Information operations – To Inform is to Influence

War and terrorism have become increasingly routine facts of life in Russia. Since 2014, this reality has become an essential tool for stimulating popular support for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The mechanics of how this support is cultivated and mobilized are now fundamental to the Kremlin’s day-to-day agenda. At the same time, Moscow’s new (and sometimes novel) approach to warfare, which runs through the conflicts in Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, Syria, and now Turkey, have become central to the future development of Russian domestic and foreign policy.

Kolesnikov is a senior associate and the chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Andrei Kolesnikov

SENIOR ASSOCIATE AND CHAIR
RUSSIAN DOMESTIC POLITICS AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS PROGRAM
MOSCOW CENTER

It is difficult to overstate the impact that war has on the mass consciousness of the Russian public. The memory of the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War, continues to provide a powerful basis for national unity. Ideological differences aside, successive Soviet and Russian governments have sought to legitimize themselves through mythologized interpretations of the war. Themes that were developed during the Soviet era are being recycled in an entirely new context.Peddling threats, external and internal, including the threat of war, to the Russian people is a key tool of the Putin regime’s political strategy. At the same time, the Kremlin has embraced the so-called virtualization of war. For a large majority of the Russian population, war is experienced solely through mass media. Meanwhile, the appeal of modern war is driven largely by the absence of significant losses on the Russian side, something that directly plays into the level of popular support for the government.

Russia’s recent military operations in Crimea, the Donbas, and Syria, as well as the information and trade war with Turkey, serve as a form of symbolic compensation to the Russian populace for swelling economic hardships. However, public opinion data suggest that Russians continue to perceive these contemporary wars differently from earlier conflicts. Most Russians don’t regard Russia’s recent wars as real or big wars, on a par with earlier conflicts like Afghanistan. Likewise, because of its continued reliance on state media for information about Russia’s military operations, the public’s interpretation of war remains distorted.

The Kremlin’s mythmaking regarding war relies on three key elements, some of which have clear antecedents in the Soviet-era discourse about war:

Moscow’s wars are just, defensive, triumphant, and preventive.
Nearly all of Moscow’s modern wars are linked, thematically or otherwise, to the Great Patriotic War. By blurring realities on the ground, government propaganda is able to portray any domestic opposition to war as inherently immoral.
War is now part of a so-called marketplace of threats from which the Kremlin can choose on a whim, helping mobilize popular support for the regime.

Focus groups held at the Levada Center on December 21, 2015, confirmed all this.¹ And the focus groups, selected according to the professional rules of the only independent sociological organization in Russia, highlighted the fact that the public is unable on its own to readily grasp the logic behind Moscow’s military moves; participants tended to simply regurgitate the Kremlin’s propagandistic clichés. The Syria operation, for instance, is supported by the general public because it is a preventive war that will, as one of the participants in the focus groups said, “destroy terrorists in their hole.”

The political class’s continued grip on power depends on the Kremlin’s ability to sustain current levels of political mobilization. That suggests that the permanent war against perceived enemies who are supposedly besieging Russia will have to continue. But before the September 2016 Duma elections, the Kremlin is likely to focus primarily on wars against internal threats—namely, opposition activists and nongovernmental organizations that are not controlled by its political machinery. At the same time, the general public remains decidedly skittish about a real or big war, which highlights the intrinsic limits on the Kremlin’s militarization and heavy-handed propaganda.

War in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Consciousness

In 1961, Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a particularly wonderful poem—“Do Russians Want War?”—that later became a smash hit for crooner Mark Bernes.² The poem’s text was a handy encapsulation of the Communist Party’s peace-loving policies. In Yevtushenko’s telling, external circumstances—and the need to prevent larger wars—consistently provoked the Soviet Union into action. As the lyrics explained:

It is not only for our country
That soldiers fell in this war,
But so that all the people of the earth
Can sleep peacefully at night.
Just ask those who fought,
To those who kissed you on the Elbe.
We believe in that memory.
. . . The Russians, do they want war?³

The popular propaganda song “The March of the Soviet Tankmen” from 1939 echoed this defensive ideology perfectly (“We don’t want a single bit of another’s land, / But we won’t give up any of ours”).

