Two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is an ongoing debate in Russian society about how to deal with it. And if the arguments of the opponents of the war basically come down to the fact that the decision to send troops to a neighboring country was criminal and immoral, those who support the “special operation” justify it in different ways. Someone remembers how “NATO bombed Yugoslavia”, others say that the war could not be avoided, but no one knows the truth about it anyway, and still others ask questions like “where were you for eight years while people were dying in Donbass” .

About what phrases the Russians are trying to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and where these phrases come from, the BBC spoke with Alexandra Arkhipova, social anthropologist, author of the telegram channel ” (Not) entertaining anthropology “.

BBC BBC: Why did you decide to study the arguments that people use to somehow rationalize the war in Ukraine? In your post, you call them justificatory-defensive clichés.

Alexandra Arkhipova: People don’t just talk about the world around them and their attitude towards it – they create their own world. That is why now in the speech of people, both oral and online, there are so many identical phrases. We call them cliches – for example, “not everything is so simple.”

The repetition of these clichés allows you to create the feeling that there are many people who think the same way. And when people want to join the majority (and this is a feature of a person – we all really want to feel like part of a group), they begin to use clichés in their speech, which, according to them, the majority speaks. At the same time, of course, a native speaker may not feel these phrases as a cliché.

Therefore, my colleague from America, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, and I have compiled a dictionary of clichés from Russian conversations about the war, which are repeated many times – at least a thousand times. The rest we discard as irrelevant – we do not consider them clichés.

Now I’m not talking about the clichés that express the anti-war position – there are also many of them. For example, despite all the repressions and persecution under article [20.3.3 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation], the number of people who write “no war” and “I am against war” in Russian social networks is unusually high. In our work, we collect clichés that seem to defend or justify the very fact of war. No matter how disgusting it may sound, it is important for us to understand how an exculpatory “Russian speech world” is created.

BBC BBC: How is your search?

AA: We find a certain number of statements, then we look at which phrases are repeated, then I literally start a search for variants of this phrase. For example, “do you feel sorry for the children of Donbass?” Or another option: “Don’t you feel sorry for the children of Donbass?”

Then I look at how many texts fall on such a cliché, and I already evaluate their popularity.

My colleague and I divided these clichés into four main blocks. There is a block, which we conditionally call “And in America, blacks are lynched.” It includes such statements as “Biden unleashed the war”, “America bombed Yugoslavia”, “Mariupol is in the flying time of NATO missiles”, “if not for us, there would have been more victims of the war”, “where have you been for eight years? ”

Our language is our main traitor. It gives out our basic settings. And from these clichés it follows that America is considered the main enemy, and not Ukraine at all. This partially removes the wild paradox according to which, on the one hand, many Russians support the war, the “special operation” in Ukraine, and on the other hand, they consider Ukrainians to be a brotherly people.

BBC : This kind of argumentation is often also called “ Watebautism “ ) . This is a popular tool of Russian propaganda: for example, Vladimir Putin, when asked about torture in prisons in Russia, says that “there are no less problems in other countries.” Why is this argument so prevalent in Russian culture?

AA: Because it is much easier to point out the enemy than to explain one’s own actions. This mobilizes, this is a technique that relieves you of responsibility and demonizes the enemy. In a sense, this is the rhetoric of a small child.

When the child is asked why he hit Petya, he says: “And Petya started first.” “Why did you steal in kindergarten?” “Because everyone steals.”

When a child is not ready to talk about his own responsibility for what is happening, he refers to the current state of affairs, in which there are strong people who do the same, and he is in solidarity with them.

So it is here: in response to any question, we are pointed out that somewhere else is even worse.

BBC BBC: What other blocks have you identified with a colleague?

AA: The next block is “My country, right or wrong”. “I justify Russia, no matter what she does.” These include quotes by actor Sergei Bodrov that “during the war you can’t talk badly about your own”, it’s “we don’t abandon our own”, “Russia does not start wars, but ends them”, “Russia always saves everyone”, “we are just historically do not like”.

These are statements in which we either idealize Russia or admit that there are problems, but we must be loyal subjects.

The third group I call “I am a small person.” These are arguments in the spirit of “we are required to sit quietly”, “what can we do”, “we are small people, they know what to do”, “they are not fools sitting upstairs, they know what they are talking about”, “nothing from us does not depend”.

