In early March 2022, as Russian troops were approaching the outskirts of Kyiv and the international media were focused on Ukrainian frontlines, the informal meeting of EU leaders at Versailles did not attract much attention among journalists, nor was the document they adopted carefully scrutinized. The insipid language of the Versailles declaration did not differ much from past EU statements about Ukraine, reduced essentially to non-binding “acknowledgement” of Ukraine’s “European aspirations and European choice” and vague promises to “further strengthen our bonds and deepen our partnership to support Ukraine in pursuing its European path.” This time, however, a short phrase was added to the ritualistic curtseys to mark a real breakthrough in long and ambiguous EU-Ukraine relations. Seemingly simple and ordinary, it would have been unfathomable just a few weeks earlier. “Ukraine,” the document stated, “belongs to our European family.”
This might be too obvious, even trivial, unless we remember that throughout the past decades the official language of the EU had been watchfully cleansed of any wording that may have hinted at Ukraine’s Europeanness. Because such a hint, EU officials believed, may have implied, at least theoretically, Ukraine’s eligibility for membership. And this was a real nightmare for the EU, as a French diplomat once told me, comparable only to the possible accession of Turkey. This is why not a single EU document has ever referred to Ukraine as to a “European state,” but employed instead tricky euphemisms like a “partner country,” or “neighboring country,” and cautiously pushed it onto mental maps at a safe distance, within a nebulous space called “western NIS,” “western CIS,” or “western Eurasia.” This is why all Ukraine’s overtures vis-à-vis the EU were met with polite “acknowledgement” of its European aspirations – a frustrating catch-phrase that meant something like “give me your phone number, I’ll call you later.”
The real meaning of this politeness was revealed in less formal statements by many EU officials. Suffice to mention Romano Prodi’s notorious remark that Ukraine “has as much reason to be in the EU as New Zealand” (because New Zealanders, in his words, also have European identity). Or Günter Verheugen’s even more scornful quip that “anybody who thinks Ukraine should be taken into the EU should perhaps come along with the argument that Mexico should be taken into the U.S.”1 The hopes of many Ukrainians who, overwhelmingly, under all governments, supported EU accession, were dashed. Especially for those who stood with blue EU flags in Maidan under police batons and snipers bullets in 2014, and who cherished their “belonging to Europe” as a key element of their Ukrainian identity.
The persistent Western denial of Ukraine’s Europeanness went hand-in-hand with Russian denial of Ukraine’s existence. Politically, these two denials were framed differently and had incomparably different consequences – purely institutional in one case and military-genocidal in the other. (To what degree the first denial facilitated the second, is another matter.) Epistemologically, yet, both denials stemmed from the same root that can be defined, after Edward Said and Ewa Thomson, as “imperial knowledge” – a system of narratives that any empire develops about itself and colonies to strengthen and legitimize its hegemony. In both cases, it was Russian imperial knowledge that informed both the Russian and Western view of Ukraine, though in the latter case it was supplemented, of course, with some local experience and ideological-cum-ethical constraints.
Russian “Ukraine denial” has much deeper ontological roots, being strongly connected to the way in which the Russian imperial identity was constructed – by appropriation of Ukrainian (and Belarusian) history, territory, and identity, and placing Ukraine/Kyiv in the very center of the imperial myth of origin. Independent Ukraine, by its very existence, undermines that mythology and challenges the foundations of the Russian imperial identity. Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state provokes, among imperial Russians, ontological insecurity and anxiety. Putin, who calls independent Ukraine “anti-Russia” and defines it as an “existential threat” to his country, is correct in a way – with due caveats. Ukraine is, indeed, “anti-Russia” inasmuch as its national identity is incompatible with Russian imperial identity. And it is, indeed, an “existential threat” for Russia as an empire, though it is also a chance for the emergence of Russia as a nation-state.
Western nations which uncritically accepted and normalized, since the 18th Century, Russian imperial knowledge, largely accepted also “Ukraine denial” as part of it. Westerners shared that “knowledge” through the 1990s and many still do, but their “Ukraine denial” was not driven by any kind of ontological insecurity and anxiety. It simply mirrored the Russian mythology that suited perfectly their own cynical, a.k.a. “realist”, policies vis-à-vis both Russia and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they accepted Ukraine’s independence as a fait accompli, buttressed by legal norms and procedures rather than cultural and historical arguments (so dear, in a perverse form, to Putin and his cronies).
Ukraine’s pronounced desire to “return to Europe”, i.e., to join Euro-Atlantic institutions, was a different story. One may argue, more generally, that the desire of East Europeans (and Ukraine in particular) to join the EU and NATO had challenged the established notions of “Europeanness” and caused, in a way, some sort of ontological turmoil. While Russians’ anxiety stemmed from the feeling that their imperial identity without Ukraine is incomplete, Europeans’ anxiety stemmed from the opposite feeling – that their identity (not only well-being) would be threatened by a dubious, alien body. It was quite natural for them to re-adapt the old, epistemologically induced “Ukraine denial” into a more suitable denial of Ukraine’s European identity and belonging.
To support this new, essentially anti-Ukrainian narrative, some elements of Russian imperial knowledge (that had never been properly revised and dismissed in the West) were employed again. One of them, perhaps the most important under the new circumstances, was the overblown narrative about primordial Russian-Ukrainian affinity, interconnectedness, and virtual inability to exist without each other. This argument was also beneficial in practical terms since it justified a cynical “Russia-first” policy at the cost of its former satellites, assigned tacitly into the Russian “legitimate sphere of influence”, a.k.a. Russian “backyard”.
So, the German and French foreign ministries concluded in a joint classified report that “the admission of Ukraine [to the EU] would imply the isolation of Russia,” so “it is sufficient to content oneself with close cooperation with Kiev”.2 Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing argued that only “a part of Ukraine has a European character” while the other part has “a Russian character,” so that other part “cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted into the EU”. His German counterpart, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, assured readers that “as late as 1990, nobody in the West doubted that Ukraine had for centuries belonged to Russia. Since then, Ukraine has become an independent state, but it is not a nation-state.”3
Putin receives Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in May 2015 // kremlin.ru
In a recently published article, the renowned publicist Timothy Garton Ash recollects how in 2004, after the spectacular Orange Revolution, he urged the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, to say publicly that the European Union wished Ukraine one day to become a member. “If I did that,” Barroso replied, “I would immediately be slapped down by two major member states [France and Germany].” “There will first have to be a discussion whether a country is European,” a spokesperson for the EU external-relations commissioner candidly clarified the issue.
Only within this context may one properly appreciate the tectonic change in the EU’s attitude toward Ukraine, indicated in a short phrase of the Versailles Declaration. It came too late, however, and at too high a price: vast swaths of Ukrainian territory were occupied, cities destroyed, and thousands of citizens killed. Ukrainians may have good reasons for anti-Western sentiments since they had been betrayed and neglected rather than recognized and supported by fellow Westerners throughout their history. But the only alternative was Russia, a rogue autocratic state, determined to either assimilate Ukrainians or physically destroy them.
Ukrainians nation-builders of different hues perfectly understood this and leaned to the West, even though their desperate love remained unrequited. They saw there at least a chance, however small and improbable, while no chances remained whatsoever on the opposite side. Ukraine’s pro-Western orientation was its modus vivendi, its sine qua non for survival vis-à-vis a hostile neighbor who made the “Ukraine denial” into the imperial creed. One may say that Ukrainians became “Westerners by default”: they had little choice but to accept Western values and discourses, even though they did not always feel comfortable with them.
Contrary to the commonly mediatized Western wisdom, some consensus about Ukraine’s “European integration” had existed in Ukrainian society long before the “Euromaidan revolution” of 2013-14, even though many people hoped (rather naively) to combine Ukraine’s westward drift with good relations with Russia. They did not support Ukraine’s tentative NATO membership, being fully aware of Moscow’s sensitivity on the issue, but they did not expect at the time that the purely economic agreement with the EU would cause a similar wrath. The Russian Anschluss of Crimea and invasion of Donbas put an end to Ukrainians’ ambivalence. Their support for NATO, since 2014, became as strong as for the EU.
The Versailles Declaration of 2022 that has finally recognized Ukraine’s belonging to “our European family” and opened a thorny way to its eventual EU membership, has brought Ukrainian “European dreams” as close to reality as never before. That same year, however, with the Russian all-out invasion, Ukrainian “Eurasian nightmares” became also as real as never before. This raises the stakes of the current struggle enormously, making the need for mobilization of all the resources, including symbolical, highly important.
Public opinion is certainly such a resource, both domestically and internationally. At home, it is easier to exploit this resource since Ukrainians are well aware of what the war is about and what they are fighting for. With the past couple of years, they lost whatsoever ambivalence they used to have vis-à-vis Russia, the West, or national independence. They now know that this is an existential war – a war of national survival. But international opinion is a different matter. And Milan Kundera’s seminal essay, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, may provide us probably, on the 40th anniversary of its publication, with some lessons on which rhetorical strategies can be employed and which probably should not.
Throughout his essay, Kundera pursues two clear goals: first, to persuade Western readers that so-called “Central Europe” (essentially, only three nations from the former Habsburg Empire occupied eventually by the Soviets) shares culture and history with the West to such a degree that Western Europe (Europe in general) without them remains incomplete, ontologically insecure. And secondly, to remind Westerners of their debts and sins vis-à-vis “Central Europe”, primarily the sins of neglect and betrayal, to evoke the feeling of guilt and empathy, and to channel it into a higher public awareness of Central Europe and stronger support for its “European”, effectively anti-Soviet/anti-communist aspirations.
There was also the third, supplementary narrative that supported the main two discursive lines. It was a recurrent reference to Russia and/or the Soviet Union that provided, as a dark “Asiatic” force, a suitable contrast to the impeccable Europeanness of Kundera’s three chosen nations, and, on the other hand, reminded us implicitly of the Yalta betrayal and other Western misdeeds, contributing thus to the blame-game and the Western feeling of guilt.
There are no clear proofs, however, that Kundera’s essay had a significant impact on Western readers beyond a narrow circle of intellectuals who knew something, indeed, and cared a bit about East European matters. One of them, Timothy Garton Ash, appreciated Kundera’s concept as a timely reminder for Westerners that the region is something more than the “footnotes of Sovietology”: “East Berlin, Prague, and Budapest”, he wrote, “are not quite in the same position as Kyiv or Vladivostok”, and “Siberia does not begin at Checkpoint Charlie”.4 (Whether Siberia really begins in Kyiv and whether Ukraine’s capital is exactly “in the same position as Vladivostok” was not discussed at the time, with some tragic consequences apparent today).
In Eastern Europe, Kundera’s essay, transmitted illegally, probably played a much more powerful mobilizing role at the time than in the West. It was broadly perceived as an argument for the region’s “belonging to Europe” and a passionate claim for “a return to Europe,” to “normalcy,” for liberation from Soviet domination. Its exclusivist essence came to the fore much later, in the 1990s, when the notion of “Central Europe” was instrumentalized by the chosen nations to elbow their way to the elite clubs of the EU and NATO, bypassing less “Central” and less “European” co-prisoners from the same Soviet camp. As Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko noticed bitterly, “the idea of the ‘stolen West’ may have been liberating for central Europe, but for the Europe situated further east it was disastrous. Instead of breaking down the wall between East and West, it simply shifted it further eastward. The idea should have been used to fight totalitarianism everywhere, but instead localized it geographically in the territories of the former USSR, thereby placing a permanent ‘curse’ on our east European lands… Instead of remaining faithful to his own dictum and seeing just how much diversity there is on the whole of the European continent, [Kundera] chose to split it into two parts, in opposition to each other — the humanist West versus the demonic East that had stolen [the Central European] part of the West.”
Today, in their messages to the West, Ukrainians employ all the narratives once used by Kundera. They emphasize their “Europeanness”, their cultural affinity and historical interconnection. They remind Westerners of their faults and blunders vis-à-vis both Ukraine and Russia, their long-time appeasement of the rogue regime, their betrayal of the Budapest memorandum and many other wrongdoings, striving apparently to awaken the guilty consciousness of their interlocutors. They construct Ukraine’s image as thoroughly opposite to demonic Russia, and argue that nowadays this is a country of liars and killers rather than great composers and writers, as too many gullible Westerners still prefer to conveniently believe. And last but not least, Ukrainians use one more argument that Kundera mentioned only once, at the very beginning of his essay, when referring to the last words of the Hungarian broadcaster during the 1956 Budapest uprising: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.” The phrase seems to have become the main Ukrainian message now: “We are dying for your security, your freedom, and your values. We are dying for international order, principles, and justice”.
With all this rhetorical similarity, there is also a profound difference. Ukrainians today can rely on arguments that were not available for Kundera at that time because the Cold War order was based on the Yalta agreements reaffirmed by the Helsinki accords that stipulated, as Przemysław Czapliński aptly remarked, “inviolability of borders, and therefore – inviolability of the narrative”. Ukrainians now can employ legal arguments which are fully on their, not Moscow’s, side. The cultural, historical, and even moral arguments (especially in politics) are disputable while written rules and agreements are much more clear-cut. Whatever Putin may fantasize about Ukraine’s “artificialness” and Russia’s special entitlement to destroy it, there is the undeniable fact of aggression against a sovereign state, there is blatant violation of the UN charter and bi-lateral and multilateral documents, there are apparent war crimes and increasingly obvious genocide. This does not make historical, cultural, and other arguments irrelevant or redundant but inevitably relegates them to a secondary, auxiliary role.
Ukrainians may have the same illusions about the West that Kundera and his generation had, but they certainly have more self-confidence stemming from newly acquired historical agency. This was famously expressed by the Ukrainian president on the first day of the war – in his alleged response to American diplomats who offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to a safer place: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
The real tragedy of the new “Central Europe” that shifted eastward, is that it was recognized too late and at too high a price. And the account is still not final.
The research for this publication was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science in the framework of the FOR UKRAINE Program.
As reported by Oleg Varfolomeyev, “The EU’s Unwanted Stranger?” Transitions Online, July 12, 2002 ↩
Quoted in “New Neighbourhood – New Association. Ukraine and the European Union at the beginning of the 21st century,” Policy Papers 6 (Warsaw: Stefan Batory Foundation, March 2002), p.11. ↩
Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, Ukraine in Our Future. New York Review of Books, February 23, 2023 ↩
Timothy Garton Ash, Does Central Europe Exist? New York Review of Books, October 9, 1986 ↩
“The fool who does away with restraint and leaves the bounds of reason, does not easily return to the straight and narrow”.
— Michel de L’Hospital, Complete Poems, Paris 1857
The meteoric rise of “anti-Putin” candidate Boris Nadezhdin has raised many questions in our media and those of the Russian diaspora. We wonder why he is still on the loose when he criticizes the war in Ukraine and even Putin. But we are not asking the right questions: if he has been allowed to speak, is it not because he reflects an underground change within certain circles of power? Was he not put to the test because he could become an important piece in the post-Putin Kremlin set up? Even if his campaign was aborted, it shows that serious thought is being given in high places to the post-Putin era, for which this Establishment figure has made himself the spokesperson. That is why the unsuccessful candidate’s program deserves our attention.
The libido dominandi that characterizes Russian leaders always comes up against the same obstacle. It is both inward-looking and outward-looking. There comes a time when internal tyranny is so extreme that it compromises ambitions for external expansion. We saw this under Stalin during the great purges that so disorganized the special services and the Red Army that Hitler almost won; or in 1952-3, when the transition to a war economy brought the Communist bloc to the brink of collapse. The same is true now, when scientists and entrepreneurs are leaving Russia in droves, to the extent that the “shortage of cadres” is severely crippling Russia’s ability to produce weapons and to project its power abroad. Moreover, Russia’s despotism acts as a repellent to the outside world, making it difficult for the Kremlin’s countless agents of influence in NATO countries to operate. We have reached a point where, as in the spring of 1953, a thaw at home is beginning to be seen as indispensable by part of the Establishment, so that Russia can regain the economic health required to relaunch the external expansion project.
