Let us dispense with pleasantries. The Kremlin, we are told, has mastered the image. Vladimir Putin is the strongman astride a horse, the judo champion, the shirtless fisherman of Siberia.
This is presented as a revelation, as though the use of propaganda were a modern invention. The Romans deified their emperors, the Tudors painted flattering portraits, and the Soviets airbrushed Trotsky out of history. Putin’s team is merely continuing a tradition as old as power itself.
What stings, what truly rankles the Western intellectual class, is that it works. We, children of the Enlightenment, are supposed to be immune to such crude manipulations. Yet here we are, watching a former KGB colonel outflank us with a carefully curated Instagram feed.
The real scandal is not the propaganda. The scandal is our own decadence: we have forgotten how our own empires were built on similar fictions. Every time a European leader poses with a hard hat at a factory, they are crafting a myth.
The difference is that Western myths have grown anaemic, too self-aware to be believed. Putin’s myth, by contrast, is lusty, primitive, and effective. It appeals to a yearning for a lost age of certainty.
We tut-tut about his ‘exposed’ propaganda, but we do not ask why it resonates. Because resonance requires a receptive audience. And an audience that feels its own identity slipping will always turn to a strongman who promises to restore it.
The Russian people are not fools; they are choosing a narrative of strength over a narrative of decline. Until the West offers a compelling vision of its own, we will continue to lose the battle of images, not because Putin is a master, but because we have surrendered our own capacity for myth-making. The tragedy is that we have convinced ourselves we are above it.
