during World War II and just as they were on the hottest days of the Cold War. Their government sees the Western world as the enemy at the gate and as the great threat to the Motherland. All who question the line and the dogma are portrayed as little more than saboteurs.
Public and open debate — the very foundation of democracy and freedom — has left Russia, and soon, if nothing is done to impede this flight, the capacity for reasoned individual thought surely will follow it out the door. For a nation that possesses enough firepower to destroy our Earth a hundred times, this is no small thing.
—Written by C.R. Jones III, fourth-year political science and history student