Russian Active Measures

23 Quoted in Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 90.

24 Huntington, 20.

25 Ibid., 125.

26 Ibid., 130.

27 Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019), cover page.

28 The term “political warfare” was outlined in George Kennan’s 1948 Policy Planning memo. It reads: “Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, and ‘black’ psychological warfare.” See “George F. Kennan on Organizing Political Warfare,” History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Wilson Center, 30 April 1948, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114320.pdf?v=941dc9ee5c6e51333ea9ebbbc9104e8c (accessed 18 June 2020); also quoted in Stengel, Information Wars, 139.

29 See, for instance, David V. Gioe, Richard Lovering, and Tyler Pachesny, “The Soviet Legacy of Russian Active Measures: New Vodka from Old Stills?,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 33, no. 3 (2020): 1–26.

30 Rid, Active Measures, 13.

31 Vladimir Putin, “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II,” The National Interest, 18 June 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982 (accessed 19 June 2020).

32 Shane Harris, @ Wars: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (New York: An Eamon Dolan Book, 2014), 226.

33 Stengel, Information Wars, 289.

34 Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda, xi.

35 Huntington, 156.

36 Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West (New York: Mulholland Books, 2019).

37 Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 443.

38 Kalugin, Spymaster, 442.

39 Agnotology refers to the “study of the deliberate manufacture of ignorance or doubt, including the spread of selective, inaccurate or misleading scientific data.” See John Launer, “The Production of Ignorance,” Postgraduate Medical Journal 96, no. 1133 (2020): 179–80; also available at https://pmj.bmj.com/content/postgradmedj/96/1133/179.full.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).

40 Theodor W. Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2012), 35.

41 Alexander J. Motyl, “Putin’s Russia as a Fascist Political System,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no. 1 (2016): 25–36.

42 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, From Competition to Collaboration: Strengthening the U.S.-Russian Relationship: Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 111th Cong, 1st Sess., 25 February 2009 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2009); also available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg47667/html/CHRG-111hhrg47667.htm (accessed 20 June 2020); see also Ashish Kumar Sen, “Will Sanctions on Russia, Weapons for Ukrainians, Keep Putin at Bay?,” Atlantic Council, 7 April 2015, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/will-sanctions-on-russia-weapons-for-ukrainians-keep-putin-at-bay/ (accessed 20 June 2020).

The Many Faces of the New Information Warfare

Marcel H. Van Herpen

In the last ten to fifteen years the world has been confronted with a new phenomenon—information warfare. It is called a “war” and sometimes, as was the case in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, part of a real kinetic war. However, in most cases this war is being fought in areas of the world which are at peace. For this reason, a new term has been coined—a “hybrid war,” a state between war and peace that in many respects resembles the Cold War. At times, a conflict takes on the character of a kinetic war, fought with soldiers and weapons. Yet, more often than not, the kinetic aspect of military action, involving lethal force, is missing from the picture. One of the features of a hybrid war is secretiveness: the aggressors try to conceal their involvement. They do not acknowledge that they are waging a war. For this reason, for the aggressors, plausible deniability is important. Plausible deniability means that the attacking party is able to deny its knowledge of or responsibility for hostile actions conducted by its agencies or by third parties under its control, such as so-called “separatists” in Ukraine’s occupied Donbas region, manipulated and supported by the Russian Federation. Although there is ample evidence to suggest that that these separatists are controlled, instructed, armed, and manipulated by the Russian Federation, the Kremlin stubbornly denies its involvement in the region, arguing that this is not a war of aggression, but a civil war, waged by “separatists” who refused to accept a new, illegal, and “fascist” government in Kyiv, installed after the Maidan revolution.

