Godwin's Law states that the more heated an online discussion becomes, the more likely someone will draw comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis. It appears that a similar observation can be made regarding discussions of full-scale war in Ukraine. Sooner or later someone will remember Mordor, the orcs and the Eye of Sauron.
References to this trilogy have been made by Zelensky, Ukraine's former (and then current) Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, and Russian liberals: all of whom, of course, compare the Russian government to the tyrannical regime of this fictional state. But pro-government Russian media and experts talk about Mordor especially often, ironically pointing to the supposed innate "Russophobia" of Western society.
But why exactly Mordor? And will the Russians ever be able to get rid of the comparisons with "orcs"?
For those who have forgotten, haven't read or watched, Mordor is the sinister kingdom of Sauron, the main villain in "The Lord of the Rings" by John RR Tolkien. The novel was published in 1954-1955, at the height of the Cold War. And almost immediately his interpretation as a political allegory became popular: "the free peoples" (humans, elves, and others) are the West, and Mordor and its orc inhabitants are the Eastern Bloc, led by the USSR.
Tolkien himself rejects this interpretation. Commenting on the likening of Sauron to Stalin, he wrote: "I completely reject such a reading. The plot was conceived long before the Russian Revolution. Such an allegory is completely foreign to my thought."
However, the comparison remained. Including in the USSR, where the first translation of "The Lord of the Rings" was published in 1982 - the translators have no doubt that "Mordor is a hybrid of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, this is discussed and taken for granted.
After the collapse of the USSR, the film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" of Peter Jackson in the early 2000s helped to revive this interpretation. Soon, the first jokes on the subject of Russia - Mordor and Russian orcs began to appear in thematic forums. And after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, they were already everywhere.
"I thought about this analogy for a long time," wrote journalist Leonid Bershidsky at the end of 2014. "When I worked in Kyiv in 2012, my colleagues and I joked that Ukraine was very similar to the County, the motherland of hobbits, and Putin's Russia is like Mordor, casting evil magic over a beautiful country."
Why they call Russia - Mordor
This, of course, is nothing more than an insult. But still, insults have their meaning.
Insult is the ultimate expression of alienation. It should always be noted that the insulter chooses insults as his "topic," and that says much more about him than the person he insults. Let's say that Vladimir Putin calls the West an "empire of lies" - not to stupidity, not to ugliness, not to anything, but to lying. Of the many possible binary oppositions, the most significant is "truth - falsehood".
What opposition does the insult "Mordor" suggest? Here everything is quite simple: individuality - mass character. Each of Tolkien's characters, from the hobbit Frodo to the entity representative Fangorn, is a bright personality. And the orcs are an indistinguishable mass, most of them have no character of their own, they are just mindless tools of Sauron.
In the West, the perception of Russia as a faceless mass is greatly facilitated by the nature of its media coverage. There is a very narrow circle - perhaps up to two dozen people - journalists and experts who, with their publications and comments, set the general tone of this coverage. As a rule, they are interested in Russia almost exclusively as a participant in international politics: it "wants" something, "aspires" to something, "supports" someone and "hostile" with someone. She looks like a monolith, practically synonymous with Vladimir Putin. When we talk about the US or the EU, we must always keep in mind that they consist of different interest groups. In the case of Russia (and also why not China), such groups are hardly noticeable to an outside observer.
This problem is noticed and criticized by researchers who object to the image of a faceless and monolithic Russia and argue that it actually differs from the real one. And it is necessary, like any image of the other, not to reflect the truth, but to emphasize one's own superiority.
This positioning of Russia directly affects international relations. For example, most observers (both Western and independent Russian) took the recent exchange of political prisoners as a new sign of a decisive demarcation between Russia and the West.
In particular, the West - above all in the person of US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz - has probably shown that it does not hope for changes in Russia, it no longer intends to try to influence it in any way way and sees its mission only, if possible, to save individuals from there; and that is the only legitimate reason it still has anything to do with Russia.
Can Russia stop being "Mordor"?
This is a sufficiently complicated question.
For several centuries, the image of Russia in the eyes of the Western community was built around the image of the "other", and often simply the enemy. In this regard, Putin and many of his associates like to talk about the "century-old Russophobia" in the West. You don't have to agree with the political conclusions they draw from it to recognize that there are indeed some reasons for such reasoning."
"The Other" always judged by stereotypes. In Western cinema, Russia is often portrayed as a mysterious, strange and unhappy place, and its inhabitants as alcoholics or just some savages.
Many different conclusions can be drawn from this.
We can also assume that Russia itself (and before that the USSR) does not take any action to improve the opinion of itself. To change its own image, a country can use what the American political scientist Joseph Nye calls "soft power". That is, to achieve recognition through cultural and diplomatic means: to revive tourism and educational programs, to restore channels of communication with other countries.
But for these changes to have a real effect on the perception of the country, it is important to really change the internal politics of the country, not just to "create a picture". According to Nye, it is precisely because of the lack of such genuine democratic changes that China has failed to improve its image. Despite the fact that the country actively invests in self-promotion and the number of Chinese students in foreign universities is growing, the world community does not stop paying attention to the repressions that are taking place in the country.
Russia, judging by the research of sociologists, also had chances to change its image, and only recently. The same Americans (and not only them) at the end of the last and the beginning of this century had a rather positive attitude towards Russia. The turning point came only in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea.
The Russian authorities themselves adhere to the opposite point of view. According to them, "Russophobia" is too firmly entrenched in the western heads. Try as you might, Western countries are simply not ready to let Russia into their "circle": they still need the "image of the enemy".
Putin uses this narrative as a justification for his every action. Since 2010 of the last century "Russophobia" is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion among Russian officials and Putin himself. Under the auspices of the "fight against Russophobia" repressive laws are introduced and wars are started. But according to the logic of the authorities, this does not particularly strengthen the negative attitude towards Russia abroad: they say, what does it matter, they will still condemn our every decision.
The reality is probably somewhere in between. The American political scientist Alexander Wendt argues that the image of states is formed through social interactions, a kind of mutual construction. And Western politicians really profit from the "negative" image of Russia. American scientist Peter Brooks believes that too many people interpret human history as an eternal struggle between good and evil.
In this sense, it is difficult for the West to abandon the existing image of Russia, woven into books, films, politicians' speeches and history textbooks. But not impossible. True, this seems to require more than just democratic reforms.
We will have to reinvent and "sell" a new historical role for Russia in the world. Such an image with which people can replace the previous role of "enemy". As Simon Anholt, an independent policy advisor on nation branding, notes, the purpose of rebranding is not to "please" to someone. The only significant question, according to the expert, is "what can Russia do to gain new importance?"
PS: One of the attempts to make sense of the events of "The Lord of the Rings" from the point of view of "real politics" was made by the Russian writer Kirill Eskov. In 1999, he published the novel "The Last Ring Bearer". Eskow proceeds from the premise that Tolkien's text does not present events objectively, but presents the history of the world from the point of view of the victorious peoples. Eskov's Mordor is a technologically advanced country that managed to survive thanks to the efforts of scientists in the conditions of a climatic catastrophe that turned the country's territory into a desert. Orcs and trolls are simply a people of miners and nomads whose image has been demonized by Gondor and its allies. And the western states themselves are essentially feudal kingdoms resisting the industrial revolution and falling under the influence of the conservative western elves.