This defensive logic undergirded much of Cold War–era nuclear policy. Moscow’s nuclear arsenal stood as the last line of defense preventing a catastrophic war between the USSR and the United States. As the irradiated physicist Dmitri Gusev explained in Mikhail Romm’s Nine Days in One Year, one of the most popular Soviet films of the 1960s, “If we didn’t make [the atomic bomb], we wouldn’t be having this conversation, pops. About half of humanity wouldn’t exist, either.”⁴

As viewed through the prism of such ideology, all of the Soviet Union’s wars in the pre-perestroika era were both preventive and defensive. This logic is being revived by the Putin regime. The Kremlin’s current wars, after all, are being waged under a Soviet adage: “So long as there’s no war.” That is, the Kremlin’s military actions have the explicit goal of preventing a big war among nation-states. Of course, Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s concept of waging war for the sake of war’s prevention remains inherently paradoxical—but for the Russian public, no such paradox exists.
To understand why, it’s worth explaining the logic’s origins under the Soviet regime. Lenin—referencing Friedrich Engels, wrote extensively on the topic of defensive wars and managed to construct a national theory of justifiable wars waged by the proletariat. As Nikolai Voznesensky, the onetime chairman of Gosplan, the state planning committee, wrote in 1947, “[On] numerous occasions Lenin and Stalin warned the socialist homeland of the inevitability of a historical battle between imperialism and socialism, and they prepared the people of the USSR for such a battle. Lenin and Stalin explained that wars waged by a working class that has defeated the bourgeoisie—and waged in the interests of the socialist homeland, and in the interests of the consolidation and development of socialism—are just and holy wars.”⁵ In the 1950s and 1960s, this rationale provided an additional layer of justification for Moscow’s decision to back revolutions in Cuba and elsewhere.

Yet it was the Great Patriotic War that offered the Soviet regime an opportunity to apply this defensive logic theory on a grand scale and to graft it onto Moscow’s eventual victory. And while Joseph Stalin later sought to distance military leaders from his regime, the memory of the victory eventually became the foundation for the Soviet Union’s legitimacy during the Brezhnev era of stagnation, surpassing even Marxism-Leninism itself. Leonid Brezhnev leaned on the memory of the war because, as Peter Weill and Alexander Genis later noted, the victory stood as “a reference that can be used constantly. Unlike the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station and collective farms, the victory is difficult to interpret from different angles. It exists, and that’s it. All other questions are secondary.”⁶ Or, as Brezhnev said, “The main truth is that we won. All the other truths fade before it.”⁷

Unsurprisingly, the Putin regime has consistently cited the Great Patriotic War in pursuit of its own legitimacy. Consider, for a moment, the enormous celebrations in 2015 for the seventieth anniversary of Moscow’s victory. And since most Western leaders turned down the invitation to witness the festivities in person, the event became a kind of celebration of Russian isolationism, an endorsement of the Kremlin’s shift away from integration with Europe.⁸

Of course, external Soviet military action continued in the years after the Great Patriotic War. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan (1979–1989) perhaps bears the closest resemblance to the Kremlin’s current model—as well as to the outcome it is most keen to avoid. The Afghan war played an outsized role in the USSR’s eventual collapse, and it also exposed the inherent fallacies embodied in the Soviet regime’s defensive logic. As Yegor Gaidar wrote in Collapse of an Empire, “The decision to send troops into Afghanistan would cost the Soviet regime dearly up until the last years of its existence. Privates and officers killed in Afghanistan, their grieving families, the injured—all that against the background of the war, incomprehensible for Soviet society—was an important factor that undermined the fundamentals of the regime’s legitimacy. In addition, the war was costly.”⁹

The Afghan war was, without question, a traumatic event for the general public. However, the current whitewashing of Soviet history may be paying off. In public opinion polls by the Levada Center, the proportion of citizens who describe the Afghanistan intervention as a state crime has fallen from 69 percent in 1991 to 44 percent in 2014, and the share of Russians who view the war as a necessary move to protect the country’s geopolitical interests against the United States has inched up.¹⁰ And while a majority of Russians likened Moscow’s first wave of air strikes in Syria to those in Afghanistan (78 percent of respondents didn’t exclude the possibility that the new campaign could potentially turn into “a new Afghanistan”), that didn’t prevent some 46 percent of Russians from voicing support for the authorization by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, to use troops abroad in connection with the Syria operation.¹¹

Continued at http://carnegie.ru/2016/06/14/do-russians-want-war/j1u8?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWW1Wa1kyWmpOREJsWVdRNSIsInQiOiJcL202bm5Hc0loZnBpU1dYQWR3WE5Ea1NOT0pCcm5lbXhuUUlEUVFzR0V6b2g5RXRBTFZDZUU3MW9mTVZFRkZDQUh3dTdEam1sK29rRVh1SDZjZkJSVmRia3llMVNYcFdORGVBVDhpWDlOdW89In0=

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Whether the Russian government directed hackers to break into the Democratic National Committee’s servers and steal opposition research on Donald Trump and other documents recently is an open question.