“Hybrid war” and “plausible deniability” are the two characteristics of new information warfare, a war that is hidden and non-declared, in which the aggressor denies responsibility for the casualties and damage this war causes. Often, the damage is substantial. For instance, cyberattacks might bring the economies of entire countries to a standstill, paralyzing electricity grids and the air traffic, and putting people’s lives in jeopardy in dysfunctional hospitals. Manipulating public opinion and meddling in the electoral process might have even more damaging and enduring consequences. These actions might undermine democratic governments and challenge the values on which these democracies are built.

A Russian Vision: The First and Second Global Information Wars

For aforementioned reasons, the phenomenon of a hybrid war deserves close attention. It seems prudent to begin its analysis with an explanation offered by Igor Panarin, a Russian scholar, an expert in Russian information warfare, and a former KGB agent who has recently become Dean of the Diplomatic Academy of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation. His contribution to the knowledge of young diplomats about information warfare is significant. In 2010, Panarin published a book on the topic entitled The First Global Information War: The Collapse of the USSR.1 A Western reader might be surprised with its content because, unlike Western analysts who believe that a global information war has begun in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Panarin claimed that the war began much earlier, during the pre-Internet and social media era. He even offered the exact year (1943) and the place (the city of Quebec, Canada) where the “first global information war” began.

In August 1943, there was a summit in Quebec, where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King met. According to Panarin, Churchill instigated the information war against the Soviet Union, and its objectives included “weakening the competitor, [and] its economic and geopolitical expansion,” which would ultimately lead to the “destruction (disintegration) of [our] main ideological and geopolitical opponent—the USSR.”2 The beginning of this information war was unsuccessful because of the “heroic resistance” of Joseph Stalin, whom Panarin profoundly praised in his text. However, the situation changed after Stalin’s death in 1953, when the CIA and the British MI6 launched the “Operation Anti-Stalin.” Nikita Khrushchev was the ideal target for this operation. He was the “anti-Stalin” who provided the Anglo-Americans with an “opportunity to break up the USSR.”3 But they had to wait a bit longer to celebrate the final victory. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose election was “a victory for those who promoted him,” facilitated their task.4 The first global information war ended with the demise of the Soviet Union which, according to Panarin, was a Western plot, organized by Churchill as early as 1943.

Yet, this was only part of the story. In his second book entitled Information War, PR, and World Politics published in 2014, Panarin described the second global information war. He argued that, initiated again by the West, the second information war began in the 1990s, but this time this war would be won by Russia. According to Panarin, Russia’s victory would be conditioned by several factors, including the Russian political elite’s passion and its preparedness for the “global uncompromising informational-psychological confrontation with the global elites [the US and the UK].”5

Interestingly, Panarin’s texts open a window into how the Russians view information warfare and how they perceive the West’s tactics and strategies vis-à-vis Russia. First, we learn that the representatives of the highest echelons of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs support conspiracy theories and build on them. Second, they believe that Khrushchev and Gorbachev were “foreign agents” who were placed in their posts by foreign powers. Third, they suggest that the information war that began in 1943 has never ceased, and has been extended by the West even after the demise of the Soviet Union. Finally, there is a certain optimism among them about Russia’s eventual victory, and this victory is imminent. Moreover, Panarin predicted that this war would be won in 2020, which means that we might be witnessing Russia’s victory this year, now, any moment, in fact.

Let us take a pause here and think what happened between 2010 and 2014, the time when Panarin published his books, and a situation, in which we live today. In the United States Donald Trump was elected President; the Brexit referendum occurred in Britain; and separatist movements unraveled in Catalonia. Russia seems to play an active role in these events.

