Czytaj książkę: «Russian Active Measures»

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

About the Editor and Contributors

Foreword

Introduction A Blind Spot of Active Measures

The Many Faces of the New Information Warfare

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

The KGB Operation “Retribution” and John Demjanjuk

Disinformation Soviet Origins of Contemporary Russian Ukrainophobia

Russian Active Measures against Ukraine (2004) and Estonia (2007)

Russian (Dis)Information Warfare vis-à-vis the Holodomor-Genocide

Russian Influence on Italian Culture, Academia, and Think Tanks

Russian Influence Operations in Scandinavia The Case of Sweden’s Largest Tabloid Aftonbladet

The Trojan Media Narrative Framing on Russian Television in the Occupied Donbas

Acknowledgements

This volume was conceived prior to the cataclysmic events associated with COVID-19 but was finalized at the peak of the epidemic, a factor that complicated the logistics and the process of coordination among the members of our team. There was, however, a positive aspect of the timing—a sense of urgency that was dictated by both the importance of the topic and the medical considerations and uncertainties of the global world. I would like to express my gratitude to the contributors of this volume for their enlightening and thorough research, self-organization, and determination that helped me bring this project to fruition, as well as to our publisher who supported this project from the very beginning, providing an opportunity for the contributors’ voices to be heard.

The idea for this book had been germinating in my mind for several years but the volume came into being because of the inspiration and support from the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Study of the European University Institute, the Centre’s Director Brigid Laffan, and Administrative Coordinator Sarah Beck. They helped Mark Galeotti and me organize an international scholarly conference on Russian active measures held in Florence, Italy on 23–24 May 2019. This event gathered scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Ukraine, Latvia, Germany, Belgium, and Poland, inviting us to expand our thinking about Russian active measures, ideological subversion, and non-conventional warfare. Our intellectual exchange helped us broaden our special knowledge and enhance our understanding of the spatial applications of Russian active measures, as well as their historical dimensions.

I would also like to thank my colleagues, faculty members and staff in the Department of Global Security and Intelligence (College of Security and Intelligence Studies; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University), for creating a comfortable working atmosphere that facilitated the completion of this project. I am especially grateful to Professors Thomas Field and Murray Henner for their moral and intellectual support, and Professors Richard Bloom and Furman Daniel who read selected chapters of the manuscript, offering their thoughtful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts.

I am grateful to Professor Jan Goldman for inviting me to be part of a conference focusing on the ethics of intelligence held at the Citadel, South Carolina, in February 2020, where I had an opportunity to sharpen the ideas that laid the conceptual foundation for this collection of essays.

This project would have been far more difficult to complete without the support and help of brilliant scholars, researchers, and observers, working in various discipline as historians, political scientists, anthropologists, linguists, and intelligence studies specialists. Special thanks go to Paul D’Anieri, Myroslav Shkandrij, Serhy Yekelchyk, Bohdan Harasymiw, Laada Bilaniuk, Filip Kovacevic, Alessandro Achilli, Marta Baziuk, Mykola Kotcherha, Roman Serbyn, Volodymyr Serhiichuk, and Mikhail Minakov.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professors Victoria A. Malko and Dale A. Bertelsen who helped me tremendously during each step of the project. Their special knowledge and skills as writers, linguists, editors, and rhetorical critics helped me enhance the volume structurally, semantically, and rhetorically. Beyond professional tasks, our interactions have become a vigorous process of learning new things in the spheres of philosophy and communication, helping us better understand each other and the world.

About the Editor and Contributors

Olga Bertelsen is an Assistant Professor of Intelligence Studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, Arizona. Educated at the Medical State University, Ukraine, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, Penn State University, and the University of Nottingham, she published widely on state violence in the USSR and the methods and traditions of the Soviet/Russian secret police. She is the author of The House of Writers in Ukraine, the 1930s: Conceived, Lived, Perceived (2013), and the editor of anthologies of archival KGB documents on persecutions of Jews (On the Jewish Street, 2011) and Ukrainian intellectuals in the Soviet Union (2016), and of a collection of essays entitled Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine (2017). She is also a member of the editorial boards of Scripta Historica, Kyiv-Mohyla Arts and Humanities, Kultura Ukrainy, and Naukovyi visnyk Kharkivskoho derzhavnoho pedahohichnoho universytetu imeni H. S. Skovorody. Seriia “Filosofiia.” She is currently at work on a new book on Soviet writers and KGB covert operations.

Massimiliano Di Pasquale is an Italy-based journalist, independent scholar focusing on Ukraine and post-Soviet states, and Associate Researcher at the “Gino Germani Institute for Social Sciences and Strategic Studies” (Rome, Italy). He is also a member of the Baltic Studies Section (BSS), a discrete section within the Department of International Studies at the University of Milan. After obtaining a degree in Business Administration from Bocconi University in Milan, he specialized in post-Soviet states’ culture, politics, and society. He broadly published on these topics, being the author of Ucraina terra di confine. Viaggi nell’Europa sconosciuta (2012), Riga Magica. Cronache dal Baltico (2015), and Abbecedario Ucraino. Rivoluzione, cultura e indipendenza di un popolo (2018).

Jonas J. Driedger is a Research Associate and Doctoral Researcher (final year) at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). A College of Europe graduate and a political scientist, he specializes in the foreign and security policies of Russia, the European Union, and its member states. His research focuses on international security, deterrence, and the causes of armed conflict. He was an Alfa Fellow and Visiting Researcher at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, and taught and conducted fieldwork in Germany, Italy, Ukraine, and Russia. Apart from his academic publications, Jonas contributed analyses and policy advice in German, Russian, and English to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the Oxford University Changing Character of War Centre, Politico Europe, The National Interest, EUObserver, and EurActiv.

Luigi Sergio Germani is Director of the Gino Germani Institute of Social Sciences and Strategic Studies, a non-profit educational and research think tank established in 1981 located in Rome. Educated at the University of Bologna, the Gregorian University, and the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center, he specializes in Russian and post-Soviet politics and security issues, intelligence and counterintelligence in contemporary societies, Italian national security issues and policies, organized crime, terrorism, political warfare, and disinformation. He has widely published on these topics, and has edited and co-edited several books, including L’Intelligence nel XXI Secolo (2001); New Frontiers of Intelligence Analysis (2005); Pathways out of Terrorism and Insurgency (2005); Information Warfare: le Nuove Minacce provenienti dal cyberspazio alla sicurezza nazionale italiana (2011); La sfida della cyber-intelligence al sistema-Italia (2012); I fondamentalismi religiosi nel mondo contemporaneo (2014), Disinformazione e manipolazione delle percezioni (2017). He is currently working on Russian political warfare and active measures in Italy.

Marcel H. Van Herpen is Director of the Cicero Foundation, a pro-EU and pro-Atlantic think tank (www.cicerofoundation.org). He is the author of Putin’s Propaganda Machine: Soft Power and Russian Foreign Policy (2016), Becoming Marx: How the Young Karl Marx Became a Marxist (2016), Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (2014), and Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (2013). His personal website is www.marcelhvanherpen.com. He can be followed on Twitter: @MarcelHVanHerpe.

Nataliia Kasianenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at California State University, Fresno. Her research is focused on nationalism, legitimacy, and identity politics in the countries of the former Soviet Union. A native of Eastern Ukraine, Nataliia is currently working on several projects that incorporate social media data to analyze political trends in the occupied Donbas.

Martin Kragh is an Associate Professor (docent) at the Uppsala University Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He holds a PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics (2009), and currently is Head of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He is also a member of the board of the Sverker Åström Foundation and a former member of the board of directors of Transparency International Sweden (2012–2016).

Taras Kuzio is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and a Non-Resident Fellow in the Foreign Policy Institute, the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C. He is the author and editor of seventeen books, including (with Paul D’Anieri) The Sources of Russia’s Great Power Politics: Ukraine and the Challenge to the European Order (2018), Putin’s War Against Ukraine. Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime (2017, 2019), Ukraine. Democratization, Corruption and the New Russian Imperialism (2015), From Kuchmagate to Orange Revolution (2009), and Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Nationalism (2007), and the author of five think tank monographs, including The Crimea: Europe’s Next Flashpoint? (2010). Professor Kuzio is also a member of the editorial boards of Demokratizatsiya, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and Eurasian Geography and Economics and has authored 38 book chapters and 100 scholarly articles on post-communist and Ukrainian politics, democratic transitions, color revolutions, nationalism, and European studies.

Victoria Malko is a faculty member and founding coordinator of the Holodomor Studies Program in the Department of History at California State University, Fresno. She is the author of The Chechen Wars: Responses in Russia and the United States (2015) and editor of Women and the Holodomor-Genocide: Victims, Survivors, Perpetrators (2019). She is also a member of the editorial board of American History and Politics.

Sergei I. Zhuk is a Professor of History in the Department of History at Ball State University, U.S. A former Soviet expert in U.S. history, especially in the social and cultural history of colonial British America, Professor Zhuk moved to the United States in 1997, and defended his new (now American) Ph.D. thesis on imperial Russian history at Johns Hopkins University (2002). Since 1997, he taught American colonial history, Russian/Soviet and Ukrainian histories at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University. His research interests include international relations, knowledge production, cultural consumption, religion, popular culture, and identity in imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine. He is a recipient of numerous research grants from the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bellagio Center in Italy, Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, IREX, and Petro Jacyk and Tymkiw Ukrainian Studies grants from the University of Toronto and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. His publications include Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (2018), Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People’s Diplomacy in the Cold War (2017), Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (2010), and Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (2004). Currently, he is writing a book entitled “The Seductive Adversary”: The KGB Operations against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1991. He was invited as a Fulbright scholar to teach in 2021 in Estonia.

Foreword

We live in perilous times as the information revolution bends its arc to backfire on democratic institutions. European countries that only in the last few decades have recaptured their freedom and independence after several generations either directly or indirectly under the control of the Soviet Union were partially liberated with the rise of fiber optic and digital information technology.

President Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to loosen the Soviet bondage on Eastern Europe’s countries created the independence and democratic momentum that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the overthrow of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. During this time, the unplanned but powerful interplay of bureaucratic interests and other institutional forces that operated in the Soviet Union made it difficult to foretell the close linkage between the information revolution and their citizens’ longing for freedom and democracy. It assumed that the information revolution would whet citizens’ appetites to taste self-independence. It was not long ago when the repressive regimes were frightened that “copy machines” would become accessible to ordinary citizens, allowing them to create their independent newspapers. State-sponsored propaganda for the masses was antithetical to the spreading of independent thought from its citizens. The once-powerful Communist-party bureaucrats would later ask at the cusp of the communication and cyber revolution that if Soviet society would produce samizdat (self-publication), can it also produce samoinformatizatsiia (self-informatization)? The upheaval in wireless communication was led by infrared, satellite, microwave transmissions, resulting in mobile phones and the ability to randomly assemble people using global positioning satellites.

Since then, the communist-led Soviet Union has been replaced with an authoritarian consumer-driven society directed by the corrupt Russian leadership. It was during that transformation that East European countries began their liberation and their conversion to independence. This led to the blossoming of information relying on modern and universally accessible telecommunication systems capable of supporting voice, data, and video information. Democratic values thrive on the free flow of information spreading throughout the world.

Unfortunately, today, the reignition of Russian expansion goals has led to an attack on those countries that are perceived as a threat to the inhabitants inside the Kremlin. The Russian government has learned that a government can inhibit information in a democratic society, and while it cannot completely shut it off, it can stunt its growth or prevent it from spreading. Rather than guns, troops, and tanks, Russia uses social media and the growing availability of software bots and other tools for manipulating video and other online content to conduct broad disinformation campaigns.

This book is an account of Russia’s attacks on the liberties of democratic states. It contains chapters on the history of Russian active measures, strategies, and tactics of the assault these countries must endure from their larger and more threatening neighbor in this new type of warfare. I would encourage everyone who supports the freedom to transmit their ideas, regardless of political boundaries, to read this important book.

Dr. Jan Goldman

Professor of Intelligence and Security Studies

The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina

Introduction
A Blind Spot of Active Measures

Olga Bertelsen

Thousands of books have examined the traditions, methods, and special operations employed by the Soviet/Russian secret police against Soviet/Russian citizens, the West, and the Third World. They have been published since the 1920s, including detailed narratives by intelligence officers, their victims, observers, and scholars who described, analyzed, and guessed the degrees of violence and sophistication of overt and covert operations employed by the chekists.1 Thanks to these accounts and historical analyses, the international community learned a great deal about Soviet/Russian intelligence operations designed to suppress internal and external enemies. The KGB, FSB, and GRU have become internationally recognized agencies, associated with disinformation, assassinations, and special operations—activities broadly known as Russian active measures or aktivnye meropriiatiia.2

Today our knowledge about the nature and mechanisms of active measures is deeper and more nuanced. Yet there is a blind spot that should be constantly observed, analyzed, and discussed—the supreme imperative and rationale of Russian active measures shaped by Russia’s cultural traditions and history, and its civilizational choice to extend Russian influence in support of the Russian World.3 An analysis of Russia’s cultural traditions and its history might help us answer many questions about its geopolitical and foreign policy strategies and tactics, and the persistence of Russia’s active measures against its neighboring states and the West that puzzle the world intelligence community, politicians, and ordinary people. Many want to understand the mechanisms of and connections among Kremlin officials, Russian disinformation, and assassinations of politicians and journalists in Russia and beyond. Some are curious about Russian cultural centers that mushroomed abroad, such as Rossutrudnichestvo (translated as Russian Cooperation), becoming extremely active since 2010 in recruiting Western youth as Russian intelligence assets.4 More recent events and a crisis in Russian-Czech diplomatic relations invite questions about why a Russian diplomat affiliated with Rossutrudnichestvo arrived in Prague in late April of 2020, allegedly carrying ricin. And many are intrigued by a planned assassination of a Georgian journalist who on television insulted President of Russia Vladimir Putin. Was this operation motivated by Putin’s personal vendetta, or did Basambek Bokov, a Russian citizen arrested by the Georgian security services on 16 June 2020, prepare this assassination with much broader goals in mind?5 Randomly selected, these questions touch on an extremely complex topic, Russian active measures, and their scope and geography that have been expanded under Putin’s regime. What are their roots and the philosophy behind them?