BBC: Why are these types of clichés so common?

AA: Russia is very apolitical, and it became so as a result of a conscious process of maintaining political “learned helplessness”. We have done everything so that a person does not take any active political actions – and preferably not even go to the polls, but rather go to the dacha instead of them. In a situation of war, this position of non-intervention (“what can we do?”) must somehow be justified. And the position of non-intervention is justified by underestimating one’s own importance and destroying subjectivity, if you like: “we are small people.”

That is, the position can be expressed by referring to the messianic role of Russia and the a priori hostile West, when a person says: “We are simply not loved historically, Biden will attack us tomorrow” (these are aggressive clichés). Or, on the contrary, you can downplay your influence and portray yourself as a being who cannot influence anything, and thus relieve yourself of guilt. Blame for bombing Mariupol, for the murders in Bucha. After all, he “cannot influence anything.”

BBC BBC: What is the fourth group of clichés that you identified?

AA: I call the fourth group “Post-truth” or “Refutation of facts”. These include arguments like “no one knows the whole truth”, “time will tell who was right”, “history will put everything in its place”, “they bomb themselves” and so on.

BBC BBC: Journalists in their work with this category most often encountered. Don’t you think that it exists, among other things, due to the fact that during these month and a half of the war the meaning of the word “fake” has been devalued and that is how any unpleasant information is now denoted?

AA: At the beginning of this year, we wrote an article called “Ministry of Truth” – about state projects on fact-checking. The state has taken the word “fake” into service, many Kremlin channels use exactly the same logic to “check” fakes: “It’s fake, because Ministry X said differently.”

In reality, no fact-checking is done. It is absolutely true that the word “fake” has devalued. The word “fake” now refers to any information that does not coincide with the official one.

This trend appeared not now, but in 2020. We now have five fake news laws. In 2020, I often said that these are very scary articles, but everyone was pretty cool about it. But in fact, the development of this trend has led to what we have now.

My colleagues and I studied about 350 cases of people who were punished under criminal and administrative articles in 2020-2021 for “fakes” related to covid. And it is absolutely clear that more than 75% of cases have nothing to do with what we call fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories. There are few such cases.

75% of administrative and criminal cases for “fake news” about covid are statements that denigrate the activities of local institutions or that express doubt about the actions of the authorities. For example, the case in Irkutsk about a message on Viber in the spirit: “Girls, don’t go to work, I heard that the head physician fell ill with covid and goes to work, but they don’t tell us.” That is, as if the authorities hide information and allow infection.

People were blamed when they doubted the decisions of the authorities or the ability to cope with covid. That is, already then a norm was developed according to which information that is incorrect from the point of view of power structures is called fake.

Now this trend is developing right before our eyes (we are also creating such a database). On March 4, Administrative Law 20.3.3 was adopted. about discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation, and as a result, more than 850 people were fined at least for a poster, a verbal phrase, a badge on a bag, blue jeans and a yellow jacket, for holding a blank sheet of paper, an Orwell book, and for “no war” on the profile picture.

At the same time, there is a twin article – a criminal article on fakes about the Russian army (207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), which continues the development of the logic of punishment for a fake from 2020. We now have 32 criminal cases in our database under the new article for “fake” about the armed forces and “special operation” that were opened over the past month. It’s a lot.

On hearing the case of the artist Sasha Skolichenko from St. Petersburg, who is accused of creating counter-messages – in the store, next to the price tags, she placed information about the death of people in Mariupol. But the majority of criminal cases under this article about “fakes” are arranged in the same way – these are attempts to break through the information blockade. These are publications of videos from Mariupol, stories about the crimes of Russian soldiers, support for Ukraine, anti-war statements. These are all considered “fake”.

BBC BBC: But this can not but influence the minds of people? Because if the border of “fake” is so blurry, then how can you really tell where the truth is? Even reflective people can find it difficult to understand.

AA: Yes, and in fact, in this case, the government refuses to win-win situations. Because either the person who is being bombarded with information does not believe and considers the murders in Bucha to be fake. Or he simply despairs of finding out and says that “we will never know the whole truth,” and withdraws from the analysis. And then the official point of view also wins.