The atmosphere in Russia in recent months is strikingly reminiscent of that at the end of Stalin’s rule. We have a paranoid dictator preparing for the Third World War, leading the country’s economy to total ruin due to the priority of military production. We have the maniacal persecution of “foreign agents”, widespread denunciation, the hunt for “cosmopolitans” in the cultural sphere, the chauvinistic obscurantism imposed on scholars, the Guide’s increasingly delirious initiatives. All this is the tip of the iceberg. We now know from the memoirs and testimonies of Politburo members and those close to them - Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Sergo Beria in particular - that a muted opposition had crystallized around the ageing dictator. These men secretly sabotaged Stalin’s most hare-brained orders, such as the increase in levies imposed on already starving peasants. We know that these men were preparing for de-Stalinization while the dictator was still alive. Beria had ordered an investigation into the profitability of the Gulag, which showed that far from contributing to the country’s economy, the Gulag was a burden on the state1. We know that Beria multiplied rumors about Stalin’s failing health, that he sent discreet signals to Western powers, warning against Stalin’s aggressive intentions and suggesting that the Guide’s successors did not necessarily approve of this policy. All kinds of evidence suggest that those close to Stalin sought to discredit him while he was still alive, amplifying to the point of hysteria the campaigns of the end of his rule, such as the famous « doctors’ plot », which unleashed a tsunami of anti-Semitism in the country. By the time of Stalin’s death in March 1953, there was a consensus among his successors around a minimum program: cutting military spending, reducing tensions with the West, and rehabilitating some of Stalin’s victims. But cracks soon began to appear, as Beria’s colleagues felt he was going too far, notably in wanting to bring down the communist regime in East Germany and to derussify the republics of the USSR.
Stalin’s funeral // Public domain
After Beria’s fall, Stalin’s diadochi opted for controlled de-Stalinization. As Mikoyan told the plenary session in June 1957: “It took us a long time to judge Stalin properly. In the two years following his death, we did not criticize him. First, we were not psychologically ready for such criticism. Secondly, we had to defend Stalin before the Yugoslavs; we did not want to judge Stalin under the influence of the Yugoslavs. We are prepared to correct our mistakes, but it is not up to the Yugoslavs to teach us what to think of Stalin”2. Khrushchev finally decided to raise the question of Stalin at the 20th Congress (February 1956), because he wanted to take the lead and channel the spontaneous de-Stalinization from below that was worrying the authorities (insurrections in the Gulags were shaking the country). The Soviet leadership initially envisaged a wide-ranging discussion of Stalin’s crimes within the Party, inviting old Bolshevik victims of the repressions. In January 1956, however, they decided it would be more prudent to make these revelations in a closed circle. The solution adopted was to contrast a good Stalin before 1935 and a bad Stalin after 1935, when he attacked the regime’s bigwigs. As Khrushchev put it, “there were often no serious reasons for the physical liquidation” of many people who were “honest Communists” (Khrushchev took it for granted that rank and file “enemies of the people” should be liquidated). But from April 5, 1956, Pravda went to war against “unhealthy minds” who took criticism too far. The Party organized resistance to de-Stalinization. Propaganda called for communism to be regenerated by going back to its roots: “The tragedy of the Party is that it did not listen to Lenin”. In 1956, Stalinism was explained according to Stalinist logic: the crimes of the “personality cult period” were due to the mistakes of some, the incompetence of others, and the treachery and sabotage of “enemies”. Stalin was solely to blame, he was a bad war leader and a mass murderer of good Communists.
In launching de-Stalinization, we must not forget foreign policy objectives. The Soviets were already intent on using the nascent détente to torpedo European integration and transatlantic cooperation. At the Berlin Conference in February 1954, Molotov proposed a European security pact. The West was not fooled. This is how Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State, interpreted the move: the pact “was presented by Molotov as a Monroe Doctrine for Europe that would exclude American influence.” The pact was to be used by the Soviets to “establish their own dominance in Europe.” The US Security Council noted that “Molotov’s essential objective was to scupper the EDC (European Defense Community) project. In his mind, this was the purpose of the Berlin meeting, and the principal means of achieving it was to create disunity among Western powers.” And it was not long before Moscow was able to reap the rewards of this détente. The proposed European Defense Community (EDC), the Kremlin’s bête noire, was rejected by the French National Assembly in August 1954 under the influence of propaganda by the Gaullist Party and the Communist Party, which presented the project as a serious attack on France’s “sovereignty”. Better still, in December 1954, the Americans abandoned their “rollback” policy to free Eastern Europe from the Soviet yoke.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU voting for Nikita Khrushchev’s report // Public domain
This precedent helps us to decipher what is happening in Russia. Putin’s regime goes from one excess to another. The dictator’s obsession with LGBT people, gender-neutral toilets, etc. is reaching grotesque heights; the militarization of the regime is on display everywhere; threats of apocalyptic destruction of the West are an almost daily occurrence. At the same time, confidential contacts with the West are multiplying, foreshadowing an imminent change of policy. Professor Valery Solovey is spreading disparaging rumors about Putin, preparing the desacralization of the “national leader” and the denunciation of the “cult of personality” by showing Putin as a sicky old man wearing incontinence pads with one foot in the grave, or even a corpse kept in a freezer. These efforts to undermine Putin, suggesting that the West (and Ukraine) will soon have another interlocutor in the Kremlin, have already enabled Moscow to achieve notable successes, such as the suspension of US military assistance to Ukraine. The outrageousness of Putin’s policies, the repression for trivial offenses, the arrests of public figures, the suspicious deaths, the increasingly extravagant statements made by the president and his stooge Dmitry Medvedev: all this is paving the way for the tremendous success in Western opinion of an heir endowed with common sense using civilized language.
In the West, people are constantly asking why Putin has not yet been overthrown, when his bellicose posture is costing Russia more and more in economic and political terms. The answer is simple: because the Kremlin’s project of hegemony over Europe cannot be achieved until Ukraine is returned to the service of the Russian empire. Russian propagandist Daniil Bezsonov recently declared that “Ukrainians are needed by Russia as a ‘mobilization resource’ in Russia’s future war against NATO”. An independent and prosperous Ukraine would prodigiously strengthen Mitteleuropa, making Russia an average middle power. The prerequisite for the realization of Russia’s eternal design for domination of Europe is the destruction of Ukraine’s national elites for at least two generations. Stalin starved Ukraine in 1933 while obliterating the Ukrainian intelligentsia; after the war, he waged a merciless war on Ukrainian resistance fighters, most of whom came from annexed areas. Today, Putin stays in power because he does the dirty work. As soon as Russia feels it has achieved what it set out to do in Ukraine, Putin will have to make way for a more presentable replacement capable of repairing relations with the West, winning acceptance of Ukraine’s amputation and enslavement, and getting East-West trade back on track.
The launch of Boris Nadezhdin’s candidacy shows that the changeover may not be as far away as we think. Boris Nadezhdin is not a “decorative” candidate comparable to the “liberal” extras who have taken part in previous elections (indeed, he denies being “liberal”). Here is how he explains to Meduza journalists his reasons for believing in his presidential future by the nature of power in Russia: “Russia is a country where power is exceptionally important. Much more important than in any other country, simply because everything stems from power. And this does not date back to Putin; it was already the case under the Tsars. At the end of Yeltsin’s rule, the government was weak, much weaker than it is today. But the state managed to take someone as insignificant as Putin and turn him into a president. There was nothing obvious about that in 1999, I am sure you will agree. The state has enormous possibilities, everything depends on it.” These enigmatic remarks suggest that he feels he has powerful backing within the “Deep State” machine. And, why not, “maybe Putin will appoint me as his successor”. Indeed, Nadezhdin is an Establishment figure, a seasoned old apparatchik who is on first-name terms with the big names of the regime - Surkov, Volodin, Kirienko, as he likes to boast. He prides himself on being part of the establishment: “People know me,” unlike the unfortunate Yekaterina Duntsova, whom he speaks of with the patronizing attitude of a regime bigwig (“Nobody knew Duntsova”).
More importantly, Nadezhdin is the only person who has formulated a program of controlled de-Putinization that deserves our attention, as it may hold the key to the way Russia changes in the years to come. It is a long-term project: as early as the summer of 2023, Boris Nadezhdin, then Director of the Institute of Regional Projects and Legislation, suggested on the NTV channel that normal relations with Europe should be rebuilt. However, he said, “under the current political regime, we won’t be able to return to Europe; all we have to do is choose another president, who will build a normal relationship with European countries. And everything will fall back into place. The presidential elections will take place next year. I won’t say any more”. In August, he announced his intention to run in the March 2024 elections on the YouTube channel of his friend Dmitry Demushkin, an ultra-nationalist who made his name organizing “Russian marches”. Whenever he expresses a point of view, Nadezhdin engages tirelessly in psychotherapy of the Russian people, deeply marked by the slogan hammered home for two decades by televised propaganda: “As long as there is Putin, Russia will continue to exist. Without Putin, there would be no Russia”. He strives to prove that his approach is strictly legalistic, that he is not a revolutionary, ostensibly distancing himself from Navalny: “I’m not a hero, I have no intention of ending up in prison”, or: “I’m not crazy, I’m not trying to fight the Russian state. Why should I? I’ve been living with it quite normally for so many years. My task is a little different: to create mechanisms that will influence the behavior of this state.” He cites the model of peaceful transition from Stalin to Khrushchev, from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. In short, it will not be the end of the world when Putin leaves power. Everything will go smoothly in the revolution from above that he is proposing. Already, Nadezhdin continues, the regime’s apparatchiks understand the situation as they see problems piling up. They will only serve Putin as long as they perceive his grip to be tight. The Prigozhin crisis shows that this is no longer the case. “Everyone realizes that we’re heading straight for the wall.” When the system enters its final crisis, the Potemkin institutions and organizations created by the regime will start to really function, just as the sham parties in the GDR ended up behaving like real parties in 1990. In the meantime, the watchword is: no waves - “I’m not a revolutionary”. Nadezhdin has no intention of forming a radically new government or reforming the state apparatus. “These are civil servants who carry out orders.” There will be no mass dismissals, no sudden moves. Nadezhdin is aware that it will take time to return to a less militarized economy. Nor does he want to see oligarchs dekulakized. They will simply have to pay more taxes.
“Putin has made catastrophic mistakes in recent years.” In a lengthy interview with nationalist blogger Igor Rybakov, Nadezhdin gives the most exhaustive list of his grievances against Putin (the quotes without hyperlinks that follow are taken from this video). In his view, the Russian president has set the country back, and destroyed the institutions of the Russian state. He confuses a country’s power with its military potential. But “militarization killed the Russian empire and the Soviet Union”. The war in Ukraine, militarization, the obscurantism that leads to brain drain (notably contempt for science, to which Nadezhdin says he is particularly sensitive because he was trained as a physicist), Putin’s obsession with the LGBT community (“according to him, we are at war with gays and lesbians supported by NATO”), the clericalism on display (even though “Catholic churches are busier than Russian Orthodox churches”). But worst of all, in Nadezhdin’s eyes, is the break with Europe, “with which we cooperated for 300 years”, and the pivot toward China: “I don’t understand how we decided to turn toward China”. “The Chinese have no concept at all of what helping a friend means. They think like this: you are weak, we can take advantage of that to make money.”
Ideologically, Nadezhdin is a chameleon, just like Putin was during his election campaign in 2000. He sends signals to liberals and patriotic nationalists that he is one of them. But it is in his videos with patriots that he reveals himself the most, and it is obvious that he is on their side. “I’m a Russian patriot, 100% a gossudarstvennik,” he repeats. Like Putin, Nadezhdin regrets the collapse of the USSR. “Gorbachev should have turned it into something similar to the EU.” Nadezhdin justified Russia’s aggression against Georgia. Asked about it by the Georgian media, he replied that, in his opinion, this war had been “90% provoked by Saakashvili”. In a 2018 interview, he also expressed surprise that the Georgian president had taken this decision, when his army numbered 30,000 and the Russian army numbered over a million. Apparently, according to Nadezhdin, he was hoping for support from the West, which encouraged him to go to war, but he received no help. Thus, Nadezhdin was repeating word for word the allegations of Kremlin propaganda. And when a Ukrainian journalist pointed out that there was a regular Russian army in Donbas, Nadezhdin was furious: “Why are we giving you the floor?” In 2014-5 our “liberal” welcomed the bloodless annexation of Crimea and believed that “the West will swallow it”.
Nadejdine and his boxes with signatures // His X account
More importantly still, he proposes to relaunch the realization of the Putin-Dugin project for a Russo-centric Eurasian Union, the only way for Russia to maintain its status as a great power: “Russia must unite with Europe, it’s the largest country in Europe, more populous than any European country, and its economy is bigger than that of any European country. In this choir, our voice will be the loudest, and if we unite Europe and Russia, we’ll have an economy more powerful than that of America and Canada, capable of competing with India and China, whereas if we pursue Putin’s policy toward China, we’ll find ourselves China’s vassals”. And he reassures patriots: “We won’t kowtow to NATO. Europeans need to understand that we are no longer a threat.” Nor does he fail to harp on about Europe’s lack of sovereignty because of US presence: “Why isn’t Europe sovereign? Because the American army is stationed there. I want the Russian army there… Today, American generals are in charge, but I want Russian generals to be. Europeans put up with Americans, they’ll be delighted to have Russians. Not by conquest, God forbid. America is in decline. The Germans themselves are going to ask for a Russian corps to be stationed in Germany…” Nadezhdin does not dispute Putin’s thesis about the decline of US and NATO hegemony.
Nadezhdin pledges that his first measures will be the release of political prisoners and the suspension of military operations in Ukraine. He also promises to bring back the Russians who have fled the country. But beware: evacuating occupied territories is out of the question, and so is handing over war criminals to The Hague: “They are Russian citizens”. Giving up occupied territories is also out of the question, since according to the Russian Constitution they belong to Russia. Besides, “Ukrainians fight well precisely because they are Russians“. As far as foreign policy is concerned, Nadezhdin sees his main task as getting the West to recognize Russia’s Crimea and Donbas, even if “it’s going to take a long time”. “Without negotiations with the West, we won’t solve the Ukraine problem”. Like Putin, he is counting on Trump. His aim is to persuade the West to force Ukraine to accept the amputation of its territory, endorsed by a referendum in the occupied territories. With America, it will not be difficult, he says: Americans are only interested in making money. Agreeing with Valery Solovey, Nadezhdin is convinced that the Kremlin will be able, with symbolic gestures such as the amnesty of political prisoners, but without any fundamental concessions, to mend fences with the West and return to business as usual. It has to be said that precedents are encouraging, so Russia’s future leaders have good reason to look to the future with optimism.
As soon as the Kremlin talks about détente, the West magically forgets all about its past difficulties with Moscow. No sooner had Russia dismembered Georgia in 2008 than the West was raving about “liberal” Medvedev. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner felt that Medvedev offered his country a more “promising” future: “The Medvedev generation is something other than Vladimir Putin”. And, under the guise of contributing to the “modernization partnership” with Russia, Westerners rushed into arms contracts, led by France, helping to manufacture the “weapons of the apocalypse” that Putin is now threatening us with. In April 2014, a few days after the annexation of Crimea, French Senator Jean-Pierre Chevènement found justifications for Putin and invited the West to wipe the slate clean by carrying out Russia’s grand project of absorbing European states into the Moscow-dominated Eurasian Union. In September 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s organization of secessionist enclaves in Donbas, Chevènement was despatched to Russia by the French government to convey to the Kremlin that France was eager to lift sanctions. Chevènement was careful to stress that France was not concerned about Western solidarity: “I am still of the opinion that contracts have been signed and must be implemented. France is a sovereign country.” In his view, Putin acted as he did as a result of a misunderstanding, “of instances of incomprehension whose accumulation over time has led to this Ukrainian crisis that nobody wanted in the first place”. Russophiles and Kremlin propaganda always speak of “incomprehensions” and “misunderstandings” precisely when Westerners begin to see through Moscow’s game.