Soviet Propaganda and Disinformation

Let us, however, make a foray into history. Propaganda is not something new. The Soviet Union advanced itself in producing propaganda. In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks established a special unit within the Central Committee of the Communist Party, called the Agitation and Propaganda Department, well known in its abbreviated form—Agitprop. The Agitprop had sub-departments responsible for the press, cinema, theater, radio, the arts, literature, science, and schools. It was so successful that it served as a model for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The word “disinformation” (dezinformatsiia) is also of Russian origin. For the first time, the word appeared in 1963, when the KGB created a special section, tasked with spreading disinformation.6 The rich experience of the Soviet secret police, including its tactics and strategies, eased the tasks of Vladimir Putin who employed and emulated the Soviet models. However, Putin has not simply copied the existing intelligence templates but rather improved them, being a true reformer and even an innovator. He allocates extremely generous budgets to the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts, profoundly modernizing the Russian propaganda machine. He uses psychological know-how, systematically adjusting the ways in which he conducts information warfare. He intelligently uses the openness of the Western media, making it vulnerable to the Russian propaganda offensive. Importantly, he has transformed propaganda into an effective war machine, destabilizing Western countries and actively interfering in elections. These tactics allow Putin to effectively influence political, social, economic, and cultural processes, undermining developed world democracies.

How Does the Russian Propaganda Machine Work?

The main instrument used in the Kremlin’s propaganda offensive is the Russian cable TV RT (originally named Russia Today). Launched in May 2005, it was designed to become a global competitor of CNN, BBC World, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera. The channel went live on 10 December 2005. The Kremlin was prepared to invest substantial sums in this project. Starting with $70 million in 2005, the budget was increased to $80 million in 2007 and to $120 million in 2008. In 2011, the budget was tripled to $380 million. RT grew into an organization with a staff of two thousand employees worldwide, reporting from twenty bureaus. It included a bureau in Washington with approximately one hundred personnel. The new Russian cable TV was very successful. In 2013, two million Britons watched RT regularly. It did not confine itself to broadcasting in English, but also offered programs in Arabic and Spanish. After the annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin decided to focus on the two leading countries of the EU, France and Germany, launching a French-language and German-language channel. Confronted with Western sanctions, RT’s budget, which was still approximately $330 million in 2015, was reduced by ten percent for the year 2016, when it received approximately $300 million.7 According to the Russian American Magazine,

… today RT is a global, round-the-clock news network that includes seven TV channels broadcasting news, current affairs and documentary content, digital platforms in six languages and a video news agency RUPTLY. Round-the-clock news channels in English, Arabic and Spanish and documentary channel RTDoc in English and Russian broadcast from Moscow, while RT America airs from a Washington, DC studio and RT UK—from London. Today, RT is available in more than 100 countries spanning 5 continents.8

What is the content of RT’s programs? In the first years RT aimed at improving Russia’s image abroad. The programs featured Russia’s unique culture, its ethnic diversity, and its decisive role in the Second World War. Their viewers would seek in vain for reliable information on more critical subjects, such as election fraud, frequent murders of journalists and politicians, and government officials’ corruption. In the summer of 2008, during Russia’s invasion of Georgia, RT became a source of active disinformation, depicting the Georgians as the ones who committed genocide against Abkhazians and residents of South Ossetia. This narrative was embraced by other Russian news outlets and scholars at prestigious Russian universities (i.e., MGIMO), and it persists today among Russian journalists and the Russian political elite.9 From the moment RT’s focus began to change. Defensive “soft power” tools were replaced with an offensive tool of disinformation that helped RT accentuate the negative sides of the West in general, and the United States in particular. Routinely, an emphasis was made on the growing social inequality, race problems, homeless people’s suffering, mass unemployment, human rights violations, and the consequences of the banking crisis. Anchors of RT programs, such as Peter Lavelle, did not hide their explicit anti-American views.10

