MOSCOW — The huge banner was unfurled Friday outside one of Moscow’s biggest bookstores, Dom Knigi, on Arbat Street across from a Citibank, a Baskin-Robbins, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, and down the block from a big movie theater where the main feature at the moment is “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
“Fifth Column,” the banner declared. “Strangers Among Us.” It showed black-and-white portraits of three of Russia’s better-known political opposition figures and two Soviet-era dissident rock musicians, along with two evil-looking space aliens, one carrying a briefcase marked with the white ribbon that has been the symbol of political protests against President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
From the moment that Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea cast a new, bitter chill over relations with the West, a sinister jingoistic vibe has pervaded this unsettled capital — stirred up by state-controlled television and Putin himself.
“Some Western politicians are already threatening us not just with sanctions but also the prospect of increasingly serious problems on the domestic front,” the president said in his speech announcing plans to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation. “I would like to know what they have in mind exactly: action by a fifth column, this disparate bunch of ‘national traitors,’ or are they hoping to put us in a worsening social and economic situation so as to provoke public discontent?”
Moscow today is a proudly international city, where skateboarders in Gorky Park wear New York Yankees hats they bought on vacation in America. IPhones and iPads are nearly as common on the subway here as they are in Washington.
In the weeks since the military incursion into Crimea, however, Russian flags have been hung from the windows of apartment buildings all over the city, just as American flags appeared in profusion after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
There is also now a website with a name that translates as “traitor.net” that includes photos and quotations of public figures who have spoken out in some way against Russia’s policy toward Ukraine.
The bottom of the site has a button inviting viewers to “suggest a traitor.”
At Putin’s direction, a committee led by his chief of staff is developing a new “state policy in culture.”
Widely expected to be enacted into law, the proposed cultural policy emphasizes that “Russia is not Europe” and urges “a rejection of the principles of multiculturalism and tolerance” in favor of emphasizing Russia’s “unique state-government civilization,” according to Russian news accounts that quoted a presidential adviser.
A Russian news website, znak.com, also reported last week that a popular series of math textbooks would be dropped from an official list of recommended educational texts because it used too many non-Russian fairy tale figures and other characters in its illustrations.
“What do we see from the first pages? Gnomes, Snow White — these are representatives of a foreign-language culture,” an expert of the Russian Academy of Education, Lyubov Ulyakhina, told the site. “Here’s some monkey, Little Red Riding Hood,” Ulyakhina continued, “of 119 characters drawn here only nine are related to Russian culture. Sorry — no patriotism — this is not funny; this is our mentality.”
And last week, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned its citizens not to travel to countries that have extradition treaties with the United States, saying that the Obama administration “is trying to make a routine practice out of ‘hunting’ for Russian citizens in third countries with the goal of their subsequent extradition and conviction in the US on the basis of, as a rule, questionable charges.”
In some cases, the xenophobic language has been accompanied by an intensified crackdown on political opponents and also on some media outlets that do not strictly toe the Kremlin line.
On the same day that Russian forces initially deployed across Crimea, Alexei A. Navalny, the political opposition leader and anticorruption blogger, was placed under house arrest in connection with one of the several prosecutions that were brought against him long before he spoke out against Putin’s policies toward Ukraine.
Navalny is generally confined to his home but has also been barred from speaking in public or using the Internet or other electronic communication.
Navalny’s photo is at the top of the website listing traitors, and he was among the opposition figures pictured on the banner outside the bookstore.
A previously unknown group called Glavplakat took responsibility for the banner outside the bookstore on its website, and it promised additional street art in support of its antitraitor mission.
Boris Y. Nemtsov, a longtime political opposition leader and a former deputy prime minister under Boris N. Yeltsin, who also appeared on the banner, wrote on Facebook that the situation seemed worse than during the Cold War. “In my opinion, even the Soviet Union wasn’t like this,” Nemtsov wrote.
Nemtsov said he believed the banner was installed with Kremlin approval, given the prominent location on Arbat Street, a major thoroughfare that leads directly to Red Square and is heavily patrolled by the traffic police.
“March 2014 marks a turn in the country from authoritarianism to dictatorship,” Nemtsov said, adding, “Could you imagine a banner of the same size hanging on Dom Knigi if it said, ‘Putin get out!’ or ‘Putin stop lying!’ Can you imagine it? Of course not.”