Modern Hell #11: Russia Is Cancelled

Russia is entering an informational black hole. What will come out the other side?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

At Yale’s school of management, you’ll find a list of – at writing – over 300 companies that have either suspended their operations in Russia, otherwise limited their engagement in the country, or actively made it difficult for Russia/Russians to be part of the global market. The most recent major pull-out was McDonald’s, which suspended its operations on Tuesday.

Of all the western corporations to leave Russia, it’s one of the most symbolic. When the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow in February 1990 (at that time the world’s largest, with seating for 700), it was hailed as emblematic of the west’s superiority. The New York Times even quoted Stanislav Kondrashev, a business analyst for Izvestia, the official news horn of the Communist Party, as opining that the McDonald’s was “the expression of America’s rationalism and pragmatism toward food.”

From the Times:

''The contrast with our own unrealized pretensions is both sad and challenging,’' [Kondrashev] wrote on the front page, recalling old Kremlin vows to commercially bury the West's cola industry with Russian kvass and its pasta craze with stuffed Siberian pelmeni. ''All that has turned to sand,'' he rued.

The speed at which this list of companies grew over the last two weeks is reflective of the speed that most decisions are being made these days. The economic rug is being pulled out from under Russia – as is a broader social and geopolitical one, as much as possible.

Over at the Times on Wednesday, Spencer Bokat-Lindell asked whether the corporate exits and a wider campaign to punish other, high-profile Russians (athletes, artists, etc.) can “alter the course of the war? Or are these historic gestures that risk stigmatizing an entire population for the crimes of one autocrat?”

When it comes to the businesses, it’s not entirely clear whether corporations are playing offence or defence. Do they see their Russian withdrawals as genuinely part of a global effort to win the war? Or are they actually concerned that if they don’t do something, they’ll lose business where it probably matters way more: in their respective domestic markets where annoyed customers can launch personal boycotts against inaction? Maybe it’s a combination of both, though more likely the latter.

But the other question – that of what happens to Russians – is more complex and worrisome. Clearly there are a lot of Russians who are aware of what’s happening and are aware that the corporate and cultural sanctions/backlash are an expression of global moral outrage. Tens of thousands of Russians have reportedly been arrested for protesting the war.

Others in Russia see it differently. Before most western journalists fled the country, there were plenty of anecdotal admissions of support for Russia’s invasion – and in those cases, the justification fit the line of government propaganda.

“I’m against the war. But to be honest, it’s been a long time coming,” a man named Yuri, 49, told EuroNews. “The problem is not with Ukraine, but with those Anglo-Saxons who are creeping upon us. Just look at what happened to countries they’ve got into, like Syria. And now they’re trying to get at us (create internal strife) via Ukraine. Therefore, I think all of this is justified and right.”

A new poll from the independent Russian pollster, the Levada-Center, suggests Yuri’s (incorrect) opinion is hardly unique – 60% of respondents said they felt the U.S. and NATO countries are the instigators of the escalation in Ukraine.

As of Wednesday, the ruble was worth less than one U.S. cent. There’ve been reports of runs on the banks in Russia. Now companies are deserting the country, a pariah state filled with newly-pariah people.

Russian inconvenience pales by obviously incomparable margins to the inhumane suffering in Ukraine, where the Russian military continues its horrific and unjustified campaign. Yet how many Russians, constantly inundated with lies, will properly relate their worthless paycheques to their nation’s responsibility for a criminal war? How many of them will see these sanctions the way we do? How many of them even can?

If perhaps as many as 60% of Russians, like Yuri, unquestionably absorbed state propaganda at a time when foreign sources – via YouTube or Facebook or otherwise – were, by and large, still available to counter it, what happens now when all those sources have been cut off, either by Russia or as part of proactive western corporate cancellation? You can’t know what you can’t know.

“Our whole population was brought to the edge of the nuclear abyss without knowing about it, without having an opportunity to understand why – for just what reason! this extraordinary situation had arisen,” Stanislav Kondrashev, the Russian journalist who praised McDonald’s in the Times, wrote a few weeks later in Izvestia, recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis. “From an objective standpoint, it is quite possible to call this deception of the people or, in any event, total disregard for their right to know things… At the time, however, there was no talk about a right.”

Vladimir Putin, this neo-Stalinist thug crouched at his long tables, feels the same – that Russians ought to be deceived, that there is no right to know. Now, cut off from the world, that deception will only increase. His lies will become everyone’s reality. His enemies will become everyone’s monsters. I don’t know what comes out of that in the long run for us all, but I would guess nothing good.

Update:

I woke this morning to find The Atlantic had published this piece that speaks directly to the problem.

“In Russia’s version of the war, Russians are liberators, Ukrainians are Nazis, and the West is full of mendacious hypocrites. To turn on Russian TV news is to enter a parallel universe,” Olga Khazan writes, watching Russia’s Channel One. “And Russians, with dwindling news options, tend to buy what their government and its media allies are selling. Russians with Ukrainian relatives buy it…The alternative—that the invasion is not justified, that Russians are the aggressors—is too horrific to entertain.”