The essays of this collection demonstrate that, like Soviet narratives, Russian narratives of world history, international relations, and global politics attempt to camouflage contemporary Russia’s violence and subversive activities. These narratives help sustain Putin’s regime in the Russian Federation and enhance Russia’s role in managing the balance of global power. One of the central objectives of Soviet/Russian active measures is to control these narratives in political, economic, and cultural realms. These narratives have been created by the Russians to benefit themselves and to besmirch other states and ethnic groups. The task of the Russian intelligence services is to preempt or coopt anything that contradicts Russian narratives. They do so by using at least two primary strategies. First, they cast challenges to their narratives and alternative narratives as actions on the “extreme end of the Cold War spectrum.” Second, any critique of Russian foreign policy or Russia’s encroachments into other states’ political or cultural spheres are identified as nationalistic manifestations of ultra-right neo-fascist governments or groups that have an ax to grind with Russia. A response from the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. to the FBI investigation of Yurii Zaitsev, a Russian Foreign Intelligence officer and a professional spy acting as the Director of the Russian Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. Rossutrudnichestvo, provides an example of these strategies:

All such “scaring information” very much resembles [the] Cold War era. A blunt tentative is made to distort and to blacken activities of the Russian Cultural Center in DC, which are aimed at developing mutual trust and cooperation between our peoples and countries. As a matter of fact, somebody intends to torpedo the guidelines of the Russian and U.S. Presidents, whose Joint Statement in Lough Erne emphasizes the importance of “expanding direct contracts between Americans and Russians that will serve to strengthen mutual understanding and trust and make it possible to raise U.S.-Russian relations to a qualitatively new level.”6

Ironically, even some scholars who study active measures adopted this rhetoric without realizing the Russian influence on them, the influence of those whom they study. As one scholar has stated, “I am not a Cold War warrior. I am a scholar. The Russians do not deserve to be treated this way.”7

This strategy seems to be extremely effective. Silencing the opposition this way, Russian propagandists exempt the Russian political leadership from criticism, and those critics who choose a path of persistence often find themselves in isolation, oblivion, or being physically eliminated. Through active measures, Russian “subverters” have been skillfully manipulating the argument of balance and moderation, identifying their critics as individuals of unbalanced and one-sided views. This tactic works each time, obscuring the truth and promoting the Russian version of events, be it in politics or the social sphere. Russian threats and accusations of being radical and aggressive, and of spreading “scaring information” (quoting a clerk at the Russian Embassy who, it should be acknowledged, is likely a well-trained intelligence officer pretending to be a diplomat) end up covering dangers of a much more serious magnitude, such as the suppression, deletion, misrepresentation, and trivialization of information inconvenient for the aggressor, as well as the promotion of one view that should dominate the discourse. The augmentation of Russian power and narrative occurs precisely through these measures, through the deletion of pluralism of opinions.

In his new book Active Measures, Thomas Rid has noted that “[r]ecognizing an active measure can be difficult.”8 Recognizing the goal behind it might be even more challenging. What complicates this recognition is chaos. Spreading anarchy and chaos and disrupting order have long been a strategy embedded in active measures.9 Pulled to the right or to the left, confused, manipulated, and bluntly deceived, the general public, let alone disinformation professionals, lose their analytical perspective and defensive power. The cleverest of the cleverest get persuaded by nonsensical theories and explanations, embodying a living example of an erosion of cognitive abilities and common sense. It is not the power of disinformation itself that is magic and overarching but rather a combination of various tactics that makes people embrace a narrative which is structured and crystallized as a single message, gaining a strong foothold in their consciousness. Under the right circumstances, a single message, nicely packaged and to a degree intellectualized, is capable of shaping people’s strong beliefs and convictions. Beyond being effective, it is also contagious, if persistently repeated and circulated. Subscribing to a persuasive narrative helps people rid of confusions, insecurities, and vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, active measures erode democratic and social institutions, the pillars of democratic society, something that fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville upon his trip to the United States. The empty space is typically filled with other structures, institutions of coercion that sustain and perpetuate the machine of violence, direct or symbolic, akin to the contemporary Russian model known today as Putinism.10 Disinformation professionals and scholars agree that the final result of active measures, especially when they are applied on a global scale (i.e., Russian anti-Western campaign), is impossible to measure or assess in some quantitative terms. Yet, some have claimed that Russian subversion of Western states in general, and the United States in particular, has been extremely successful, and its effects have been perceptible and quite visible since the early 1970s.

Broad Western audiences, especially in North America, learned about the process of ideological subversion from Yurii Bezmenov (1939–1993), also known in the West under his pen name Tomas D. Schuman, a Soviet journalist from the Soviet Novosti Press Agency and a KGB informant who in February 1970 defected to the U.S. Embassy in Athens and latter resettled in Canada. He was part of the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities known as the First Main Directorate (Pervoie glavnoie upravleniie) of the Committee for State Security under the Soviet Council of Ministers (PGU KGB). His position allowed him to master skills necessary for a deputy chief in the KGB’s Research and Counterpropaganda group, serving in India, and to deeply understand the philosophy behind Soviet active measures.11 On numerous occasions and in an extremely systematic way, Bezmenov explained the essence of active measures which he identified as operations of ideological subversion or psychological warfare. Deception, misinformation, disinformation, forgeries, and other tools (i.e., the use of alcohol and women that helped build trust between KGB agents and their targets), falling under the category of active measures, were broadly used by the KGB, particularly during the Cold War, to influence the course of events and behavior of foreign countries, first and foremost, of the United States, the main adversary of the Soviets. “Deception was my job,” Bezmenov stated. Indeed, in his interviews, books, and lectures he explained that his task as a professional propagandist and “subverter” was to deceive the target and to change the target’s perception of reality through the distortion of facts, lies, and half-truths.12 In his 1984 interview to G. Edward Griffin, an American author, journalist, and filmmaker, Bezmenov argued that the Soviets had been extremely successful in demoralizing American society and persuading American citizens of the benefits of socialism. Moreover, Bezmenov warned the Americans that their awakening was urgent and crucial, otherwise they should say “farewell” to their freedoms that would be inevitably taken from them. From Bezmenov’s perspective, the process of ideological subversion in the United States had been nearly completed by the late 1970s, yet most Americans did not have the slightest idea that their nation was under attack.13

Filled with quite graphic examples and stripped of any shades of political correctness, Bezmenov’s interviews and statements require a fresh and sober look. He appealed to the West and his beloved America and its citizens, asking them to pay close attention to how the Russians overtly and openly had been ideologically subverting them, changing their views, beliefs, and convictions: “All American media has to do is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it, with their own eyes.”14 This interview was aired in 1985, fourteen years after Bezmenov defected to the West, but today, his message and concerns sound particularly relevant and instructive. Since 2010, Russian measures have become more active, more aggressive, and quite dangerous.

Crucially, in the space of where Russian special operations and disinformation campaigns are implemented, there are no clearly defined borders, geographical, political, or cultural. A common fallacy is that Russian active measures target foreign states and their domestic use is irrelevant or non-existent. In fact, the implementation of active measures abroad necessitates a mirror action at home, and vice versa. As KGB documents suggest, a given KGB operation or active measures often had two dimensions, domestic and foreign. Their task was to enforce and reinforce a Soviet version of the story, a discourse, and rhetoric across geographical and political lines. During the Cold War, the stability and omnipresence of the chekist narrative and discourse guaranteed change in public opinion, and this change had to be universal. The prevalence of this discourse ultimately suppressed and marginalized other voices, truths, or discourses (domestically and overseas) that were inadmissible for the Soviet regime.15 This approach is still in use in the Russian Federation.

Conceptually, as far as the strategy of active measures is concerned, little has changed in the Russian Federation since the Cold War. To maintain the consistency of Russian narratives that are promoted by the Russian political elites and affirm the allegedly democratic nature of the Russian regime and the exceptionalism of Russian culture, active measures and disinformation campaigns target the “fifth column” in Russia that undermines these myths, and the decadent West that produces narratives and ideologies hostile to Russia. Silencing both of them eliminates the problem of discrepancy in preserving the Russian elites’ narrative intact and unchallenged from within and abroad. The Russian politics of silencing alternative narratives that have intensified since 2010, combined with enduring disinformation campaigns, have extended the space of violence and confrontation, evident in Russia’s “near abroad,” Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

Subversion is a form of violence and coercion, albeit “cultural,” “symbolic,” or “systemic,” using Johan Galtung’s or Slavoj Žižek’s terms.16 It is a self-perpetuated project that is informed by Russia’s “‘schematic narrative template’ […] a social construct created to shape collective memory to fight external enemies, and this template was constantly reinforced and shaped by history itself in Russia.”17 It is rooted in Russia’s “historic mission” and “civilizational choice,” and, more broadly, in Russian culture.

In his insightful book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington has noted that for many, the end of the Cold War signified the end of conflicts in global politics.18 In the late 1990s, however, Huntington predicted that the world would inevitably change after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it would not necessarily become peaceful. “Change was inevitable, progress was not,” he wrote.19 Indeed, the world encountered a new wave of ethnic and neo-imperial wars, frozen conflicts, and genocides. The estimations of wars and high and low intensity conflicts that occurred in the world within two years after 1991 are mindboggling: 48 ethnic wars and 164 conflicts erupted due to ethnic-territorial claims.20 By 1996, “[w]ithin five years of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ethnic conflicts spilled over two hundred hot spots throughout its vast territory, most of them in the Russian Federation.”21 Russia played a pivotal role in inflaming and steering them. The most notorious examples of armed and low intensity conflicts accompanied by chaos and mass deaths are Russia’s two wars in Chechnya and its genocide of the Chechens.22

Although Huntington’s interpetation about Russian-Ukrainian relations and histories has certain limitations, his civilizational approach to conflicts and wars that were escalated after 1991 seems to be prophetic in light of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and conventional war in Ukraine’s Donbas. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander identified the Russian campaign in Crimea as “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg” in history.23 In Huntington’s terms, Russia’s conventional and hybrid war against Ukraine is a cultural war and a war of identities. The disintegration of the Cold War world inspired peoples and nations to seek identity and reinvent ethnicity, a process in which the discourse about enemies and hostilities toward them became an inseparable part of emerging ideologies, narratives, and practices. Deep and historically bound differences among civilizational identities and cultures shaped the severity of cultural conflicts, changing the balance of power among civilizations and exacerbating enmities among them across the cultural fault lines.24

The global politics of the post-Cold War world illuminated a general trend of new communication patterns: civilizations with similar cultures were coming together, and those with different cultures were coming apart. Alliances were built across similar cultural lines, and conflicts emerged because of cultural and ideological differences that seemed to be amplified with the passage of time.25 In this context, the on-going conflict between Russia and Ukraine has highlighted the differences between these two civilizations that appear to be substantial and, thus, their clash seems to be logical and inevitable. As a militarily competitor that is stronger than Ukraine, Russia attempts to redraw political boundaries that should coincide with its cultural boundaries, real or imagined. This can only be accomplished from a position of force, as regionalism has never been an accurate term that would ultimately assume or condition the cooperation between Russia and Ukraine. “Regions are geographical not political or cultural entities,”26 and volatile and turbulent relations between these two states have been shaped by shared geography but different histories, having produced a phenomenon of two different cultures and civilizations that contest shared geography and reject volitional cooperation.

Putin’s 2014 attack against Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and Russian intense non-conventional warfare largely dissolved multiple identities in Ukraine and crystallized the most important and meaningful identity among the Ukrainians, associated with concepts such as solidarity and unity necessary for the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression. Putinism exacerbated the identity differences between these two states, pulling them further apart and creating the foundation for a multi-generational enduring conflict and the human casualties it causes.

Huntington’s civilizational approach helps us better understand the vector and the severity of Russian active measures in Ukraine and beyond. Most importantly, checking the blind spot and learning more about the cultural and often irreconcilable differences among civilizations might enhance our ability to recognize a narrative that motivates “subverters” to launch a hybrid or disinformation war against those who advance competing narratives and discourses. In other words, for diagnostic purposes, it is necessary to learn in depth the cultural histories of entities involved in a conflict and to go beyond an analysis of the intelligence aspect of their national and transnational histories, international relations, and foreign policies.

This volume is a step in this direction. This collection of essays written by scholars and specialists in intelligence studies and Soviet/Russian history, culture, and politics illuminates the multifaceted nature and the broad geographic mosaic of Russian active measures. The focal point is Ukraine. The violent lawlessness of Russia’s 2014 covert operation in Crimea, “accompanied by a blizzard of Russian denials and false flags,” opened a “new era of global information warfare, in which countries and non-state actors use social media and disinformation to create their own narratives and undermine anyone who opposes them.”27 Ukraine’s case is most instructive and classic for those who would like to study Soviet/Russian active measures and political warfare in its terrain and beyond.28 The range of Soviet/Russian special operations and subversive practices in Ukraine has been all-encompassing since the Cold War era. Historical studies and analyses of the most current events in Ukraine, including its territories occupied by Russia-backed separatists, such as the Donbas, will offer readers a glimpse into Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns that prepare the space for potential covert operations and a military take-over. They reveal a wide array of tactics and practices used by Russian intelligence, from disinformation to memory wars, and the use of paramilitary forces (the “little green men” in Crimea who were Russian Spetsnaz) and cyber technology. Many scholars have emphasized that “re-historicizing interpretations of active measures through the lens of Russian/Soviet history is a necessary prerequisite to contemporary analysis of similar Russian activities,”29 and this volume is an attempt to observe Russian psychological warfare through historical and philosophical lenses.

The studies included in this collection demonstrate with absolute clarity that Russia’s historical and philosophical traditions, and its new nationalist ideology underpin and inform a variety of influence campaigns in contemporary Ukraine, Italy, Sweden, France, and Estonia, accentuating the evolution of Russian active measures and revealing that today they target not only people’s minds but also technologies and the state’s governmental infrastructure.30 The proactive nature of these campaigns and Putin’s expansionism (a desire to extend Russia’s influence and its borders) are analyzed by exploring the extent of Russia’s cultural connections overseas and its infiltration of Western academia and cultural establishments. Through thorough research, the contributors of this collection have shown that, building a cyber and conventional army and coopting Russian and foreign journalists, scholars, and politicians, Putin ultimately has built a reputation of a powerful and invincible leader of a new Russian state, a supersized KGB/FSB/SVR/GRU entity that solves foreign policy and diplomacy issues through force, bullying, and intimidation. The most frequently used rhetoric emanating from the Kremlin offices, such as the Presidential Administration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, include an emphasis on Russian “mirror actions” in response to the “aggressive Western alliances’ behavior.” A Russian narrative with a traditional binary model encompassing “us” vs “them” which is instrumental in Russian disinformation campaigns (Russia as a victim that resists Ukrainian nationalists and neo-fascists, as well as Western pressure) is effectively deconstructed and exposed by several authors in this collection.

Ironically, Russian history that helps us better understand the nature and the roots of active measures is being actively rewritten in the Russian Federation under Putin and by Putin himself.31 On 18 June 2020, The National Interest published an essay written by Putin in which he reassesses the meaning of the 1938 Munich conference, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Yalta Conference. The studies included in this collection highlight the toxic nature of Russian memory politics that is capable of obscuring narratives other than Russian and of coopting Russian and Western historians. In this context, it became clear that one has to learn Russian history through more objective sources and studies, conceived and published outside the heavily censored and ideologically guarded space of the Russian Federation, not under the patronage of its current political leadership. Importantly, as several studies in this collection argue, Russian history should be studied through national historical narratives produced in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, and other states of post-Soviet space. They help observe a shared goal of Russian active measures and memory wars that create a space for uncertainty and doubt about the truth, discouraging and preventing individuals and states from pursuing it. This space is unattended, unregulated, and ungoverned. As Shane Harris has noted, ungoverned spaces eventually fall apart,32 or are filled by another force that typically establishes its own regulations and rules that help control its narrative. Whoever controls information and whoever controls the narrative has power, and as Soviet/Russian history has demonstrated, power is a paramount consideration and concern in the Russian civilization.

Today, the world cannot complain that there is a lack of information. On the contrary, an ordinary consumer is crushed by information from all sides. Richard Stengel reminded us that the U.S. Library of Congress alone has 39 million books.33 Yet, Russian information warfare seems to have limited people’s choices of sources, persuading many that Russia has a monopoly on truth. Peter Pomerantsev has aptly noted that “[m]ore information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but we seem less capable of deliberation than ever. More information was supposed to mean mutual understanding across borders, but it has also made possible new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion.”34 Mutual understanding across borders, the future without conflict, and cooperation among civilizations might be possible only if international order and peace are maintained. The problem with the latter, as well as international law and order that has been consistently violated by the Russian Federation since 2014, seems to rest in cultural differences between world civilizations and their leaders’ cultural understandings of order. Huntington was convinced that in the future “the world will be ordered on the basis of civilization or not at all.”35 Those civilizations that are culturally close will come together, and those who are drastically different will come apart.

We are living in a time when this process has been accelerated, and Russia is a key player in that process. The Russian secret biochemical weapons program and laboratories function at full capacity, Novichok is being produced and used, the territories of foreign states are annexed, passenger liners are shot down by Russian BUKs, the “Kremlin’s assassination program”36 is active and has new young trainees (employees of the GRU), American students and scholars are coopted and recruited through FSB front organizations, and history is being rewritten because of Putin, for Putin, and by Putin himself. Bezmenov, who in 1984 expressed serious concerns about Russian subversive activities that, from his point of view, had been quite successful in North America, did not have an opportunity to observe the extent of Russian active measures after 2014, having died under mysterious circumstances in Canada in 1993 at the age of 54. A quarter of a century later, the veteran of Russian intelligence Oleg Kalugin was similarly concerned, stating that “current developments in Russia are highly disturbing,” referencing Zbigniew Brzezinski who foresaw the emergence of a new form of fascist nationalism in Russia.37 This volume is designed to raise public awareness of these trends and Russian active measures that beyond ideological motivations also have financial ones. As Kalugin has suggested, “the KGB was an organization. There are no organizations in Russia now, just organized crime.”38 The authors in this volume consider a discussion about Russian overt and covert operations of ideological subversion timely and necessary, as thorough analyses of the current developments in Russia and agnotological inquiries produce concerns, and thus solutions.39

While this book answers many questions about Russian active measures, it also provokes new questions. Can we all learn the skills of diagnostics or does only naturally acquired cultural knowledge help recognize subversion imposed on us? Can we map a false narrative? Can we distinguish between reality and falsehoods? Will Russia discontinue active measures, and when and where will Putin stop? Theodor Adorno once compared Nazi Germany, engaged in mass killings, with a serial killer who could not stop unless he was stopped.40 By analogy, the Russian economist, senior fellow at the CATO Institute, and former economic policy adviser to Putin Andrei Illarionov has emphasized the danger of Putin and the regime he established in Russia. Over the last decade, one can observe that the Russian Government led by Putin has become authoritarian at home with clear features of fascist ideology, as some scholars have argued, and more aggressive and destabilizing in its foreign policy.41 Illarionov has offered several suggestions about how the international community can stop Putin and his hybrid war against Russia’s neighboring states and the West.42 The initial stage includes the process of learning and understanding Russian culture and civilization.

By the time you finish reading this book, you will be able to answer some of the aforementioned questions. However, you will certainly have questions of your own. Indeed, much more should be done. Research should be continued, the former KGB archives should be mined, and studies have to be published to identify and analyze the blind spot of Russian active measures. Thus far, there are no signs of Putinism receding into the past, and hence the history of Russian active measures will be expanded. Their geography will be broadened, their tools will be perfected, and their technological support will be advanced. The world might radically change in the nearest future because of cataclysmic events, similar to COVID-19. What likely will stay permanent is Russian narratives used by “subverters.” And Russia’s battle to promote them will continue.

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1 The term chekists refers to those who worked/work for the Soviet/Russian secret services. It originated from the abbreviation used for the Bolshevik’s secret police—VChK, also known as Cheka (its full name Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia kommissiia po borbe s kontrrevoliutsiiei i sabotazhem/the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage), created on 7 (20) December 1917. In 1923, the VChK was replaced by the OGPU/GPU (1923–1934) (Obiedinennoie Gosudarstvennoie Politicheskoie Upravleniie/the United State Political Administration, also known as the Joint State Political Directorate). The functions of the OGPU were transferred to the NKVD in 1934 (Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del/the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) which in 1946 was renamed to the MGB (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti/the Ministry of State Security). In 1948, the military personnel of the foreign intelligence service were returned to the Soviet military, known today at the GRU (Glavnoie Razvedovatelnoie Upravleniie/the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation). The KGB emerged in 1954 and was reformed after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Today in the Russian Federation, the functions of the KGB are performed by the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshei Razvedki/the Foreign Intelligence Service), the FSB (Federalnaia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti/the Federal Security Service, before 1995 the Federal Counterintelligence Service), and the FSO (Federalnaia Sluzhba Okhrany/the Federal Protective Service).

2 Although the term emerged after the Second World War in the 1950s, the strategies, tactics, and tools of active measures have been designed and perfected since the early 1920s.

3 Kevin N. McCauley, Russian Influence Campaigns Against the West: From the Cold War to Putin (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016), 374. The concept of the “Russian World” (Russkii mir) emerged in the 1990s but was vigorously promoted by Putin in 2014 to justify Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. The idea of gathering all Russian-speaking people under one “roof,” the Orthodox Christianity, and possibly being included in one political entity, the Russian Federation, motivated the current political regime in Russia to pursue this idea for Russia’s nationalist interests and security. For a detailed discussion about the Russkii mir, see Marlene Laruelle, The “Russian World”: Russia’s Soft Power and Geopolitical Imagination (Washington, D.C.: Center of Global Interests, 2015); also available at https://globalinterests.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FINAL-CGI_Russian-World_Marlene-Laruelle.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).

4 For more on Rossutrudnichestvo and its ties to Russian intelligence, see a chapter in this volume written by Massimiliano Di Pasquale and Luigi Sergio Germani; Molly Redden, “FBI Probing Whether Russia Used Cultural Junkets to Recruit American Intelligence Assets,” Mother Jones, 23 October 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/fbi-investigating-yury-zaytsev-russian-diplomat-spy/ (accessed 17 June 2020); “Spy vs. Spy—Rossotrudnichestvo, Russia’s Agent of Influence Finder,” Minding Russia, 25 October 2013, https://3dblogger.typepad.com/minding_russia/2013/10/spy-vs-spy-rossotrudnichestvo-russias-agent-of-influence-finder.html (accessed 17 June 2020); for a discussion about Russia’s recruitment of American students, exchange programs, and co-opted American scholars, see Yuri Felshtinsky, “‘My name is Fedyashin, Anton Fedyashin.’ Who Is Anton Fedyashin and What Was He Teaching Maria Butina?,” Gordon, 21 September 2018, https://english.gordonua.com/news/exclusiveenglish/my-name-is-fedyashin-anton-fedyashin-who-is-anton-fedyashin-and-what-was-he-teaching-maria-butina-investigation-by-yuri-felshtinsky-342703.html (accessed 17 June 2020).

5 “Kontrrazvedka Chekhii zakryla delo ob ugroze otravleniia prazhskikh politikov,” Radio Svoboda, 13 June 2020, https://www.svoboda.org/a/30668588.html (accessed 17 June 2020); Georgii Kobaladze, “‘Vypolnial voliu Putina.’ Kto khotel ubit gruzinskogo zhurnalista?” Radio Svoboda, 16 June 2020, https://www.svoboda.org/a/30674132.html (accessed 17 June 2020).

6 Redden, “FBI Probing.” This text was updated at 6:00 p.m. EDT, on Wednesday, 23 October 2013. The Russian Embassy provided this statement in an email to Mother Jones.

7 Private conversation with an American scholar, 24 November 2019, the ASEEES Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA.

8 Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020), 9.

9 Rid, Active Measures, 11.

10 Rid, 11; on the rebirth of Cold War-style dictatorship and Putinism in Russia, see Walter Lacqueur, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, 1st ed. (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015).

11 Edward Mickolus, The Counterintelligence Chronology: Spying By and Against the United States From the 1700s Through 2014 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 74.

12 “‘Deception Was My Job’ or ‘Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press’ (complete interview of Yuri Bezmenov posted by Kevin Heine),” YouTube, 11 April 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFfrWKHB1Gc (accessed 18 June 2020); see also Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy (New York, NY: Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defense Publishers, 1984), 2.

13 “‘Deception Was My Job.’”

14 “KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov’s Warning to America,” YouTube, 1 February 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA (accessed 17 June 2020).

15 Olga Bertelsen, “The Writers and the Chekists’ Discourse about the Holodomor,” in Crossing Ethnic Boundaries: Cultural and Political Labyrinths of the Literati in Kharkiv, Ukraine in the 1960s–1970s (Lexington Books, forthcoming).

16 Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 291–305; Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; Slavoj Žižek’s, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, U.K.: Picador, 2008).

17 Olga Bertelsen, “A Trial in Absentia: Purifying National Historical Narratives in Russia,” Kyiv Mohyla Humanities Journal, no. 3 (2016): 73.

18 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London, U.K.: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 31.

19 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 31.

20 Huntington, 35.

21 E. I. Stepanov, ed., Konflikty v sovremennoi Rossii: Problemy analiza i regulirovaniia (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), 228. I am grateful to Victoria Malko for sharing this source with me.

22 On Russian genocide in Chechnya and responses to it in Russia and the West, see Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, trans. John Crowfoot (London: Harvill, 2001); Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002); Victoria A. Malko, The Chechen Wars: Responses in Russia and the United States (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015); Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin’s War: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 187–204; James Hughes, “The Chechnya Conflict: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?,” Demokratizatsiya 15, no. 3 (2007): 293–311; see also “Latvia: Latvian Parliament Member Accuses Russia of Genocide in Chechnya,” IPR Strategic Business Information Database/Business Insights: Essentials, 9 February 2000, https://bi-gale-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/essentials/article/GALE%7CA59278837?u=embry&sid=summon (accessed 14 June 2020); and “Czech Republic: Czech President Accuses Russia of Genocide in Chechnya,” IPR Strategic Business Information Database/Business Insights: Essentials, 29 February 2000, https://bi-gale-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/essentials/article/GALE%7CA59648000?u=embry&sid=summon (accessed 14 June 2020). In February 1999, Latvian parliamentary deputy Juris Vidins claimed that there were documents in his possession detailing Russia’s genocidal policies against Chechnya. These documents were signed by Russian Chief of Army General Staff Colonel-General Anatolii Kvashnin, ordering the “filtration of Chechens between the ages of 10 and 14” who were to be sent to Omsk for military training. The second document dated 15 December 1999 was a Russian Security Council report to then State Duma Speaker Gennadii Seleznev. This document ordered the destruction of mountain villages in Bamut, Itum-Kale, and Zandak Districts with the subsequent resettlement of inhabitants to northern regions of Chechnya or elsewhere in Russia. The Czech President Václav Havel shared Vidins’ claim, arguing that Russia’s operations in Chechnya should be identified as the “killing of a nation.” Gavel asserted that the Russian war in Chechnya had nothing to do with countermeasures against terrorism.

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

Buying Western Papers: The Case of France-Soir

In 2009 in France, where a popular paper France-Soir was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was bought by the Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev and his son Aleksandr. They planned to transform this paper into a popular mass-selling tabloid, similar to the German Bild or the English Sun. The young Pugachev who was in charge openly expressed his extreme-right sympathies. “I like the ideas of Le Pen,” he said.16 His bias in favor of the extreme right became even clearer in March 2011, when during the campaign for the regional elections in March 2011 the paper published the results of an opinion poll, commissioned by the paper, about the Front National, an unconditional supporter of the Putin regime.17 The results of this poll were accompanied by an editorial that praised the Front National for having become a party “just like the others.”

In order to have a significant influence on their subscribers, papers need mass readership. In the United Kingdom, for instance, The Sun has a readership of approximately two million, and in Germany Bild reached approximately one million. The Pugachevs aimed high. They even hired a man who had led an (abandoned) Springer project to launch a French version of Bild. However, the paper never sold more than 75,000 copies, and in 2012 the paper was liquidated. As a result, an attempt to win support of a mass tabloid in France for the Front National, a party that supported Putin’s regime unconditionally, failed.

