Is Russian Civil Society Dead? - FT: Russia’s Unlikely Media Revolutionary

Photo Credit: Financial Times

I had written (Is Russian Civil Society Dead?) that the tendency to authoritarian government prevents Russian civil society from confronting its own history as evident from the absence of introspection and atonement for past societal crimes; that Russia has not faced the truth about its brutal past, and this enables Putin’s crimes and his war on Ukraine.

In a Financial Times interview, Natalia Sindeyeva, head of Russia’s former independent news service, TVRain, makes the same argument on a more personal level.  She argues in a similar vein that Russia's problems go beyond Putin.  She "thinks the problem has deeper roots in Russia's failure to hold a truth and reconciliation process in the way Germany did after the second world war...'We didn't get together as a country, as a society, to recognise the mistakes that were made.  It all went unsaid.'"

Sindeyeva continues on social values--what I described as the basis for liberty--during the transition from communism to capitalism, “…if you move from communism to capitalism, it doesn’t mean you can start making money.  There are values—private property, human life, freedom of speech, free elections…we didn’t have a big discussion as a society about how it happened in our country…we didn’t set those values.”  

Sindeyeva describes the personal complicity that I quoted Axio's Dave Lawler on, "It's not just collective guilt but collective complicity.  What Putin's done is smear everyone, so you become part of it even without doing anything."  She describes the "cognitive dissonance" of complicity; "You can't imagine that your government, which you believed in, could have done something like that.  You start convincing yourself and everyone around you that it's all lies and you know the truth..."At some point you have to convince yourself, because otherwise you just lose your mind."

Read Sindeyeva FT's interview.  It makes tangible on a personal level what I described in historic terms that Russian society is going through in the manufactured reality of a criminal Russian authoritarian government.