Vladimir V. Putin’s vision of Russia — successful, innovative and borderless — is on display at one of Moscow’s biggest tourist attractions, a Stalin-era exhibition center that now houses a sleek showcase called Russia 2024. The exhibition promotes what the Kremlin presents as Russia’s achievements over the past two decades, roughly the time Mr. Putin has been in power, and his promises for the future after securing another six-year term in elections this weekend.
The report is in many ways a microcosm of a country whose people – at least publicly – are averting their gaze from the long and bloody war in Ukraine that Mr Putin started more than two years ago.
The centerpiece is a large hall housing pavilions of all Russian regions, including five illegally annexed by Ukraine. Visitors to a booth are greeted by two LED screens showing fields of tulips depicting the region of Belgorod, bordering Ukraine, as calm and peaceful.
That is increasingly at odds with the reality of regular air raid sirens and deadly Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on the city, including one on Thursday that killed two people and wounded 19.
At the Crimea pavilion, throngs of visitors pose with men dressed as Roman legionnaires next to a video boasting of the bridge linking the peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014, to the Russian mainland. There is no mention of the 2022 Ukrainian attack that blew a hole in the bridge, nor the frequent threats that lead to the bridge being closed for hours at a time.
It’s a cognitive dissonance that many Russians have embraced, celebrating the motherland and buying into the government’s triumphant narrative — even as Mr. Putin has become a pariah in much of the Western world, domestic prices are rising and the Russian military is undergoing a stunning number of casualties Ukraine.
“People spent these two years in this strange situation where you basically have to choose to ignore a great tragedy,” said Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist and researcher at Princeton University. “Most people understand what’s going on, but they still pretend nothing is happening. This is a deeply traumatic experience.”
Neither the war nor the newly annexed Ukrainian territories were mentioned by exhibition visitors approached by a New York Times reporter on a recent visit.
“Maybe it’s not a masterpiece, but it showed Russia exactly as it is,” said Maria, a 42-year-old water drainage engineer who attended the exhibition with her colleague Elena, 63. they were reluctant to share their names with a foreign journalist for fear of retaliation.
Mr Putin has visited the fair four times and his presence is everywhere in quotes displayed on many of the stands.
“Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere,” read a passage in the report on the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine. On a recent afternoon, a woman posed in front of the squad, flexing her biceps as a man photographed her.
With Russia’s election machinery controlled by the Kremlin, Mr Putin has been assured of being declared a landslide winner over three other candidates in the vote which begins on Friday and ends on Sunday night. Already in power since 1999, if he serves his term to completion, Mr Putin will become the longest-serving Russian leader since Empress Catherine the Great in 1700.
The vote comes as the Russians are gaining ground amid declining support for Ukraine in the United States. Mr Putin has recently adopted a tone of confidence, reassuring Russians that life will be normal, while taking an increasingly antagonistic stance towards the West, which he sees as a threat to Russia’s very existence.
The Russia 2024 report is part of what leaked Kremlin documents obtained by Delfi, an Estonian news agency, refer to as a domestic “information war” whose budget is at least $690 million.
The documents, released to the Times and other news organizations, reveal extensive spending on media and film projects aimed at supporting the war, known in Russia as a “special military operation,” and its seizure of parts of eastern Ukraine.
For now, the Kremlin’s “information warfare” appears to be paying dividends. Attendees expressed awe and joy at the exhibition, a sign that the selective vision of Russia pushed by the Kremlin two years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is still rallying many ordinary citizens.
Last month, in a poll by the independent Levada Center, 75 percent of respondents said the country was moving in the right direction — more than at any time since the question was first asked in 1996.
Another Levada poll found that fewer than one in five Russians “believe they have the power to change anything” in their country. But most Russians “still believe they live in a republic,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Moscow.
One of the few reminders of the war in Russia 2024 was a booth that married two of the Kremlin’s key political priorities: the militarization of society and “patriotic education” for school-aged youth.
“The Army for Children” welcomed children with cartoon animals in uniform. The children were invited to practice operating state-of-the-art drones, sit in a virtual reality flight simulator and play a video game called Counter-Strike.
Nationally, the Kremlin sought to turn both the trauma and drama of the war into opportunities. Military parades and school programs with war veterans have been organized to stimulate national pride and patriotism.
Mr Putin promised to prioritize servicemen and women, announcing a new program called “Time of Heroes” in his annual State of the Union address last month. Its goal is to give veterans and military personnel the opportunity to become part of a “special staff training program” for developing professionals.
As Russia reorients its economy to serve the war, the Kremlin is “creating a new middle class,” said Mr. Kolesnikov, the Carnegie analyst.
Still, Russians remain worried about the war, said Mr. Yudin, the Princeton sociologist. It is an uncertainty that paradoxically has the effect of attracting voters to Mr. Putin.
“There are fears of what will happen if we don’t win: we will be humiliated, everyone will be prosecuted, we will have to pay huge reparations — and basically come under foreign control,” Mr. Yudin said. “These fears are fueled by Putin, who has also positioned himself as the only one who can end the war.”
This is largely because the Kremlin has suppressed any candidate who has called for an end to the war. One of them, Yekaterina Duntsova, a former TV presenter, was disqualified from running at the end of last year. Boris B. Nadezhdin, another anti-war candidate, collected more than 100,000 signatures of support, but was disqualified for what the electoral commission called “irregularities.”
This weekend’s vote will also be held without independent oversight. The country’s primary election monitoring group, Golos, has been labeled a “foreign agent” by the Justice Department and its co-founder, Grigory Melkoniands, has been jailed.
Mr. Putin’s biggest rival, opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny, died on February 16 in an Arctic penal colony under mysterious circumstances.
His grave on the outskirts of Moscow has become a pilgrimage destination for some tens of thousands of Russians who preferred his vision of the “beautiful Russia of the future” to Mr Putin’s war, mobilization and nuclear threats.
Many anti-war Russians, at home and in exile abroad, are unsure whether to take part in a sham election that is neither free nor fair.
Before his death, Mr Navalny called on the opposition to go to his polling station at noon on Sunday to protest. The turnout will be the first test of his legacy and the anger and momentum building up after his funeral – if the desire to protest outweighs the fear of reprisals.
On Thursday, Moscow’s prosecutor’s office warned that the protests were illegal and that organizing or participating in them would be considered acts punishable by up to five years in prison.
Back at the Russia 2024 exhibition, Elena, the water sanitation engineer, said she was ambivalent about the vote. “Maybe I’ll vote, because things are going really well right now,” she said, before quickly stopping herself.
“But of course, we hope this will all end well,” he said in an oblique reference to the war. “People really want this to end.”
