Russian Active Measures

Conclusion

In February 2020, the Svobodnaia Pressa (Free Press) published an article by Yurii Piskulov, an expert on trade with Finland, with the intriguing title “The Information War: Why We Lose to the West?”33 In his article, Piskulov complained that, instead of winning the information war (as many in the West concede), Russia was losing this war. He quoted the head of RT, Margarita Simonian, who came to the same conclusion eight years ago, blaming insufficient budget allocations to RT. Although Piskulov admitted that since that date much more money had been invested in the Russian media, he insisted that Moscow nevertheless was losing.

It may be that Piskulov’s text is part of Russian propaganda and a tactical approach to solving the “Western question” once and for all. His view might assure the West that it has nothing to fear and should stop fighting an information war with Russia. The West’s faith in the argument made by Piskulov and people like him, and a subsequent weakening of its effort in fighting an information war with Russia might have devastating and enduring consequences, ultimately creating a pre-condition for the realization of Igor Panarin’s prediction.

Bibliography

“Airways Wobbly—Russia Today Goes Mad.” The Economist. 6 July 2010.

Bastrykin, A. I. (interview to the journal “Oriientir”). Sledstvennyi Komitet Rossiiskoi Federatsii. 31 August 2009. https://sledcom.ru/press/interview/item/507343/?print=1.

Brandt, Willy. Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1976.

“Een hoofdredactionele reflectie op het artikel over Vladimir Poetin.” De Correspondent. 23 August 2014. https://decorrespondent.nl/1626/een-hoofdredactionele-reflectie-op-het-artikel-over-vladimir-poetin/41674380-3b47ac5a.

“Facebook Data Gathered by Cambridge Analytica Accessed from Russia, Says MP.” The Guardian. 18 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/18/facebook-data-gathered-by-cambridge-analytica-accessed-from-russia-says-mp-damian-collins.

Gambhir, Rajkaran, and Jack Karsten. “Why Paper is Considered State-of-the-Art Voting Technology.” Brookings. 14 August 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/08/14/why-paper-is-considered-state-of-the-art-voting-technology/.

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1 Igor Panarin, Pervaia mirovaia informatsionnaia voina: Razval SSSR (Moscow: Piter, 2010).

2 Panarin, Pervaia mirovaia informatsionnaia voina, 12–13.

3 Panarin, Pervaia mirovaia informatsionnaia voina, 144.

4 Panarin, Pervaia mirovaia informatsionnaia voina, 9.

5 Igor Panarin, Informatsionnaia voina, PR, i mirovaya politika (Moscow: Goriachaia Liniia, 2014), 133.

6 Cf. Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine: Soft Power and Russian Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD, and London, U.K.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 2–4.

7 “RT’s 2016 Budget Announced, Down From 2015, MSM Too Stumped to Spin?” RT, 10 October 2015, https://www.rt.com/op-ed/318181-rt-budget-down-msm/ (accessed 20 May 2020).

8 “RT—Washington Bureau,” Russian American Magazine, 20 May 2020, https://russianamericanmagazine.com/directory/listing/rt-washington-bureau (accessed 20 May 2020).

9 See Sergei Bagapsh’s commentary of Pavel Sheremet’s text “Ataka otchaianiia,” Ogoniok, no. 33, 17 August 2008, p. 10; also available at https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2301243 (accessed 20 May 2020); Elena Ponomariova, “Abkhaziia i Iuzhnaia Osetiia: Budushchee otnoshenii s Gruziei,” MGIMO Universitet, 5 December 2009, https://mgimo.ru/about/news/experts/129314/ (accessed 20 May 2020); The Head of the Investigative Committee A. I. Bastrykin’s interview to the journal “Oriientir,” Sledstvennyi Komitet Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 31 August 2009, https://sledcom.ru/press/interview/item/507343/?print=1 (accessed 20 May 2020); “V Iuzhnoi Osetii prokhodiat pamiatnyie meropriiatiia,” RT, 8 August 2013, https://russian.rt.com/article/13693 (accessed 20 May 2020).

10 Peter Lavelle is an American journalist who since 1997 is based in Moscow. He was hired by RT in 2005, and a participant of the Valdai Discussion Club, where the Russian political elite meet with domestic and foreign journalists and scholars. For more details about the Valdai Discussion Club, see “Valdai Club Foundation,” Valdai Discussion Club, 2020, https://valdaiclub.com/about/valdai/ (accessed 20 May 2020).

11 Daphne Skillen, Freedom of Speech in Russia: Politics and Media from Gorbachev to Putin (London, U.K.: Routledge, 2016), 296.

12 “Airways Wobbly—Russia Today Goes Mad,” The Economist, 6 July 2010; see also Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine, 73.

13 Michael K. Lavers, “Washington Post Publishes Pro-Russian Supplement,” Washington Blade, 16 October 2013, https://www.washingtonblade.com/2013/10/16/washington-post-publishes-pro-russia-supplement/ (accessed 20 May 2020).