The de-Putinization program now emerging has another point in common with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization. In both cases, the criminal aspect of the regime is glossed over. The war in Ukraine is criticized because it was a failure, not because it is criminal and unlawful to attack a neighbor who will not submit. The destruction of the Ukrainian nation is an objective that no Establishment Russian will question. Yet, without an honest willingness to expose the crimes of the past (not only those committed by Putin, but also those of the Soviet era), all we will get is a new-look autocracy. The study of history is a school of honesty and an apprenticeship in truth, which Russia needs more than anything.
History, as ever, has one last question for us. We have seen that Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization went off the rails, despite the CPSU’s efforts to channel and control it. It led to a crisis in the Soviet empire (Berlin uprising in 1953, political turbulence in Poland in 1956, Hungarian uprising in 1956); in the long term, it undermined Marxist-Leninist ideology and dealt it a blow that proved fatal. The leaden blanket that Putin has brought down on the country is so heavy that, predictably, the process initiated by future de-Putinizers will be unmanageable. As soon as the lid is lifted a little, everything risks boiling over. Reformers may be forced to go further than planned. Here, much depends on the firmness of the Western position. In October 1989, the beleaguered GDR requested emergency financial aid from West Germany. To the dismay of East German leaders, who had been accustomed to living off West Germany for years, Chancellor Kohl refused to bail out the SED (GDR’s Communist Party), and made it a condition of his aid that truly democratic elections be held in the GDR. This firm stance led to the collapse of the SED and made German reunification possible.
The Russia that will emerge from the ruins of Putinism will require investment, technology, and consumer goods. It will have understood its dependence on Europe, but it will intend to remedy this by seeking to bend European elites to the Kremlin’s will. Consequently, the West will have to set firm conditions from the outset for the lifting of sanctions and the resumption of trade with this country, and not budge on this point, despite Moscow’s siren calls. The evacuation of all territories taken from neighboring countries is the only serious indicator of a genuine desire for change and the abandonment of hegemonic aims in Europe. Until Russia gives up its domination logic, it will remain a dangerous interlocutor for democracies. Nadezhdin was not an anti-war candidate; he was a candidate for war by other means.
]]>Since the failure of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive in 2023, two buzzwords have become especially popular to describe the situation: “stalemate” and “fatigue”. Yale Professor Timothy Snyder spoke out angrily against the both terms, arguing that they not only obscure the reality but also distort adequate policies: “How we speak drives how we think, and how we think drives what we do, or choose not to do”. Stalemate is a metaphor borrowed from thchess that reflects a peculiar situation when the pieces are deadlocked: they cannot move because of some curiosities of the rules. But war is not a chess game, since the number of players/resources on this “chessboard” can be changed. In other words, Ukraine can get – and needs to get – more weapon to its strategic advantage. Because so far, as another observer sarcastically remarked, “Ukraine is fighting a war against Russian aggression with one hand tied behind its back”.
Snyder reacts to the term “fatigue” even more emotionally: “I have been in Ukraine three times since the war began. I have been in the capital and in the provinces. I have seen almost no Americans, fatigued or otherwise, in the country. And that is for the simple reason that we are not in Ukraine. How can we be fatigued by a war we are not fighting, when we are not even present? This makes no sense. It causes no fatigue to give money to the right cause, which is all that we are doing. It feels good to help other people help themselves for a good cause”.
Human parsimony might be a problem but certainly not the only - and probably not the main - one. As long as we operate with the percentage of GDP that the Western states spend on Ukraine (all forms of aid) the figures are miniscule: from 0.9 % endorsed by Germany to 0.5% by France and Italy, 0.4 by the UK and 0.3 by the US and Canada. A far cry from what the small Nordic states are giving to Ukraine: 1.8% of GDP by Lithuania and Estonia, and 1.6% by Norway, Denmark, and Latvia. But in gross (nominal) terms these modest figures turn into millions and billions of dollars that the citizens of any state would be happy to appropriate domestically for various social programs rather than give them abroad for some uncertain and sometimes unclear purpose. In other words, we encounter a communication problem – the ability (will and skill) of governments, experts, public figures and media workers to explain comprehensively what the whole story is about and how many Ukrainian lives can be spared with each percentile of sacrificed GDP.
And here we come back to the “fatigue” problem that is largely induced by the media and exacerbates many other problems. Sorbonne Professor Francoise Thom expresses a rather grim view of her fellow citizens, who have not the “slightest notion of what is at stake in the conflict” (and this view is probably applicable probably not only to the French): “Subjected to the daily bombardment of news, they have acquired a flickering perception of the world, where one sensational news item drives out another, where the same irrational affects pour out on successive objects, one event eclipsing and erasing the previous one, while only the torrent of emotions remains permanent… The passions aroused by the Middle East conflict have diverted attention from the Russian-Ukrainian war, and obscured in our minds what is at stake: the freedom of European nations”.
Ukraine has apparently entered a difficult time as her resistance capacity is severely challenged in both the European Union and the United States. In the EU, a five-billion aid package was blocked by the Moscow-friendly Hungarian government (supported, so far verbally, by the similarly populist government of Slovakia). In the US, the partisan bickering over a broad set of issues effectively blocked the envisioned 60-billion military aid for Ukraine. In both cases, the situation is not hopeless. EU officials look for a way to legally overcome obstruction of two petty blackmailers within their ranks, while in the US the negotiations about a possible compromise are pending between republicans and democrats. Neither camp, ironically, denies the need to support Ukraine, but none wants to give any policy advantage to the rivals in an election year.
This made the White House recently (on Jan. 17) summon the top congressional leaders for a private meeting and provide them with a “classified time frame for when Ukraine’s key military resources will be significantly depleted”. The president’s security advisers did not predict an outright victory for Russia but emphasized, reportedly, that “Ukraine’s position will grow more difficult over the course of the year” and that the country “will run low on various capabilities in the short term”. The gravest of all these prospects is Ukraine’s looming inability to protect civilians in big cities from the barrage of Russian drones and missiles. The president’s aides, remarkably, also reminded the lawmakers that “the lack of aid would affect many more countries in addition to Ukraine and could prompt other countries that rely on the US, including Japan and South Korea, to rethink their alliances”.
Ukrainian officials are still confident that problems with aid will be solved and assert that in any case Ukraine will fight as long as it takes. They might be, however, more nervous than they claim to be – as Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba’s recent remark indicates: “If we run out of weapons, we will fight with shovels”. One may wonder if this is an expression of self-confidence or, rather, despair.
Ironically, one may find an encouragement coming from a different, absolutely unexpected corner. A prominent Russian warmonger and Ukraine-hater, the former president and prime minister of the Russian Federation and current deputy head of the National Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, wrote recently in a Telegram post that an independent Ukraine will never be a legitimate state regardless of who leads the government because the very presence of an independent Ukrainian state on what he calls “historical Russian territories” is a “constant reason for the resumption of hostilities” – either from 10 or 50 years from now, regardless of whether Ukraine (“that artificial state”) joins the EU or even NATO. So, he concludes, Ukrainians will be terrorized by Moscow as long as it takes – until they recognize that Ukraine’s very existence as an independent state is “mortally dangerous” for them. They will be killed and tortured until “they understand that life [with Russia] in a large common state, which they do not want very much now, is better than death. Their deaths and the deaths of their loved ones. And the sooner Ukrainians realize this, the better”.
Most commentators focused on the genocidal essence of Medvedev’s message but it was barely new because Medvedev and the entire Kremlin elite have been expressing the same ideas afor the past two years at least: Ukrainians are Russians and they can survive if they accept this. But those who refuse, are surely Nazis and should be exterminated. What surprisingly passed unnoticed, however, in Medvedev’s statement, was his apparent uncertainty about the current “special military operation”. His assumption that the war with Ukraine may last for 10 or even 50 years, and that Ukraine still may become anthe EU and NATO member does not indicate total confidence in immediate victory unlike his boss. One may only guess only whether the deep feelings of others in the Kremlin about the war prospects differ much from Medvedev’s.
In any case, Ukraine has a good chance of making their worst fears come true. If only Ukraine’s partners properly understand this chance.
]]>“Righteous people are weak, self-centered, and timid; only scoundrels are determined.”
— Chamfort, 17891
The situation in Ukraine is dramatically reminiscent of that in Finland in March 1940. The small country had been invaded by the Red Army on November 30, 1939. “In three days, our troops will be in Helsinki,” Vyacheslav Molotov told Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet ambassador to Sweden, in October 19392. Stalin had already prepared a Communist government to be installed in Helsinki. The heroic resistance of the Finnish people and their initial dazzling successes aroused the admiration of the democracies and a torrent of declarations of support from Paris, London and Washington. But after initial setbacks, Stalin pulled out all the stops. On February 11, 1940, the Finnish lines were broken. Field Marshal Mannerheim reconstituted his defense on a second line, but this too gave way on February 19. By February 28, Mannerheim felt that the defense had run its course. Ammunition supplies were exhausted. On February 29, the Finnish government decided to open peace negotiations. The front was in danger of collapsing. On March 11, France and Great Britain, which for months had been debating the form of assistance to be provided to Helsinki, officially promised to help Finland if it asked: an allied expeditionary force was to be dispatched as early as March 15. But on March 13, the armistice was signed. According to diplomat Raymond Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne3, right up to the end, General Gamelin and his British counterpart General Ironside “scuppered the execution of the Supreme Council’s decisions by the sluggishness of preparations, so as to be ready too late”. In Gamelin’s case, there was even talk of “very conscious sabotage”. As for Daladier, head of the French government, bellicose in words, “in extremis, he stalled”4. The Kremlin’s propaganda succeeded in blocking any inclination to act in the Western camp by whispering that Allied intervention on Finland’s side would further drive Stalin into Hitler’s arms, while the master of the Kremlin was more than willing to negotiate with the West. And so, throughout this period, the German-Soviet partnership managed to stun democratic countries and prevent them from taking action. Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne wrote5: “The impression was one of weakness and timidity: tragic and mediocre days indeed.” Daladier bitterly observed: “The terrible thing is that we are pursuing a great-power policy and we are no longer a great power. The Empire is all talk”6. This lamentable fiasco of democratic countries foreshadowed the catastrophe of May-June 1940.
History is an echo chamber. If today we hand Ukraine over to its Russian executioner in the same way we let Finland down in the winter of 1939-40, we may soon be facing a debacle on an altogether different scale in the face of the Axis of dictatorships cemented by hatred of Western civilization.
Above all, we need to understand the causes of the paralysis of the will that cripples democratic peoples when they have to deal with rogue regimes, similar to the seizure that petrifies moderates when they find themselves confronted with small but aggressive factions using terror; something already noted by the perceptive Pierre de l’Estoile at the time of the first revolutionary crisis that shook Paris in 1589, when in the midst of the religious war the League bringing together extremist Catholics took power: “Good people are paralyzed by terror… Courage was lacking, not strength”7 among the remaining supporters of the legitimate monarch (Henry III, then Henry IV). We forget too often that Putin is a revolutionary intent on overturning the world order. We fail to see that a backward-looking project, such as that of the Kremlin, can perfectly well be accompanied by revolutionary practices: this was the case with the League mentioned above, and it is the case with Putin today.
The immediate causes of our passivity lie first and foremost in the insidious propaganda of the enemy and its relays in democratic countries. Marc Bloch, whose book L’étrange défaite (The Strange Defeat), was written between July and September 1940, deserves to be reread today. Like today’s “realists”, the pacifists, as Bloch observes, “invoked interest above all else; and it was by forming an image of this supposed interest that was terribly alien to any true knowledge of the world that they heavily misled the sheep-like followers who put their faith in them. They taught, not without reason, that war wrecks useless devastation. But they failed to distinguish between the war you voluntarily decide to wage and the war that is forced upon you, between murder and self-defense. They whispered — I heard them — that Hitlerites were not, in fact, as evil as they were portrayed: as the word they preached was a gospel of apparent convenience, their sermons found an easy echo in the lazily selfish instincts which, alongside nobler virtualities, lie dormant at the bottom of every human heart.”
Russia’s psychological warfare against the “collective West” appeals to the same tendencies. Russian subversion uses two levers: intimidation (nuclear blackmail) and demoralization. The aim is not only to frighten Western democracies into denying Ukraine victory (which has been the case since the beginning of the conflict), but above all to provide arguments to justify their cowardice and abandonment of Ukraine. And here the Kremlin showed itself to be utterly inventive. The number one objective was to destroy the idea of the moral superiority of the Ukrainian cause. Everything was used to this end: the corruption of the Kyiv elites, discord at the top, Zelensky’s infatuation with the limelight, etc. were all highlighted. Pseudo-humanitarian rhetoric was called to the rescue: let’s put an end to the needless suffering of the Ukrainians, who in any case will return to the Russian fold, from which they are not far away anyway, etc. And let us not forget the old tried-and-tested argument: Western hostility only strengthens ties between Beijing and Moscow, whereas it would be in the West’s interest to pull Russia out of China’s orbit. So, from the outset, the Kremlin has knowingly banked on Western weakness and eagerly provided it with the whole arsenal of sophisms to justify future climb downs.
But beyond these immediate causes, there are factors endogenous to our societies making the manipulations of Moscow much more effective. Marc Bloch incriminated “the intellectual lethargy of the ruling classes”: “Misled by their predilection for insiders’ tidbits, our political leaders thought they were getting information when all they were doing was picking up gossip at random meetings. Global and national problems appeared to them only in terms of personal rivalries. […] Why should we be surprised if the staffs did not organize their intelligence services properly? They belonged to circles where the taste for information had gradually died down; where, when they could leaf through Mein Kampf, people still doubted the true aims of Nazism, and where, when they adorn ignorance with the beautiful word “realism”, people still seem to doubt them today. The worst thing is that this laziness to seek knowledge almost necessarily leads to a fatal self-complacency.” A popular upsurge was possible, provided the nation was properly informed of the danger: “Now, these people […] who were not, I believe, incapable, in themselves, of choosing the right paths, what have we done to provide them with a minimum of clear and reliable information, without which no rational conduct is possible? In truth, nothing. Such was certainly the great weakness of our supposedly democratic system, such the worst crime of our so-called democrats.”
All these bitter observations apply to the current situation, except that it is aggravated by the changes in consciousness brought about by the expansion of the media and the suicidal lack of culture in our democratic societies. The Finnish fiasco led to Daladier’s resignation on March 20, 1940, proof that people in France understood the scale of the disaster. Today, the prospect of a Russian victory in Ukraine scarcely moves our fellow citizens, who have not the slightest notion of what is at stake in the conflict. Subjected to the daily bombardment of the news, they have acquired a flickering perception of the world, where one sensational news item drives out another, where the same irrational affects pour out on successive objects, one event eclipsing and erasing the previous one, while only the torrent of emotions remains permanent. Hamas’s spectacular attack on Israel was enough to make us forget Ukraine’s martyrdom. The passions aroused by the Middle East conflict have diverted attention from the Russian-Ukrainian war, and obscured in our minds what is at stake: the freedom of European nations. And how can we expect our politicians to be able to draw up a coherent plan of action and explain the need for it to their people, if they allow themselves to be swayed by opinion polls and media-inflated passions? The loss of a sense of continuity means that we stop trying to understand the world around us, and abandon any attempt to see clearly, in favor of a permanent state of emotional over-excitement quickly transformed into a conspiracy construct cemented by partisan passion. Worse still, those who resist this bias of ignorance and incomprehension are met with a barrage of hostility. The few experts who warned against Putin’s Russia were labeled “essentialists”, because their knowledge of the weight of Russian history meant they did not share the euphoria that followed the fall of communism. An “essentialist” is someone who believes that the world, despite all its sound and fury, is intelligible. That this term is now used to stigmatize speaks volumes about our society’s allergy to freedom of the mind. The deliberate choice of ignorance and the visceral rejection of intelligence, out of a passion for equality and out of bureaucratic comfort, are the Kremlin’s best allies. This narrowing of horizons translates into growing provincialism, when parochialism and partisanship obscure a sense of the public good and long-term interests. Moscow does its utmost to cultivate this narrow-minded provincialism, which feeds fanaticism and antagonism, inevitable in a confined space cut off from the open sea and deprived of its past. The Putin regime sees this as the best way to bring down democracies.
