Three Little Words of Truth

“Здесь Вам врут” (zdyes’ Vam vrut: “here they lie to you”) — one of five antiwar slogans displayed by producer Marina Ovsyannikova on her hand-written sign on Russian Channel One, one of Putin’s chief video propaganda organs.

Russian is not an economical language. In most cases, the English translation of something in Russian is more compact, in both letters and syllables.

But not in this case. Here the Russian beats the English by twelve letters to sixteen, three syllables (and words) to five. In the long run, this three-syllable slogan may become as important to humanity’s survival as the better-known three little words “I love you.”

What mattered more than their pithiness was courage of the woman displaying them. Ms. Ovsyannikova is (or was) a producer on Russia’s Channel One, one of Russia’s few TV elite.

Already she’s been fined the equivalent of about $280. But she could lose her job and prestigious career. Unless she has a high-level protector, she could spend up to fifteen years in prison for daring to call Russia’s current atrocity in Ukraine a “war” rather than a “special military operation,” the dictator’s Orwellian phrase. In the teeth of all these threats, she refused to recant after being arrested. She’s a real heroine.

Her hand-lettered sign said it all, well and briefly:

“NO WAR” (In English)
“STOP THE WAR” (In Russian)
“DON’T BELIEVE THE PROPAGANDA” (In Russian)
“HERE THEY LIE TO YOU” (In Russian)
“RUSSIANS AGAINST WAR” (In English)

The great English novelist and prophet George Orwell knew that words matter, that truth matters. In his classic novel 1984, he predicted the advent of “Newspeak”—not far from today’s “spin.” He also penned these fictional Party slogans: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.”

Such a seer was Orwell that his fictional slogans would have served Vladimir Grozny well. As in Orwell’s fiction, Putin tries to achieve internal stability and “peace” in Russia by making war on its neighbors. He tries to convince his people that free elections, free markets and free speech will make them slaves to the West. He acts as if he believes that ignorance of his gratuitous butchery of civilians in Ukraine will make his people strong and unified. He is the consummate spook: his whole career has been based on lies, deception and violence in the shadows. He is Orwell’s Big Brother come to life.

But we in the West must never conflate the Russian people with Putin, his spooks or his oligarchs. The Russian people are victims, not perpetrators. This includes many of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, some of whom never knew where they were headed until their tanks and troop carriers crossed the Ukrainian border. (Then some deserted.) They are all hapless tools of a system that has not changed much since the days of Ivan the Terrible (“Ivan Grozny”) and that has kept repeating its human depredations through Lenin, Stalin and now Vladimir Grozny. Communism was never much more than a false intellectual gloss on a continuing tradition of brutal autocracy.

That’s what’s so remarkable about Marina Ovsyannikova. In the midst of the latest version of oppressive Russian autocracy, and with the entire machinery of Russian state oppression arrayed against her, she stood up and honored the truth. She shows what all Russians could be if given the chance.

The late, great South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu also knew. After Apartheid had ended, he named his vehicle for achieving national racial harmony the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” (Emphasis added.) He understood that there can be no justice and no peace without truth. From the Nuremberg Trials accounting for the Holocaust, through Archbishop Tutu’s seminal work, to the still-incomplete apologies of Turks for the Armenian Genocide and Japanese for the Rape of Nanking, the truth is a precondition for understanding, for justice and for peace.

So we in the West must value, honor and nurture truth-tellers. If they flee, we must accept them as refugees. We must feed and house them and educate their children. And we must trust them to pipe their truth back into their sorry countries, through friends, family, distant relatives and (when possible) the media.

The Russian people are not our enemies. Nor are they enemies of the West. The self-sustaining Russian autocracy is, and so is Vladimir Grozny, as its current dictator. The good-hearted, if often inebriated, Boris Yeltsin, who picked him out of obscurity, could never have foreseen what he would become. Now The West, the Russian people, Ukrainians and we Americans all have a common interest in seeing him gone. And the Russian people, first and foremost, are the best (and perhaps the only) ones to make that happen.


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