Chinese propaganda is rampant on the fediverse. We need to discuss ways to combat this. One group- memes or something is wholly controlled by Chinese state actors. What do you think?
Chinese propaganda is rampant on the fediverse. We need to discuss ways to combat this. One group- memes or something is wholly controlled by Chinese state actors. What do you think?
A rise in party membership in the CPRF does indeed suggest that they are growing, and further establishing legitimacy. National election results in war-time aren’t a major indicator of popularity of the CPRF. Further, no, the nationalists are not creating soviet sympathies, but trying to take advantage of them. Capitalism has been devestating for Russia, and people yearn for the old days when their needs were better taken care of. The nationalists are appealing to that and trying to turn it into Russian pride.
The idea that the nationalists are just beaming sympathies to the heads of the citizenry, rather than the citizenry longing for a working system after the devastation of cspitalism and the nationalists are trying to take advantage of that, is absurd. That’s not how propaganda works, you have to identify actually felt beliefs and leverage them.
If you look at just about any country anywhere, you’ll find that party membership does not really correlate with election success, but rather with more radical beliefs or activism. The national election results of the CPRF had been on a downward trend well before the war broke out as well. Their membership may have increased, but electorally they lost about 70% support. Even in wartime that’s hard to ignore.
I also don’t think you’ve been paying attention to what the propaganda efforts of the Kremlin have been putting out. As a result, you have cause and effect reversed. They’ve been boosting national pride through the “great history of Russia”, which inevitably means highlighting the Soviet Union and the great patriotic war. But the Soviet sympathies created through it are a side-effect of this.
This also explains why polling suggests that sympathies for the Soviet Union mostly (not fully) consist of cultural and military pride. Yet sympathies for the Soviet economic system is low in comparison. It’s also heavily influenced by current geopolitics. Ukraine used to be the most pro-communist member state, but these days the majority no longer regrets its dissolution. In East-Germany, there’s a significant chunk of people who believe life was better in the GDR, yet that effectively translates into nationalist support for parties like the AfD (who of course are fascist, not communist). In Hungary, a large majority believe they were better off under communism than they are now, yet a large majority of 70% supports the move to a market economy. Uzbeks believe the Soviet government better responded to their needs, yet only a tiny minority believe life was actually better in the USSR.
But this is all largely besides the original point, which is that the graphic showing the Soviet referendum results is used in a misleading narrative that suggests people did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve, as that wasn’t on the ballot and subsequent referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence and dissolution. And as election results in former Soviet states prove, support for a return to communism or a more socialist system is fairly low, despite a complicated nostalgia for the Soviet Union in some member states.