As long as confusion reigns in people’s heads, no course of action is possible, and democracies will continue to look permanently bungling, allowing Putin further gloating. Our fellow citizens and decision makers need to distance themselves from the media din and the bombardment of news and current affairs. To instill a sense of proportion and perspective on events, nothing beats historical culture. Marc Bloch stressed the importance of the teaching of history: “Not that it can be blamed for neglecting the contemporary world in our secondary schools. On the contrary, it gives it an ever more exclusive place. But precisely because it focuses on the present, or the very near past, it becomes unable of explaining them: like an oceanographer who, refusing to raise his eyes to the stars, on the pretext that they are too far from the sea, can no longer find the cause of the tides. The past may not command the entire present, but without it, the present remains unintelligible.”
Let us take a look at what history can tell us about what to expect from Putin and post-Putin Russia. Soon, Putin will have been in power as long as Stalin was. Both dictators are responsible for what in any other country would have been considered absolute disasters: bloodshed, economic regression, massive enslavement of the people. But both dictators stayed in power because they were able to tap into the deepest aspirations of the Russian people: the desire for power that lies dormant in a any person treated as a slave; the desire to humiliate and set back neighbors who live better than they do; the pride of intimidating and infiltrating Europe and the West in general; the affirmation of Russia’s metaphysical superiority. Both men came to power after a contraction of the Russian state and understood that the formula for lasting despotism was to promise the restoration and expansion of the empire, by transforming the state into a gigantic army and police force, all in the name of “reuniting the Russian lands”. In so doing, they inserted their regime in a major trend of Russian history. From the 15th century onward, Russia grew every year by an area the size of Holland. During the 300 years of the Romanov dynasty, the Russian empire expanded at an average rate of 140 square kilometers per day8. Territorial expansion justified autocracy. The state was conceived as the instrument of territorial expansion.
Russia is a country that was self-colonized before it became a nation. “Muscovites seemed to feel like strangers in their own state, temporary inhabitants housed by chance in a building that didn’t belong to them,” wrote Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, referring to Russia in the 14th and15th centuries. The weakness of internal and spontaneous ties was compensated for by the systematic concentration of all the country’s forces and resources in the hands of the autocrat and the small cosmopolitan imperial elite surrounding him. The underdevelopment of social organization led to the hypertrophy of the state. As Klyuchevsky famously put it: “The state swelled while the people withered away”. From the 15th Century onward, the Muscovite state was exceptionally militarized; it was this growing militarization that explained the worsening of serfdom until the 18th Century. In 1830, the English army numbered 140,000 men, the French 159,000, the Habsburg Empire 273,000, Prussia 130,000 and the Russian army 826,000. “We have found no other means of guaranteeing our frontiers than to extend them,” Catherine II wrote to Voltaire, justifying the partition of Poland.9 A few days ago, the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov echoed: “If we have to take Lisbon to ensure our security, we will”.
With the advent of Bolshevism, the Russian imperial elite was transformed into a criminal international. After 1991, the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc survived underground in underworld networks supported by the former KGB. From the outset, the Kremlin used these networks to carry out its plan to reintegrate the former Soviet space. Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, was a multi-recidivist. Pro-Russian activists in the Donbas and Crimea were mostly local convicts, who were then eliminated to make way for the corrupt networks of oligarchs close to the Kremlin. Under Putin, the process of merging power with organized crime was completed. At the same time, the pace of expansionist dynamics has accelerated, under the camouflage of an ideological messianism. Russia is a state in appearance only. In reality, it is an aggregate of criminal gangs revolving around an all-powerful godfather. This mafia-like structure of Russian power has merged organically with imperial practice: for Putin, the main thing is to control the elites of target countries, just as a godfather, the capo di tutti capi, supervises his henchmen. Hence his obsession with “color revolutions”, which make him lose face by dethroning his satraps.
To regard Putin’s regime as “nationalist” is to seriously misread the situation. The Russian president and his inner circle divide Russia into three circles. There is the core of the ruling group, made up of the regime’s tycoons, the directors of the major state corporations, the high-ranking siloviki and so on. Then there is the group of the privileged, those serving the elite who owns the country, mainly Muscovites and a few foreign nationals. The remainder of the population is considered to be serfs, with the regime’s favorites scarcely bothering to hide their contempt for this brainless plebs dazed by televised force-feeding. Not long ago, propagandist Margarita Simonyan proposed detonating an atomic bomb over Siberia to scare the Americans: a fine expression of the Moscow elite’s disdain for the Russian people. The vulgum pecus is seen as ballast past the expiry date. Not enough thought has been given in the West to what Russia’s battlefield strategy reveals, these successive assaults where wave after wave of soldiers are slaughtered in Ukrainian fields. The Darwinian vision in vogue during the Yeltsin years, when the “new Russians” had all the rights, while the rest of the miserable population was trampled underfoot by high ranking predators, has deeply permeated Russian ruling circles. Putin revealed what he really thinks of the Russian people during his meeting with soldiers’ mothers, when he told them that they should console themselves for the death of their sons in battle by thinking that otherwise they would have died of alcoholism anyway, whereas their sacrifice for the motherland was at least worthwhile. For such remarks Putin can be considered the ultimate Russophobe: he sees his compatriots as nothing more than cannon fodder, Russian women as reproductive organisms whose task is to renew the stock of cannon fodder for future wars and conquests.
Europeans are finding it hard to grasp the scale of Putin’s immense effort to get Ukraine under his grip, and above all to grasp what this means for Europe. Let us look at some figures. At the start of the “special military operation”, Putin sent 170,000 troops to Ukraine, reinforced by 60,000 troops recruited from the annexed regions, making a total of 230,000. Then 300,000 were mobilized in the autumn and sent to the front, to which must be added the 60,000 recruited in the Gulag by Wagner. Finally, according to the figures revealed by Putin at his news conference on December 14, 486,000 enlisted under contract in 2023. A total of 1,076,000 troops have been drafted into the Ukraine, while, by Putin’s own admission, 617,000 troops are currently on the front. This leaves a shortfall of 459,000 troops. Given the piecemeal rotation of troops, this gives an estimate of Russian casualties far higher than the figures given so far (around 300,000 troops). And clearly Putin is ready to continue feeding the mincer until he has achieved his initial objectives, the total enslavement of Ukraine and the liquidation of its national elites, as he confirmed in his December 14 news conference. Darwinian vision and imperial logic explain this obstinacy. Putin is euthanizing the jetsam of the Russian Federation’s population - tramps, drunks, drug addicts, the incurably and mentally ill people, multi-recidivists - in order to make himself master of the Ukrainian people, because he is convinced that without Ukrainians at Russia’s service, Russia’s power objectives cannot be achieved: Ukrainians are perceived as better soldiers, better farmers and better engineers than Russians. The Soviet military-industrial complex relied heavily on Ukraine, and the Soviet army was staffed by many Ukrainians. That’s why Putin is cynically trading the scraps of his empire’s population for the destruction of the Ukrainian national elite. Once he has subdued Ukraine, he expects to augment his army with Ukrainian contingents to threaten Europe, just as the defeated Chechens were sent to spread terror in Ukraine and the men of the Donbas were thrown to the front against their compatriots, to the point where there are almost no men left in that region.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba with his British counterpart David Cameron in Brussels on November 29, 2023 // nato.int
Now let us get back to the genesis of this war, which is the only way to grasp what is at stake. After the American debacle in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, Putin believed that the time had come to push his pawns into Europe, that it would only take a flick of the wrist to drive the Americans out, an indispensable condition for the realization of the vast Moscow-dominated Eurasian Union that is the grand project of his reign: a Europe divided into states governed by men (or women) loyal to the Kremlin, a vassal Europe working for Russian power, obediently providing capital, technology, agricultural produce, empire administrators, industrialists and so on, but all under the close supervision of the Kremlin. To achieve this goal, NATO had to be destroyed and the transatlantic link severed. Russia had to make sure that the Americans were no longer a credible player in European security. This was the aim of the Kremlin’s ultimatum of December 2021, which called on NATO to return to its 1997 borders, and threatened nuclear war. When the West refused to comply, Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, with the same aim in mind: to discredit NATO in Europe, and to discredit the United States by showing that it was incapable of protecting those who looked to it for security.
If the United States, made short-sighted by partisan bickering, stops supporting Ukraine, Putin will have won. Russia will be all the more determined to enslave Europe as it has realized, after its disastrous experiment with “import substitution”, that it is totally dependent on Europe. And Russia aims to control those on whom it depends. It cannot do this with China, but with Europe the process was well underway until the aggression against Ukraine. Moscow will strive to revive the “Schröderization” of Europe. If Putin is perceived as an obstacle to this process, the Kremlin’s criminal syndicate will change its proxy and choose a Chekist with a human face who will stage a “perestroika 2”, with a superficial liberalization of the regime. But the fundamental objective — to co-opt Europe’s human and material resources and channel them to serve the Russian power machine — will remain unchanged.
Putin thinks he has already won the day. Not only is he convinced that he will achieve his goals in Ukraine, as he keeps asserting, but he believes that it will be possible to restore relations with the West once “internal changes” have taken place in democratic countries. Knowing from experience that Westerners have short memories, he already sees them rushing to the “immense Russian market”.
Westerners should not be fooled by the Russian president’s impudence. Russia is only as strong as our weakness. It depends on us, and it knows it. It is up to us to turn our strengths into leverage, instead of remaining paralyzed by fear of this country, like a hare caught in headlights. The sanctions put in place have only worked in part, because the West had the wrong target: they wanted to punish a state, when in fact they were dealing with a protean mafia with countless tentacles. We discovered that the African gold raided by Putin’s mercenaries went straight to financing the war in Ukraine. Oligarchs were allowed to tamper with the sale of hydrocarbons and raw materials, in the belief that they would divert the funds from state coffers, drying out finances for the war in Ukraine. In reality, these oligarchs are the Kremlin’s piggy banks: Putin can demand his share of the spoils at any time to feed his war chest. The Russian diaspora in the emirates is systematically put to work. The high number of “suicides” and “accidental” deaths among oligarchs since the start of the war in Ukraine is a clear signal to survivors that they must cough up the dough when they are ordered by the boss. Similarly, the West thought it was fighting Kremlin subversion by expelling Russian spies. A laudable measure, to be sure, but we should not forget that the Kremlin’s influence is exerted through a thick web of “informal” networks. Fighting the Russian state is missing the target. It is the Kremlin’s criminal corporation that needs to be eradicated, with all its metastases in our countries. If we take this factor into account in our sanctions policy, they will reach their goal more quickly. The Russian economy has been compared to the Titanic, after he has hit the iceberg and continues on its way as if nothing had happened, even though its compartments are sinking one after the other. The image is apt, and we can already see the water seeping under doors; planes are on fire, inflation is running riot, queues are appearing again. We need to stand firm, rush to Ukraine’s aid and, above all, make the Russians understand right now that as long as their troops occupy territories wrested from neighboring states, sanctions will only get heavier until the Titanic sinks to the bottom. Putin thinks he can have his cake (Ukraine’s submission) and eat it too (the lifting of sanctions). We must prove him wrong.
Quoted in: Jean-François Marmontel, Mémoires, Mercure de France 1999, pp. 409-410 ↩
O.A. Rjechevski, O. Vehviläinen (eds.),Zimnjaïa Voïna 1939-1940, Moscow, Nauka, 1999 t. 1 p. 126 ↩
Raymond Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne,Une politique étrangère, Paris, Editions Viviane Hamy, 2000, pp. 215, 232 ↩
Raymond Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne, Note dated March 14, 1940, op. cit. p. 250 ↩
Note dated December 13, 1939. Raymond Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne,op. cit., p. 172 ↩
Note dated January 11, 1940. Raymond Boyer de Sainte-Suzanne,op. cit., p. 192 ↩
Pierre de l’Estoile, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous Henri III, 10/18, 1966, p. 274 ↩
Quoted in: Michel Heller,Histoire de la Russie et de son empire, Plon, 1997, p. 573 ↩
Quoted in: Jacques Bainville, La Russie et la barrière de l’Est, Plon 1937, p. 179 ↩
In the 1970s and 1980s, Paris was the center of a third wave of Russian, or more precisely Soviet, emigration. The KGB and Politburo decided that it was more “profitable” to get rid of a number of well-known dissidents than to throw them into prison or subject them to inhumane treatment in psychiatric hospitals, risking a wave of protest in the West every time. This is how many writers, artists, philosophers, directors, musicians, etc. found themselves in Paris and other major Western cities. The profusion of people I witnessed in Paris was extraordinary: Andrey Sinyavsky, Oskar Rabin, Alexander Galich, Alexander Ginzburg, Leonid Plyushch, Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Maximov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Vadim Delaunay, Vladimir Maramzin and many others.
In this constellation, one extraordinary figure stood out by virtue of her charisma, strength of character, sharp mind and capacity for hard work. It was Maria Vassilievna Rozanova, born in 1930 in Vitebsk, whose death we mourn today.
Maria Vassilievna was the wife of Russian literary historian and writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who, in the first half of the 1960s, managed to have satirical short stories ridiculing the Soviet regime published in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz (the name of a Jewish brigand). He was arrested by the KGB and put on trial in 1966, along with his friend Yuli Daniel, also guilty of publishing in the West. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a harsh prison camp for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. The trial, which marked the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, provoked a wave of protest in the USSR. The young Muscovite Alexander Ginzburg, who himself had published an underground poetic almanac, Sintaksis, in 1959-1960 and spent two years in prison for it, managed to gather his own transcripts and other documents from the trial to write a White Book, distributed via samizdat, clandestinely, and also published in the West. This was the birth of Soviet dissidence.
I am telling this story because Maria Vassilievna played a very active part in it. An art historian, architect-restorer and teacher, she had a fusional relationship with her husband. When he was arrested in 1965, their son Iegor (the future writer Iegor Gran) was eight months old. She endured lengthy searches, behaved insolently with investigators and later the jailers at the camp where Andrei was serving his sentence, supported him unconditionally, exchanged hundreds of letters with him during his incarceration and began an unofficial and successful career as a jeweler. Later, she boasted of having become a well-to-do woman and of having been able to provide for her young child, when the authorities thought she would be reduced to poverty. More importantly, the couple’s epistolary exchanges contained chapters from Andrei’s future book, Walks with Pushkin, written in 1966-1968 in the Dubravlag camp in Mordovia, which revolutionized the canonical image of Russia’s greatest 19th-Century poet. The book was published in 1973 in the West, under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, thanks to the efforts and perseverance of Maria Vassilievna.
Andreï Siniavski and Maria Rozanova on their arrival in France in 1973.
A year after Sinyavsky’s release, the couple and their son left Russia, at the suggestion of the KGB, and settled in Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris. Their house, surrounded by a large, neglected Russian-style garden, soon became a strategic location for dissidents in exile. Sinyavsky was appointed professor of Russian literature and civilization at the Sorbonne. In 1978, he and Maria Vassilievna began publishing a major literary and political review, Sintaksis, thus named in a bid to carry on the tradition started by Ginzburg. Unlike Vladimir Maximov’s Kontinent, this review was not subsidized, and Rozanova worked on all fronts: she was editor-in-chief (from 1982), proofreader, printer and administrator. She also acted as typographer and turned the printing press herself. At the same time, she worked at the French bureau of Svoboda radio, where she hosted a program called “We Abroad”. I was her guest on several occasions, and came to appreciate Maria Vassilievna’s finesse and fighting spirit.
