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Professional trolls and influencers can shape online conversation in ways that are helpful to the Kremlin, and with far less effort than in the past.
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Social media is far more addictive and absorbing than the badly printed newspapers of that era, too. Perhaps there don’t need to be, because Russian state-run television, the primary source of information for most Russians, is more entertaining, more sophisticated, more stylish than programs on the crackly radios of Stalin’s era. Nowadays, less violence is required to misinform the public: There have been no mass arrests in Putin’s Russia on the scale used in Stalin’s Russia. All of this-the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder-is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history. Instead of declining, the Russian state’s ability to disguise reality from its citizens and to dehumanize its enemies has grown stronger and more powerful than ever. Official museums and monuments to the victims remain small and obscure. Memorial, the most important historical society in Russia, has been forced to close. But although the same books are theoretically still available, few people buy them. Once, we assumed that the mere telling of these stories would make it impossible for anyone to repeat them. In the late 1980s, during the period of glasnost, their books and other accounts of the Stalinist regime and the Gulag camps were best sellers in Russia. The works of Kopelev, Kravchenko, and Grossman have long been available to Russian readers who want them. Nine decades have passed since those events took place. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash”-that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. He too had found that clichés and ideological language helped him hide what he was doing, even from himself: Lev Kopelev, another Soviet writer who as a young man had served in an activist brigade in the countryside (later he spent years in the Gulag), had very similar reflections. His team spoke of the “peasant front” and the “kulak menace,” “village socialism” and “class resistance,” to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they were stealing. He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped camouflage the reality of what they were doing. “You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.” “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes-and your mind,” he explained. Years later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies-rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised. View MoreĪt the time, the activists felt no guilt. Featuring a healthy mix of gay and straight stars, notable past faces (and bodies) include Madonna, David Beckham, Tom Daley, Lady Gaga and Elton John - the list goes on and on.Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. Since 1994, over 300 celebrities and gay icons have graced the front cover of attitude. Now published and distributed worldwide, attitude offers their readers unparalleled, award-winning editorial on trending lifestyle topics including men’s fashion/style, health/fitness, travel, politics and relationships. Originally published back in May 1994, for over 20 years attitude have been the go-to bi-monthly magazine subscription for British gay men.