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.