That is, the task is not reduced only to making people believe in one point of view or another. For example, we now know that the truth is conditionally “A”. The task of Russian propaganda is not only to make us believe that the truth is “B”, but also to make people withdraw from the process and not believe in either “A” or “B”. It’s also great for power.

BBC: Why do the clichés we’re talking about even form and appeal to so many people now?

А.А.: The general effect we are talking about now is called collective avoidance – collective avoidance. He is widely known. Collective avoidance occurs when people are confronted with information that threatens to destroy the unity of the group.

I just read a fascinating study, extremely far from Russia. Imagine: a small Norwegian village, where everyone used to go skiing, skating, to admire the cold Norwegian winter. But here comes global warming. Many winters in a row there is no or almost no snow, almost no ice is formed. At the same time, the entire village unanimously denies global warming.

And when you talk to the residents, they reluctantly admit that there is no snow and it is very warm. But the fact of global warming and that this is some kind of ecological process that has been going on for a long time, they deny. Some of them are leaning towards the idea that this is a conspiracy.

Why? This is due to the fact that the whole identity of this village is built on how cool they are, how great they survived the difficult Norwegian winters, how they suffered as children clearing the houses of snow, how they were freezing when they went to school. And for them, the recognition of the fact of global warming means that the factor that can unite them will no longer exist and they will fall apart as a group. Therefore, they deny this fact in every possible way.

In our case, the very recognition of the fact of war – not just some pinpoint strikes, but large-scale ground operations in which not some individual militants are killed, but civilians are massacred – threatens some integrity of Russian society. Therefore, Russian society is fighting this as much as it can.

BBC BBC: And why didn’t all those attitudes with which generations grew up against this “collective avoidance” that you speak of: “ peace peace” , “if only there was no war”, “war is the worst what could be?”

AA: The fear of war is indeed very strong in Russia. This is even the damned opinion polls show – the same VTsIOM or the Levada Center (it has the status of a “foreign agent” in Russia. – BBC ).

But war in the Russian view is what comes to your doorstep. This is when your father goes to fight, when foreign soldiers come to the house, when the hut is burned down, when children are under threat, when famine sets in. This is war.

And now people take a comfortable position for themselves, which the official Russian point of view tells them, and support the clichés that we are talking about.

Moreover, if their relatives, friends, children send them photographs of bombed-out houses, photographs from Bucha, then the acceptance of this fact will come into conflict with what they say from blue TV screens. And in this case, there is a big threat of cognitive dissonance.

Human beings generally strive for conformity. It is the opposite of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance blocks your behavior, you do not know where to run and what to do, because you have two very contradictory pictures of the world in your head. And you don’t know how to behave.

Therefore, the human brain is ready to do everything to avoid this dissonance. Especially the brain of a conformist person – and the Russian population as a whole is very conformal.

As a result, the brain repels uncomfortable information – for example, that people are actually being killed in Ukraine. The reverse situation may also be possible: a person is completely immersed in the war taking place in Ukraine, and he will repel any facts about mercy.

BBC: Let’s explain what conformity is.

AA: Conformity is a person’s tendency to identify with the opinions of others, with those whom he considers a significant majority. A conforming person will never say, “I’m against it.” He will agree with what others say, even if he internally thinks that they are wrong.

An experiment was recently conducted here, which delighted me. The authors of the article recruited people to survey people who support Vladimir Putin and asked them how they feel about him.

But the wording for different groups was different – one group was simply asked about their attitude towards Putin, another group received a question with a preamble that two-thirds of citizens support Putin, and a third with a preamble that only two-thirds of citizens support Putin. As a result, among those who received the wording “only”, the level of support for Putin fell.

Let me put it this way: in authoritarian regimes, such as, for example, the Russian one, the authorities are trying in every possible way to wean people from expressing their political opinion. This is replaced by a ritual, ceremonial component, which carries no real choice.

But this has interesting implications. They lie in the fact that in such regimes, people who have unlearned to take political action express preferences not on the basis of any real preferences, but on the basis of their association with the majority.

If the majority believes that they support the president, then I will say that I will support the president. And if I see that not so many people support the president, then maybe I won’t either.

That is, I am sure that at the moment when the political situation in Russia changes dramatically, a huge number of people will appear who will say that they never supported the Russian authorities in 2022. There will be a huge number of people who “have always been against it.”