14 For an explanation of this hypothesis, see Elihu Katz, “The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1957): 61–78.

15 See Russia Beyond’s official site, 2020, https://www.rbth.com/ (accessed 20 May 2020).

16 Frédérique Roussel, “Russie-Soir,” Libération, 17 February 2011.

17 The National Front, known after June 2018 as National Rally (French: Rassemblement national), is a right-wing populist and nationalist political party in France.

18 See, for instance, Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia, 1st ed. (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007).

19 Evgeny Morozov, “What Do They Teach at the ‘Kremlin’s School of Bloggers’?,” Foreign Policy, 26 May 2009, https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/05/26/what-do-they-teach-at-the-kremlins-school-of-bloggers/ (accessed 20 May 2020).

20 “Een hoofdredactionele reflectie op het artikel over Vladimir Poetin,” De Correspondent, 22 August 2014, https://decorrespondent.nl/1626/een-hoofdredactionele-reflectie-op-het-artikel-over-vladimir-poetin/41674380-3b47ac5a (accessed 20 May 2020).

21 For a discussion about trolls, see Peter N. Tanchak, “The Invisible Front: Russia, Trolls, and the Information War against Ukraine,” in Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine: The Challenge of Change, ed. Olga Bertelsen (Stuttgart, Germany: ibidem-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2017), 253–81.

22 Takashi Inoue, Public Relations in Hyper-globalization: Essential Relationship Management—Japan Perspective, 1st ed. (London, U.K.: Routledge, 2018).

23 D. D. Guttenplan, “Critics Worry about Influence of Chinese Institutes on U.S. Campuses,” The New York Times, 4 March 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/us/critics-worry-about-influence-of-chinese-institutes-on-us-campuses.html (accessed 20 May 2020).

24 The Guillaume affair is one of the most well-known espionage scandals in Germany during the Cold War. The exposure of Günter Guillaume revealed that he was an East German Stasi spy who was working as a close aide to the first Social Democratic Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt. After Guillaume’s arrest in 1974, Brandt resigned. The Stasi was the secret service of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).

25 Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1976), 586.

26 Rajeev Syal, “PM’s Tennis Match with Wife of Former Putin Minister Will Go Ahead, Say Tories,” The Guardian, 31 July 2014.

27 Greg Miller and Adam Entous, “Declassified Report Says Putin ‘Ordered’ Effort to Undermine Faith in U.S. Election and Help Trump,” The Washington Post, 6 January 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/intelligence-chiefs-expected-in-new-york-to-brief-trump-on-russian-hacking/2017/01/06/5f591416-d41a-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html (accessed 20 May 2020).

28 Rebecca Savransky, “Poll: Political Identity Largely Affects Belief in Conspiracies,” The Hill, 27 December 2016, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/311949-poll-belief-in-conspiracies-largely-depends-on-political-identity (accessed 20 May 2020).

29 “Facebook Data Gathered by Cambridge Analytica Accessed from Russia, Says MP,” The Guardian, 18 July 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/18/facebook-data-gathered-by-cambridge-analytica-accessed-from-russia-says-mp-damian-collins (accessed 20 May 2020).

30 Caroline Wheeler, Richard Kerbaj, and Tom Harper, “Revealed: The Russia Report,” The Times, 17 November 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/revealed-the-russia-report-kz6c9mwxf?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307 (accessed 20 May 2020).

31 Oscar López-Fonseca and Fernando J. Pérez, “Spain’s High Court Opens Investigation into Russian Spying Unit in Catalonia,” El País, 21 November 2019, https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/21/inenglish/1574324886_989244.html (accessed 20 May 2020).

32 Rajkaran Gambhir and Jack Karsten, “Why Paper is Considered State-of-the-Art Voting Technology,” Brookings, 14 August 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/08/14/why-paper-is-considered-state-of-the-art-voting-technology/ (accessed 20 May 2020). Yet, the safety of this system is as debatable as the online system.

33 Yurii Piskulov, “Informatsionnaia voina: Pochemu my proigryvaem Zapadu,” Svobodnaia Pressa, 1 February 2020, https://svpressa.ru/blogs/article/256047/ (accessed 20 May 2020).

KGB Special Operations, Cultural Consumption, and the Youth Culture in Soviet Ukraine, 1968–1985

Sergei I. Zhuk

A retired Ukrainian KGB officer has recently noted that “since 1945 until the collapse of the USSR, capitalist America was the main real adversary of the Soviet leadership and the KGB. But after the opening of Soviet Ukraine to various Western influences under Khrushchev, and especially under Brezhnev, this adversary, the U.S.A., created a new front inside Soviet society, affecting the Soviet youth culture. After 1945, enduring Ukrainian nationalism, Zionism, and religious sects became traditional targets of KGB operations in Soviet Ukraine. Since 1968, after the massive participation of Czech youth, influenced by American imperialist propaganda, in the events of the Prague Spring, a new object had emerged for KGB active measures and special operations. This object was Soviet Ukrainian youth culture, which was shaped by alien Western, especially American, influences.1

The author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine

This study explores KGB active measures and special operations against Americanization/Westernization of Soviet youth culture which is analyzed here through the prism of cultural consumption in Soviet Ukraine. The first persecutions of “mass alien” groupings of college students who imitated American hippies in 1968 and campaigns against high school student neo-Nazi punks during the Andropov era is the focal point of this archival research. Through an analysis of declassified KGB documents, this study adds depth to prior attempts to analyze KGB operations targeting the youth culture in Soviet Ukraine during late socialism.2

After the Second World War, the Soviet political police and major intelligence agency, the KGB, targeted the United States of America as the “main enemy in the world” for the USSR.3 By late 1947, under Stalin, the United States, former major Soviet political ally in the war against Nazi Germany, had gradually become a main political and ideological enemy of the Soviet Union.4 In this new geopolitical confrontation, the most important domestic target of the KGB was Ukrainian nationalism, which was believed to be connected to and funded by Americans. According to KGB archival documents, from 1953 until 1991, approximately 50% of all criminal cases focused on “dangerous” Ukrainian nationalists. The second most important target of the KGB in Ukraine was another type of nationalism, Judaism and Zionism (which comprised more than 30% of all criminal cases). Religious sects were identified as the third threat for the USSR (10%). The remaining 10% was allotted to American espionage and foreign visitors as agents of Western intelligence. As the head of Ukraine’s KGB, a general-major Vitalii Nikitchenko, noted, on 12 March 1954, “the major threat for Soviet Ukraine consist[ed] of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, Zionists, and religious sectarians,—all of them [were] funded and organized by intelligence services of the United States and England.”5

In 1968, thirteen years later, KGB officials expanded the scope of their special operations in Soviet Ukraine. Besides the perpetrators of Ukrainian nationalism, Jewish Zionism, and religious sects, the KGB concentrated on the problems of youth culture and American influences which, in the KGB’s view, were associated with the old issues of dissident activities in Soviet society. Targeting Western influences on Soviet youth, KGB operations became an important part of active measures.

These KGB activities began during the World Youth Festival in 1957 in Moscow, when Soviet youth were exposed to contact with Western guests. As early as June 1956, Ukraine’s KGB ordered the formation and special training of a group of special operatives, undercover KGB agents, to be sent to the World Youth Festival in 1957 in Moscow as official members of the delegation from Soviet Ukraine. According to official lists, composed by the KGB in Kyiv, more than 60 % of the representatives of Soviet Ukrainian youth in Moscow were undercover KGB agents.6

The events of the Prague Spring of 1968, which involved the mass participation of Czechoslovak youth, contributed to the KGB’s anxieties about political and ideological stability in the USSR. On 21 March 1968, during the CPSU Politburo meeting in Moscow, the Ukrainian Communist Party leader Petro Shelest, frightened of “American dangerous ideological influences” being spread from Czechoslovakia to Ukraine and to the “entire socialist camp,” proposed to suppress those developments immediately. Supported by Yuri Andropov, the KGB’s new head, Shelest emphasized that, although it was “essential to seek out the healthy (pro-Soviet) forces in Czechoslovakia more actively,” immediate “military measures” there would also be necessary. This was especially important for prevention of similar developments elsewhere, especially in Soviet Ukraine.7

As a result, Ukraine’s KGB directed its efforts on special operations against its main enemy, capitalist America, and its influences on young Ukrainians. In the 1970s, Ukrainian nationalism in both capitalist America and socialist Ukraine was still a major concern of KGB operatives (20% of all cases). Jewish nationalism/Zionism followed suit (20%). Various Christian sects continued to be a serious problem for the KGB in Ukraine (20%). A rising problem was Crimean Tatar nationalism/Muslim activism (10%). Western intelligence in various forms, including espionage, was among the aforementioned targets of the Ukrainian KGB leadership (10%). Perceived as the United States’ creation and inspiration, the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the Soviet human rights movement posed a new threat for the KGB. A special KGB operation codenamed “BLOK” was designed to curtail the political activism of Ukrainian intellectuals, constituting approximately 10% of the KGB’s counterintelligence operations.8 Finally, a new and serious problem for the KGB campaigns, “the threat of westernization” of Soviet youth, constituted the major focus of approximately 10% of all criminal and “prophylactic” cases in the 1970s, and nearly 20% of all cases in the 1980s.9 KGB analysts realized that “capitalist America” became not only the main, but also the “seductive adversary,” creating political forms, cultural products, and practices, attractive for young Soviet consumers.10