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.
Subversion is a form of violence and coercion, albeit “cultural,” “symbolic,” or “systemic,” using Johan Galtung’s or Slavoj Žižek’s terms.16 It is a self-perpetuated project that is informed by Russia’s “‘schematic narrative template’ […] a social construct created to shape collective memory to fight external enemies, and this template was constantly reinforced and shaped by history itself in Russia.”17 It is rooted in Russia’s “historic mission” and “civilizational choice,” and, more broadly, in Russian culture.
In his insightful book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington has noted that for many, the end of the Cold War signified the end of conflicts in global politics.18 In the late 1990s, however, Huntington predicted that the world would inevitably change after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it would not necessarily become peaceful. “Change was inevitable, progress was not,” he wrote.19 Indeed, the world encountered a new wave of ethnic and neo-imperial wars, frozen conflicts, and genocides. The estimations of wars and high and low intensity conflicts that occurred in the world within two years after 1991 are mindboggling: 48 ethnic wars and 164 conflicts erupted due to ethnic-territorial claims.20 By 1996, “[w]ithin five years of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ethnic conflicts spilled over two hundred hot spots throughout its vast territory, most of them in the Russian Federation.”21 Russia