In the bottom line, this is an important property – a person feels the need to identify with the majority. It’s not even a question of direct security – they say that they stand over you and scare you with a baton, although sometimes that too. But it gives some feeling that it is so right. This is what you are used to.

BBC: In our conversation about conspiracy theories about vaccination, you said that people in Russia in general are much more willing to believe who is nearby – for example, the conditional “neighbor’s sister “ than institutions and the same state. Russia and Ukraine have a huge number of social ties. But now Russians often do not believe even their own children or close relatives who tell them about the horrors of war, but they believe what they say on TV. Why is this happening?

AA: This is really happening. And this is contrary to what we know. It’s really strange: why a year ago Russians referred to “Marya Ivanovna, whose neighbor’s sister died from vaccination”, but today this mechanism works exactly the opposite and we don’t believe what our close friends and relatives told us?

There is one very important thing here. When a person says that a vaccine is dangerous because “the neighbor’s sister told how the girl died from the vaccine,” in reality, he already has an established point of view. The story about the neighbor’s sister is just an invented outward confirmation of what the person believes. He understands that if he says that he “just thinks so”, he will be stoned. That is, an imaginary majority is needed, with which a person is in solidarity and whose voice he becomes.

But in the situation of war that we are now discussing, the fear of cognitive dissonance seems to be much stronger – even than family ties. People resist with all their might and say, “That’s not true.”

There are many such stories. I have now made friends with the mother of a wonderful artist, her family ran away from Kharkov. The husband stayed there. And they are in despair, because the husband’s parents, who are in Crimea, do not believe them. They say: “Nothing, you will be released soon, you will be patient.”

That is, we see the opposite effect: here the imaginary majority with whom these parents want to identify are those who believe that there is no war, but there is some kind of pinpoint unpleasant operation in the Donbass. And in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, the brain discards any other information – including from relatives.

BBC BBC: Are there any positive examples of resistance to this majority?

AA: Culture is able to develop mechanisms for protecting society even in a situation that seems absolutely hopeless to us. They come from where they often did not expect. For example, I’m talking about the explosion of anti-war graffiti. Graffiti is probably too narrow a word. I’m talking about all kinds of inscriptions in public spaces.

People leave a huge number of inscriptions on the entrances, in elevators, at bus stops, on bulletin boards. They are persecuted for this, now there are quite a lot of criminal and administrative cases on graffiti. But still not as many as these inscriptions themselves.

This morning I spoke with the girl who made such graffiti. These people have a great desire to break through the information blockade. It is clear that such inscriptions will not be able to stop the war, the killing of people right now. But they are able to break through the blockade.

It is very important to show people that there is no imaginary majority. This is a semiotic war, a war of signs against him. It is important that the word “war” be present in the public space of people and the blockade be broken. So that a person can see that many people leave such inscriptions, and understand that there are many people who do not agree with the “party policy”. This is an attempt to explain to the imaginary majority that in reality it is not such a majority.

Pay attention to the action, brilliant in its idea, when anti-war slogans are inserted into the price tag windows. We know that six people were punished for this in different cities, and they could not detain someone else. This is a way to break through the signal in the space controlled by the state: the old woman Marya Petrovna bends down to study the price tag for sugar, and there is information about those killed in Mariupol.

BBC BBC: Your personal position on the war in Ukraine affects you as a scientist and influences your research, what do you think?

AA: I perceive myself a little as a sewer. This is a skill that the anthropologist-folklorist develops in himself. We are accustomed, smiling sweetly, to work with texts that are disgusting in content.

But we have another problem in the scientific sphere that worries me a lot. I am saddened by the isolation of my colleagues. They are terribly worried, but they lock themselves in their work and try to pretend that nothing is happening. They choose a position of silent disagreement.

Does my positional opposition affect my scientific research? Well, with a good life in an ideal world, I probably would not have done such a study. Let those who are absolutely neutral do it.

But where can you find such neutral people now to undertake this research? If I don’t collect the graffiti database now, who will collect it? Or the database on cases of detainees under Article 20.3.3 (public actions aimed at discrediting the armed forces) and 207.3 (“fakes” about the armed forces), which we collect with a colleague?

This is really a very big problem.

To keep getting BBC news, subscribe to our channels:

Download our application: