Other prescient pull quotes (and think about all of this being written in 2014)...
The main difference between propaganda in the USSR and the new Russia,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who worked on Putin’s election campaign and was a long-time Kremlin insider, “is that in Soviet times the concept of truth was important. Even if they were lying they took care to prove what they were doing was ‘the truth.’ Now no one even tries proving the ‘truth.’ You can just say anything. Create realities.
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In this shape-shifting context, which endures today, all political philosophy becomes political technology, and the point of ideas and language are not what they represent, but what function they fulfill. The point of any statement is its effect rather than any notion of truth.
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As Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and Stephen Holmes of New York University have pointed out, many Russians are perfectly aware that the news is faked: the Kremlin’s power is entrenched not by trying to persuade people that it is telling the truth,but by making it clear that it can dictate the terms of the “truth” and thus enhancing its aura of power. Information, and television in particular, is key in this society of pure spectacle, which has been labeled everything from the “TV-ocracy” to a “postmodern dictatorship.”
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The border between “fact” and “fiction” has become utterly blurred in Russian media and public discourse. During the Ukraine crisis, Russian news has featured brazenly fake “interviews” with Russian “victims” of alleged atrocities by Ukrainian“fascists,”1 such as the lurid story of a child being crucified by Ukrainian forces. This story, like many others, was a complete fabrication. When asked about the incident Deputy Minister for Communication Alexei Volin showed no embarrassment and indicated that all that mattered were ratings, arguing that the public likes how the main TV channels present material, as well as the tone of the programs,and noting that viewers of the leading Russian TV channels had increased by almost 50% over the last two months. The Kremlin tells its stories well, having mastered the perfect mix of authoritarianism and entertainment culture, but the notion of “journalism,”in the sense of reporting “facts” or “truth,” has been virtually wiped out. In a lecture to journalism students of Moscow State University, Volin stated that students should forget about making the world better: “We should give students a clear understanding: they are going to work for The Man, and The Man will tell them what to write, how to write, and what not to write about certain things. And The Man has the right to do it because he pays them.”
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The aim of this new propaganda is not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid, rather than agitated to action. Conspiracy theories are the perfect tool for this aim. They are all over Russian TV. For over a decade political commentary programs such as Odnako on state-controlled Channel 1 have talked about current affairs in a way that avoids clear analysis but nudges the viewer towards a paranoid worldview with endless hints about “them” and“outside enemies” who want to “bite off a piece of Russia.
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As Max Seddon’s investigative reports for Buzzfeed have detailed, the Kremlin employs an army of “trolls” to wage its online war in the comment sections and Twitter feeds of the West. Seddon writes of one agency:
On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and
tweet 50 times a day.
“The main effect of these comments is not necessarily to persuade anyone,” says Luke Harding, “but to delay and frustrate our journalistic work by having to clear Twitter feeds of trolls [and] spend money on IT people to clear up the mess.” The Kremlin’s use of trolls is described by Joel Harding, a US military analyst, as the information equivalent of “suppressive fire.”
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The underlying mindset of the Kremlin’s political technologists exploits the idea that “truth” is a lost cause and that reality is essentially malleable, and the instant, easy proliferation of fakes and copies on the Internet makes it the ideal forum to spread such ideas.
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“The idea that there ‘is no alternative to Putin,’ that Putin is some sort of staunch moral conservative, that dissidents like Pussy Riot are‘projects’ or extreme fascists, or that Putin is ‘going mad’ and therefore the West needs to placate him—these have all been convenient myths spread by the Kremlin and readily taken up by Western experts and media.”
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The Russian system uses corruption as an integral part of securing the Kremlin’s power vertical. Notions of “market rules,” “rule of law” and “private property” are erratically practiced. Many companies, and especially those in strategic industries, are operated along quasi-patrimonial lines, with business leaders allowed to control their assets as long as they pay off bureaucrats, pledge political loyalty and “sponsor” national projects. The lines between the state and the private sector are utterly blurred.
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If the premise of the neoliberal idea of globalization is that money is politically neutral, that interdependence will be an impulse towards rapprochement,and that international commerce sublimates violence into harmony, the Russian view remains at best mercantilist, with money and trade used as weapons and interdependence a mechanism for aggression.
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Russia’s approach to information takes advantage of the idea of freedom of expression in order to subvert it, replacing information with dezinformatsiya, abusing the idea that “truth is always relative”to the point where Kremlin media show “complete disregard for facts.” But as the Kremlin’s political technologists negotiate the international information space, they are working on fertile ground. On a philosophical level, the West is having its own crisis with the ideas of “truth” and “reality,” while on an institutional level, the space previously taken by journalism is being increasingly occupied by PR.
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“If in the 20th century the great challenge was the battle for freedom of information,” says Vasily Gatov,“ in the 21st century the greatest challenge will be from states and other powerful actors abusing freedom of information.” Gatov’s observation strikes at a core problem. An underlying issue in addressing such media as RT is the lack of any stable definitions for “propaganda” or “disinformation.” “Isn’t everything propaganda?” was a sentiment often heard by the authors during the research for this paper. But this dismissive attitude risks opening up the space for the weaponization of information, making deception equivalent to argumentation and the deliberate misuse of facts as legitimate as rational persuasion.
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Overall, the challenges posed by the Kremlin’s weaponization of information, culture and money have to be seen in the broader context of establishing the institutions to face 21st-century challenges.Today’s Kremlin preys on the weaknesses, contradictions and blind spots of the Western system. It thus serves as a sort of X-ray of the defects of the system. The battle against disinformation and strategic corruption, and the need to reinvigorate the global case for liberal democracy, are not merely Russia-specific issues. The Kremlin acts as an avant-garde of malevolent globalization, pioneering and pushing approaches that risk being taken up by other actors—many of the recommendations suggested in this paper to deal with the Kremlin’s challenge can, and should, be extrapolated to other cases.
