As Russian forces have attacked Ukraine, officials in China have met behind closed doors to study a Communist Party-produced documentary glorifying Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin as a hero.
The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, the video says, was the result of attempts by the United States to destroy its legitimacy. With soaring music and sunny scenes of present-day Moscow, the documentary praises Mr. Putin for restoring Stalin’s position as a great war leader and for renewing patriotic pride in Russia’s past.
To the world, China presents itself as a principled spectator of the war in Ukraine, taking no sides, simply seeking peace. But domestically, the Chinese Communist Party is campaigning that portrays Russia as a long-suffering victim rather than an aggressor and defends China’s strong ties to Moscow as essential.
Chinese universities have organized classes to give students a “correct understanding” of the war, often emphasizing Russia’s grievances with the West. Party newspapers have posted a series of comments blaming the United States for the conflict.
Across the country, the Communist Party has organized sessions for officials to watch and discuss the history documentary. The 101-minute video, completed last year, makes no mention of the war in Ukraine, but states that Russia is rightly concerned about neighbors breaking away from the Soviet Union. It describes Mr Putin as cleansing Russia of the political toxins that killed the Soviet Union.
“The most powerful weapon the West possesses, aside from nuclear weapons, is the methods they use in ideological struggle,” says the documentary’s stern narrator, citing a Russian scholar. The documentary was marked to be viewed internally — that is, publicly elected by party officials and not general public release — but the video and script recently surfaced online in China.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it says, “some countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Transcaucasia have become forward positions for the West to restrain and interfere with Russia.”
China’s leaders have long used the collapse of the Soviet Union as a cautionary tale, but Mr. Xi has given that story a more urgent, ominous twist. In doing so, he has embraced Mr Putin as a fellow authoritarian standing in line against Western domination, demonstrating to the Chinese people that Mr Xi has a partner in his cause.
China has refused to convict Mr Putin for the war that killed thousands of civilians. Despite pressure from other world leaders to use its influence over Moscow to help end the crisis, Beijing has done little but call for peace. And on Thursday, during talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in China, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said his country has close ties with Moscow.
The Biden administration portrayed the war as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Chinese officials are making a counter-argument that American-led dominance is the source of conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere. They view China and Russia as both threatened by “color revolution,” the party’s term for uprisings supported by Western governments. President Biden’s recent comments calling for Mr Putin’s impeachment are likely to bolster Beijing’s views.
“They actually believe their own story about color revolutions and tend to see this whole situation as a US-led color revolution to overthrow Putin,” said Christopher K. Johnson, the president of the China Strategies Group and former analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency of Chinese Politics.
“Both at home and abroad, Xi has been telling this dark story since he came to power,” Johnson said in an interview. “It allows him to justify his accumulation of power and the changes he has made by creating this sense of struggle and danger.”
The documentary shows the collapse of the Soviet Union as a lesson for Chinese officials not to be seduced by Western liberalism. China, the documentary says, should never follow the course of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet Union leader who started with glasnost, or openness, and involvement with the West.
In 2013, propaganda officials led by Xi released a documentary about the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This latest version offers an even more conspiratorial interpretation.
The documentary attributes the Soviet Union’s decline to political liberalization, especially what Beijing calls “historical nihilism,” or highlights the Communist Party’s mistakes and misdeeds. It accuses historians, who criticize the Soviet revolution, of fabricating estimated multimillion-dollar deaths for Stalin’s purges.
Stalin, he argues, was a modernizing leader whose purges went too far but were initially “a necessity” given the threats to the Soviet government. It suggests that rock music and modern fashion were symptoms of the moral decline that set in later.
“They’ve only learned one lesson from this, and that is that you don’t allow any kind of freedom of expression,” said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who studies Chinese and Soviet history, “because this kind of freedom leads inevitably leads to a loss of political control and that creates chaos.”
The documentary credits Mr Putin with restoring the spirit of Russia.
It shows Mr Putin marching in a parade marking Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany, and young Russians kissing a banner with his portrait. Earlier leaders in Moscow – especially Mr. Gorbachev and Nikita S. Khrushchev – are portrayed as fools, enchanted by the siren song of liberal reform and Western superiority.
The documentary, “Historical Nihilism and the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” was the focus of a months-long campaign targeting party officials that has continued since Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, according to reports on local government websites. Officials overseeing the screenings are often described in official announcements as calling on executives to maintain steadfast loyalty to Mr Xi.
“Keeping a party and its leader is not a cult of personality,” Zheng Keyang, a former deputy director of the party’s Central Policy Research Office and an adviser to the documentary, said in a discussion of the documentary published by a pro-party website. this month.
Chinese leaders have debated why the Soviet Union had fallen apart since its dissolution in 1991. More than his predecessors, Mr Xi has attributed the disintegration of the Soviet Union to a lack of ideological backbone and Western political subversion.
“If you have the worldview you see in this documentary, you could tell yourself the story that the Russians are facing a real threat from the West,” Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at American University in Washington who studies elite politics in China and Russia, said in an interview.
The study aims to inspire loyalty among executives for a Chinese Communist Party congress later this year, where Mr Xi appears to be claiming a third term.
Political loyalty has become more important to Mr Xi as Beijing tries to contain Covid outbreaks with strict lockdowns and manage a slowing economy. China’s foreign policy is under scrutiny after some Chinese scholars posted essays criticizing Beijing’s refusal to condemn Putin.
Many of the critical essays have been scrapped and the party has pushed harder in recent weeks to defend its position. Editorials in Communist Party newspapers have bolstered the Chinese leadership’s argument that the real culprit in Ukraine is the United States and NATO for undermining Russian security.
“It was the United States that personally lit the fuse of the current conflagration between Russia and Ukraine,” according to one of a series of editorials in the Liberation Army Daily, the military’s main newspaper.
Universities and colleges have organized indoctrination lectures for students, suggesting officials are concerned that young, educated Chinese are receptive to criticism that Beijing has been too lenient towards Mr Putin.
Liu Zuokui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told an audience of students in eastern China that the war stemmed from “NATO expansion eastwards that reduced Russia’s chances of survival,” according to an online summary by the lecture.
China, another speaker told physicists in Beijing, had to protect its strategic partnership with Russia from “intense jolts and knocks”.
The party’s demands for conformity over the crisis will make it harder for any dissent to coalesce into a pushback against Mr Xi.
“There is an attitude of ‘either we hang together or we hang apart’ attitude that comes into play,” Mr Johnson, the former CIA analyst, said of Chinese leaders. “If it’s a strong nationalist approach, who in the party wouldn’t want to be a good nationalist?”