Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Putin’s government clings to strategy of the Big Lie

Toledo Blade

A meteor streaked across the Russian sky and exploded over a populated area with the force of a nuclear bomb last month, injuring hundreds of people and casting the light on the world’s largest country that has failed to put anti-Americanism in the rearview mirror despite more than two decades of post-Soviet development.

Once dashboard-camera video footage of the phenomenon spread across the Internet, Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the founder and leader of Russia’s ultra-nationalist LDPR party and a former vice chairman of the lower house of the country’s legislature — announced that it was not a meteor falling but a secret U.S. weapon being tested.

A showman of Russian politics, Mr. Zhirinovsky is notorious for making outrageous public pronouncements aimed at pleasing Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter uses Mr. Zhirinovsky as a scare for those in the Russian middle class who are unhappy with the country’s systemic corruption and his autocratic regime that perpetuates it.

Unfortunately, many uneducated Russians believe Mr. Zhirinovsky and support him and Mr. Putin, bringing to mind a propaganda technique that Adolf Hitler termed the Big Lie — a lie so preposterous that people believe it to be the truth because they can’t imagine anybody making it up. According to opinion polls, close to half the Russians do not believe the United States is a friendly country.

Until recently it was not that important for us in the U.S. because the livelihood of the Russian elite depended in part on the goodwill of the West, and its leader, the United States.