In its twenty-four years of existence, in its 37 issues, the review published, in addition to articles by Sinyavsky and Rozanova, writers, literary critics and dissidents such as Efim Etkind, Lev Kopelev, Igor Pomerantsev, Andrey Amalric, Vladimir Sorokin, Friedrich Gorenstein, Sasha Sokolov, Andrey Dovlatov, Boris Groys and so many other talented authors. But also Western academics such as Georges Nivat, Alain Besançon, Slawomir Mrozek and Vittorio Strada. Today, these remarkable texts can be read here.
Maria Rozanova works in her house in Fontenay-aux-Roses // Archive video, screenshot
The couple’s hopes of Gorbachevian glasnost were quickly dashed after the armed assault by the Supreme Soviet commanded by Boris Yeltsin in 1993, in response to his attempted impeachment. From today’s perspective, it signified an authoritarian turn by the Yeltsin regime, which gradually paved the way for the establishment of Putinism, even though, at the time, many democrats supported it as a legitimate and necessary measure. In this, Sinyavsky and his wife shared the same appreciation as the writer Vladimir Maximov, even though as emigrants they often held opposite opinions. As a sign of reconciliation, Maximov is said to have brought Maria Vasilyevna a bouquet of white roses.
Sinyavsky and Maria Vassilievna even took part in Gorbachev’s 1996 election campaign, when the former Soviet president positioned himself as a “third force” against both Yeltsin and the Communist Zyuganov, calling on voters, in vain, to make a social democratic choice. Together with Gorbachev and Raissa, they criss-crossed the vast country to speak to the people, overcoming the hostility of local authorities. An unforgettable experience that convinced Maria Vassilievna that Russia was somehow incorrigible.
In an interview in 2004, she said:
“Three things have ruined my homeland.
The first is its size. It’s the richest country in the world, but with the poorest population! Other countries are much poorer. But they know how to make the most of their lesser wealth, which is not our case. Because slaves don’t know how to think, how to build, they only know how to obey, how to perform. And when slaves come to run the state, as has happened in our country, they are naturally incapable of doing anything.
The second thing is monstrous, incredibly inflated national vanity. The Americans are stupid, the French are stupid, only the Russians are the smart ones. This raises a legitimate question: if you’re so smart, where’s your money? Why don’t you know how to earn it?
And the third is orthodoxy. It’s a fatal thing. Anyway, Catholicism and Protestantism as ecclesiastical institutions suit me much better. Forgive me, but emperors used to bow to the Pope, not the other way round. And yet, after the Decembrists, the Synod allowed the secrecy of confession to be broken. Today, the Church is also adapting to the state in every possible way.
In 1995, I said: ‘I won’t go back to the motherland, because I’m afraid I’ll die of exasperation!’”
Maria Vassilievna Rozanova was the last surviving participant in the intellectual ferment and struggles of Russian dissidence in France. Her death on December 13, 2023 brings to a close an extraordinary, rich and daring adventurous life.
The writer Dmitry Bykov, who knew her well, said after her death: “Maria Vassilievna Rozanova, an eternal source of strength and light. The word ‘death’ is taboo in her case. ’Death does not exist!’ she always insisted, and I think she knew what she was talking about.”
RIP
]]>In the propaganda in favor of Moscow, accusations of “neo-conservatism” come up again and again. According to a false dramaturgy, French foreign policy is a battleground between this current of thought, specifically American, and those who espouse Charles de Gaulle’s and François Mitterrand’s diplomatic and geopolitical doctrine and who are concerned with preserving France’s greatness and position, described as a “counterweight”. In this vein, proponents of French-style Titoism obsessively quote George W. Bush’s speech of January 29, 2002, when the US President spoke of the existence of an “Axis of Evil” that included Iraq, Iran and North Korea1. If some analysts are to be believed, it is this type of rhetoric that drives the people and systems of power thus designated to take action. We did not know that despots and tyrants were so sensitive to the gaze of others.
In fact, the reactions to Bush’s January 29, 2002 speech, and its over-interpretation as an explanation for the actions of evil regimes, are indicative of the involutions at the heart of Western societies. In a context of advanced secularization, the social sciences’ claim to axiological neutrality and the development of a hedonistic counter-culture have combined to establish moral relativism (“Everything is relative except the proposition that everything is relative”) as the yardstick for the problems of our time. In accordance with Gresham’s law, bad money has driven out good, and the therapeutic language used by the media (‘malaise’ for ‘bad’; ‘well-being’ for ‘good’) has replaced the vocabulary of moral philosophy, eclipsing the words that enable us to think and express ethical references (the “moral clarity” necessary for a great policy).
But let us return to George W. Bush’s speech. In 2002, the American president was careful not to reduce “good” to the limits of a secular state, inevitably forced to resort to physical force to fulfill its proper function (violence is the specific means of “politics”); all he did was designate a small number of liberticidal and murderous regimes as the “Axis of Evil”. This was by no means scandalous. Just as there is a negative theology (Dionysius the Areopagite), or a negative epistemology (Karl Popper), so there is a negative morality. Just think of Pascal: “Although we cannot assign what is just, we can see what is not” (Pensées, fragment 120). While there is no such thing as an ideal civil society or political regime, not all evils are created equal: the evil nature of the regimes with which Westerners are confronted is self-evident.
Of course, politics and morality are different in regards to their nature, defined by Julien Freund as orders of activity consubstantial with the human condition. They have their own purpose and their own presuppositions — that is, the constitutive conditions that make this activity what it is, not something else — and their own specific means2. Thus, politics — “lo politico”, as opposed to “la politica”, subject to historical contingencies — responds to a primary given: conflict and the friend/enemy polarity. Its purpose is the common good of the human community it serves: the internal harmony and external security of this political grouping (chiefdom, city, state or empire). To achieve this, the political authority relies on force, power and, if necessary, armed violence.
As for morality, it is based on the distinction between good and evil, which is an existential condition of human beings. For Julien Freund, morality responds to an inner demand, and concerns the rectitude of personal acts according to the norms of duty, with each individual assuming full responsibility for their own conduct. This has the particularity of being an end without means. Unlike political action, economic activity or religious ritual among others, it is not possible to carry out a moral action per se, which would mobilize specific means. Morality concerns all actions, without exception, and relates to the entirety of the act (intention, means and consequences).
Distinguishing orders — in this case, politics and morality — does not mean separating them. While Julien Freund rules out moral politics, because the aim of political activity is political and not moral, he insists on the importance of acting morally in politics, i.e., of working to achieve one’s own end, by articulating means to ends, according to a rule of proportionality: “The political end consists in protecting citizens by ensuring internal concord and external security, so that the morality of politics lies in the proper accomplishment of this task”.
In the Ukrainian war, Western powers did not give in to excess, quite the contrary. If Vladimir Putin had been content with a revision of the Russian-Ukrainian borders, albeit by armed force, the reaction of the United States and its European allies would probably have been no greater than in 2014, after the manu militari annexation of Crimea and part of the Donbas region. In fact, some revealing statements had escaped Joe Biden, shortly before the “special operation” of February 24, 2022 (he had made a distinction between an “incursion” and a general offensive). It was the act and the proclaimed desire to destroy the Ukrainian national state, with the destruction of the West as its goal, that determined Western reaction. In view of the prevarication over arms deliveries and the nagging illusion that it would be possible to negotiate a “white peace”, or a definitive territorial arrangement with Russian power, it has to be said that many Western powers, far from erring on the side of hubris and grandiloquent objectives, persist in underestimating the threat posed by Russia, the support it enjoys in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang, and the reverberations of the Ukrainian war in the “Global South”3. Ultimately, Ukraine is sometimes seen as the distant theater of a local war, the effects of which would be less fearsome than food inflation.
In short, Sancho Panza”s prosaic nature and the shortcomings of his imagination (the “true imagination” of the Platonists) too often outweigh Don Quixote’s ardor. Perhaps it is this attitude that Russophiles, but also sincere observers, hold up as the pinnacle of “realism”, at the expense of reality (reality is not “realistic”).
Julien Freund, in his masterly work on decadence, was hardly given to lyrical illusion but he stressed that every political order carries a moral code; if it were limited to the simple objective of self-preservation, this would be a sign of profound decline. In the face of such an attitude, it must be hammered home that political and moral support for Ukraine is a vital requirement.
Ronald Reagan once referred to the USSR as the “Evil Empire” (Orlando speech, March 8, 1983). ↩
Cf. Julien Freund, L’Essence du politique, Sirey, 1965. ↩
See Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, “Au-delà du défaitisme et de la “fatigue de l’Ukraine” : lucidité géopolitique et opiniâtreté stratégique” ; Desk-Russie, November 25, 2023. ↩
The Russian war in Ukraine unleashed an extensive debate on its reasons, ideological underpinnings and the role of intellectuals in developing, promoting or variously enabling the spread of imperial ideology. In most cases, that role was not active and purposeful but, as a Ukrainian-Canadian scholar aptly remarks, “without explicitly supporting or endorsing the Russian regime, both academics and governments have played the classic role of enablers: they created, allowed, and/or sustained a framework in which Russia’s actions have been seen as either legitimate or at least acceptable and tolerable. The prevailing academic discourse has served to assure the Russian government of its impunity and emboldened its aggressive and violent political course”. People in the West who wrote about Ukraine with a supremacist (“orientalist”) bias and/or sheer incompetence “partly laid the groundwork for many of Putin’s statements” that eventuated ultimately into a genocidal practice.
It was that practice (and the popular outrage it provoked) that forced Western intellectuals to take a more critical look, albeit belatedly, at the ideological rationales — quasi-historical, ersatz-ethnological and geopolitical — that had been promoted by Putin’s regime for years but never evoked any serious repudiation either from Western scholars or politicians. Politicians’ permissiveness might be simply in line with the logic of the 1933 British secret memo: not to spoil profitable relations with Moscow for some minor issues like a genocidal famine in Ukraine1. But intellectuals’ non-responsiveness reveals a more serious problem: Kremlin arguments apparently did not contradict the basic premises of “political realism” dominant in the West nor ran they against the major assumptions of Russian “imperial knowledge” internalized internationally as a scientific truth and a common wisdom.
In the heart of that “realism” dwells a racist belief that some nations are superior over others and are therefore entitled to various privileges (like a “legitimate sphere of influence”), while smaller, “non-historical” nations have neither agency nor dignity of their own, and should be subordinated (and occasionally sacrificed) to big masters for the sake of stability and “progress”. This is why Russia’s imaginary (and largely hypocritical) “security concerns” were taken more seriously than quite real and reasonable concerns of its neighbors; why hundred-plus years of Russian dubious ownership of Crimea fully obliterated half a millennium of the prior Crimean Tatar statehood in the peninsula (let alone their genocidal deportations by Russian colonizers); and why so many pundits and politicians are still more preoccupied with how to “spare Putin’s face” and avoid “humiliation” than how to bring him to justice for crimes of aggression and genocide.
Western “political realism” matches perfectly with Russian “imperial knowledge” insofar as the latter also dwells on the racist hierarchy of “historical/non-historical” nations, “more important” and “less important”, “objectively” entitled to dominance and, conversely, assigned to subordination. Russian historical myths about “Kievan Russia” and political continuity between Kyiv and Moscow, about Ukraine’s artificialness and secondariness to allegedly eternal Russia, or Ukrainian primordial affinity, almost sameness with Russia, resonated perfectly with realists’ assumption of geopolitical superiority of Russia and inferiority of its satellites. There was no need to challenge “imperial knowledge” since it provided “stability” while any questioning of its premises implied probability of political bifurcations.
This dubious status-quo may have lasted forever if Putin did not overplay his hand and launched an all-out invasion — instead of further hybrid advances in Ukraine, euphemistically called in the West “Ukraine crisis”. Western awakening came too late and at very high price — at least for Ukrainians. The whole international system — of security, trade, diplomatic relations, cultural exchange, etc., — was profoundly shattered. International scholarship, which by and large is the Western scholarship, could not any longer ignore the new situation, which was largely enabled by deficiencies of international knowledge about both Russia and Ukraine and, more generally, by global structural problems of knowledge production.
“When we look at the intellectual construction of the world from the position of an American college or British university [a Ukrainian-Canadian author wrote], a very imperial picture of reality emerges, where you can clearly see former imperial centers and the periphery, the provinces… In reality, empires have not disappeared but continue to exist in mental geography. After all, the nineteenth-century empires were not just about conquests and the capture of territories but also about imperial metropoles, those grand centers of culture and knowledge with wonderful universities and academies of science”.1 And the system of knowledge production remains virtually the same insofar as “academic [and not only academic. — M.R.] structures are duplicating the configurations of power, influence, and domination already present in international relations”.
It remains to be seen whether the system can be substantially challenged. But decolonization looms large, at least as a slogan. The recent conference of ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) declared it as a primary goal: “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread calls for the reassessment and transformation of Russo-centric relationships of power and hierarchy both in the region and in how we study it”. Russian war in Ukraine, as one of the participants aptly remarked, has “pushed the field to understand empire and colonialism as probably never before… Previously it was all academic discussion but now people are dying over this”.
Paramount to this new debate is a gradual recognition that the ongoing war is not about territory, resources and sheer colonial conquest, as political realists staunchly insist. Nor is it about perceived NATO “threat” and alleged “security concerns”, — which are quite ephemeral for the country with the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It is not even about regime survival and the need to tighten the screws and mobilize people against the invented external threat, or to suppress democratic “disease” in the neighborhood and prevent its spillover into Russia.
The war is a “culture war”, war about history and identity, — something that does not fit the theory of political realists who believe that international relations are first and foremost about accumulation of power and wealth and enhancing security. They have little if any professional expertise on Ukraine or Russia, but lavishly give advises on how to end war and reach “negotiated solution”. They are confident that all political actors are rational and able to compromise, and simply cannot assume that some leaders might be irrational and paranoid. It is really “unprecedented in the twenty-first century: a delusional political leader seeking to pursue his utopian nationalist vision based on the antiquated primordialist notion of nation long discarded by scholarship”.
But for Ukrainian scholars who are much better acquainted with Russian history than their international counterparts, and therefore do not buy at face value Russian myths about “Kievan Russia” and “thousand-year-old Russian statehood”, the cultural/identitarian roots of the war are just obvious. They dwell in a profound incompatibility of the Russian imperial and Ukrainian national identities: independent Ukraine, Ukraine outside Russia fundamentally shatters the entire Russian world-view and “Ruś-sian” self-perception; Ukraine’s absence creates a huge black hole, a bleeding wound it the very center of Russian imperial identity and imperial imaginary. Shortly after Ukraine attained independence in 1991, professor Oleh Ilnytzkyj argued perceptively that “Ukraine, by its very political existence and through its intensive national soul searching, is raising doubts about Russia’s exclusive claims to specific historical periods (e.g., Kyivan Ruś), as well as individual cultural figures… Ukraine appears to be challenging Russia’s own sense of self which, by and large is defined with reference to this land, its culture and history”2.
This does not mean that all-out war, far beyond the discursive field, was inevitable or that all other factors did not play a role. Maria Mälksoo perspicaciously listed recently all of them while featuring ultimately the cultural/identitarian factor as the most important: “Russia’s 2022 full-fledged invasion of Ukraine is many things at once: a war of aggression; an attempt at yet another territorial conquest after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the eight-year-long struggle for Donbas; a parading of an ontologically anxious state whose leadership appears obsessed with being a great power through consolidating the idea of a Russkii Mir by ruthless violence and lies outperforming George Orwell’s dystopic imagination. Most importantly, it is an imperial war in the world of nation-states, underpinned by Russia’s open denial of Ukraine’s political sovereignty and the Ukrainians’ right to exist as2 an independent nation. The incompatible logics of sovereignty (Ukraine’s) and imperialism (Russia’s) are at the loggerheads in this conflict”3.
