RIA Novosti published an article under the heading "The media reported on the" strange "Putin's popularity in Germany." It says :
“There is a high level of support for Russia and its President Vladimir Putin in Germany and Austria,” columnist Gerhard Lechner wrote in the Wiener Zeitung newspaper . According to him, the impression that the Germans unanimously support Ukraine is misleading - Moscow has an impressive number of supporters.
“But why this strange benevolence towards Putin and Russia, which is especially great in the German-speaking space? Of course, Putin impresses the right with criticism of ultra-liberal gender policies, and the left with anti-NATO rhetoric,” Lechner said.
Among the population of Germany and Austria, discontent is brewing due to the consequences of economic sanctions, the observer added. “Rising inflation, looming gas shortages and outrageous prices are dampening enthusiasm for Ukraine. It comes to the point that many see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an instigator of the conflict, which hinders the establishment of peace, ”the publication says.”
Quotes from the article are generally translated correctly, although the author is interested in the favorable attitude of the Germans not to Putin, but to Russia in general. By the way, he writes specifically about the Germans, the article was published under the heading "Germany", and the Austrians are mentioned in it only once, and even then in passing. The attitude of Germans towards Putin is more likely evidenced by the results of a survey published in Focus in March: 72% of respondents expressed a negative attitude towards Russia, and 82% towards Putin.
But the explanation of the sympathy of some Germans for Russia, which is given by an Austrian journalist, for some reason did not fit into the RIA material. We fill this gap and give a few more detailed quotes.
“Supposedly, February 24, the day the Russian army launched a frontal offensive into Ukraine, changed everything. The EU, which has rarely been united in its relationship with Russia before, is suddenly more united than ever. He introduced harsh sanctions, began to accept refugees, supply weapons. Even Germany has distanced itself from its state pacifism. Since then, the Ukrainian flag has been ubiquitous, giving the impression that the West is united against the military policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But a quick look at the Internet shows that this impression is deceptive. Governments can decide what they want, but the population is increasingly dissatisfied. The comment section under the articles on the war shows that Putin has significant support in this country even after February 24th. Rising inflation, the threat of gas shortages and horrendous prices are dampening enthusiasm for Ukraine. So much so that the warmonger, the person who interferes with peace, is considered by many not Putin, but Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. If the former actor Zelensky is not at all called a puppet in the hands of the “real mastermind of the war”, US President Joe Biden.
And those who speak or write like that are not necessarily Russians. Among my Russian acquaintances living in Vienna <…> many were shocked by the beginning of the war. The tendency to romanticize Putin's kleptocratic mafia regime, to see it, for example, as a promising conservative antithesis to decaying Europe, is often much less pronounced among them than among some Austrians or Germans.
But where does this peculiar benevolence towards Putin and Russia come from, which is especially strong in German-speaking countries? Of course, Putin has been scoring points on the right for years with his opposition to ultra-liberal gender politics, and on the (old) left with anti-NATO rhetoric.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to explain the support of the Russian president: the still vivid traumas of the Second World War - deportations, rapes, imprisonment in the Gulag - do not contribute much to close relations with Russia. What followed was a long cold war that kept the old fears of danger from the East alive. The threat from the Soviet Union has always existed. Of the two superpowers, the western one, the US, was clearly the more popular: it offered freedom instead of communism and laid the foundation for post-war prosperity with the Marshall Plan. <…>
Nevertheless, there has always been a sentimental inclination towards Russia, especially in Germany. The gigantic empire in the East was foreign and mysterious enough to inspire fantasy and arouse an interest that, for example, never existed in relation to its closer neighbor, Poland. <…>
Eastern European historian Gerd Koenen, who has written a book about the German "Russia complex", speaks of a "mixture of fear and fascination, sympathetic acceptance and phobic defense", of "hidden fantasies of power and options for an alliance on the Berlin-Moscow axis", which are almost never could be fully realized, but, nevertheless, occupied the minds. <…>
The Treaty of Rapallo, concluded 100 years ago between Weimar Germany and the newly formed Soviet Union, in addition to mutual recognition, had a strategic revisionist component. An agreement was reached on secret military cooperation, which continued until the autumn of 1933. There was a rapid rapprochement: during evening talks on maneuvers, Könen writes in a recent article, senior officers of the Reichswehr and the Red Army, for example, were in full agreement that "Poland, as a stronghold of the Versailles powers in Eastern Europe, must be erased from the map, which must also be cleared on a large scale in other respects,” long before the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Even among the National Socialists in the 1920s there was a Russophile wing that was impressed not only by the depth of the Russian soul, but also by the brutal anti-bourgeois radicalism of the Bolsheviks. To this wing, in particular, belonged the young Joseph Goebbels, who was at first repulsed by Hitler's plans to create an "Eastern space". <…>
The resistance of Western modernity also existed in this country [Germany], and not only in the Romantic period. Even before the First World War, there was talk of a deep German soul and culture that surpassed the flat, superficial, mercantile, sterile, materialistic Western civilization and could bring salvation to the world. After the war, youth movements such as Wandervögel preached a return to nature, anthroposophical circles arose, and people looked for a natural image in the "noble savage" as opposed to the corrupt civilization of money. Such desires were not far from anti-Semitic conclusions. <…>
Most of these alternative concepts have gone down in history. However, the sentiment behind them has not completely died out in this country. For example, the dislike for the United States, which can develop surprisingly quickly in some people, is a legacy of the anti-modernist and anti-Western sentiments of the past. It is also striking that skepticism about science and modernity always resonates particularly well in the German-speaking world, whether it is opposition to nuclear and genetic engineering, organic agriculture, opposition to vaccination or alternative treatments. There are widespread fears - in many cases not unfounded - that out-of-control technological development will destroy the remaining untouched nature and deprive people of the air they need to breathe. Here, more than abroad, they are afraid of freedom, too market economy. <…>
Modern Germany has always been two-faced like Janus: a long sleepy and backward "belated nation", it broke into the forefront of technological progress after uniting around Prussia. At the same time, however, there has always been a whole body of critics of this development, and it is the criticism of technology that has reached a high level in Germany. The widespread search for a life close to nature has also led some to turn to Russia, a country that has always seen itself as an alternative to the West. The fact that the Bolsheviks were in power there, who wanted to take Western technological development to the extreme, did not bother them: somewhere the old Russia, Dostoevsky's Russia, which would still say a redeeming word to the world, must have dozed off.
Despite all of Germany's ties to the West, the bridges with Russia have not been completely destroyed - for example, there is a strong bias towards Moscow in the ranks of the New Right. Conversely, the controversial Russian Eurasian ideologue Alexander Dugin also draws heavily on Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and the thinkers of the German “conservative revolution” of the 1920s. The cement that holds this coalition together today is still the rejection of Western modernity. However one feels about this rejection, one thing must be clear: there is still room for anti-modernist sentiment in this country.”
So there is nothing particularly pleasant for the Kremlin regime in Lechner’s article: he sees in sympathy for Moscow the manifestation of the same anti-Western tendencies of rejection of progress and the modern world as a whole, which at one time led Germany to the greatest catastrophe in its history.