But experts said the hacking reflects the latest cyber and traditional espionage that Moscow has been pursuing lately: collecting data surreptitiously, often for years, with the goal of using information to humiliate and destabilize the country’s rivals rather than steal money, industrial secrets or military information.

To be sure, Russia still aims to gain information on NATO, American politics and other issues. But Russia’s cyberspies are following the examples of some activists and hackers who seek to violate their targets to score points in the realms of politics and public relations.

“We see a definite shift in cyberattacks from the financial-motivated or state-motivated theft,” said Dave Ostertag, global investigations manager at Verizon who helped produce the telecommunication company’s respected 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, speaking to VICE News. “The data is being stolen more for embarrassment purposes. We see data posted somewhere on the internet simply to embarrass.”

News of the yearlong alleged Russian hacking broke on Tuesday. A company hired by the Democrats to investigate the breach, CrowdStrike Services, said groups codenamed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear were behind the infiltrations. They are likely to be Russian, believed to work for Russia’s military intelligence service, or GRU, and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to KGB that Russian President Vladimir Putin once led, said CrowdStrike, but were likely not coordinating their spying.

Soon after the news broke, however, a supposed lone wolf hacker or group of hackers called Guccifer 2.0 — an allusion to a Romanian hacker who allegedly broke into the personal email accounts of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and published awkward photos of the family — posted what appear to be the documents that CrowdStrike claimed were stolen by the Russians. Guccifer 2.0 said WikiLeaks now had the files and would publish them soon.

They include potential Democratic lines of attack in the upcoming faceoff between the presumptive presidential candidates, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Trump, including references to Trump’s ex-wife’s claim that he raped her.

The Democrats and their consultants haven’t confirmed the documents are real but they have raised questions about Guccifer 2.0’s claims that he, she or they acted alone.

“CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis,” the company said on Wednesday in a statement. “Whether or not this posting is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin.”

Russia has denied involvement in the incident.

Joel Harding, a consultant and former officer in the Army’s intelligence command, said he believed the Russians were behind the hack. He couldn’t prove it and didn’t think anyone could definitely say unless the Russian security agencies committed a stupid mistake. But a major political party is an obvious target for Russian government hackers, he said.

The outcome of the hack also suggests Moscow was behind it, Harding said. Russia has doubled down on “information warfare,” or using and manipulating the media and other public information to achieve its geopolitical goals, he said. Meddling in an American election and suggesting the Democrats are preparing to smear Trump, thus lending support to the real estate tycoon whom Putin has praised, is in that vein.

Russia has hacked into Ukrainian national guard websites and inserted a press release saying they were preparing to violate a ceasefire. It also shut down Estonian networks when that country planned on moving a Soviet war memorial.

But while the GRU or FSB, or both, may have been using Russia’s advanced cyberespionage methods to attack the Democratic National Committee, the state of Russian traditional espionage is not great, according to a report issued last month by the European Council on Foreign Relations. The Kremlin’s intelligence agencies, it said, competed with each other as much as they spied on other countries, often duplicating efforts and acting sloppily.

“Unlike the hydra with its single controlling intellect, the agencies are often divided, competitive, and poorly tasked,” the report said. “They are certainly not in charge of the Kremlin, but nor is the Kremlin wholly adept at managing them.”

The report also noted that Russian cyberespionage often included “disinformation campaigns and political dirty tricks.”

Harding agreed that the Russian intelligence services jockeyed against each other. But he said Putin has been increasing Russia’s espionage budget to beef up spying abroad while also imposing order on the services’ bureaucracies.

“I know they are creating new cyber agencies. They are really investing in cyberespionage and they are really investing in intelligence,” Harding said. “You have sleeper agents around the world, you have cyberespionage around the world and you have the combination of the two.”

Similarly, Politico recently reported that the number of Russia’s spies in Europe had roughlydoubled in recent years as tensions have escalated between Russia and the West. It’s impossible to be sure about the proportion of additional spies, said Harding. But Russia is more aggressive than ever in planting agents, as well as viruses that can quietly suck up information and access that might someday prove useful for as-yet-unknown purposes, he said.

“They are eating up the EU, all the counties in Europe,” said Harding, “and spying on the US and Canada.”

Source: https://news.vice.com/article/the-hackers-that-broke-into-the-democratic-party-may-show-that-russia-is-really-good-at-cyberspying