Day: April 5, 2015

Ayder Muzhdabaev: To the Fourteen Percent

To the Fourteen Percent
Ayder Muzhdabaev
April 4, 2015
echo.msk.ru
facebook.com

Governments, international organization, and concerned citizens in different countries have been protesting against the increasing discrimination against the Crimean Tatars. They have demanded an end to the crackdown. Only in one country have no such protests been heard.

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Guess what country?

For more than a year, its citizens have pretended not to notice that their government has been behaving towards the Crimean Tatars along the lines of the Third Reich, having cast this people in the role of collective outcast. Moreover, it is not only officials and supporters of the regime who have behaved this way, but its opponents as well.

“Opposition,” “intelligentsia”: it is no longer possible to write these words in Russian without quotation marks. In this entire country of 140 million people you will hardly find ten people who have spoken out publicly in defense of the Crimean Tatars. Almost all my Moscow “friends” have been silent as well. When I appealed specifically to them here on Facebook, telling them in detail about the plight of the Crimean Tatars in Crimea, I got zero likes and zero reposts from those whom I had imagined as my addressees.

It is worth pondering this situation and evaluating it on its merits.

An entire people have been made second-class citizens in their country. People have been deprived of the chance to listen to the radio and watch TV in their own language, and children cannot even watch cartoons in this language! People are intimidated. Some of them have disappeared without a trace, others are in prison. The rest simply sit at home crying from fear, a sense of injustice, and despair. No one can be punished (at least not yet) for expressing sympathy with the Crimean Tatars. So why has the cat got your tongue, citizens?

It is just that no one really cares at all.

I think that even if the Crimean Tatars are shipped from Crimea in cattle wagons, as they were in 1944, I will read two or three posts about it in Russian on Facebook, amidst an account of sluts at a bar and snapshots of beloved doggies.

It is because of this, and not for some other reason, that I do not believe this country can essentially change for the better.

The damned eighty-six percent are to blame for everything? Is that right?

Look who is talking, fourteen percent.

Ayder Muzhdabaev is deputy chief editor of Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. Image courtesy of Ukraine Today

Spiral of Silence

spiral-of-silence-communication-theory

Greg Yudin
Facebook
April 3, 2015

Let me tell you a story about opinion polls.

The so-called spiral of silence has often been recalled recently in Russia in connection with public opinion polls. The idea behind the spiral of silence is simple. As soon as an opinion is conveyed either in the media or those selfsame surveys as having support from the majority, the minority, out of fear, prefers either to keep silent or join the majority. The idea has been used to explain where unanimous opinions, 86% ratings, total approval, etc., come from. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the “godmother” of public opinion polling in post-war Germany, coined the term “spiral of silence” in 1980. And so in Russia, it is usually argued that the spiral of silence is an inherent feature of public opinion, because it was discovered in Germany, a proper bourgeois country.

We know that Noelle-Neumann was a Nazi. She did not join the party per se, but she did head a branch of a party student organization, made a considerable stir in the US by actively promoting Nazism, and later worked for two years at Goebbels’s weekly newspaper Das Reich.

But that is not so important. Many people suffered from Nazi fever, including social scientists. What is more interesting is that while many of those people somehow reflected on their Nazi experiences, trying in different ways to explain what had led them to do the things they did, Noelle-Neumann went into total denial. All her life, she maintained that she had done nothing extraordinary, that Hitler was a charming man, and that she had just been forced to denounce Jews, and in fact, she had secretly opposed the regime. It is easy to see how she opposed it if you take a gander at the articles she wrote for Das Reich. It is as if a columnist for the current incarnation of Izvestia would say that he had secretly been fighting for peace and harmony in Russia.

Subsequently, the spiral of silence theory was repeatedly tested, and it turned out that it works poorly in multipolar societies. If it explains anything at all, however, it explains the personal experience of Noelle-Neumann herself. It is her own fear that she identifies with the intimidated majority. She tries to justify this fear by arguing that the spiral of silence is something ordinary and inevitable. But this is a bad excuse, because, in order to save her conscience, she justifies political repression, not only past repression but future repression. It is one thing to recognize that no normal person is immune from becoming a beast, and quite another thing to say it is a normal thing when people turn into animals.

In fact, as far back as her 1940 dissertation (which simultaneously functioned as a report to Goebbels’s office on American attitudes to Germany), she writes directly about the difference between the US and the Third Reich.

“In Germany, public opinion figures like the body of the people, which receives orders from the head and ensures their implementation. […] In one case, public opinion holds sway. In others, it is guided.”

All this came to mind after the stunning lecture last week by my colleague Grigory Kertman from the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM). Kertman spoke about the fear of respondents during interviews. It cannot be measured directly. You cannot ask respondents, “Are you afraid of me right now?” But Kertman cleverly got around this by collecting information from the interviewers who conduct the polls. He discovered that they are used to the fact that respondents are afraid: this is the most common cause of insincere responses. A significant part of the interview takes place in circumstances where the respondent’s fear is so strong that it is palpable to the interviewers.

This silence of the lambs is abnormal, and it has nothing to do with the “nature of public opinion.” The insatiable desire to pass human beings off as naturally cowardly creatures and justify those who systematically bully them always comes from those who themselves have been victims of violence. Nothing good will come of it. We definitely do not want to go where this spiral would lead us.

Greg Yudin is a research fellow and lecturer at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Translated by the Russian Reader. See my previous posts on Russia’s pollocracy. Image courtesy of masscommunicationtalk.com