Interestingly, in the United Kingdom the former KGB agent Aleksandr Lebedev and his son Yevgenii launched a similar project. They bought The London Evening Standard and The Independent. Although Lebedev publicly supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, he is far from being a Kremlin tool or a fan of the extreme right. Together with the former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev owns the Russian opposition paper Novaia Gazeta (New Newspaper). One of its prominent journalists, Anna Politkovskaia, who covered Russia’s campaigns in Chechnya and who was a vocal critic of Putin and the FSB, was assassinated on 6 October 2006 in the center of Moscow.18 Until today, the editorial line of The Independent has remained true to its name.

Kremlin Trolls

Anonymous state-sponsored Internet political commentators, known as Kremlin trolls, is another innovation in Russia’s information war against the West. The origin of this phenomenon is associated with symbiotic cooperation that developed among the Russian government, the Russian secret services, and the Kremlin-sponsored youth movement, known as Nashi (Ours). In 2009, the Kremlin pundit and the director of the Foundation for Effective Politics Gleb Pavlovskii set up a project entitled the “Kremlin School of Bloggers.”19 Pavlovskii’s Foundation for Effective Politics is a think tank that has been instrumental in shaping the Russian ideology and Russian identity over the last decade.

Since 2009, the “Kremlin School of Bloggers” has been advocating, defending, and selling the Kremlin’s policies to the Internet community by writing blogs, attacking opposition websites, and posting comments on Facebook and Twitter. In times of increased tension with the West these activities reached new heights. In May 2014, for instance, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the British paper The Guardian received a massive number of pro-Russian comments, often written in poor English. Due to the activities of these trolls, the Moscow Times had to close its comments page. In July 2014, a Dutch web magazine, De Correspondent, had a similar experience, having published an interview with the author of this chapter. The magazine received an avalanche of pro-Kremlin comments that doubted the integrity of the reporter and the interviewee. Moreover, the magazine was accused of receiving financial support from dubious sources. The slur campaign encouraged the chief-editors to publish a declaration in which they distanced themselves from these comments.20 This happened a few weeks after the downing of the MH-17 airliner by a Russian BUK missile above the occupied Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Of the 298 victims, 196 were of Dutch nationality. In the Netherlands, the deaths of 298 people became a national trauma, which made broad popular support for the Kremlin’s policies an unlikely development.

In June 2015, more information about secret activities of “troll farms” became available, when Liudmila Savchuk, a former employee of the “Internet Research Agency” based in Saint Petersburg, sued her purported former employer who failed to provide her with a contract. This firm employed an estimated workforce of four hundred employees who worked in two twelve-hour shifts. They were paid relatively high salaries of approximately $780 a month for posting comments on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Each employee was in charge of a dozen or more fake Facebook and Twitter accounts.21

Hiring Western Communication Firms

Beyond establishing “troll farms,” which was a genuine communication innovation, Russia began to hire Western communication firms. During the Cold War, this was inconceivable, but the situation changed after 1991 and Russia’s integration in the capitalist world economy. In 1997, the Russian government was accepted into an intergovernmental political forum, the G7, which became the G8. In this new international environment, it became possible for the Kremlin to get access to prestigious Western lobbying and communication firms. These firms were eager to work with the Kremlin that was willing to generously pay for their services.

The first initiative was undertaken in 2006, when Russia was tasked to organize the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg. To improve its image, the Kremlin hired the prestigious New York-based firm Ketchum with its Brussels-based daughter GPlus Europe. The $2 million contract included sending twenty-five people to Saint Petersburg, who arranged interviews, established podcasts featuring Russian officials, and made a webcast of the summit with the BBC. After the event Ketchum touted that it “succeeded in helping … shift global views of Russia to recognize its more democratic nature.” Its privileged contacts with the Kremlin apparently boosted Ketchum’s reputation: the firm received the “2009 Silver Anvil Award of Excellence Winner—Marketing Consumer Products,” a prize from the Public Relations Society of America.22

The Kremlin was also satisfied, because its reputation was enhanced. In January 2007, Russia signed a two-month contract for $845,000 with Ketchum and its subsidiary, the Washington Group. The contract was worth its money. Ketchum lobbied successfully on behalf of Putin who was chosen Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2007. The political implications of the Kremlin’s cooperation with Ketchum became even more transparent during the war in Georgia in 2008, when Ketchum helped set up a web platform, called ModernRussia, later changed into ThinkRussia, which disseminated the Kremlin’s views. Even Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine did not end the honeymoon between the Kremlin and the American PR firm. Although the scale of their cooperation was reduced, it was even then not suspended.

The “Russian World”

The Russian propaganda offensive also included a process of mimesis which consisted of copying Western soft power initiatives. In 2007, Putin established the Russian World Foundation (Russkii Mir), an agency led by Viacheslav Nikonov, a grandson of Viacheslav Molotov. The official goal of this agency was to defend the interests of Russian speakers outside Russia and to promote Russian culture and language abroad. At the beginning, the agency targeted the former Soviet republics, but today its strategic scope is truly global. Pretending to be a cultural organization, similar to the British Council, the Alliance Française, or the German Goethe Institut, it has a clear political task: to mobilize Russian speakers all over the world to support the Kremlin’s policies. Together with the Russian aid fund Rossotrudnichestvo, founded in 2008, the agency opened Russian Centers at foreign universities. In 2015, there were approximately 70 such centers in the United States, 14 in France, 11 in Germany, and 13 in Britain. Branches of the Chinese Confucius Institute established at university campuses served as a model for the Russians. Arthur Waldron, a Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, who refused to open such a branch, has stated: “Once you have a Confucius Institute on campus, you have a second source of opinions and authority that is ultimately answerable to the Chinese Communist Party and which is not subject to scholarly review.”23 Subjects, such as the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, the repression of the Uighurs, and the democracy movement in Hong Kong, would be declared off limits. It is clear that similar objections can be made against the opening of Russian Centers at European and American universities. These are not independent cultural or scientific institutes, but tools in the hands of a revisionist power.

Financing Political Parties

The Russian information war intends not only to influence Western public opinion, Western elites’ opinions, and students at Western universities, but also—more directly—governments and political parties. The Kremlin could here fall back on an old tradition, developed during the Soviet era. A famous example is the case of Günter Guillaume, the Stasi’s agent who became a close aide to German chancellor Willy Brandt.24 In his memoirs, Brandt would later write: “In hindsight, I accepted advice that I certainly should not have accepted.”25 KGB practices of planting agents of influence abroad have survived the demise of the Soviet Union, being extremely useful under Putin.

The arrest of a Russian spy ring by the FBI in the United States in June 2010 seemed to be an echo of the Cold War, reminding the world of Soviet practices. A team of eleven illegals with fake names and false passports resided in the United States for many years, living normal lives. Their mission was to gather information and to infiltrate circles close to the government. The calculations were simple: although not every “sleeper” would become a Guillaume, there was a chance that at least a few of them would succeed.

To influence foreign governments of Western countries, the Russians also used more conventional ways, such as bribing politicians and political parties. For instance, in 2004, the Lithuanian president Roland Paksas was removed from office after having accepted $400,000 from Mr. Yurii Borisov, a Russian businessman who, according to the Economist, was linked to the Russian security services. Another case is that of the Centre Party in Estonia, an opposition party whose members are mainly Russian speakers. Its leader, Edgar Savisaar, at that time mayor of Tallinn, was accused by the Kapo, the Estonian intelligence service, of having asked for 1.5 million euros from Russia for his party.

In addition, there is ample evidence to suggest that in the Czech Republic, President Miloš Zeman received money for his presidential campaign from the Russian firm Lukoil. In 2014, in France the extreme right party Front National received a loan of 8 million euros from the First Czech Russian Bank. In 2016, it asked for an additional loan of 27 million euros. In November 2014 the German Bild reported about a dubious gold business transaction: the Eurosceptic German party Allianz für Deutschland (AfD) apparently bought cheap gold from Russia, which the party later resold for the world market price. Obviously, an exchange of favors and services between the Russian Federation and the AfD was guaranteed in the future through Russia financing the party. An even more subtle approach was employed in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2014. The Conservative Party received a gift of £160,000 from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, a former deputy finance minister in Putin’s government. She paid this sum to play tennis with the Prime Minister David Cameron during a fund-raising event.26 The party rejected criticisms and accepted the money. Of course, in most cases, there is no direct quid pro quo, but certainly this transaction helps create a friendly atmosphere in which the generosity of one side might be reciprocated by the other side in the future.

Election Interference as the Kremlin’s Infowar Weapon

Financing political parties offers only a limited influence. Being a donor among dozens of others cannot guarantee that the favor will be reciprocated in the future. Therefore, the Kremlin conceived a new and bold strategy—to interfere directly in the electoral process. The emergence of the social media facilitated interference practices. The Facebook platform was founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, which exponentially increased the number of users of social media. The American presidential election of 2016 was an excellent opportunity to test the new strategy.

In March 2016, the personal email account of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was hacked, and his emails were stolen. According to the American intelligence services, acting under the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0, the hackers were affiliated with the GRU, the intelligence service of the Russian army.27 In October and November 2016, in order to increase the impact, Podesta’s stolen emails were published by WikiLeaks just before the presidential election. The impact was greater than the Kremlin expected. The fact that Clinton used her private email accounts instead of her professional email account was used by Trump in his attacks on the Democratic candidate. Podesta’s emails were also used to spread fake news, such as the allegation that these emails contained coded messages that revealed the connections of Clinton and other officials, members of the Democratic Party, with human trafficking and a pizza-restaurant child sex ring, allegedly run by Clinton. This “Pizzagate” story went viral on the social media before the election. The owner of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, mentioned in the social media, received death threats. Moreover, on 4 December 2016, a man walked into the pizzeria with a semi-automatic rifle and fired three rounds, attempting to save the alleged victims. Fake news narratives are “sticky,” and it is telling that in a poll, conducted one month after the election, even among the Clinton voters were those (17 percent) who believed that Podesta’s emails contained secret information about pedophilia. For Trump voters this number was much higher—46 percent.28

The Russian trace is also evident in the activities of Cambridge Analytica, a firm which collected the data of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. The British Information Commissioner’s Office discovered evidence that suggests that the files of Cambridge Analytica were accessed from Russia.29 Damian Collins, an MP who led a parliamentary inquiry into fake news, shared his views about the possibility that the Russians had subverted Facebook users’ personal information to run their advertisements in the United States during the presidential election, individually targeting voters in swing states. In a report of the British Parliamentary Intelligence Committee, it was alleged that Russian interference might also have affected the 2016 Brexit referendum, although its effect was said to be “unquantifiable.”30

Finally, the separatist drive in Catalonia during the 2017 Catalan breakaway was likely instigated by the Russians. In 2019 in Spain, the High Court opened an investigation into a Russian spying unit in Catalonia. The activities of an elite group called Unit 29155 traced to the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, included contacts with radical Catalan separatists during the independence referendum of 2017.31 The members of this unit reportedly participated in the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the United Kingdom in March 2018, and in the failed coup attempt in Montenegro in October 2016. Indeed, the scale and geography of Russian covert operations and Russian interference in foreign political processes are substantial, and their consequences might be detrimental to national and global security.

How to Fight the Russian Infowar?

As mentioned earlier, in his 2014 book, Igor Panarin assumed that the second global information war would be won by Russia in 2020. Putin’s influence campaigns and information war have destabilized the political landscape in the United States and Europe, and have helped regain Russia’s influence in its “near abroad” and expand its borders. The dismemberment of the EU and Western military alliances would be welcomed by the Kremlin. The question, therefore, is: how can the Russian information war and election meddling be countered? At least, six of the following measures should be considered:

1. Spend more money.

Until recently Russia has been augmenting the budget for its propaganda effort. In contrast, Western governments have been decreasing the budgets available for public diplomacy. This trend has to be inverted.

2. Create an alternative Russian language TV station.

This station should be able to compete with RT. Latvia has already taken an initiative in creating a Russian language TV station. In Berlin, on 1 June 2016, Peter Tietzki’s private firm RtvD launched Russian language TV for Russian speakers in Germany.

3. Tell the truth.

Do not fall into the trap of producing “counter-propaganda” which is not trustworthy.

4. Raise public awareness of Russian trolls’ activities.

“Forewarned is forearmed.” At the high school and college levels, an emphasis should be made on analyzing how propaganda works.

5. Analyze the facts.

Russian propaganda includes misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is false information, which is intended to deceive. Disinformation is a mixture of true and false facts designed to mislead the public. Debunking lies, half-truths, and half-lies is important. Progress has been made by the EU External Action Service that publishes weekly disinformation bulletins. In Ukraine, a private initiative entitled StopFake.org debunks myths since 2014. Quality papers and studies accessible by broader audiences are an effective weapon against fake news.

6. Do not be too tolerant.

RT has direct access to homes of tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, while the Western media in Russia have limited possibilities in this respect. The West could ask for reciprocity as a condition for the Russian media presence in the West. Western governments should issue a series of legislations preventing RT from diffusing explicitly biased information. In the United Kingdom, there exists a media watchdog, Ofcom (Office of Communications) which ensures impartial news coverage. Several times it has found RT in breach with the British regulations, imposing punitive measures on RT. Media watchdogs in Western countries should more closely coordinate their efforts.

7. Forbid foreign financing of political parties.

Foreign financing of political parties and political advertisements should be strictly forbidden.

8. Protect the electoral process.

There should be designed a set of measures that would prevent outsiders from interfering in the electoral process. Voting online should therefore be discouraged and the use of voting machines restricted. Old-fashioned paper votes should be kept or reintroduced.32

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.

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

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

López-Fonseca, Oscar, 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.

Miller, Greg, 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.

Morozov, Evgeny. “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/.

Official Site of Russia Beyond. 2020. https://www.rbth.com/.

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

_____. Informatsionnaia voina, PR, i mirovaya politika. Moscow: Goriachaia Liniia, 2014.

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

Politkovskaya, Anna. Putin’s Russia, 1st ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.

Ponomariova, Elena. “Abkhaziia i Iuzhnaia Osetiia: Budushchee otnoshenii s Gruziei.” MGIMO Universitet. 5 December 2009. https://mgimo.ru/about/news/experts/129314/.

