Staunton, March 16 — In scathing terms, Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina denounces the ways in which the Putin regime has promoted Russian national pride in order to conceal the way in which those near the throne are stealing the country blind and to suppress any concerns about human rights and individual dignity.
In a commentary in Moskovsky Komsomolets, the Moscow commentator says that those who “are ashamed of the present and fear the future” take refuge in being “proud of the past. Moreover,” she continues, “not being in a position to change their own lives, they destroy others.”
And Aleksandrova-Zorina says, “in Russia, the people have been separated from the state,” whose “narrow ruling class treats the resources of the country as if they owned them and the state budget as their personal money bag.”
The only way to maintain this is to promote national pride in place of dignity and war instead of the struggle for individual rights.
“Why have people in Russia so easily forgotten that the Ukrainians are a fraternal people?” she asks. The reason is that “today it doesn’t matter who one hates.” It is only important that one does because those who hate others won’t pay attention to the ways in which they and their rights are being suppressed.
The “ideological triad” in Russia today is “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Television,” Aleksandrova-Zorina says, all of it devoted to promoting unquestioning loyalty to “us” by playing up hatred of “them.”
The former includes patriots, Putin, and Russia’s “special path;” the latter includes them, national traitors, Europe and America, and the rotting West.
That in turn has involved “a witch hunt” for liberals and foreign agents, who just happen to be found “exclusively in the opposition,” even though the regime itself is carrying out “to their logical conclusion,” the liberal reforms begun in the 1990s, leaving the country with destroyed industry, educational system and medical system.
The Russian people are told to hold America and “the fifth column” responsible for all of this. But “where is America — in the Kremlin? Is ‘the fifth column’ in the government?” she asks rhetorically. But the regime knows what it is doing, the more “external” enemies Russians believe in, then the “more strongly” they “unite around the oligarchic higher ups.”