Recognition of cultural/identitarian roots of the war leads to a closer look at the underlying mythology that informs Russian imperial identity and makes it in particular incompatible with the very existence of independent Ukraine. Deconstruction of that mythology got a boost in Ukraine in 2014 and culminated in a total purge of all things imperial in 2022. In the West, such a revision is a more complicated task since it encounters vested interests of many “Russianists” who dominate the field, runs against the cynical “realism” of many politicians, let alone businessmen, and drags helplessly in mental clichés and “common wisdom” of the general public accumulated and solidified through centuries.
Back in 1995, Mark von Hagen considered the implications of the new political order for the Western academia: “Just as the international political system must now make adjustments for the newly claimed sovereignties of eastern and central European nations, so too will scholars outside the region restore historical and intellectual legitimacy to their objects of investigation… What all this does not mean is that we must establish chairs in Ukrainian history everywhere just as it is unrealistic to think that Lithuanian, Estonian or Kazakh history will now be offered everywhere. But, at a minimum, it might mean that in the future departments offering positions in Russian and east European history might very well insist on knowledge of the histories of more than one people of the Russian empire, and of the intellectual and methodological problems of teaching the history of empire”.
This challenged only implicitly the pervasive dominance of Russocentrism in regional studies. Now, the agenda of thorough decolonization is articulated more forcefully. “The war is really an earth-moving event and academia — as part of that world — has been shaken”, Edward Schatz, the director of the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the University of Toronto, concludes. “I feel like it is impossible to do things the way we have done it all along. Something has to change. The question is how much changes and along what dimensions”.2 The proposals envision not only revised curricula, critical re-consideration of Russian sources and broader representation of alternative non-Russian, but also more fundamental, structural changes:
“Decolonization must begin with language. Structural decolonization of narratives is equally important… So far, regardless of person’s views, his or her structural thinking for some reason remains constant and often fits perfectly into Putin’s logic… This reveals the problem of understanding how we tell a story, how we (mis)work with a language that was borrowed in the nineteenth century… Look at historical narratives: they are nationalizing narratives. They Russify not because of any malicious intention, but because Russianness is present in them as something ‘ancient’, something that is the systemic basis of the narrative. This natural perception of Russianness needs to be deconstructed… All the concepts that we take for granted need to be reconsidered. That is why new narratives are needed… If we do not break the structural foundations of the reproduction of these narratives, these patterns of organizing the discipline and training graduate students, unfortunately, we will not change anything”.
The discussants reasonably remind that it is not only the field of history or culture and literature that requires revision but also the field of political sciences and, particular, of international relations, — a real nest of “political realists” who skillfully combine explicit condemnation of Russian aggression with its implicit justification by various calls and arguments to “understand Putin”. Indeed, as Maria Mälksoo observes, “the war in Ukraine challenges the discipline of International Relations with a difficult postcolonial moment. It calls the IR to systematically face up to the tensions between an imperial order and a nation-state order in its long-neglected East European periphery. It also forces the field to probe the moral weight of asking another state to serve as one’s buffer zone”.
Two other aspects of the decolonization agenda go beyond the Ukrainian studies and Ukraine-related politics. One of them reminds us that Ukraine is not the only victim of Russian “imperial knowledge” and its global dominance, even though it occupies really a central role in the Russian imperial mythmaking. All the Russian dependencies deserve postcolonial scrutiny, regardless of different forms of colonial subjugation — either through sheer conquest, or colonial settlements, or even dynastic appropriations (coercion or threat of coercion has always dwelled behind each of these forms and their various combinations). It is in particular true about indigenous people of the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia and Far North who occupied the lowest places in the imperial ethnic hierarchy and suffered not only from Russian supremacism (insofar as the Russian people were deemed the most “progressive” under the Soviets, and “God-bearers” — народ-богоносец — under the tsars), but also from the most banal and ubiquitous racism. Scholarship from those regions, as a Kazakh author points out, “often has difficulties being heard in the West because of power hierarchies in knowledge production. … Since the Soviet collapse, policymakers in the West saw Russia as cementing sovereign rights of ex-colonies, especially in Central Asia… Activists in the Global South, too, still see the Soviet Union as an anti-Western, anti-capitalist power” [and feel no solidarity with the deprived people of the “Soviet South”].
Another aspect of the pending decolonization agenda relates to the West itself — its own tradition of “Orientalism” and what is defined today as “Westplaining”: a tendency to “explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives”.3 Some scholars express overt skepticism of “decolonization” initiatives that “originate in privileged imperial centers with a long history of colonial enterprises” unless the “structures and frameworks that shape the multidisciplinary subfield of regional studies” are fundamentally changed. Andriy Zayarniuk mentions “Eurasia” as one the concepts that sheds peculiar connotations on everything under its shield, regardless of scholars’ intentions: “Carved around Russia, the space will be dominated by Russia, just as Comecon or Putin’s “Eurasian Union” were”.
“When it comes to the geography of knowledge production [he maintains], “decolonization” of its own history and culture should be left to Ukraine, but it also should be accompanied by the “de-imperialization” of Western academia’s imperial optics. The first simple step could be to acknowledge the existence and legitimacy of Ukrainian studies, including Ukrainian history. Ukrainian culture was just as real and rich a century ago as it is now. To identify trends in that culture and make judgements about it, one has to master it first. It is a field that requires linguistic proficiency and specific background knowledge. A doctorate in Russian history should not be seen as a credential of expertise about Ukraine. The scholarly community must finally realize that the centre of Ukrainian studies is now in Ukraine. The voices of Ukraine’s expert scholars should be heard and respected, instead of being ignored or ridiculed. And finally, those Ukrainian historians who themselves have been involved in demonizing Ukraine and Ukrainian identity need to recognize their moral responsibility for the war, death, and suffering of Ukrainians and to re-examine their priorities, agendas, empathies, and approaches within the discipline”.
The decolonization debate elucidates the colonial essence of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and helps the Westerners to gradually dispose the “imperial knowledge” with all its stereotypes about Russia, Ukraine, and their historical relations. Potentially, it may also promote the Ukrainian cause in the Global South which still perceives Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union and therefore a flagbearer of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Blinded with anti-Western, in particular anti-American feelings, those people fail to recognize Ukraine as a victim of the same kind of genocidal colonialism that tormented them in the past centuries, and acquired even more power today due much stronger weapons and much more barefaced propaganda. The debate may contribute also to the general field of postcolonial studies that for long time excluded East Europeans (as well as other Russian subalterns) from their sight, but may finally recognize that colonial subjugation, exclusion, supremacism and even extermination are not necessarily racially-based and practiced exclusively overseas.
Research, 2022, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2022.2074947. Russia’s almost religious fervour in its current war against Ukraine, she further explains, “speaks of the denial of genuineness of the Ukrainian nation, culture, history and the state, on the one hand, and reveals the ontological void of the Russian nation, the fact that any politically meaningful Russian state identity is perceived to be viable only when linked to the empire, on the other. The political fate of Ukraine hence appears as the ultimate test of Russia’s brand of imperial nationalism: that the Russian state and nation have been conceived as imperial, and need to be continuously policed, defended and substantiated as such”.
“The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia (sic), similar to that which had appeared in the press… We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.” Quoted in M.Carynnyk, L.Luciuk, and B.Kordan (eds.), *The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-1933 *(Kingston: Limestone Press, 1988), p. 397. ↩ ↩2
Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, Russian and Ukrainian Studies and the New World Order. Canadian Slavonic Papers 34:4 (1992) 445-6. ↩ ↩2
Maria Mälksoo, The Postcolonial Moment in Russia’s War Against Ukraine. Journal of Genocide ↩ ↩2
“A victory for common sense, victory for the Georgian constitution, and a victory for Georgia’s European future” — this was the reaction of an MEP Miriam Lexmann (EPP), Georgia’s friend and supporter at the European Parliament, to the failure of the ruling Georgian Dream party to impeach President Salome Zurabishvili. Most Georgians — irrespective of their attitude to rather controversial political persona of Zurabishvili — agree that impeaching her for visiting the European capitals without the cabinet’s express permission would have meant inflicting an irreparable self-damage, just as the country holds its breath before the European Commission’s report on the chances of its EU candidacy, expected for November 8.
But it would be naïve to assume that the failure to impeach was an act of political resilience of sorts. In fact, the Georgian Dream went through the impeachment process — application to the Constitutional Court, subsequent hearings and the favorable decision to the ruling party — knowing full well, that the final vote would fail. GD toxic chair, Irakli Kobakhidze said the process itself was of more importance. And at least for this one time, he did not lie.
Georgia’s European friends — politicians, journalists and analysts alike — follow their natural, professional habit of fixing their attention on politically significant acts. Yet, in a country whose institutions have been captured by the financial interests of a single oligarch, institutions are a mere façade and their acts — a farce. Yes, the imitation of the political process has little bearing on the outcomes. Yet, it serves an important purpose — that of communication. By their acts and words, the party gonzo, talking heads and media, all loyal to the constituency of one, are trying to prepare the ground for certain, upcoming acts, and to obfuscate the actions that are taking place.
Take the impeachment saga. While it has certainly captured attention abroad and grabbed the social and mainstream media headlines, by going through these motions the ruling party has managed to neutralize the sting of a far deeper and more damaging story.
Otar Partskhaladze, a henchmen of Bidzina Ivanishvili’s family, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury and accused by the State Department to act upon the remit of the Russian FSB. What’s more, the ruling party has responded by revising the banking regulations to shield Partskahaldze, and the National Bank’s qualified managers quit in protest. To manage the fallout, the Bank has been blowing through the national reserves. Let that sink in — the National Bank’s reputation was hit and public coffers are being emptied to shield the alleged FSB contact point, which is apparently close to top-level decision-making. President Zurabishvili’s impeachment story was of course a “lucky” decoy to keep that story off the first pages.
Zourabichvili with Ivanishvili // Mtavari, screenshot
There is more. Salome Zurabishvili can be many things, but she is clearly not the product of the Soviet and post-Soviet system, as she was intent to point out during the parliamentary impeachment hearing. Granddaughter of the political immigrants from Georgia’s First Republic (1918-1921) she was born and bred in France, and molded by the likes of SciencesPo Paris and ENA, before reaching ambassadorship at Quai d’Orsay. And even though some of her Georgian-language musings would have raised eyebrows at those respected institutions, she is neatly fitting the European discourse when she speaks in French, or English. Zurabishvili and Georgia she incarnates is welcome in Brussels, while PM Irakli Garibashvili and Bidzina Ivanishvili’s other thuggish or caricatural cronies have been giving Eurocrats a persistent nausea.
Yes, Zurabishvili, formally running as an independent, was elected on the Georgian Dream ticket. The GD Chair has reminded her during the impeachment hearings, that having lost the first round of the vote to the opposition candidate, she had to be dragged into the office on Bidzina Ivanishvili’s coattails, who literally replaced her on campaign posters. But that was when the Georgian Dream was looking for some European legitimacy. Those days are now gone.
After Russia brutally invaded Ukraine, Bidzina Ivanishvili’s incentive structure was laid bare. He is much more vulnerable to a polonium tea or a defenestration from an inadvertently open window of his palace, and much more likely to benefit from helping his Moscow buddies evade financial sanctions, than he is receptive to scolding from the West or exhortations from Kyiv. The two real fears from the West that Ivanishvili has exhibited — through reactions of the state-controlled media, his court “analysts,” and party leadership — are the fears of civil society-led protest and financial sanctions. The attempt in March 2023 to pass the “foreign agents” law modelled at Russia and aimed at silencing free media and civil society actors was a clear indication of this fear. But it failed, due largely to a sudden and unexpected — even to civil society — mobilization of the citizens, and, especially, youths.
From that point onward, the Georgian Dream has redoubled efforts to construct the conspiracy theory, in which the Western-inspired coalition of the national actors — opposition, CSOs, media — are concerting in the effort to drag Georgia into war with Russia. They call this the “global party of war” a terminology borrowed from Hungary’s maverick adept of “sovereign democracy” Victor Orban and aimed to trigger and exploit the natural human fear of war and unrest to the benefit of the ruling class descending rapidly into authoritarianism.
Just as the impeachment procedures were capturing the headlines, the Georgian Dream administration, through politically controlled security services, has advanced the accusations of USAID-funded coup and dragged civic activists, artists, writers and painters to questionings. Since the investigation is “classified” they are bound by non-disclosure agreements and cannot divulge the contents, which helpfully keeps the public guessing, while the party-affiliated pundits supply helpful, sordid hints. The accusations have amplified and now spread to the EU, with Parliament Speaker making wide-ranging allegations and demands answers to the counterfactual questions. The idea of public protest — even occasionally violent one — being a normal occurrence in a democracy is being portrayed as seditious and “anti-European.”
Tying Zurabishvili into this story was thus almost irresistibly tempting as a public relations spin: the Western-born President makes an ideal “foreign agent”, aligned with the “global party of war” and dragging Georgia into devastating conflict, at the behest of Brussels or Washington D.C. The Georgian ruling party is thus fabricating a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is talking about impending street protests while eradicating any other institutional way to challenge their authority, it is preaching Europeanness while stamping out dissent. Such modelling the political reality is only possible once the checks and balances of democracy are gone, the courts are tame and the media — largely under control. No wonder, that Hungary’s Orban and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliev are now Tbilisi’s best friends.
The deputy chair of the Georgian Dream, Kakha Kaladze said he was “100% certain” that Georgia is going to get the EU candidacy. PM Garibashvili is meeting Enlargement Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi in Brussels who has a reputation for sweetening the EU path to less-than-palatable regimes, like those in Banja Luka or Belgrade.
Georgia’s opposition and civil society are now held hostage by a simplest trick in the gangster’s book: if they speak of the damage that Georgian Dream has done an is doing to country’s institutions, they are accused of undermining Georgia’s European future. The Georgian Dream wants to have it both ways: if the candidacy is granted, it would take the credit for advancing on the European path, while continuing to denigrate the western partners. If it is denied — “the global party of war” would be blamed and the lurch towards authoritarianism would become a slide, lubricated by the toxic notions of Europe rejecting Georgian identity and traditions.
Brussels should be well advised to see through and call that bluff: Georgia’s current regime is clearly and wantonly failing the Copenhagen criteria and any progress on merit is only possible once this changes.
]]>After the October 7 massacre, the Russian regime and its propagandists sided with Hamas, a long-standing “ally” that Russia has always refused to call a terrorist organization. This attitude was bluntly expressed by United Russia’s Duma deputy, General Andrei Gurulyov: “I’ll try [to say it] in a military way, a little, perhaps cynically […] Whose ally is Israel? The United States’! Whose ally is Iran and the surrounding Muslim world? Ours! We have our own goals and objectives”.
And he was not alone. The Hamas attack was applauded by Russian propaganda. Not least by the turbo-patriotic Z channels, which mocked with wicked glee Israel’s “weakness”, American “impotence and incompetence”, and the Russian Jews who had “sold out” by moving to Israel. These channels went so far as to cheerfully salute the ignominy perpetrated by Islamists in Israel. Some Z bloggers even wished they had been able to take part in the massacre.
For those Jews who had previously been pro-Putin, it was a rude awakening. As in the Stalinist era, which practiced “anti-Zionism” and condemned “Jewish cosmopolitanism”, they now had to choose between Putin’s homeland and their ethnic, cultural and religious identity. One of the regime’s worst propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, who used to boast about his Jewish origins while cursing the “Ukronazis”, had to set the record straight by distancing himself from any support for Israel or even compassion for Israelis: “I’d like to make it clear that I’m Jewish, but not Israeli. In other words, I have no favorites except my homeland. My homeland is Russia. So when people ask me which side I’m on, I don’t understand that question at all.” He seemed to want to provide a “guideline” for Russia’s Jews, if they did not want to be perceived as hostile elements.
