As Putin lays out his vision, voters turn their eyes away from the war
Vladimir V. Putin’s vision of Russia – successful, innovative and borderless – is on display at one of Moscow’s biggest tourist attractions, a Stalin-era exhibition center that currently houses a sleek display called Russia 2024. The exhibition promotes what the Kremlin portrays as Russia’s achievements over the past two decades, roughly the period Putin has been in power, and his promises for the future after he secured a new six-year term in rubber-stamp elections this weekend.
The exhibition is in many ways a microcosm of a country whose people are largely averting their gaze – at least publicly – from the great and bloody war in Ukraine that Mr Putin started more than two years ago.
The centerpiece is a large hall with pavilions containing all Russian regions, including five illegally annexed regions from Ukraine. Visitors to one pavilion are greeted by two LED screens attached to robotic arms that display tulip fields portraying the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, as calm and peaceful.
This is increasingly at odds with the reality of regular air raid sirens deadly Ukrainian missile and drone attacks in the city, including one on Thursday that killed two people and injured 19.
At the Crimea pavilion, crowds of visitors pose with men dressed as Roman legionnaires next to a video boasting about the bridge connecting the peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014, to the Russian mainland. There is no mention of the Ukrainian attack in 2022 that blew a hole in the bridge, or of the multiple threats that led to the closure of the bridge for hours.
It is a cognitive dissonance that many Russians have adopted in celebrating the motherland and accepting the government’s triumphant narrative – even as Mr Putin has become a pariah in much of the Western world, domestic prices are rising and the economy is suffering Russian military a staggering number of casualties in the Western world. Ukraine.
“People have spent these two years in this strange state where you basically have to choose to ignore a great tragedy,” said Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist and researcher at Princeton University. “Most people understand what’s going on, but they still have to act like nothing’s going on. This is a deeply traumatic experience.”
Neither the war nor the recently annexed Ukrainian territories were mentioned by visitors to the expo who were recently contacted by a New York Times journalist.
“It may not be a masterpiece, but it showed Russia as it is,” said Maria, a 42-year-old water purification engineer, who attended the exhibition with her colleague Elena, 63. Both women were exuberant about what they saw, but were hesitant to share their full names with a foreign journalist for fear of reprisals.
Mr Putin has visited the exhibition four times, and his presence is evident throughout the quotes displayed in many of the pavilions.
“Russia’s borders end nowhere,” read a quote from the exhibition about the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine. On a recent afternoon, a woman posed for the quote, flexing her biceps as a man photographed her.
With Russia’s electoral apparatus controlled by the Kremlin, Mr Putin is confident he will be declared the landslide winner over three other candidates in the voting that starts on Friday and ends on Sunday evening. Putin, who has been in power since 1999, will become Russia’s longest-serving leader since Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century if he completes his term.
The vote comes as the Russians are winning on the battlefield, while support for Ukraine in the United States is declining. Mr Putin has adopted a tone of confidence of late, reassuring Russians that life will be normal, while taking an increasingly hostile stance towards the West, which he portrays as a threat to the survival of Russia.
The exhibition Russia 2024 is part of what leaked Kremlin documents obtained by Delfi, an Estonian news channel, speak of a domestic ‘information war’, the budget of which is at least $690 million.
The documents, shared with The Times and other news organizations, reveal extensive spending on media and film projects aimed at building support for the war, known in Russia as the “special military operation,” and the occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine.
For now, the Kremlin’s “information war” appears to be paying off. Attendees expressed awe and joy at the exhibition, a sign that the selective view of Russia put forward by the Kremlin two years after its massive invasion of Ukraine continues to appeal to many ordinary citizens.
Last month, 75 percent of respondents in a poll by the independent Levada Center said the country is moving in the right direction — more than at any time since the question was first asked in 1996.
Another Levada poll found that fewer than one in five Russians “believe they have the power to change” in their country. Yet most Russians “still believe they live in a democracy,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Moscow.
One of the few reminders of Russia’s 2024 war was a pavilion that linked two of the Kremlin’s main policy priorities: the militarization of society and “patriotic education” for school-age youth.
“The Army for Children” welcomed children with cartoon animals in uniform. Children were invited to practice piloting state-of-the-art drones, sit in a virtual reality flight simulator and play a video game called Counter-Strike.
Nationally, the Kremlin has tried to turn both the trauma and drama of the war into opportunity. Military parades and school programs featuring war veterans are organized to enhance national pride and patriotic spirit.
Mr Putin has pledged to prioritize servicemen and women, announcing a new program called “Time of Heroes” in his annual State-of-the-Union address last month. The goal is to give veterans and soldiers the opportunity to be part of a “special workforce training program” for developing professionals.
As Russia reorients its economy to serve the war effort, the Kremlin is “creating a new middle class,” said Carnegie analyst Kolesnikov.
Still, Russians remain concerned about the war, said Mr. Yudin, the Princeton sociologist. It’s an uncertainty that strangely tends to draw voters to Putin.
“There is fear about what will happen if we don’t win: we will be humiliated, everyone will be persecuted, we will have to pay huge reparations – and essentially be under foreign control,” Mr Yudin said. “These fears are fueled by Putin, who has also positioned himself as the only one who can end the war.”
That’s in large part because the Kremlin has suppressed every candidate who has called for an end to the war. One of them, Yekaterina Duntsova, a former TV presenter, was disqualified from the end of last year. Boris B. Nadezhdin, another anti-war candidate, collected more than 100,000 expressions of support but was disqualified due to what the election commission called “irregularities.”
The vote this weekend will also take place without any independent supervision; The country’s main election monitoring group, Golos, has been designated a “foreign agent” by the Justice Ministry and its co-founder, Grigory Melkonyants, has been jailed.
Putin’s biggest rival, opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, died under mysterious circumstances on February 16 in a penal colony in the Arctic.
His grave on the outskirts of Moscow has become a place of pilgrimage for an estimated tens of thousands of Russians who chose his vision of the “beautiful Russia of the future” over Putin’s war, mobilization and nuclear threats.
Many anti-war Russians, both at home and in exile abroad, are unsure whether to participate in sham elections that are neither free nor fair.
Before his death, Mr Navalny called on opposition-minded people to go to their polling stations at noon on Sunday to protest. The turnout will be the first test of his legacy and of the anger and momentum that has built up since his funeral – whether the desire to protest outweighs the fear of reprisals.
On Thursday, the Moscow prosecutor’s office warned that the protests were illegal and that organizing or participating in them would be considered acts punishable by up to five years in prison.
Back at the Russia 2024 exhibition, Elena, the water treatment engineer, said she was ambivalent about voting. “Maybe I’ll vote, because things are going really well now,” she said, before quickly stopping herself.
“But of course we hope that this will all end well,” she said in an indirect reference to the war. “People really want this to stop.”