RT began to invite “experts,” many of whom represented marginal or extreme right groups. One of these groups was the “truthers,” people who believed that the 9/11 attacks were not the work of al-Qaeda, but of the U.S. government.11 Another group was the “birthers” who, without offering any evidence, doubted Barack Obama was born in the United States, and questioned his eligibility to serve as American president. Manuel Ochsenreiter, an “expert” from Germany and the editor of the neo-Nazi magazine Zuerst! has been regularly invited as a speaker by RT’s English-language channel. The Economist did not hesitate to qualify RT’s programs as “weirdly constructed propaganda” characterized by “a penchant for wild conspiracy theories.”12 Despite this sort of criticism, and Western nations’ constraints and regulations which prescribe the rules of impartiality, RT acquired free access to Western audiences and became an effective propaganda tool of the Kremlin. RT’s success inspired the Kremlin to also revamp The Voice of Russia, an international radio station. On 9 December 2013, Putin issued a presidential decree, merging The Voice of Russia with the news agency RIA Novosti and forming a new international news agency Rossiia Segodnia (Russia Today). The radio station was transformed into Radio Sputnik, becoming part of a broader platform, Sputnik News, which also had an online presence. The new international radio station began to broadcast on 10 November 2014.

“Russia Beyond the Headlines”: Targeting Western Elites

The objectives of RT and Sputnik included targeting broad international audiences, yet the Kremlin never gave up the idea to also reach out to the Western elites. This was the reason to launch another project in 2007—Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH). The initiator of this project was the Rossiiskaia Gazeta (The Russian Newspaper), the official Kremlin paper in which state laws and decrees are published and official views are reflected. This project was extremely ambitious, and once a month a Russian eight-page supplement was added to a number of highly influential Western papers, including The Washington Post (United States),13 The New York Times (United States), The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom), Le Figaro (France), Repubblica (Italy), El País (Spain), De Standaard (Belgium), and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). The titles of this supplement were: Russia Now in the United States and the U.K.; La Russie d’Aujourd’hui in France; Russland Heute in Germany; Russia Oggi in Italy; and Rusia Hoy in Spain. Each of these printed supplements had their own website that could be reached via links offered by these newspapers at their official websites. The Russians succeeded in making the supplement look like a Western newspaper, with an attractive layout and interesting texts that covered sport events, cultural issues, cuisine, art, and faits divers.

Interestingly, one could not find any straightforward Kremlin propaganda in it. In fact, some publications openly criticized Kremlin leaders. One of them was an interview with the Russian writer Liudmila Ulitskaia who discussed her correspondence with the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, praising him as “brilliant.” The 2011–2012 mass protests in Russia were characterized as the events that had made political life in Russia “more lively.” These texts, critical of the political regime in Russia, had no chance to be published in these supplements’ mother paper—Rossiiskaia Gazeta (Russian Newspaper). So what was the strategy behind these practices?

The Russians understood very well that merely copying the content and layout of Izvestiia (News) or Moskovskii Komsomolets (Moscow Komsomol Member) into the supplement would hardly win the hearts and minds of Western readers. Therefore, Russian propagandists designed two stratagems that were used to mollify and manipulate Western readers. The first included diminishing their cognitive dissonance by adapting the content and the style of publications to fit their liberal critical Western mind. The second stratagem was the application of the two-step flow of communication model, offered by the Austrian-American sociologist and the founder of Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research Paul Lazarsfeld. He has argued that information disseminated by the mass media does not find its way directly to broader audiences, but is rather indirectly channeled to them through opinion leaders.14 For this reason, it was especially the Western quality newspapers that were targeted by the Kremlin, and not the tabloids. The RBTH project was a living example of active disinformation. Its main objective was to ascribe a “liberal” image to the Kremlin, a KGB old strategy. Attributing liberal values to the KGB chief Yurii Andropov can serve as an example of this strategy. In 1982, when he became the Soviet leader and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB presented him as a modern, Western-style, jazz-loving man and a whisky drinker. In reality, Andropov had kidney problems and could not drink alcohol.

The RBTH project has gone through several changes in recent years. On 9 January 2016, the RBTH became part of TV Novosti, and in 2017 the printed versions were dropped, although printed supplements in the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal continued into 2018. The decision to drop the print media was probably made because the project was costly and was increasingly criticized in Western media. This might have been one of the reasons why in September 2017 the project name, RBTH, dropped the last two words, becoming Russia Beyond.15