But this thinly veiled warning did not have the desired effect. For example, Orientalist Evgeny Satanovsky, one of the permanent guests on Vladimir Solovyov’s flagship talk show, criticized harshly on air one of the key figures of the Russian political establishment, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, claiming that she “doesn’t particularly like either Jews or Israel” and calling her a “drunken slut.” Shocked by the Israeli tragedy and the Russian government’s pro-Hamas stance, Satanovsky even insulted former president Dmitry Medvedev on the same program, calling him a “weak little shit.” Similarly, a Russian regular on Solovyov’s show, Yakov Kedmi, who purports to be an Israeli expert on security issues, but who has always ardently supported Putin’s policies and reviled the West, also completely changed course after October 7. Needless to say, they are no longer guests of Solovyov, who has also had to apologize to Zakharova.
Solovyov’s line was then somewhat formalized by Putin himself. On October 21, he convened a meeting of the Russian Federation’s religious leaders to discuss the situation in Gaza. First, he got them all on board with his war against Ukraine, thanking them for their support for the Russian armed forces, before explaining that Russia’s main task was to “stop the bloodshed and violence”, again without condemning Hamas, while “certain forces are trying to provoke a new escalation, to draw as many countries and peoples as possible into the conflict, to use them for their own selfish interests, to cause chaos and mutual hatred not only in the Middle East, but far beyond.” Bluntly speaking, he was pointing to the West, which would try to inflict “a strategic defeat” on Russia, and which “needs the Middle East and all the other religious and national conflicts in the world to be directly or indirectly linked, in one way or another, to Russia or, more precisely, to hit Russia, our society!” To oppose them, Putin stressed, we need to understand that we are “one people with one Homeland. And we share responsibility for its security and prosperity.”
However, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berel Lazar, while paying tribute to Putin for his policy of so-called peaceful religious coexistence in Russia, suddenly hardened his tone and dared to contradict the official Russian line:
“Like all religions, we pray for peace, so that there will be no more wars. That is why, as we mourn the hundreds of innocent victims killed by terrorists on October 7, as we pray for the rescue of over 200 hostages […], we know that there can be no negotiations with terrorists, and above all no compromises. Any terrorist organization must be isolated and destroyed.”
We can assume that the anti-Jewish riots in the North Caucasus were “sponsored” on the sly by the regime, as were demonstrations in support of terrorists in Chechnya and other Muslim-majority regions of Russia in the past. This was particularly the case after the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo and the assassination of the French school teacher Samuel Paty. The antisemitic riots in Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus have in any case sounded a fresh warning to the Russian Jewish community. In a country under heavy police surveillance, is it possible that “spontaneous” and violent demonstrations are spreading like wildfire: in Khasavyurt , in Cherkessk, in Nalchik, and finally at Makhachkala airport, where the confrontation with the forces of law and order, very late in the day, resulted in dozens of injuries? These were not just calls to prevent the arrival of Israelis, but a stated intention to “cleanse” the North Caucasus of any Jewish presence. It is certainly possible that these violent actions exceeded the expectations of those pulling the strings, and official Russian discourse was quick to attribute them to Ukrainian “scheming” and the Western masters of the “Ukronazis.”
Although it is important for the Russian regime to “contain” the reactions of Russia’s Jews, a still influential community that includes leading figures from the worlds of culture, science and business, the Makhachkala pogrom and other antisemitic acts are above all a warning to the government of Israel, the message being in essence: you have hostages not only in the hands of Hamas, but also here at home. Remember the anti-Armenian pogroms of the late 1980s. As the ever-popular Russian slogan goes: “We can always do it again!”
Meanwhile, the official Russian position has removed even further any inhibitions antisemites of all stripes in Russia may have had. Here is how the YouTube channel Ya tak i znal (“I knew it”), just one of many Russian fascist sites, talks about Satanovsky, Kedmi and Solovyov, making no distinction between them: “The overrepresentation in the Russian Federation’s information field of people from a single Semitic tribe, the ability of these people to imitate a particular nationality or culture, is simply astounding. And then, when they get important positions, they begin to eat away at this society from the inside. Such is the case with Solovyov, his right-hand man Satanovsky and the traitor Kedmi, who went from being a grieving Jew suffering for his people to being a Nazi”. This kind of language has become commonplace.
Purges and pogroms threaten more than just Jews. On public television channel Rossiïa-1, General Andrei Gurulyov proposed to “destroy” Russians who do not trust Putin. According to him, “the level of cohesion” in society is reflected in the 80% of citizens who trust the head of state, while the remaining 20%, “all that rot”, should be, if not isolated, at least destroyed one way or another.
But there is an even broader question to be asked. The pogrom at Makhachkala airport could be a warning to Western governments, first and foremost the United States, with this message: do not support Israel, because this will unleash a wave of Muslim antisemitism on a global scale. So far, we have ve managed to contain the anger and arrest activists, but the pot is boiling.
Russian power likes to see itself as the master of complicated games, and one of these manipulations is probably taking place before our very eyes.
]]>The Valdai meetings are increasingly looking like the Komintern Congresses of the Stalinist era. Their aim is the same: to inform the leaders of pro-Russian parties abroad of developments in the Kremlin line; to convey Moscow’s propaganda directives to the vast network of agents of influence and Kremlinophile movements around the world.
Putin’s Valdai speech of October 5, 2023 can be equated with Andrei Zhdanov’s speech at the inaugural session of the Cominform on September 25, 1947, which marked the break with the Grand Alliance sealed in 1942 against Nazi Germany and its allies, and the official start of the Cold War. Putin’s speech merits a closer look, even if he said nothing fundamentally new, merely consolidating a doctrine that had been in the making for years. He did, however, strike us with his millenarian overtones. Referring to the Russian-Ukrainian war, Putin declares: “This is not a territorial conflict or even the establishment of a regional geopolitical balance. The issue is much broader and fundamental: we are talking about the principles on which the new world order will be based. […] Modern international law, built on the basis of the United Nations Charter, is outdated and must be destroyed, and something new must be created.” Like Zhdanov in 1947, Putin proclaims the existence of two irreconcilable antagonistic camps, and articulates his entire message around this confrontation.
The Valdai speech, and the exegesis of it by Kremlin propagandists, enable us to identify the various ingredients of Putin’s ideology, which grafts onto an omnipresent Soviet substratum more recent influences: that of the Mafia mentality, that of the KGB, and above all that of the Russian president’s particular obsessions.
This substratum has increasingly cropped up over the years, even if Putin does not dream of abolishing private property. Whole swathes of Leninist ideology are recycled in his discourse. First, messianism: “We must take on the task of building a new world”, he insists. And, of course, Manichaeism. His entire Valdai speech is devoted to the antagonism between the two camps, “the West versus the Rest”, with the anti-Western camp led by Russia and Comrade Putin himself. The continuity with Zhdanov is obvious: “On the path of its aspirations to world domination, the USA collides with the USSR and its growing international influence, as the bastion of anti-imperialist and anti-fascist politics…“.
Determinism is also very important: according to Putin and his hacks, the old world order is condemned by history, just as the bourgeois camp was for Lenin and Stalin. Journalist Dmitry Popov writes: “Like many events we have witnessed, this will not happen because of the will of politicians, it may even be against their will, but because of the laws of historical development.”
Putin also shares the Marxist conception of wealth. He understands nothing about the production of wealth, and is unaware that it is created by human ingenuity, under the protection of the rule of law. He believes it results from the plundering of others: “The prosperity of the West has been largely achieved through the plundering of colonies over the centuries.” The West has reached “this level of development thanks to the plundering of the entire planet”. As we shall see, this posture enables him to remain steadfast in his denial of the contributions of Western civilization.
The “decolonial” theme also comes straight from Marxism-Leninism. To quote Zhdanov again: “The crisis of the colonial system, accentuated by the outcome of the Second World War, is manifested by the powerful rise of the national liberation movement in the colonies and dependent countries. By the same token, the backbone of the capitalist system is under threat.”
Finally, one of Putin’s rhetorical hobbyhorses — the defense of the “sovereignty” of peoples in the face of American “hegemonism” — has its roots in the Stalinist propaganda deployed from the end of 1947 to torpedo the implementation of the Marshall Plan. Zhdanov continues: “The imperialist countries, such as the United States, England and the states close to them, are becoming dangerous enemies of the peoples’ national independence and self-determination, while the Soviet Union and the countries with new democracies [the future People’s Democracies] provides a bulwark in the defense of equal rights and the national self-determination of peoples. […] The substance of the veiled, intentionally muddled formulas of the “Marshall Plan” consists in forming a bloc of states bound to the United States through commitments and offering European states American credits, in payment for renouncing their economic independence and, later, their political independence.”
Putin constantly accuses European leaders of betraying “national interests” and meekly following the orders of “their boss in Washington”: “Today, the AfD, Alternative for Germany, is raising its head. No wonder, because nobody in the ruling class fights for Germany’s interests. That much is obvious. […] As for Schröder, Germany can be proud of people like him. He is a true son of his people, he puts the interests of the German people first… What surprises me? I’ll tell you in all honesty: I’m surprised that such people and politicians [like Gerhard Schröder] still exist in Europe, that they have survived.”
To understand Putin’s hostility to the international order, we need to remember the milieu that enabled his ascent and fabulous enrichment. Putin made his career during the Yeltsin years, which he later decried so much, in the sheriffless Wild West that was Russia during this period, when everything could be bought and former thugs turned oligarchs offered themselves a mandate as a deputy to acquire immunity. He feels that, to succeed in the same way in the international arena, he must deconstruct it and create a jungle similar to the one in which the Russians of his generation lived, and which enabled his dizzying rise. His relentless fight against “American hegemony” is that of a gangster who sees an upright police officer pitted against him. His entire foreign policy program basically comes down to the quest for impunity. The “new, fairer world order” he celebrates is in fact a chaos in which the Russian president and his cohort of thugs hope to indulge in their depredations without restraint. “Sovereignty” as they understand it is the ability to do anything without getting a slap on the wrist.
As long as the old order lasts, Putin complains, “anyone can be attacked simply because this or that country is not liked by the hegemonic power […] Lasting peace will only be established when everyone begins to feel safe, to understand that their opinions are respected and that there is a balance in the world, when no one is able to force or coerce others to live and behave as the hegemonic power wishes. […] Anyone who behaves independently, who follows their own interests, is instantly turned in the eyes of Western elites into an obstacle that must be eliminated”. Putin takes exception to the idea that he should comply to rules: “What kind of ‘order’ based on certain ‘rules’? What are the ‘rules’ and who came up with them? It’s not at all clear. It’s pure nonsense… It’s always the same manifestation of colonial thinking. And as for those who advocate them, perhaps it’s time they got rid of their arrogance in the face of the international community that fully understands its tasks, its interests and it’s time they got rid of their mentality going back to the days of colonial domination. I’d like to say: open your eyes, those days are long gone and will never, ever return.” When the “new, fairer world order” is established, sanctions will be impossible: it will be “an open, interconnected world in which no one will ever attempt to erect artificial barriers to communication, creativity and individual prosperity. There should be a barrier-free environment — that’s what we have to strive for. […] Everyone should have access to the benefits of modern development, and attempts to limit it to a particular country or people should be considered an act of aggression, and nothing else.”
Putin’s contempt for the law goes so far as to call into question the very notion of the state, precisely because a state is based on a legal framework and has borders, something the Russian president does not like. Russia, Putin tells us, is a “civilization state”: “In the Russian Foreign Policy Concept adopted this year, our country is characterized as a distinct civilization state. This formulation accurately and succinctly reflects the way in which we understand not only our own development, but also the fundamental principles of the world order, whose victory we hope for.” In his view, “the main qualities of a civilization state are diversity and self-sufficiency”. “The world is moving toward a synergy of civilization states, of large spaces, of communities that recognize themselves as such.” This vision leaves no room for the nation state. Our sovereignists should understand that Putin’s conception of “sovereignty” is the antithesis of our own, which was formulated in the 16th century by magistrates. In Putin’s mind, “sovereignty” means impunity.
Putin dreams of deinstitutionalizing the “world order” just as he has deinstitutionalized Russia since 2000: “It is essential,” he tells us, “to free international relations from the bloc approach, from the legacy of the colonial era and the Cold War.” Agreements must be made on a one-to-one basis, as between mafia godfathers: “No one person decides for everyone, and not everyone decides everything, but those directly concerned with this or that issue agree on what to do and how to do it.”
A tirade by the Russian president betrays his exasperation with democracies. Of course, their weakness is to be welcomed, but in Putin’s eyes they have the serious flaw of being unpredictable: “The paradox is that tomorrow the situation could change: that’s the problem. For example, there will be internal political changes after the next elections. One day, a country is pursuing this or that goal stubbornly, and the next day, domestic political changes occur, and they start to pursue sometimes completely different, even opposing goals, with the same determination and the same nerve. The most striking example is Iran’s nuclear program. A [US] administration pushed through one decision, another came along, everything was reversed and went in the opposite direction. How can you work in such conditions? Where are the points of reference? What can we rely on? Where are the guarantees? Are these the “rules” they’re talking about? What idiocy!” The former KGB agent’s frustration is understandable. How many admirably orchestrated operations have been derailed by electoral unpredictability! How many people carefully cultivated in the West by the Russian services have had their careers absurdly cut short by accusations of corruption!
Putin understands nothing about Western civilization. On the other hand, he has an unerring instinct for what can destroy it. He relies on relativism, which in the West tends to be confused with objectivity: “There are many civilizations, and none of them is better or worse than the other,” he proclaims. His bête noire is universalism: he finds it intolerable that rules not imposed by him should apply to everyone. Putin is an outlaw in the literal sense of the word. “Civilization is not a universal concept, one for all — there is no such thing,” he insists. He holds a mortal grudge against Russians who leave the civilizational preserve of the “Russian world”, which he considers his property: “Of course, it’s forbidden to betray your civilization. It leads to general chaos, it’s unnatural and it’s repugnant, I would say.”
In 1947, after Zhdanov’s speech, Westerners realized that the confrontation with the Stalinist regime was also an ideological one. The Valdai speech should lead us to a similar realization. Putin’s destructive nihilism attacks the foundations of our civilization. The Russian president seeks to obliterate our heritage. From the 5th to the 4th centuries B.C., Greece and, later, Rome began to reflect about the universal, about nature and law, about the advantages and disadvantages of different political regimes, about the corruption of these regimes, about the role of justice in the survival of the City, about the necessary link between politics and morality, laying the foundations of Western civilization. It was precisely this intuition for the universal, present in the Ancients and in Western Christianity, that later enabled the development of science. Conversely, the relativism cultivated by Putin leads to a proliferation of superstitions and charlatanism, which are a threat to true knowledge. It condemns the people who profess it to an inability to put themselves in other people’s shoes, turning them into a herd of criminals unaware of their own moral decay. It deprives them of that sense of belonging to a common humanity that forms the basis of true civilization. Compare the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, full of poignant empathy for the defeated Persians and Trojans, with the hyena-like howls of Russian propaganda and you’ll see that, once again, Putin is lying when he claims that no civilization “is better or worse than the other.”
Rossiya 1, screenshot
If you were wondering what the “new world order” that Putin celebrated in his Valdai speech might look like, all you have to do is look at the Kremlin’s propaganda reaction to the Hamas offensive, and everything becomes crystal clear. Military bloggers and the usual guests on the Solovyov and Co. talk shows literally revel in the “success of the Palestinian militants, who conquered more territory in 24 hours than the Ukrainian armed forces managed to cover in 4 months of ‘counter-offensive’”, and the “resounding slap in the face” inflicted on Israel and its intelligence services. Solovyov sets the tone, and this theme is sometimes repeated word for word every day, on every channel: “All the legends surrounding Israel have been destroyed. The Iron Dome? A fiasco. Tsahal? A fiasco. The Israeli services? A fiasco. Israeli tanks, the best in the world? A fiasco.”
