Russian to CNN: Soviet Propaganda Never Reached Present Level of ‘Hysteria’

Appearing on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on Wednesday, The American Enterprise Institute’s Director of Russian Studies, Leon Aron, was asked for his take on the present state of anti-Western propaganda coming out of Russia. Aron said that, in a number of ways, the propaganda he is seeing today is more excessive than anything he experienced as a teenager in the Soviet Union.

“I was there in 1968, a teenager in Moscow, and I don’t recall the level of propaganda reaching this level of frenzy, and brazenness, and hysteria,” Aron said. “Now, for example, nobody used a term for forced sexual intercourse to describe U.S. policies. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin did in his speech on March 18.”

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Aron said that, in spite of the fact that Russians know their news and information is censored by the government, linking Moscow’s Western opponents to Nazism still appeals to the Russian historical memory.

Finally, Tapper asked about the images of Putin shirtless,

hunting, and playing hockey. The CNN host noted that Americans laugh at those images, but asked if they were better received by Russian audiences.

Aron said that those images are better received by Russian viewers, but that was another distinction between Putin and his Soviet predecessors. “That’s the difference with the Soviet leaders,” he said. “They cared very much whether the West laughed at them. Putin doesn’t care.”

Watch the clip below via CNN:

[photo via screengrab ]

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