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

“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/.

“RT—Washington Bureau.” Russian American Magazine. 20 May 2020.

Savransky, Rebecca. “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.

Sheremet, Pavel. “Ataka otchaianiia.” Ogoniok, no. 33, 17 August 2008, p. 10. https://russianamericanmagazine.com/directory/listing/rt-washington-bureau.

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

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

Tanchak, Peter N. “The Invisible Front: Russia, Trolls, and the Information War against Ukraine.” In Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine: The Challenge of Change, edited by Olga Bertelsen, 253–81. Stuttgart, Germany: ibidem-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2017.

“Valdai Club Foundation.” Valdai Discussion Club. 2020. https://valdaiclub.com/about/valdai/.

“V Iuzhnoi Osetii prokhodiat pamiatnyie meropriiatiia.” RT. 8 August 2013. https://russian.rt.com/article/13693.

Wheeler, Caroline, 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.

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

The KGB, College Students, and Soviet Hippies

While observing the events in Czechoslovakia in 1967–1968, KGB officials emphasized the active involvement of Czechoslovak youth and college students in the Prague Spring.11 In this context, KGB analysts realized an urgent necessity to seriously investigate various youth social groups in the Soviet Union. According to former KGB officers and archival documents, the most volatile, ideologically unreliable, and susceptible to Western (especially American) influences was the group of college students,12 a notion that was consistent with the Czech trends of 1967–1968. As early as May 1967, immediately after Yuri Andropov was appointed the head of the KGB, the intelligence analysts initiated a series of research projects to study various Soviet college student groups. The KGB realized that the official sociological data provided by Komsomol ideologists and researchers from various departments of social sciences and humanities in Soviet universities (i.e., History of the Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Political Economy, and Scientific Communism) were extremely orthodox, cautious and, overall, unreliable. Therefore, the KGB administration decided to employ various non-orthodox sources of information that provided them with necessary information.

The KGB operatives selected the most articulate representatives of the college student community who were ready to share their sociological analyses with the state police. They prepared special reports/surveys of Soviet college student groups, which the KGB sent on to the Communist Party leadership. The KGB department in Kyiv sponsored a special study involving Odesa college students, which was disseminated in 1968 among all KGB officers and the party leadership as a “model” survey of a college group in Soviet Ukraine.13 Interestingly, the most controversial and shocking observation of this 1968 survey, emphasizing the apolitical and cynical character of the students and their gradual distancing from the communist ideology, were used by the KGB in their active measures to counter the “dangerous ideological influences” in Soviet youth culture through the entire decade of the 1970s.14 Many trends in youth behavior noted by that KGB survey of college students in 1968 survived throughout the 1980s and spread to other more numerous and much younger categories of Soviet Ukrainian youth, a phenomenon that required much more sophisticated and diverse active measures to eradicate it.

The 1968 survey highlighted the increasing political indifference, apathy, and the cynical attitude toward life among Soviet college students.15 The students openly demonstrated their scepticism about the party and Komsomol leadership and their own membership in these organizations, which they used mainly for self-promotion purposes to advance their careers in college and enhance their opportunities on the job market.16 According to the survey, the students’ “encounters with the party and Komsomol leadership at colleges gave the impression that the Communist Party and Komsomol organizations were led by completely ignorant people who hopelessly lagged behind the modern requirements of life.” As the author of the survey noted, “the college Communist Party leadership’s ignorance of fashionable music, of the views of the favorite heroes of the youth, of the youth’s expectations from their senior colleagues, and a lack of cultural knowledge among the communist leaders—[all this] leads to their students’ perceptions of them as dogmatists and reactionaries.”17

At the same time, college students exhibited their own shocking ignorance of Marxist and Leninist philosophy, as well as of the modern trends in Western philosophy, culture, and political thought. They tried to compensate for this by listening to the broadcasts of Western radio stations and by reading the literature available at the time. They discussed what they learned with their classmates during their drinking parties either in the dorms or in bars. As a result of these experiences, students developed their own notions of the Communist Party as “the sole ruling corrupt political organization” that routinely “re-produce[d] the Soviet bourgeoisie.”18 They were ready to accept the Western propaganda’s clichés about the “degeneration of the Communist Party” in the Soviet Union. According to the 1968 survey, the students no longer believed that there were “real communists” anywhere. The very word “communist” was discredited among the Soviet youth.19 The Komsomol lost its ideological control over college students together with “its prestige and attractiveness to young people.” The main reason behind the Komsomol’s ideological failure rested in its inability to discover new forms of working with youth, and its absolute dependence on the institutional, party, and trade union administrations.20 Students were sceptical about the anti-capitalist propaganda pouring from Soviet television and radio. They tried to avoid watching and listening to any kind of ideological shows that criticised the Western way of life.21

The 1968 survey designed to enlighten KGB officers also revealed that college students in the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine, such as Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, exhibited their complete Russification. They “called the Ukrainian language a ‘kolkhoz tongue,’ considering its public usage ridiculous and bewildering” and arguing that the “knowledge of Ukrainian language is unnecessary” because of its provincial nature: “[this is] a rural language, the language of ignorant and poorly educated people.” They resented the idea that southern Ukrainian cities, like Odesa, were to be Ukrainized and expressed their negative attitude toward Kyiv, “a city and a national center, where [Ukrainian] nationalists resided.” In addition, the author of the survey emphasized that “even the rural [Ukrainian-speaking] students in [the city] turned to Russian language because they wanted to appear more cultured and civilized.”22

The survey’s detailed and quite convincing description of the massive commercialization and Americanization of the youth culture in cities like Odesa appears to be the most astonishing revelation for researchers. For many students, the labels and the expression “made in the USA” became the benchmarks of how good quality products and, more broadly, successful economic and social developments could be measured. They strongly believed that the Soviet economic conditions did not leave any space for the entrepreneurial talents of Soviet people to develop and become effective drivers of the socialist enterprise. The youth contended that, like in the United States, economic competition was necessary to force out low quality products from the Soviet market. Students appreciated the freedom of opinion and expression, which they thought existed only in the West. In their minds, the main criterion of “human success was defined by the level of his/her personal material prosperity (well-being).”23

It is noteworthy that, on the eve of the September 1968 Plenum of the CPSU that focused on the problems of transition to the new system of planning, the city youth discussed the revival of private entrepreneurship in light industry and the service sphere. College students preferred the black market to lecture halls, demonstrating a high propensity for commercial activities. They routinely joked that “the Americans are wise people, and therefore they have no ruling Communist Party, [only a market].”24

The author of the 1968 survey further argued that beyond commercialization, the hero cult was additional evidence of the effective penetration of American values into the consciousness of Soviet youth:

A contemporary young boy and a girl needed a real hero (as a role model), but our films showed them either unusual people in unusual situations, or personalities that were so dull and boring that they could not be an example for emulation. In this light, the heroes of Western films, strong handsome characters who solved their problems with a punch, unknowingly became the models for emulation. After watching the film The Magnificent Seven, half of college male students developed the walking style of Chris (the major character of the film). The youth love strength; that was why the body-building fashion, which came from the West and was initially criticized by our ideologists, achieved an unprecedented popularity in the country. Regarding this cult of strength, it is noteworthy that we witness a surprising rise of sympathy with fascism among some students. Agreeing with its blunders (such as the annihilation of Jews), they admire the attractive appearance of tall and handsome Arians (ariitsy), parading in the military marches …25

KGB analysts also identified another characteristic of the collective portrait of college students from Odesa—antisemitism and racist attitudes, especially toward African college students. Paradoxically, they physically attacked students from Africa, calling them “black-ass people” (chornozhopye), simultaneously supporting Czech students during the Prague Spring, and openly expressing their affinity with American jazz and beat-music.26

Besides such cases of racism, the idealization of fascist leaders, and antisemitism, the KGB noted the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism among college students in other eastern Ukrainian cities. In some Russian-speaking cities of eastern Ukraine, such as Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, the KGB officers recorded frequent cases of Ukrainian nationalism. They attributed the rise of nationalism in Dnipropetrovsk, for instance, to demographic and political developments, following the 1956 sensational Twentieth Party Congress. According to a KGB decision, former political prisoners who had been indicted for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and had served their prison terms in the Gulag were released. However, they were not allowed to return to their homes in western Ukraine. These prisoners, identified as banderovtsy in official documents, were either members or supporters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and/or members of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (Uniate or the Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholic Church) from the Trans-Carpathian and Galician regions of western Ukraine.27 After 1945, when the Soviet Army suppressed these patriotic and anti-Soviet movements, thousands of adherents were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. KGB officials tried to prevent any contacts between these former political prisoners and their homeland in western Ukraine. By the mid-sixties, many of these ex-prisoners settled in eastern, more Russified regions of Ukraine. The KGB tried to regiment the movements of Ukrainian nationalists and dilute them by more diverse, and less Ukrainian, people of the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts. By 1967, 1,041 former political prisoners who were labeled “Ukrainian nationalists” from western Ukraine had settled in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast alone.28

This posed a danger to ideological and political control of eastern Ukraine because ex-prisoners resided in strategically important cities and their vicinity, such as Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. The amalgamation of several factors, including a cultural influx of college students from western Ukraine to the Dnipropetrovsk oblast and ex-prisoners’ influences, provoked a serious international scandal, involving a group of local young patriotic Ukrainian-speaking poets. They complained about the official politics of Russification in eastern Ukraine. They sent copies of their “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” in which they documented the KGB’s suppression of Ukrainian patriots and massive Russification of Soviet Ukraine, to various offices of the Communist Party, the Komsomol, and Soviet organizations and colleges in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk in the period from August to December of 1968.29 Ultimately, the letter reached Ukrainian émigré centers abroad. The following spring, foreign radio stations, such as Liberty, included the text of this letter in their broadcasts.30 In 1969–1970, the KGB managed to supress this group of young Ukrainian patriots.31

Until 1990, criminal cases focused on Ukrainian nationalism had always been connected to the activities of college students in Soviet Ukraine. Their “Americanization” was a serious concern for KGB officers, a process that was shaped by new forms of daily consumption of Western (in many cases, American) cultural products, especially popular music. The KGB associated this process with the emergence of hippies in Soviet Ukraine, considering the imposition of American influences on Soviet youth a political threat to the Soviet system.32

In Ukraine, the KGB concentrated on the hippie movement as early as 1968. The first official KGB report about this movement was submitted to the party leadership in Kyiv on 20 May 1969, stating that the followers of this movement were discovered in Kyiv, Simferopol, Luhansk, Odesa, Lviv, Rivne and other Ukrainian cities. They were predominantly teenagers and young adults, students of high schools and college students. According to this document, those hippies emulated Western lifestyles to the last detail: “Some of them, using various excuses, try to avoid military service, criticize the Soviet order, lead immoral lives, use drugs, systematically establish contacts with foreigners, and are involved in black market transactions (fartsovka). […] Gatherings of hippies are held in private apartments and, as a rule, are accompanied by parties with alcohol and listening to new releases of foreign jazz music that are frequently ended in orgies.”33 The transgressor established contacts with like-minded people in Ukraine and outside the republic. To better explain the hippie phenomenon to party leaders, KGB analysts interjected excerpts from an analytical article on American hippies, written by an American social psychologist from Yale University, Kenneth Keniston, and published in Russian translation in the American magazine Amerika.34 The Soviet leadership immediately ordered the KGB to design active measures regarding this new cultural phenomenon popular among the Soviet youth.

As a response, on 16 February 1971, KGB officials submitted another, more detailed, report to party leaders with a description of active measures to curtail this movement.35 The KGB intended to conduct these operations in the cities where this movement originated—in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Donetsk, Voroshylovhrad, Zaporizhzhia, Simferopol, Rivne, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Sumy, and Chernivtsy. The members of hippie groups were divided into two social groups: 1) fartsovshchiks (black marketers) and 2) bitlomans, the fans of “beat-music” (Anglo-American rock-n-roll).36 The KGB’s main concern, however, laid in the sphere of ideology: “While the hippies in the West protest against bourgeois society’s rules, their emulators in our country advocate the revision of moral and ethical norms of the socialist way of life, striving to create their own moral norms.”37 Despite the fact that the majority of the movement’s members were college students (including college dropouts), the leaders were more mature individuals, who explained the emergence of hippies in the USSR by political motives. According to the KGB, they positioned themselves as the articulators of oppositionist ideas and formulators of a program of activities. To illustrate the political danger of these people, KGB operatives quoted “one of the authorities” among the Kharkiv hippies, A. L. Kleshcheiev who explained to the KGB officer:

… We advocate democracy, the free choice of moral norms (svoboda nravov), free speech, freedom of creativity, freedom to propagandize our own ideas, freedom to demonstrate, free love, and behavior unlimited by moral constraint. A society should not interfere in the [development of] personality: if I do not impose on other people, I do what I want to do—I can sit or lie down where I want; if there is the possibility to live without working—I avoid working, because our needs are minimal; I want to be dressed in what I’d like or go naked; I want to spend the night where I’d like, and travel where I like. Because these [options] are unavailable to us, my friends and I believe that our [Soviet] authorities do wrong things […] we have no full freedom and democracy; and people who have power to change [this situation] are narrow-minded and do not understand our demands. We conclude that at this stage, under this political system [in the USSR], it is unlikely that we can achieve our goals […] the West seems to us more progressive and democratic than our [political] regime …38

In their reports to Ukraine’s party boss Petro Shelest, KGB officials suggested that the hippies’ behavior in public was unacceptable. Drinking, gambling, drug abuse, black market transactions (fartsovka), and sexual perversions became habitual for the hippies. Their gatherings at restaurants, cafes, and city parks began to attract public attention because of their obscene language, improper appearance, and offensive behavior. The KGB also informed Shelest that these individuals attempted to avoid the military draft and any type of socially useful work, lived the lives of vagabonds, and engaged in seditious conversations. According to KGB analysts, this behavior was shaped by the ideologically harmful influence of foreign radio broadcasting that the hippies systematically listened to.39 The major KGB concern was to prevent the hippies from organizing and establishing an intercity communication network. There was information about such attempts when in 1969 the representatives of various hippie groups in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Voroshylovhrad tried to organize the first republican, and then all-Union, congresses that would help unite all hippies in one centralized organization. The objective of this organization would be sharing literature and art to popularize the ideas and the philosophy of hippies. The KGB operatives infiltrated the most active groups, undermining their efforts from inside.40

