Alexander Mitrofanov explains the Russian mentality of a certain psychological complex. He is not only talking about the issue of the current popularity of the Stalinist regime, but also that this system of propaganda and thinking is actively promoted by the current political system of the Russian Federation (the Kremlin). It is interesting how skillfully the Kremlin can psychologically use people's poverty to its advantage. The essence of propaganda practically revolves only around weapons:
Gennady Gudkov is a former senior KGB officer. Today, however, he has been actively involved against Vladimir Putin's regime to the extent that he was the only one to be expelled from the ranks of MPs and thrown out of parliament by a vote of the overwhelming Putin majority of MPs.
Former senior KGB officer Gennady Gudkov commented as follows on propaganda in Russia, how the Kremlin exploits a weak spot in the Russian mentality (2016):
The first is the complex of the monarch, the complex of a superpower, when a person… "let me be alone, naked and poor, as long as I am a citizen of a great country that the whole world fears". This gives him satisfaction. A person cannot just suffer. He needs to get something in return. And so he gets the superpower complex. They trample him into the ground, he is hunted, but he is still a citizen of a superpower. This works subconsciously.
The second complex is even worse, it's a psychological… or maybe rather psychiatric one – it's an inferiority complex that every normal teenager suffers from, and when they overcome it, they grow up. We are a nation that suffers from an inferiority complex.
What can we give the world today, other than the threat of a "nuclear club" and turning people into "radioactive ash," as Dmitry Kiselyov said? We can't build a functioning economy, modern factories, we can't build such ships, we can't put our country in order, we can't clean up the dump we've turned our great country into – but we'll give it to them, we'll force them to fear us! We'd like to see our Iskanders not be able to destroy everything.
If we cannot command respect, we will command fear. It is the complex of a failure, or a child from a poor family who sees the wealth of their neighbors. What will they do? They will start to quietly hate the successful, successful people, successful families, successful nations or states. These two complexes today influence the success of propaganda more than any technological methods. These are the Kiselevs and Kurginyans and the like.
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Stanislav Belkovsky on the well-thought-out psychological nature of Russian propaganda:
The laws of total propaganda still work very well today with both mass and individual consciousness, because they necessarily assume the existence of a mortal enemy. There may be several smaller enemies, but there is only one mortal enemy – in our case, it is undoubtedly the USA. And the presentation of the existing reality as a lesser evil compared to the great evil that would arise in the event of the victory of the mortal enemy, which we must prevent. The technological level of today's total propaganda is disproportionately higher than, say, in the Soviet Union of the 1980s.
Source of information:
http://tapolitika.cz/ze-sveta/ruska-mozaika/ring-volny-televize-versus-lednice-prvni-cast/
(This is part of the transcript of a Russian radio show / program)