Mastering Margarita

And we know why. They mustn’t miss out on a chance to spew bile. They need to out-Herod Herod. For if you say something peaceful — by mistake, of course — then what’s the point of you? I think they must watch their fellow propagandists before going on air and then attempt to outdo them in their vitriol as they threaten the enemies of Russia and Putin with ever more terrible retribution.

I’m interested in whether the propagandists actually believe what they say. Not all of it, of course. They treat people with contempt and assume the plebs will lap up any old nonsense — witness the absurd story that did the rounds in 2014 about the Russian boy who was crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk.

What is sincere, however, is the nastiness in which they revel, as is their belief in brute force and lawlessness and their contempt for intellect and human freedom. Even in the now seemingly idyllic interregnum of Dmitry Medvedev’s reign, for which his slogan “freedom is better than no freedom” is now a leitmotif, Solovyov was already dreaming out loud of restoring the Stalinist military counter-intelligence organisation SMERSH and heading up that august body to restore order in Russia. He wasn’t joking.

In recent days, though, Margarita Simonyan has taken a clear lead against her fellow ghouls. No-one else had even come close to suggesting that detonating a nuclear bomb over Siberia was a good idea. A couple of days after making her absurd comments on her own TV show, she was given the honour of asking the tsar of all the Russians himself a question at the Valdai Discussion Club.

While there was never any doubt about the fact in Simonyan’s case, if Putin meets you, it at least means you’re not in his bad books. The buzz around her words had hardly abated when the emperor himself spoke of Russia’s possible return to nuclear testing. Had she second-guessed the situation, did she know he was going to talk about Russia’s nuclear deterrent and decided to get in there first, or was she just obeying orders?

As well as cynicism and the ability to assert that black is white without batting an eyelid, there is another element to the propagandist worldview, especially in Simonyan’s case. During her recent TV appearance to promote nuclear apocalypse, she joked that a global catastrophe was necessary for her children, who for some reason aren’t allowed gadgets, to no longer feel deprived, as no-one else would have them either. But gadgets are the least of it. Simonyan et al yearn for an imaginary past, for antiquity.

What could make more sense? Progress, after all, is Russia’s enemy. Progress involves reducing a person’s dependence on resources. For example, no-one in developed countries still heats their homes with wood unless it’s for atmospheric effect. But how would forestry magnates react to Russia abandoning wood and transitioning to oil? Definitely not enthusiastically. Every advance in technology — cars using less petrol, energy-saving light bulbs — could be seen as a blow to Russia’s wealth and influence.

Likewise, technological progress in warfare detracts from Russia’s only combat advantage, namely the ability to send hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised people to the slaughter.

Quite simply, Russia’s rulers do not want progress. They just aren’t comfortable in the modern world, a place where they have never commanded any respect. You can dress a monkey up however you like, but people can still see that it’s a monkey. Russia’s leaders are strangers to modern times, and their propagandist loud-hailers know this and duly glorify a fictional version of the past.