As a result of these “prophylactic measures” against hippies in 1970, KGB officers were able to offer their bosses a general picture of hippie groups and their origin. Twenty members of two hippie groups in Kharkiv served as the model for their investigations. The KGB learned that their initial impulse for gathering together came from their passion for western (rock) music. In 1968, two students, A. Soloviev and A. Makarenko, and one dropout, Yu. Shatunovskii, from the Kharkiv State University, created an “amateur club of fans” of rock music that in 1968 and 1969 organized numerous so-called “psycho-concerts” in their private apartments and in the basements and stairways of public places. According to KGB reports, the ideologically dangerous events included music by foreign music stars, including “songs of obscene content, questionable in a political and artistic sense.” The KGB emphasized that these individuals planned to unite up to 2000 people, and they even wrote a program that stipulated the rights and duties of its members. The conspiratorial club “Society of Fighters for the Flaming Heart of Danko” (Klub bortsov plamennykh serdets Danko) was named after Danko, a character from Maxim Gorky’s Old Izergil, who sacrificed himself, saving his people with his flaming heart. The club members adopted a song performed by the the British rock band “The Animals” as its anthem.41

In October of 1969, Makarenko and Shatunovskii made an attempt to organize a demonstration of their followers at the Dzerzhynskyi Square in downtown Kharkiv. They planned to publicly demand the official recognition of their hippie organization by local authorities. The KGB conducted a special operation to curtail these activities, arresting ten Kharkiv hippie activists. Similarly, in April of 1970 in Voroshylovhrad, nine participants of a local hippie group were arrested for using drugs in public. The same month, the KGB reported that a hippie group from Zaporizhzhia organized a march in the city, attempting to popularize their ideas. Also Lviv had their own share of hippies: in December of 1970, 22 local hippies composed a statute (ustav) of the hippie club, planning a similar action. In April of 1971, 30 hippies from Ivano-Frankivsk organized a rock concert at the city’s central square. The evening of 18 June 1971 in Chernivtsi became memorable for the arrest of 17 hippies by KGB operatives. To celebrate Paul McCartney’s birthday, the hippies had marched in the streets, carrying hand-made banners with his portrait, completely paralyzing Chernivtsi’s downtown. Numerous arrests by the KGB eventually ceased these public actions, but not the movement itself.42 It kept growing, especially in the capital city of Kyiv.

By late 1969, the KGB discovered more than 170 hippies in Kyiv and uncovered their “president.” S. Baiev, a dropout from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute, tried to unite and consolidate the movement in Kyiv. Baiev’s behavior was rather provocative. He maintained contacts with foreign tourists and journalists, especially with Americans, and publicly criticized the Soviet system. He and his followers condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet troops, expressing their desire to escape abroad.43 Despite KGB active and prophylactic measures (arrests, expulsions from the Komsomol and colleges, interrogations of the participants and their parents), the hippie groups in Kyiv survived. In 1974, another hippie leader and a student of the Department of Biology at the Kyiv State University, Oleh Pokalchuk, reenergized the movement, accentuating the religious (spiritual) dimension in the life of Ukrainian hippies. Pokalchuk conceptualized a “Buddhist commune” as a new hippie model for his followers. During 1974–1975, the KGB documented active interactions of Ukrainian hippies with Orthodox Christian and Baptist communities, and the growing Krishnaite movement in Soviet Ukraine. These links helped them eventually connect with their foreign co-religionists.44

On 11 October 1979, in his official report to Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, Vitalii Fedorchuk, head of the Ukrainian KGB, acknowledged the KGB failure to stop the “hippisty” movement in Ukraine. According to his statistics, the KGB recorded 80 criminal cases launched against those “who imitated Western hippies” in various regions of Ukraine: Lviv 48, Donetsk 6, Crimea 5, Poltava 5, Zaporizhzhia 5, Dnipropetrovsk 4, Kyiv 2, Kherson 2, Ternopil 2, Chernihiv 1. Among them, 65 people were between 16 and 25 years of age, and 15 people between 26 and 30 years of age; 64 were males, and 16 were females.45 Thirteen of them had been “targets of active KGB measures;” 10 were “involved in ideologically harmful actions;” 3 were indicted for criminal offences; 8 were arrested for manufacturing and selling drugs; 27 were arrested for using drugs; 15 were receiving medical treatment in mental institutions; 10 were “arrested for avoiding military service; and approximately 50% of all Ukrainian hippies did not study or work.”46 As late as April 1987, the KGB still confirmed the existence of the “hippies-pacifists” in Ukraine who called themselves “Sistema.” Overall, there were 60 hippies in the republic (mainly in Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Odesa, and Simferopol), and 30 in Kyiv.47

KGB reports offered the Ukrainian communist leadership a relatively thorough sociological analysis of the hippie movement and KGB active measures that were employed from 1969 to 1987 to curtail the movement in Ukraine. Based on interviews with former hippies, one such report stated:

On the one hand, there are young people, who (due to their young age) aspire to something unusual and romantic, reading a certain type of literature […] and are keen on their crazy ideas and colorful clothes […] (which allow them to stand out among their peers). On the other hand, there is another group of young people who understand very well the incompatibility of the hippies’ ideas with the Soviet system, nevertheless, joining the movement consciously. [These] people […] make money using this movement, i.e., selling clothes (“fartsuiut barakhlom”), drugs, and other things […] [they] criticize (“khaiut”) all Soviet things, calling them “sovdela” (Soviet stuff) […] [and] want to escape to the West, inciting others to do the same. […] many of them maintain connections with people living abroad, write and send letters abroad; they have relatives or friends there, or routinely establish contacts with foreigners visiting the city […] In their milieu, they propagandize “free love,” freedom of behavior and actions, parasitism and reluctance to obey (Soviet) laws and moral norms, calling this coercion […] They insist that “we have no democracy if we have only one ruling political party,” and that people should enjoy their lives instead of wasting it for the state …48

For the KGB, the major threat of the hippie movement seemed to be the politicization of Soviet youth and the emergence of political practices among them. The KGB identified this as the “institutionalization” of Soviet hippies, which was ultimately a dangerous alternative to Soviet youth institutions such as the Komsomol. KGB operatives feared the spread of this movement: the tentacles of the underground hippie clubs reached all major industrial cities. For instance, in February 1971 in Kirovohrad, local hippies organized the anti-Komsomol “Union of Free Youth” that included 20 members. They planned to organize a mass demonstration of the “free youth” of Kirovohrad, designed to mobilize young people for a collective fight for “freedom of speech, free love, and freedom of demonstrations.”49 The active measures of the local KGB office, including the infiltration of this hippie organization by KGB undercover officers, managed to prevent these activities.

The ideological justification for KGB covert operations against the youth culture were the hippies’ alleged connections to fascism and neo-fascism portrayed as an intrinsic feature that underpinned the Prague Spring. In the KGB analysis, the hippies were active collaborators of pro-fascist elements in Czechoslovakia who allegedly inspired the 1968 Prague Spring. Similar claims related to socialist Hungary, where hippie groups were arrested for allegedly collecting intelligence for one of the Western diversion spy centers. In 1971, the KGB exploited the same ideological arguments when analyzing the activities of Ukraine’s hippies who allegedly spread fascist ideas. The declarations made by Oleksandr Balykin, a student at the Mykolaiv Ship-Building Institute, about the similarities between the modern youth’s worldview and Hitler’s ideas discarding conscience, shame, and morality, served as supporting evidence for the KGB. Its analysis also included a Ukrainian hippie group from Lviv as an example of this connection, highlighting their “black ties,” crosses, and swastikas that the hippies displayed on numerous occasions publicly.50 The alleged links between the hippie and fascist ideologies gave the KGB carte blanche to act aggressively and curtail the political activism of youth in Soviet Ukraine.

Clearly, the Czech youth political activities in 1968 forced the KGB to think about the Ukrainian hippies’ political activism in similar terms. The commercialization of Soviet youth culture and disco music that became extremely popular among Soviet youth seemed innocent in comparison with political statements made by the hippies and their attempts to organize. The KGB arrested hundreds of Ukrainian imitators of American hippies and expelled them from universities and the Komsomol all over Ukraine. Ukrainian punks who were similarly portrayed as neo-Nazi presented the same threat to the Soviet system, the Soviet Ukrainian culture, and the Soviet identity of Komsomol members.

The KGB Anti-Fascist Campaign

The KGB documented two massive organized youth movements in Soviet Ukraine after Stalin, which challenged the very existence of the Komsomol, an official Soviet youth organization, and offered the venues for anti-Soviet activities in which thousands of Komsomol members participated in the 1960s–1980s. The hippie movement emerged first, followed by the punk “imitation” movement. At the beginning, the members of both movements had some cultural fixation with Western cultural products, mainly rock music and films, but by the 1980s their cultural practices evolved embracing neo-Nazi ideas, processes that were documented by the KGB. These practices became more prominent, and even radical, especially among Soviet imitators of Western punks.51 Moreover, in contrast to the Ukrainian followers of hippies who were older and more college educated, adopting American cultural practices of pacifism and non-violence, the Ukrainian punks were much younger, with only high school education, and they adopted more radical, violent, and sometimes explicitly neo-fascist models informed by the neo-fascist movements that emerged in Italy, Germany, and Britain after 1945.

In the fall of 1982, in their letters to Ukraine’s communist leaders, KGB officers persisted in their claims that Soviet Ukrainian youth exhibited clear affinity with neo-Nazi and fascist ideas. The KGB discovered numerous pictures of fascist swastika on sidewalks and the walls of public buildings and telephone booths in many Ukraine cities, including the city of Chernivtsi. In September 1982, the KGB established the identity of at least five former students of the local technical schools (all of them were between 17 and 19 years of age) who were engaged in those “neo-fascist” activities. The report stated that they all listened to American “beat-music worshipping American pop-idols,” which profoundly shaped their worldviews.52

In addition, the KGB report stressed that the Italian film San Babila—8 PM (in Italian: San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile), a “film about the outrages of fascist youth [in Italy] [beschinstvakh fashistvuiushchei molodiozhi],” contributed to those young people’s interest in fascist ideology, symbols, and paraphernalia.53 This film was directed by Carlo Lizzani in 1976, and was included in the program of the Tenth Moscow International Film Festival in 1977. The idea of the film was inspired by violent events that took place at the Piazza San Babila in Milan in 1975. Groups of neo-fascists and anarchist communists became the protagonists for this film. Four Milanese boys were part of a neo-fascist group that subscribed to Benito Mussolini’s ideas of a new order, based on “squadrism.”54 The boys were fighting against the youth groups of communists and anarchists and frequently collided during the protests with violent outcomes. As the film portrays, one day the leader of the neo-fascist group asked Franco, the most insecure boy of the brigade, to perform a violent and demonstrative act against a randomly chosen communist boy, in order to redeem his “honor.” So one night at the Piazza San Babila, the boys met a couple of lovers, dressed in red (they were believed to be communists). The group’s state of madness drove the boys to chase the lovers and stab them. Franco was shocked and ran away from home, denouncing the assault to the police.

The KGB officer realized that the young Ukrainian imitators of Italian neo-fascism were especially influenced by the images of fashionable outfits and behavioral patterns of the young neo-fascist heroes from this Italian film.55 At home the young men listened to forbidden rock music broadcast by foreign radio stations, organized their meetings at a Chernivtsi downtown café, and publicly denounced the Soviet system and politics.56 Two of them, the leaders of that group, openly discussed the potential replacement of the Soviet political system that, in their view, was absolutely necessary, and a transfer of political power to a “military regime” that would manage the state through the fascist methods of political governing. The police discovered that these individuals displayed large images of a swastika in public. They were also suspected of another transgression: on 10 May 1981 someone burned the Soviet state banner, hanging on the façade of a public building in downtown Chernivtsi.57

Moreover, these individuals argued that the Soviet political system must be replaced by the strong authoritarian power of the fascist state because the Soviet state was nothing less than a “mafia state” and the rule of the Soviet Communist Party was a “mafia rule.” The police also learned that these references were widespread, and young neo-fascists embraced this terminology in all major Ukrainian cities. The depositions of those who were arrested were consistent, emphasizing the significant influence of the Italian film on them.58

The KGB Campaign against the Punks

In Soviet Ukraine, the KGB campaign against young neo-fascists converged with the old ideological campaign against the corrupt influences of Western popular music. This campaign was conceived in the 1960s as a struggle against the “beat music” of the Beatles and Rolling Stones and their hippie imitators, being reconceptualised as a campaign against “fascist punks” and reaching its peak in 1980–1981. To some extent, this campaign was a reaction to information published in Soviet central periodicals, where British punks were presented as neo-fascists and “skinheads.” In this light, the connection between Western music, the punk movement, and fascist symbols established by the KGB became more transparent. They all were to be prohibited from mass consumption in the Soviet Union.

According to Soviet music critics, the description of punks as fascists offered in Soviet periodicals confused and disoriented thousands of communist ideologists in provincial cities of Soviet Ukraine:

The only thing anyone knew about punks was that they were “fascists” because that’s how our British-based correspondents had described them for us. Several angry feature articles appeared in the summer and fall of 1977 with lurid descriptions of their unsavoury appearance and disgraceful manners, including one that quoted sympathetically a diatribe from the Daily Telegraph. To illustrate all this, a few photos of “monsters” with swastikas were printed … The image of punks as Nazis was established very effectively, and in our country, as you should understand, the swastika will never receive a positive reaction, even purely for shock value.59

Indeed, Soviet propagandists shaped the views of KGB officials and Komsomol activists who believed that punks and fascists were the same. All Komsomol functionaries and those who ran discotheques in Soviet Ukraine received a special notice warning against the punk ideology. The warning included Russian translations of phrases employed by British punks. This information was reprinted in many publications by Ukrainian journalists who covered this anti-punk campaign. In their texts, they quoted the punk slogans: “Live only for today! Do not think about tomorrow! Do not give a damn about all these spiritual crutches of religion, utopia, and politics! Forget about this. Enjoy your day. You are young, and do not be in a hurry to become a new young corpse” [sic!]. Unfailingly, they emphasized the anti-human essence of “fascist punk music” that allegedly embodied “bestial cynicism and meanness,” undermining the Soviet youth’s moral principles.60

The first public scandal that involved both “fascist music” and the display of fascist symbols took place in the city of Dnipropetrovsk in the fall of 1982. The city police arrested two college students, Ihor Keivan and Oleksandr Plastun who owned record collections of Western music and whose public behavior was described as “neo-Nazi.” These students were dressed in T-shirts with the images of American and Australian rock bands “Kiss” and “AC/DC,” which attracted the attention of policemen who interpreted these images as “fascist.” After Keivan’s and Plastun’s arrest, their “fascist” record collections were confiscated, and the information about these students’ anti-Soviet behavior was sent to their colleges.

