We said last week that Russian TV commentators are coarse and coarse, intoxicating the masses. They stand in front of the camera and launch primitive, Dantesque, hair-raising slogans against the Ukrainians. They are very clumsy, old and outdated ‘agitprop’ systems. Now in ‘The Sixth Key’ Rodrigo Blazquez it has taught us that they are also using other more effective and refined methods.
And it has shown us the image that the television networks controlled by Putin, of which large posters have also been printed and pasted on walls and fences throughout Moscow and Saint Petersburg: it is the picture of a grandmother, apparently a pro-Russian Ukrainian from Donbass, waving a flag of the former USSR. This Babushka Z, as the Kremlin has baptized it, is a much more penetrating propaganda tool than the apocalyptic death rattles of a television presenter standing in front of the camera claiming the “mass sterilization of Ukrainians”.
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There is a classic text, by the sociologist Gustave LeBon, ‘Psychology of the masses’ (reissued in 2014 by Editorial Morata), where it is described how well the emotional factor works when used to manipulate the masses. A grandmother, humble, fragile, lonely, placed in some devastated place and waving a flag with her hands, achieves a simply colossal impact on the soul of viewers. This technique of penetrating the masses also works very well with children. In 1937, the then head of the Commissariat de Propaganda of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Jaume Miravitlles, He ordered the creation of a figurine of a boy with a flag and a raised fist, which was called El més petit de tots. It was established as a symbol of the anti-fascist struggle of popular Catalanism. It was extraordinarily successful. He cost three pesetas. Thousands of copies were sold. It also had a peculiarity: the flag was interchangeable, to suit the buyer. It could be with the ‘quatribarrada’ flag, with the red and black anarchist, with the communist, with the republican…
oh! If this Babushka had the interchangeable flag, it could be used, indistinctly, as pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian. The emotional impact would be identical on the audience of the networks on both sides. oh! The flags, those painted pieces of cloth.