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“If you watch Russian TV on any given day, “ says Anton, 70 percent of it is global affairs, much from the U.S. “You’d think you live in the U.S., there’s so much coverage,” he says. And, since relatively few Russians travel abroad, “the coverage has credibility—which is not true about domestic affairs. And that coverage is devoted to a single theme: the model of Western liberal democracy is broken.”
Unlike the Stalinist days, Russian TV does not offer endless celebrations of a workers’ paradise. The message now is more subtle.
“The propaganda,” Anton says, is that “we’re not perfect, we’re flawed, but the West is no better.” In fact, he argues, the flood of disinformation during the U.S. presidential election was built around the idea that, since Hillary Clinton was going to win, and since she represented a much tougher approach to Moscow than Trump, it was important to undermine any claims about the moral superiority of a Clinton-led America.
“From everything we know,” Anton says, “the whole Kremlin strategy was that she was gong to win but let’s use this opportunity to show that the U.S. is broken, that there’s no real democracy there, that she won by cheating Bernie Sanders, that Trump was going to make it easier to work with Russia, but the establishment didn’t let her win.” In that sense, they argue, Trump’s victory was a priceless gift to the Kremlin.
And so, in a sense, is the growing concern in the U.S. that Russia may actually have helped determine the outcome of the election. For a nation whose people, and leadership, is still obsessed with the loss of the Soviet empire, there’s comfort in the idea that Russia is a dangerously powerful political force.
“When they see U.S. officials commenting so much on Russian influence, it’s almost flattering,” says Anton. “It’s like the people are hearing, ‘OK, you don’t have incomes, health care, good homes, but you do have a powerful leader.’”
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. When what we need is method of clearing up space debris, he gives us stuff to much much much more.