In December of 1982, the entire city of Dnipropetrovsk and the Dnipropetrovsk oblast were shaken by police raids and searches, part of the anti-fascist and anti-punk campaign. The Dnipropetrovsk City Party Committee approached Nadezhda A. Sarana, an experienced Communist and a member of the anti-fascist resistance group during the Second World War, and asked her to write a letter about the dangers of the local fascist punks’ fashion statements. On 22 December 1982, the communist functionaries staged an open public meeting with participation of all communist and Komsomol activists in Dnipropetrovsk’s downtown. During this event, they publicly endorsed Sarana’s letter against the punks and declared war against the punk movement in Soviet Ukraine. Under KGB pressure, local ideologists organized a show trial of Keivan, Plastun, and another young punk, Vadym Shmeliov, that was held in January of 1983. All three were expelled from the Komsomol and their colleges. KGB officers were outraged when they learned that Keivan and Plastun interpreted this punishment as a violation of their human rights. This case established the precedent and routine practices of Komsomol cells in the region to purge those members who were suspected of enthusiasm for the forbidden music.61

This anti-punk campaign especially affected the Ukrainian fans of heavy metal music.62 In 1983, the Dnipropetrovsk police arrested ten students from a local vocational school on charges of “hooliganism.” The police discovered images of the Nazi era and of the American Ku Klux Klan in their possession. As it turned out, Serhii Onushev, Oleksandr Rvachenko, and their friends made white robes and put the letters KKK on them, impersonating their membership in this American organization.63 Serhii Onushev was identified as the leader of this group, who listened to the tapes that included the music of the bands that “belonged to the pro-fascist movement—Kiss, Nazareth, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath.”64 Local ideologists established a direct connection between this music and the fascist inclinations of Onushev’s group. According to them, the musicians of Kiss represented a group of four hooligans, who chose SS and Nazi symbols as the emblems of their band, tearing apart live chickens and vomiting during their performances. They emphasized that, for Soviet students, they had become idols and “trendsetters” in popular culture, inspiring young Soviet people to commit inhuman fascist acts.65

The case of Dmitrii Frolin, a student of the Department of Philology at Dnipropetrovsk University, became another sensational case that attracted the attention of local journalists. As a result of the anti-punk and anti-fascist campaign, Frolin was arrested in 1983 and expelled from both the Komsomol and the university in 1985 for “propaganda of fascism.” Local ideologists pointed out that Frolin’s activities were the direct result of “intensive listening” to the music by “fascist bands,” such as Kiss and AC/DC: “Over his bed, Frolin put a fascist cross and a poster with the faces of the members of the band Kiss, distorted in non-human grimaces with ugly make up (Frolin paid forty rubles for this Kiss poster on the ‘black market’). In addition, he had a variety of audio tapes with the music of Kiss and AC/DC. Just press a button of his tape recorder and you will hear this music.”66 A journalist called the audience to consider the ideological implications of these activities:

They, the musicians of AC/DC, call themselves the devil’s children. Their song “Back in Black” became an anthem of the American Nazi Party. During a Komsomol meeting, Dmitrii justified his behavior by saying: “I do not consider myself collecting such things a crime. This is just mere collecting. It does not matter what the subject of this collection is. These items reflect a certain period in the history of these people. I consider listening to my favorite music and collecting music records part of my private life. And I have a right to protect my privacy, according to Soviet and international laws.”67

In December of 1983, a local youth periodical published the results of a sociological analysis of ideological maturity among Dnipropetrovsk youth, compiled by the Komsomol scholars. According to their findings, special Komsomol raids discovered images of the American band Kiss in many student dorms at Dnipropetrovsk colleges. One could easily observe the SS symbols and Nazi signs on these images. The analysis also included a concern pertaining to the visual appearance of young people, stating that the majority of the student population in Dnipropetrovsk were wearing T-shirts that had images of the U.S. military insignia and ones that glorify capitalist countries hostile to the Soviet Union. Apparently, they purchased these T-shirts on the black market, wearing them even during their classes.68

According to KGB officers, the “youth culture of fascist music” was shaped by the idealization of Hitler and Ukrainian nationalist leaders, such as Stepan Bandera, who were active during the Second World War. In 1983 and 1984, the police arrested the members of a “fascist Banderovite group,” students at the Dnipropetrovsk Agricultural Institute. These students, Konstantin Shipunov and his five followers, listened to “fascist rock music,” organized their own party, and popularized the ideas of Nazi leaders and Ukrainian nationalist politicians. They criticized the Russification of cultural life in Ukraine, advocated Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, and insisted on protecting the national rights of all Ukrainian patriots.69

The criminal cases of Ukrainian “fascist” heavy metal fans reveal interesting connections among various forms of cultural consumption in Soviet Ukraine in 1982–1984. The arrested members of Onushev’s and Shipunov’s groups confessed that they were inspired by the images of “clean, intelligent and civilized” Nazi officers portrayed in the Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). Based on the novel by Yulian Semenov, a famous Soviet writer of mystery and spy novels, this TV series narrated the story of Shtirlitz (Viacheslav Tikhonov), a Soviet agent posing as a high-ranking Nazi officer in Hitlerite Germany in the spring of 1945, during the final months of the Second World War. Like Carlo Lizzani’s film about Milanese fascists, this film became a real blockbuster during the 1970s and early 1980s in the USSR, romanticized in the imaginations of many “fascist” heavy metal fans and local “punks” who tried to emulate the dress code and behavior of Shtirlitz and other Nazi characters from this Soviet film.70

As early as December of 1983, the secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional Komsomol committee O. Fedoseev reported to the Komsomol Central Committee in Kyiv that in February–March of 1983, local ideologists encountered the rise of the punk movement in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, but they successfully mobilized all activists and “Soviet patriots,” organizing special counter-propaganda events all over the city and the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. As a result, they managed to curtail this “fascist movement.” The Dnipropetrovsk oblast Komsomol organization developed political measures on “how to fight fascist punks,” which became a model for the entire republic. The KGB administration approved those measures.71

However, between 1982 and 1985, the KGB and the police identified twenty new groups of neo-fascists/punks in Ukraine who had hundreds of followers. Arrested by the police and interrogated by the KGB, the members of these groups employed various fascist symbols and paraphernalia, painted their faces “in punk fashion,” and shaved their temples.72 Only a few of them, however, had anything to do with the Nazi ideology or fascism.

Conclusion

The KGB’s anti-hippie, anti-fascist, and anti-punk campaigns in Soviet Ukraine were intended to weaken young Ukrainians’ fascination with the products of Western (especially American) popular culture, such as films and pop music, and their idealization of Western neo-fascist images and culture. However, the results of these campaigns were contrary to what had been expected. The campaigns contributed to the immense popularity of forbidden Western cultural products among young consumers. Ironically, these campaigns amplified the interest in Western culture among the transgressors’ ideological supervisors who were supposed to erase it from the imagination of the Soviet youth.

Yet, there was another surprising and dangerous outcome of the anti-punk campaign in Soviet Ukraine, accentuated by KGB officers and local propagandists. During 1982–1984, the KGB active measures targeting “fascist punks” and the authorities’ hostile and coercive actions against disobedient youth encouraged young people to think about the state in political terms, and to openly criticize the Soviet political system, identifying it as a mafia state.73 Since 1967 and the anti-hippie campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, the KGB feared the potential “politicization” of cultural consumption by local youth. The drastic difference between the peaceful and relatively a-political Soviet hippies’ behavior and that of the Ukrainian “fascist punks” inspired by Italian films and Anglo-American rock music exacerbated the KGB’s fear. The political behavior of young Komsomol members became a dangerous cultural phenomenon. Their political programs, adopting neo-fascist cultural practices, challenged the Soviet political system that had to be replaced by a “more efficient, honest and stable” authoritarian system. Worse, many Ukrainian punks demanded the “liberation of Ukraine from Russian exploitation.”74 The cultural trends among young Soviet Ukrainians analyzed in this study—the mixture of popular culture and political nationalism—survived the KGB persecution, foreshadowing the distinct signs of revival in post-Soviet contemporary Ukraine.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Irina M. Kozintseva, the inspiration and the love of my entire life. Without a sabbatical leave from Ball State University, its material and moral support, I would never have finished my archival explorations in Kyiv and Dnipro during my research trip to Ukraine in 2019. My words of gratitude also go to Olga Bertelsen who invited me to share my research findings with her colleagues in Florence, Italy, and improved my text tremendously by her thoughtful suggestions and comments. Finally, I would like to thank the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., for two research grants in 2018–2019 that allowed me to complete this manuscript, a part of my more ambitious book project.

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Stites, Richard. Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Szemere, Anna. Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

Troitsky, Artemy. Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia. London: Omnibus Press, 1987.

Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture inthe Soviet Union, 1945–1970. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

Valli, Roberta Suzzi. “The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime.” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 131–50.

Vasilieva, L. “Takim ne mesto sredi nas!” Dnepr vechernii, 10 January 1983, p. 3.

Vrublevskii, Vitalii K. Vladimir Shcherbitskii: zapiski pomoshchnika: slukhi, legendy, dokumenty. Kyiv: Dovira, 1993.

Yekelchyk, Serhy. Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Zhuk, Sergei I. Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010.

_____. Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018.

_____. “‘The Disco Mafia’ and ‘Komsomol Capitalism’ in Soviet Ukraine during Late Socialism.” In Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, edited by Graham H. Roberts, 173–95. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Archival Sources

Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Dnipropetrovskoi oblasti (DADO, State Archive of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast), Dnipro, Ukraine.

Fond 19. Dnepropetrovskii obkom KPU (Kommunisticheskoi partii Ukrainy).

Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy (HDA SBU, Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine), Kyiv, Ukraine.

Fond 1. 2-GE Upravlinnia (Kontrrozvidky) MGB-KGB URSR.

Fond 16. Sekretariat GPU-KGB URSR.

Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromadskykh Obiednan Ukrainy (TsDAHOU, Central State Archive of the Civil Organizations of Ukraine), Kyiv, Ukraine.

Fond 7. Tsentralnyi Komitet LKSMU. Viddil kultury. Viddil propahandy i ahitatsii.

Interviews

Interview with Ihor T., a retired KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Interview with Oleksandr Beznosov, 19 July 2008, the Department of History, Dnipropetrovsk University, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

Interview with Stepan K., a retired SBU/KGB officer, 2 February 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

1 Stepan Ivanovich referred to “active measures” that were defined by Vladimir Bukovsky as “[a]ctions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) ranging from media manipulation to outright violence.” See Vladimir Bukovsky, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, trans. Alyona Kojevnikov (Westlake Village, CA: Ninth of November Press, 2019), 629.

2 I refer to the pioneering study by William Jay Risch, “Soviet ‘Flower Children’: Hippies and the Youth Counter-Culture in 1970s Lviv,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 3 (2005): 565–84, and his book, The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. 237–44. Juliane Fürst is writing now a book about Soviet hippies. See her recent publications: “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine: Life in a Leningrad Commune,” in Dropping out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc, eds. Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 197–207; and “If You’re Going to Moscow, Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair: The Soviet Hippie Sistema and Its Life In, Despite and With Stagnation,” in Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era, eds. Dina Fainberg and Artemy Kalinovsky (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 123–46. On some aspects of Soviet youth culture, see Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010). For these publications, the authors (including myself) did not use KGB documents from the SBU Archive in Kyiv.

3 According to Christopher Andrew, “throughout the Cold War, Soviet intelligence regarded the United States as its ‘main adversary.’ In second place at the beginning of the Cold War was the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom. In third position came France.” See in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 150.

4 On the transformation of the United States’ image under Stalin and Khrushchev, see Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. 73, 151.

5 Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy (hereafter: HDA SBU), f. 16, op. 1, spr. 902, ark. 35, 142. Unless otherwise stated, all excerpts from archival documents have been translated by the author from Russian into English. Compare with the original: “Главную угрозу советской Украине представляют украинские буржуазные националисты, сионисты и сектанты—все на службе и финансовой поддержке разведок США и Англии.”

6 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 919, ark. 60–61.

7 Rudolf Pihoia, “Chekhoslovakia 1968 god (Part 1),” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 6 (1994): 24–28. See also Mark Kramer, ed., “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part I): New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 10 (1998): 234–47; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 251.

8 Vitalii K. Vrublevskii, Vladimir Shcherbitskii: zapiski pomoshchnika: slukhi, legendy, dokumenty (Kyiv: Dovira, 1993), 167–68.

9 It is based on my calculations of criminal cases from 1971 (HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1017) to 1989 (spr. 1271). An analysis of various official KGB reports to Ukraine’s Communist Party leadership has confirmed the preliminary calculations (spr. 1056, ark. 1–311; spr. 1115, ark. 5–310; spr. 1115, ark. 25–301; spr. 1209, ark. 25–290).

10 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1249, ark. 147–49. On the Soviet youth’s fascination with American jazz and rock music as early as September 1964, see especially the September 1964 KGB report in HDA SBU, f. 1, op. 1, spr. 1567, ark. 151–52.

11 See the material about the KGB operations and Prague Spring in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 247–61.

12 The author’s interview with Ihor T., a KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

13 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 253–88.

14 This survey was submitted to the KGB on 13 September 1968. See “Obzor: Odesskoe studenchestvo. 1968 god” [“The Odessa College Students (1968)”] in HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 255–88.

15 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 258–59.

16 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 275–76.

17 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 275.

18 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 273.

19 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 274.

20 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 275.

21 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 274.

22 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 277–78. For a detailed discussion about Ukrainian speakers’ Russification who moved to the city of Dnipropetrovsk from the Ukrainian countryside, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 176–79.

