Stories
A renowned orator once said that “propaganda should be popular and should accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach”.
While Vladimir Putin may not have the intellect or the charisma of his fellow dictator, he has shown a canny ability to adapt Adolph Hitler’s fascist doctrine to the digital age.
Eighty years of Soviet rule have given present-day Russian state propagandists a much more comprehensive understanding of mass indoctrination than their Western counterparts. Tomes of analysis has been produced by disinformation experts on Russian deployment of propaganda through the media and internet, but with a free press reigning relatively supreme in the west, we lack understanding of its mechanisms and have no plan for effectively countering it.
That partly explains the incredulity with which Western audiences greet warmongering utterings of Putin and his foreign affairs mouthpiece, Sergey Lavrov, who again this week cited “de-Nazification” as the rationale for Russia’s invasion. Given that Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy is Jewish, Ukraine absorbed the highest deaths per capita in the world fighting real Nazis in the 1940’s and Russia itself appears to be following the Nazi playbook in its treatment of Ukrainian civilians, it’s hard to imagine how such an absurdity can provide an effective narrative for mass indoctrination.
From our vantage point in the West, cocooned by a free press, a multiplicity of opinion and a robust legal and regulatory framework governing media, it’s impossible for us to understand how the Russian people can be so easily indoctrinated into believing the opposite of reality.
Key to understanding this is to first recognise that propaganda, as American Philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, “does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.” In earlier, more innocent days, the internet was expected to decentralise and democratise power and information, but it turns out that the new digital world has allowed Putin to turbo-charge propaganda and weaponise it for political gain.
Russia is currently run by a cabal of ex-KGB men, all of whom have been educated in the dark arts of psychological manipulation. A key element of their KGB education is a deep understanding of how the human mind works and how it can be manipulated. For over 50 years, Russian intelligence has been researching the subconscious mind and how it absorbs and develops narrative patterns between the images, text, and sounds that our conscious mind absorbs from reality. They know better than Western leaders how this can be manipulated and self-manipulated. Elite sportspeople and even writers have an understanding of this. Being “in the zone” is a state in which the conscious mind is controlled and suppressed through training to allow a more efficient subconscious focus on performance output. This gap between the conscious and subconscious mind is where Russian propaganda is targeted.
Propaganda feeds off people’s emotion which, in the dark arts of psychological manipulation, are perceived as weaknesses. Putin, an accomplished judoka, has an acute sense of an opponent’s weakness. He recognises his country’s historical grievances and judo has helped him understand how to exploit them and adapt them to the state’s propaganda efforts. The evolution of mass indoctrination through Russian and Soviet history shows how modern-day Russia has become the mother-lode of propaganda.
In the 1940s, the Soviet army pioneered a doctrine of military deception known as Maskirovka. This was a complex of measures to deceive, deny and misinform the enemy about the scale and disposition of forces. This doctrine has also been put in place in peacetime, notably during the annexation of Crimea.
The military doctrine Maskirovka evolved into another concept, Reflexive Control, applicable more widely in post-war Soviet society with the arrival of mass media and the need for a more complex and multi-layered propaganda effort. The concept refers to manipulating an opponent to incline them to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action.
In Putin’s Russia, Reflexive Control is deployed to change the opponent’s view of the world, so they are tricked into making the self-defeating decisions Putin wants without even knowing it. This by done through the state-controlled media by creating an entire virtual reality in which fake news is deployed to trigger the reaction that the state wants. This virtual reality is a giant mask preventing the Russian public from knowing the truth about Putin’s corruption and the incompetence of his governing system. It’s deployed to support all elements of Russian government policy, the central plank of which is the continuation of Putin’s rule.
The key narrative to support the continuation of Putin’s rule is that without it, Russia will disintegrate. To provide a convincing case for this in Putin’s virtual reality, he needs to create circumstances that threaten this disintegration which only he can prevent. By creating fake enemies of NATO and Ukraine, he brought these circumstances about but has ended up turning the narrative into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Many historians believe that Hitler had gone mad by the time he lined up two million Nazi troops along the Soviet Union’s western border with Europe. Even that other madman, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would be crazy enough to order the troops over the line. Very few believed that Putin would do the same. By defying all logic and following Hitler’s example, he has turned the fake enemies of his virtual world into real ones. The vision for his virtual world has now become reality and the only leverage he has left is escalation.
The real threat to Putin’s power was never NATO or Ukraine, but the people who can vote him of kick him out of office. As the full scale of devastation in Ukraine and to Russia’s economy starts to dawn on Russians, rare voices are starting to ring the alarm on Russian state TV despite the threat of imprisonment from newly introduced legislation. Kremlin-controlled Channel One pundit Karen Shakhnazarov warned viewers on a political chat show on Wednesday that the conflict in Ukraine will isolate Russia. He demanded that the operation be “ended to stabilise things within the country”.
Another pundit, academic Semyon Bagdasarov, said that the Ukrainian operation will be worse than Afghanistan. A serving army officer on a different channel gave an impassioned speech in which he said “Our youth are dying in Ukraine” before the presenter interrupted him claiming that “Our guys are smashing the fascist snakes. It’s a triumph of the Russian army. It’s a Russian renaissance.”
With all other independent media snuffed out, national newspaper Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov won this year’s Nobel Peace Price, has been left alone to carry the flickering flame for Russia’s free press. This week, they ran a grim image on their front cover of a mushroom cloud after a massive explosion. The short text printed over the image was a disclaimer, now required under the new media rules, but cleverly positioned with devastating effect, “Created in accordance with all the rules of Russia’s amended Criminal Code”.
I’m writing this article from Odessa, southern Ukraine. There are three major battle fronts in the country– around Kharkiv in the East, Kyiv to the North and Mykolaiv, just 80 miles from Odessa. Progress has been slow, so the Russians have increasingly turned to the scorched earth methods deployed in Aleppo and Chechnya.
Ominously, this week saw the spectre of chemical weapons enter Putin’s virtual world. Boris Johnson has said that Putin may deploy them as it is “straight out of Russia’s playbook” to create a false flag operation to justify his own use of chemical weapons. Even more worryingly, Russian troops now have control over Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporozhe and the increasingly unstable Chernobyl.
As Russia’s economy heads down the path towards its inevitable collapse, Putin’s world is showing signs of caving in on itself. Western leaders need to be extra vigilant in their dealings with him now he’s cornered. His primary instinct will be to preserve power at home by feeding the fake narratives which sustain his increasingly absurd virtual reality. Unfortunately, escalation of the war is the most likely path towards this.
