In recent days, the phrase “winter is coming” has been haunting me. That is partly because, like millions of others, I have started watching House of the Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones, which had these ominous words as its tagline.
But there is a second reason. I recently watched a video on YouTube that aims to persuade English-speaking viewers to move to Putin’s Russia because, well, “winter is coming”. The 53-second film makes its pitch by highlighting the alleged attractions of Putin’s country. “Delicious cuisine, beautiful women, cheap gas, rich history, fertile soil, cheap electricity, ballet, cheap taxi,” a voice solemnly notes as images, including several of beautiful women, flash past.
That’s not all. Traditional values, Christianity, “no cancel culture” and vodka are all trumpeted, along with an “economy that can withstand thousands of sanctions”. The bizarre video triumphantly concludes that it’s time to move to Russia without delay. It might just be a jokey reference to Game of Thrones, but it has also been interpreted as a thinly veiled threat. Get out now and move to Russia, it seems to say, before Moscow targets the west in some way in the coming months.
The video is remarkable for more than brazen poor taste (the image accompanying the words “Russian literature” is of Nikolai Gogol, the 19th-century Ukrainian-Russian writer). My first instinct was that it must be a parody, yet its promotion on social media by several Russian embassies suggests otherwise. There is no official explanation from Moscow, though a fact-checking website run by Voice of America, the US state-funded broadcaster, says that a pro-Russian Telegram channel has taken credit for producing the video.
Apart from trolling the rest of the world, does this exercise have a point? There is little evidence that the video will work in the sense of luring westerners to Russia. Few Americans are likely to follow the path of the Hollywood film star Steven Seagal, who has noisily embraced Russian citizenship and recently visited a bombed prisoner-of-war camp in a Russian-held area of eastern Ukraine to demonstrate his support for Putin’s invasion.
It’s highly unlikely that this is the intention anyway. The clip’s true significance probably lies more in what it tells us about Russia’s enthusiastic use of propaganda in a divided digital world. Whoever created it seemed to intuit that the best way to “sell” the message is to tap into the cultural landscape of the US far-right. The eulogising of “traditional”, “Christian” values and “no cancel culture” is precisely what Fox News host Tucker Carlson celebrates each night on TV. (And Carlson, it should be noted, has often expressed pro-Russian views.)
Meanwhile, the emphasis on Russia’s bountiful supply of “beautiful women” seems designed to tap into the fact that many members of far-right online forums such as 8kun (formerly 8chan) are supporters of the anti-feminist “incel” movement that takes its name from the phrase “involuntary celibates”, which was adopted by men who struggled to attract the opposite sex.
The other reason the video has haunted me is that it is a potent, if exceptionally curious, example of how the internet fuels the cross-border movement of cultural memes. This is not just a 21st-century phenomenon: ideas and cultural symbols have always moved between different groups as a result of trade, war or marriage. If, for example, you travel through the lands on the ancient Asian Silk Road, you will find similar-sounding words for items such as “tea”, “table”, “salt” and “sugar” in different languages, because merchants moved across borders. Cultures rarely exist like sealed, static Tupperware boxes but are in motion, like rivers, with fresh streams flowing in.
But while this cross-border cultural movement used to happen fairly slowly, it is growing exponentially on the internet. Today our lives are connected by a digital Silk Road. This is a cyber realm that has numerous echo chambers and tribal splits. But sometimes memes jump between tribes, and in unpredictable ways. After “winter is coming” was first made popular by Game of Thrones, for example, the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov used it as the title of his anti-Putin book in 2015. Now, ironically, a pro-Putin propaganda video has grabbed it, but this has already sparked a video response spoofing the original “Move to Russia” clip. No doubt there will be many more cultural collisions and contagions. It is one sign, if you like, of how interconnected our world has become, even as ugly nationalism rises in Russia and elsewhere.
Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett and email her at gillian.tett@ft.com
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first