23 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 263, 281.

24 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 280–81.

25 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 281–82. For more details about the cult of The Magnificent Seven among Soviet youth, see Sergei I. Zhuk, Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018 [London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019]), 138–140.

26 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 281–83.

27 Banderovtsy was derived from the name of Stepan Bandera, a leader of the OUN radical branch. His name became a symbol of the Ukrainian national cause in western Ukraine since the late 1940s. See Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 125–28, 141–51.

28 Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Dnipropetrovskoi Oblasti (hereafter: DADO), f. 19, op. 52, spr. 72, ark. 9.

29 See the original text of this letter in Ukrainian in Raisa Lysha, Yurii Vivtash, and Orysia Sokulska, eds., Porohy: Vybrane, vol. 1–9 (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2009), 432–38. In August of 1968, this letter was sent to the Head of the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR V. V. Shcherbytskyi, the Candidate Member of the Politburo of the Central Party Committee F. D. Ovcharenko, and the Secretary of the Writers’ Union D. V. Pavlychko.

30 See the English translation of this letter in The Ukrainian Review XVI, no. 3 (1969): 46–52. This text entitled “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk” was published without the author’s name. As a result of international publicity of this case, the first scholarly analysis of these events appeared in English in Kenneth C. Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Post-Stalin Era: Myth, Symbols and Ideology in Soviet Nationalities Policy (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980), 158–59. Compare with Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 40. See also HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 367–71.

31 For more details, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 48–64.

32 As early as 1996, KGB documents on Soviet hippies were quoted in a book by a prominent Soviet dissident. See Bukovsky, Judgment in Moscow, 136.

33 HDA SBU, f. 16, op.1, spr. 974, ark. 114–15.

34 Ibid. See also Amerika, no. 150, April 1969, pp. 12–18. Amerika was a monthly periodical published in Russian by the U.S. Information Agency, beginning from 1959. KGB analysts discussed a shorter version of Keniston’s article published in Amerika in Russian translation. For a full version, see Kenneth Keniston, “Youth, Change and Violence,” The American Scholar 37, no. 2 (1968): 227–45. The KGB was concerned about the Soviet hippies who, like their American counterparts, might use political violence and create alternative political structures that would disrupt the political status quo. According to Keniston’s interpretation, that is what American hippies tried to accomplish. Those Soviet hippies planned to participate “in the all-Union congress during this summer (1969) either in Riga, or Tallinn.” Even recent graduates of high schools demonstrated a similar behavior in 1969 and 1970. Some of them organized a secret society in the city of Slaviansk (Donetsk oblast), known as “Koka-Kola,” “expressing their protest against the existing political order.” See HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1009, ark. 167–68. Among numerous studies on hippies as part of American counterculture, the best historical analysis was offered by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle in their “Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s” to Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5–14.

35 HDA SBU, f. 16, op.1, spr. 1011, ark. 81–92 (with a hand-written note by a party secretary “Report personally on the measures” on ark. 81). See a copy of the same report in HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1009, ark. 317–28.

36 On those groups, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 79–92, 97–105.

37 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 81.

38 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 82.

39 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 85.

40 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 84. “In April 1970, more than 100 hippies from different cities of the USSR, including Lviv, met in Vilnius, where they had a non-official festival of acoustic music (without electric instruments).”

41 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 85–86. The third part of Gorky’s Old Izergil entitled “The Flaming Heart of Danko” was an obligatory reading in Russian literature classes in Soviet high schools. Writing the report, a KGB officer, by mistake, presented the British rock band “The Animals” as American. (“Amerikanskii modernistskii ansambl ‘Zhivotnyie’” in the original, ark. 86).

42 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 87–88; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 993, ark. 358–61; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 325.

43 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 88–89.

44 On Pokalchuk, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1095, ark. 182–85; for more on the hippies’ engagement with the Orthodox Church in Kupiansk, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1089, ark. 321; for a report about the substantial growth of Krishnaites in Ukraine, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1175, ark. 132–34, and f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1184, ark. 36–37. See also DADO, f. 19, op. 60, spr. 85, ark. 7, 17, and Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 200, 201, 205. Some police officers reported that the hippies had publicly displayed various religious symbols, such as Christian crosses and icons, as well as portraits of Krishna and Buddha.

45 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1162, ark. 126.

46 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1162, ark. 128.

47 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1249, ark. 147.

48 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 90. KGB officers, who studied local hippies, distanced themselves from the “ideological nonsense” of Komsomol periodicals, which wrote that the “American hippies were a satanic sect embracing a mixture of palmistry, astrology, and black magic, and that the hippies were looking for a virgin girl for their devilish black mass ritual and could not find such girls among themselves.” See the author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine. He referred to Mykola Solomatin, “Zhertvy chornoi magii,” Ranok, no. 1, January 1974, pp. 18–19.

49 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 324–25.

50 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 323.

51 Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 102, 103, 170–71, 267–79.

52 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68; the author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

53 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68.

54 Squadrismo is an Italian term for the Italian fascist movement, based on armed squads and led by Benito Mussolini. See Roberta Suzzi Valli, “The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 35 (2000): 131–50.

55 The author’s interview with Stepan K., a retired KGB/SBU officer, 2 February 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

56 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68.

57 Ibid.

58 The author’s interview with Stepan K., retired SBU/KGB officer, 2 February 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine. For more details about these Italian films, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 145–48.

59 Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (London: Omnibus Press, 1987), 42–43.

60 Even during Gorbachev’s perestroika, local journalists and KGB officials still employed these materials. They reprinted some of the British punks’ declarations for Komsomol ideologists’ needs and tasks. See L. Gamolsky, N. Efremenko, and V. Inshakov, Na barrikadakh sovesti: Ocherki, razmyshleniia, interviu (Dnipropetrovsk: Politizdat, 1988), 139. The author’s interview with Igor T., a KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine; the author’s interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. For a discussion about similar practices in Hungary, see Anna Szemere, Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

61 The author’s interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine; see also the Communist Party veteran Nadezhda Sarana’s open letter entitled “We Declare War against Everybody Who Interferes in Our Lives and Work!” [Boi tem, kto meshaet nam stroit i zhit!], denouncing the local punks, and A. Liamina and L. Gamolskii, “Grazhdaninom byt obiazan” about the 22 December 1982 public trial in Dnipropetrovsk in Dnepr vechernii, 23 December 1982, p. 3. Compare these texts with that of the activists’ reaction in “Iz vystuplenii uchastnikov sobraniia,” in Dnepr vechernii, 23 December 1982, p. 3. See also L. Vasilieva, “Takim ne mesto sredi nas!” Dnepr vechernii, 10 January 1983, p. 3.

62 Heavy metal music, known as “metal,” is a genre of rock music that emerged in the late 1960s and further developed in the early 1970s in the United Kingdom and the United States.

63 Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, Na barrikadakh sovesti, 133.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.,134. In 1984–1985, some university students suffered persecutions for having posters of the British band Black Sabbath. The author’s interview with Oleksandr Beznosov, 19 July 2008, the Department of History, Dnipropetrovsk University, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

66 Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, 135–36.

67 The journalist continued: “Let’s think again! There is no justification for collecting the Nazi regalia! Many people in the West understand this. Leon Rappoport, an American professor from the University of Kansas, was absolutely right, when he sincerely declared: ‘Collecting Nazi relics is certainly one of the forms of fascist propaganda.’” See Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, 135–36; the author’s interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

68 Yu. Lystopad, “Ideolohichna borotba i molod (Notatky z oblasnoi naukovo-praktychnoi konferentsii),” Prapor iunosti, 17 December 1983, p. 2.

69 Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, 137.

70 For more about this film and similar cases during perestroika, see Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 152, 168, 170; interview with Ihor T., a retired KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine; Ihor T. also mentioned the Italian film’s influences on Ukraine’s youth.

71 Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromadskykh Obiednan Ukrainy (TsDAHOU), f. 7, op. 20, spr. 3087, ark. 43 (“Otchet Dnepropetrovskogo OK LKSMU ot 23 dekabria 1983 g.”).

72 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1197, ark. 30–31, 68–69; spr. 1200, ark. 236–237; interview with Ihor T., a retired KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

73 On how Soviet young consumers used films about the Italian mafia by Damiano Damiani to criticize the USSR as a mafia state, see Sergei I. Zhuk, “‘The Disco Mafia’ and ‘Komsomol Capitalism’ in Soviet Ukraine during Late Socialism,” in Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, ed. Graham H. Roberts (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 173–95.

74 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1192, ark. 68–69; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1199, ark. 49.

The KGB Operation “Retribution” and John Demjanjuk

Olga Bertelsen

From 1950 to 1952, Jim McDonald, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Second World War who received three battle stars, worked closely with the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission and Edward Mark O’Connor, its Commissioner and world expert on refugees and human migration. McDonald’s task was to screen refugees to prevent those who had criminal or espionage backgrounds from entering the United States. In the mid-1980s, Edward Mark O’Connor’s son, Mark J. O’Connor, an attorney defending John Demjanjuk (1920–2012), invited McDonald to gather evidence in Poland pertaining to this complex case. McDonald agreed and, from 1986 to 1987, he served as principal investigator for the defense in the Demjanjuk case, traveling to Israel, Germany, and Poland.1

John Demjanjuk, a retired Ukrainian-born autoworker from Cleveland, allegedly exterminated thousands of Jews, while working at the Nazi concentration camp near Treblinka, Poland. His case exemplifies the most typical Soviet approach to active measures, and deserves a detailed analysis in light of recently discovered KGB documents. This case became the most successful KGB operation that complicated Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the West for generations and obscured the issue of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. But before analyzing the case, as well as the failure of the U.S. state institutions to protect an innocent American citizen from foreign covert action, it seems prudent to briefly discuss McDonald’s findings that may serve as an introductory chapter to a much broader story about the Soviet covert operation code named “Vozmezdiie” (Retribution).

Demjanjuk was drafted into the Red Army in 1942. He was badly wounded in one of the first battles and hospitalized. After his recovery, he was sent back to the front. In the spring of 1942, he was taken prisoner in Crimea during the Battle of Kerch, and was transported as a POW to a transit camp at Rivne, Ukraine to be taken later to a large POW camp at Chełm in eastern Poland adjacent to the Soviet border. The Germans used him for forced labor, digging pits, repairing railroad tracks, and the like. He was incarcerated at Chełm for approximately eighteen months until the spring of 1944. A Holodomor survivor, Demjanjuk wanted to fight the Soviets, and the Germans sent him to Graz where he joined the Vlasov Army.2 This element of Demjanjuk’s biography ultimately made him ineligible to be working in any extermination camps. German documents specifically stipulated this exclusion to prevent information leaks about camp practices to the Soviets in case a vlasovets was taken prisoner by the Red Army.3 Demjanjuk was placed in Camp Heuberg, a Vlasov training camp near Stuttgart, and even served for a brief period of time as a bodyguard for Vlasovite General Fiodor Trukhin who was under direct command of General Andrei Vlasov.

After 1945, Demjanjuk resided in several Displaced Persons (DP) camps at Danzig, Landshut, Regensburg, and Feldafing, and was even trained by the U.S. Army of Occupation, being hired as a truck driver. In a DP camp he met his future wife Vera Kowlowa, and in 1952 they, as a married couple, emigrated from West Germany to the United States. They settled in Cleveland, Ohio, and had three children. For nearly thirty years, Demjanjuk worked as an autoworker for the Ford Motor Company.4

The Demjanjuks’ normal life ended abruptly in 1977, when on the basis of eyewitness testimonies by Holocaust survivors John was accused of having been a guard known as “Ivan the Terrible,” being notoriously famous because of his violence and cruelty toward the prisoners at the Treblinka death camp. The court stripped Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship, and he was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial. In 1988, he was convicted and received a death sentence, but in 1993 he was acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court. In 1993, Demjanjuk was allowed to return to Ohio, but in 2002 his citizenship was revoked again and, in 2009, he was extradited to Germany where he was tried for being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor. In 2011, the court convicted and sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison. He died on 17 March 2012 before the Court of Appeals delivered its final verdict. Ultimately, he died a free man, according to German law.

McDonald found three witnesses in Poland, the survivors of the atrocities at Treblinka. Immediately upon McDonald’s arrival in Warsaw, the Israeli press published articles suggesting that he went to Poland to find “false witnesses” to defend Demjanjuk, offering them trips to the Unites States and money.5 The most fascinating details of McDonald’s trips to Warsaw and Treblinka are that the description of “Ivan the Terrible” as a giant did not coincide with the appearance of Ohio’s Demjanjuk who was only six-feet tall, and that the Treblinka guard was nearly forty-years-old at the time of the Nazi occupation of Poland, “which would have been almost double that of the twenty-two-year-old John Demjanjuk.”6 Most importantly, two witnesses (the third one had passed away) who agreed to testify in the United States and in Israel and confirm the drastic discrepancy between the real Ivan the Terrible that they knew and John Demjanjuk learned that their visas to the United States were “suddenly and mysteriously cancelled with no explanations” after they had been approved by the U.S. State Department.7

This study is an attempt to decipher the meaning of the Demjanjuk tragedy on the basis of newly discovered archival documents retrieved from the former KGB archives in Kharkiv and Kyiv, Ukraine. They shed light on how the KGB facilitated the creation of the U.S. Office of Special Investigation (hereafter: OSI) that played a crucial role in the Demjanjuk case, and reveal the anatomy of a KGB operation that produced an unexpected result—Demjanjuk’s enduring show trial that transcended national and political boundaries. The importance of the recently discovered documents rest in their ability to contextualize and to better understand why Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk was denaturalized twice, extradited twice, and was put on trial four times in the United States, Israel, and Germany as an accessory to the murder of thousands of Jews. It reveals with absolute clarity that, designed in the early 1970s, the special KGB operation “Retribution” was a response to the human rights activism of “Ukrainian nationalists” and “Zionists” in North America. Some of them were former OUN members and members of other groups, such as the Vlasov Army that fought against the Soviets during the Second World War. Demjanjuk happened to be a member of both anti-Soviet groups, the OUN and the Vlasov Army. This operation helped the chekists eliminate their former and present enemies and opponents by proxy, through Western institutions.8