Nine Lessons of Russian Propaganda

by Roman Skaskiw

Roman Skaskiw served six years an infantry officer which included combat deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division, and another deployment to Afghanistan with the Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team.  He has lived in Ukraine since 2012. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times’ Homefires blog, the Daily Beast, Stanford Magazine, the Des Moines Register, in Fire and Forget and Home of the Brave — anthologies of military fiction, and elsewhere.  He has appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, the John Batchelor Show, Iowa Public Radio, and elsewhere.

Nine Lessons of Russian Propaganda

Roman Skaskiw

After visiting repeatedly, I moved to Ukraine from the United States in 2012.  My parents had been born in Ukraine and taught me some of the language during my childhood in Queens, NY.

Being so close to Ukraine’s Maidan revolution and the subsequent Russian invasion gave me perspective on American perception of these events.  The audacity and effectiveness of Russian propaganda has left me in utter awe.  After two years of close observation, some strategies and motifs of Russian propaganda have become evident.  Hopefully these lessons will lend some clarity on the information war which overlays the kinetic one.

1. Rely on dissenting political groups in Western countries for dissemination.  Kremlin talking points appear with uncanny similarity in most alternative political movements in the West, including communist, libertarian, nationalist, and even environmentalist, whose protests occasionally overlap with anti-NATO protests.

I had an especially close look at the libertarian community as I have long been a part of it.  Rampant misinformation led me to write these three increasingly horrified essays about what some prominent libertarians were saying about Russia and Ukraine: Putin’s Libertarians, When Your Former Libertarian Hero Calls You a Nazi and The Latest Libertarian Shillery for Russia.

The persistence of demonstrable lies and their almost word-for-word repetition in radical left media was uncanny and put into perspective only after I discovered the Active Measures interviews and theDeception was My Job interview of Yuri Bezmenov.  KGB agents who had defected to the United States in the 1970s and 80s all said the same thing.  Espionage was a minor consideration of Russian intelligence.  Their focus was controlling the message and it often happened through influencing media and political movements in freer societies.

Russian intrigue with dissenting groups even makes an appearance in Joseph Conrad’s fantastic 1907 novel The Secret Agent.

Their impressively broad appeal is evidenced in their recruitment of both Western neo-Nazis and Western communists who claim to be fighting for World Communism to support the war in Eastern Ukraine.

Radical Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin articulates this strategy fairly explicitly: “The most important factor should not be whether these groups are pro-Russian or not. What they oppose is of much greater importance here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is simple and easy to understand. If we adopt such an attitude in order to appeal to all possible allies (who either approve of us or who do not) more and more people will follow suit – if only due to pragmatism. In doing so we will create a real functioning network – a kind of Global Revolutionary Alliance.”

Much of Dugin’s work attempts to explaining why groups with diametrically opposed beliefs should unite to oppose the United States and, if only implicitly, support Russia.  Demonizing the United States and “Atlanticism” underpins his rhetorical strategy, just as demonizing capitalism and the bourgeois class underpinned communism’s (and also placed Russia as first among equals in a “Global Revolutionary Alliance”).

Dugin’s Anti-Atlanticism is a cargo cult for the reach and influence that Moscow had through Communism, but the centuries old influence that Moscow has among the West’s dissenting political movements remains palpable.

2. Domestic propaganda is most important. …

Continued at http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/nine-lessons-of-russian-propaganda