Russia’s position must be clear, explains Andrey Gurulyov, a deputy who is full of admiration for the Hamas offensive: “Israel is the ally of the United States, Hamas and Iran are our allies. The President described our tasks and objectives perfectly in his speech at the Valdai forum”. Solovyov feels obliged to clarify: “I’m Jewish, but I’m not Israeli. I’m on the side of my homeland, Russia.”
Why these transports of ecstasy? There is an immediate cause, summed up inimitably by propagandist Sergey Mardan, who rubs his hands in glee because “the globalist toad will be diverted from Ukraine and will be busy trying to put out the eternal inferno in the Middle East.” Journalist Dmitry Popov oozes hatred for the Ukrainian president: “All the front pages, all the TV news are about Israel. And somewhere in the corner, Zelensky is writhing with withdrawal symptoms of his addiction to the limelight. […] The West’s priority when it comes to supplying arms and money is clearly Israel, not Ukraine, which will be dumped sooner or later anyway.” Blogger Sasha Kotz exults: “The West is infinitely more concerned about the fate of Israel than that of the capricious and indocile Ukraine, and assistance to Israel will be a good pretext for redirecting Western aid and efforts.” Did Putin anticipate this windfall when he said in his Valdai speech: “Around four to five billion dollars reach Ukraine every month through various channels — loans, subsidies of all kinds, etc. As soon as we stop that, it’ll all be over in a week. Everything. The same goes for the defense system: imagine that arms deliveries stop tomorrow — in a week the ammunition will be exhausted.”
The irreplaceable Sergey Markov points out another advantage for Russia of the Hamas offensive: the rise in oil prices resulting from this war. Sergey Markov also explains the main reason for the euphoria of the Kremlin and its ideologists: “The Hamas offensive is a fiasco of the unipolar world. Washington and Brussels are responsible for the death of Israelis and Palestinians. Since you’re not capable of running the world, get the hell out of Olympus!”
The helplessness of the West is plain to see: “Israel is tragically alone,” says Mardan. “And it’s not that decrepit old man, Biden, babbling his support, who can reassure the Israelis.”
Solovyov goes on: “You didn’t want to talk to Russia? Well, this is the result.” The new world order manifests itself in the punishment that inevitably befalls those who put their faith in the United States and the West instead of listening to Russia and siding with it: in 2008, Georgia lost two provinces; in 2014, Ukraine lost Crimea, and as the lesson wasn’t enough, in 2022 it lost its eastern provinces; in 2023, Armenia, which betrayed Russia, lost Karabakh; and Israel, which had wanted to strike a deal with Saudi Arabia without asking Moscow’s permission, was punished by the deaths of thousands of its citizens. TV presenter Olga Skabeeva can’t wait for the final act: “The United States is clearly not up to its role as the world’s hegemonic power. […] All that’s left is for Xi Jinping to set Taiwan ablaze, and then it will be all over, the world will change forever.”
No wonder official commentators are careful to stress that Putin has nothing to do with these developments, which, according to Dmitry Popov, are taking place “because of the laws of historical development”, with Putin merely describing these laws. The Kremlin’s leaders are so optimistic that Putin has even declared himself ready to accept Ukraine’s accession to the European Union, because he is convinced that the United States’ withdrawal will leave him master in Europe: “Let’s see how this situation develops. The Ukrainians want to join the EU — let them; the Europeans are prepared to accept them — let them…”
The picture of the world painted by Putin and his supporters is reminiscent of the distorting mirror created by the devil, which Andersen describes on the first page of The Snow Queen: “Everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it seemed to dwindle to almost nothing at all, while everything that was worthless and ugly became most conspicuous and even uglier than ever. In this mirror the loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the very best people became hideous, or stood on their heads and had no stomachs. If a good, pious thought passed through anyone’s mind, it showed in the mirror as a carnal grin […] All those who went to the hobgoblin’s school -for he [the devil] had a school of his own- told everyone that a miracle had come to pass. Now, they asserted, for the very first time you could see how the world and its people really looked. They scurried about with the mirror until there was not a person alive nor a land on earth that had not been distorted”. One day, the mirror shattered into an infinite number of tiny splinters: “Some of the fragments were smaller than a grain of sand and these went flying throughout the wide world. Once they got in people’s eyes they would stay there. These bits of glass distorted everything the people saw, and made them see only the bad side of things, for every little bit of glass kept the same power that the whole mirror had possessed.” Seeing Putin and his propagandists gloating over the worst atrocities, and celebrating these horrors as the harbinger of a “fairer” new world, one gets the impression, that, like the tale’s young Kay, they are among those who have received a shard of the infernal mirror in their hearts.
]]>As our eyes are riveted on the battlefield in Ukraine, we tend to forget that Russia continues to wage a parallel war against the West, this one largely invisible, just as in 1941-1945 Stalin was not fighting the Wehrmacht only: from 1942 onward, he was preparing his great thrust into post-war Europe, infiltrating the Roosevelt administration and opening schools on Soviet territory to train European Communists who would become the nuclei of the future “friendly” governments that Stalin intended to install in the “liberated” countries.
To measure the intensity of this hidden war waged by an army of moles operating from Moscow, it is necessary to clearly understand the Russian plan. This will enable us to gauge the effectiveness of the action undertaken by the Kremlin. First point: Russia has in no way abandoned its initial plan to install a pro-Russian government in Kyiv. We should not imagine that Moscow would be content with a Korean-style scenario, as its agents of influence are suggesting to the West. Russia wants to enlist the West to force Kyiv to accept the so-called “peace for territory” swap and to coerce Ukrainians to resign themselves to the amputation of their country. The real scenario in the minds of Russia’s leaders is not the Korean one: for them, a part of Ukraine integrated into the West is unacceptable. The real scenario that inspires them is the Georgian scenario of 2008-9: it consisted in stirring up the bitterness felt by Georgians after the “betrayal” of the West, in twisting the knife in the wound, so as to demoralize them, make them lose heart, make them plunge back into the corruption and cynicism characteristic of the “Russian world” and finally resign themselves to electing a new government that we now know was a government of collaboration. Without creating this feeling of betrayal by the West, Moscow will not succeed in installing a satrap in Kyiv. For the Kremlin, things look promising. Just imagine the bitterness accumulated by Ukrainians over the past few months, forced to let themselves be cut to pieces for lack of airpower and long-range missiles; just imagine how demoralized these people may be if, on top of that, the West forbids them from winning the war, all to save the day for Russian autocracy. We cannot overemphasize it: allowing Russia to amputate Ukraine is tantamount to creating in Kyiv the conditions for a pro-Russian putsch, camouflaged (or not).
So the plan is clear. Now let us look at the means employed to achieve it. Historical precedents are illuminating, especially that of the Great Alliance of 1941-1945 mentioned above. As in that period, Russia’s efforts are focused on the United States. The first step was to set up a “secret channel” with the American administration. During the Second World War, this secret channel was provided by the highly Sovietophile Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s right-hand man. The advantage of the secret channel is that it enables Moscow to influence decision-makers directly, behind the scenes, behind the backs of the allies, sheltered from the media. It enables Western interlocutors to be pushed into decisions that are contrary to the West’s interests, which would be obvious in a public debate. It allows the disinformation leading to these decisions to be distilled, without being neutralized in time by counter-arguments. Thanks to Hopkins, who relayed the Kremlin’s propaganda, Roosevelt abandoned half of Europe to Stalin.
Before moving on to current affairs, let us cite a second example of the Kremlin’s well-honed procedure. It concerns the secret channel set up between West Germany and the Kremlin from the end of 1969. On the Soviet side, “journalist” Vyacheslav Kevorkov acted as an intermediary with Andropov. On the German side, his contact was Egon Bahr, a close associate of Chancellor Willy Brandt. This secret channel remained in place under Helmut Schmidt. Thanks to the Ostpolitik of which Egon Bahr was the architect, the USSR was able to establish a parasitic coexistence with the West that lasted for years, gave the dying Soviet economy a breath of fresh air and enabled Moscow to carry out the gigantic armaments program that is still bearing fruit today, since Putin’s army makes use of arsenals dating back to this period.
The second component of this policy is the creation of an appeasement party in the target country, which works on public opinion and exerts an influence parallel to that of the secret channel. The appeasement party deployed in parallel with the secret channel in West Germany enabled Putin to carry out his coups de force for a long time, without jeopardizing his profitable business with Germany.
William Burns, the then US ambassador, with Putin and Lavrov in Moscow in 2008 // kremin.ru
In the USA, the appeasement party has ancient roots. It dominated the Obama administration, so much so that, it may be recalled, the « reset » was proclaimed in Washington immediately after Russia amputated two of Georgia’s provinces following the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008. In the years that followed, the United States demonstrated its weakness and total lack of understanding of Russian objectives and modus operandi. The annexation of Crimea did not serve as a lesson, nor did Russia’s aggression against Ukraine on February 24. A recent article in Newsweek shows the extent to which illusions persist in part of the Washington establishment. The CIA sees its role in the Russian-Ukrainian war this way: “as a primary spy, a negotiator, a supplier of intelligence, a logistician, a wrangler of a network of sensitive NATO relations and perhaps most important of all, the agency trying to ensure the war does not further spin out of control.” The article quotes a CIA official: “Don’t underestimate the Biden administration’s priority to keep Americans out of harm’s way and reassure Russia that it doesn’t need to escalate. Is the CIA on the ground inside Ukraine? Yes, but it’s also not nefarious.” These words show the extent to which Kremlin propaganda has been internalized in Washington. Roosevelt, too, thought it necessary to “reassure” Stalin. Russia invades Ukraine, and it is Russia that needs to be reassured! Russia is trembling in its boots in the face of Western resolve! The Newsweek article goes on to say that after certain Ukrainian initiatives such as the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline (Ukraine denies any involvement in this action) or the drone attack on the Kremlin, the CIA’s big concern is its “main intelligence responsibilities—knowing enough about what the Ukrainians are planning, to both influence them and to adhere to their [the CIA’s] secret agreement with Moscow.” For the rest we quote Newsweek:
”The CIA had been monitoring Russia’s buildup and in November 2021, three months before the invasion, Biden dispatched Burns [William Burns, the CIA chief, ambassador to Moscow from 2005 to 2008] to Moscow to warn the Kremlin of the consequences of any attack. Though the Russian president snubbed Biden’s emissary by staying at his retreat in Sochi on the Black Sea, 800 miles away, he did agree to speak with Burns via a Kremlin secure phone. “In some ironic ways though, the meeting was highly successful,” says the second senior intelligence official, who was briefed on it. Even though Russia invaded, the two countries were able to accept tried and true rules of the road. The United States would not fight directly nor seek regime change [in Russia], the Biden administration pledged. Russia would limit its assault to Ukraine and act in accordance with unstated but well-understood guidelines for secret operations. “There are clandestine rules of the road,” says the senior defense intelligence official, “even if they are not codified on paper, particularly when one isn’t engaged in a war of annihilation.” This includes staying within day-to-day boundaries of spying, not crossing certain borders and not attacking each other’s leadership or diplomats. “Generally the Russians have respected these global red lines, even if those lines are invisible,” the official says.”
We now understand why Putin chose the term “special military operation” to designate the war of annihilation of the Ukrainian nation that he planned to wage in that country. The idea was to fool not only the Russians, but also the Americans. It is also clear why Putin literally grew wings after this meeting, to the point of issuing the infamous ultimatum to NATO. Burns had practically given him carte blanche to attack Ukraine, provided he did not attack NATO countries. This disgraceful episode did not prevent the Americans from relaunching “back-channel diplomacy”: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met for several hours in April in New York with Richard Haass, a former diplomat and outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, European expert Charles Kupchan and Russian expert Thomas Graham, both former White House and State Department officials and members of the Council on Foreign Relations. On the agenda were the fate of the occupied territories “which Ukraine may never be able to liberate”, and “the search for an elusive diplomatic off-ramp that could be tolerable to both sides.” “Signs are mounting that the U.S. and its allies are eager for Moscow and Kyiv to move toward peace talks in the fall after Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive is completed.”
Clearly, incomprehension of Russia has not changed in the United States (in Europe it is a different story, with France and Germany finally realizing that the Baltic states and Poland were right to warn against Russia). The Moscow Times revealed on July 27 that secret diplomatic talks are underway between former senior US national security officials and high-ranking members of the Kremlin, a fact confirmed by a former US official directly involved in these exchanges. Meetings between US and Kremlin officials reportedly take place at least twice a month, often via an online format. One of the American interlocutors of this secret channel formed from these talks the impression “that the Russians were unable to articulate what exactly they wanted and needed.” “They don’t know how to define victory or defeat. In fact, some of the elites to whom we spoke had never wanted the war in the first place, even saying it had been a complete mistake. […] But now they’re at war — suffering a humiliating defeat is not an option for these guys.” Once again, we find ourselves faced with American ignorance of Russian diplomatic procedures, even though these are well analyzed in the Memoirs of Roosevelt-era diplomats like Charles Bohlen, who had come to know the score. In this type of confidential exchange, the Russians never reveal their cards, letting their adversary speak, so as to realize the possible concessions to be pocketed during an initial phase, just to prime the pump. Of course, there is the familiar refrain: don’t humiliate Russia. Can you imagine that in April 1945, the Allies’ main concern was to “allow Hitler to save face”, “not to humiliate Germany”? This simple question is a measure of the power of the appeasement party in the West. But there is more. Let us continue with the confidences of a privileged Moscow interlocutor: “We made clear that the U.S. was prepared to work constructively with Russian national security concerns. An attempt to isolate and cripple Russia to the point of humiliation or collapse would make negotiating almost impossible — we are already seeing this in reticence from Moscow officials. In fact, we emphasized that the U.S. needs, and will continue to need, a strong enough Russia to create stability along its periphery. The U.S. wants a Russia with strategic autonomy in order for the U.S. to advance diplomatic opportunities in Central Asia. We in the U.S. have to recognize that total victory in Europe could harm our interests in other areas of the world. Russian power is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Charles Kupchan at the Valdai annual conference in 2019 // valdaiclub.com
Let us summarize the advantages of the “secret channel” and “back track diplomacy” for Moscow. The Western interlocutor chosen is necessarily either committed to the Russian cause, or a “useful idiot”, otherwise Moscow would refuse contact - the very meeting is seen as a favor granted by the Kremlin! Opposite this figure puffed up by a feeling of self-importance are KGB professionals who are masters of influence techniques. Negotiations become an end in themselves, and Moscow sets out its conditions for them from the outset, an explicit capitulation on the part of the American “partner”, obliged to recognize Russia’s sphere of influence in the former Soviet space and to let down its Ukrainian ally. But above all, this type of contact is a privileged means for the Kremlin to test the effectiveness of particular disinformation themes before injecting them into the West in massive doses.
If there is one lesson that the Kremlin’s leaders have learned from what happened after February 24, 2022, it is that without the West and without Ukraine, Russia sinks into insignificance. Because sanctions work, and it is only now that this is becoming obvious. In particular, we are witnessing the growing dilapidation of Russia’s transport system as a whole - air, rail, road, and municipal. The collapse of the ruble will have a snowball effect, as Russians will have to fork out more foreign currency to ensure the “parallel import” of electronics and microprocessors indispensable to missiles and other armaments. The two main aims of Russian disinformation are therefore: to co-opt the West as quickly as possible so that western countries start contributing again to the build up of Russian power; and to reinstate imperial control on Ukraine for the same reason, to enlist Ukrainians in the task of maintaining and expanding the empire. By committing the incredible folly of steering Russia toward a project of autarky, Putin has brought the country face to face with itself, forcing it to recognize that, left to its own devices, it becomes irrelevant, to the point where even its ability to do harm is compromised.
The Russian leadership’s priority now is to tilt the United States on Moscow’s side. Europe will follow, Kremlin leaders believe, for they have not taken the measure of the profound changes that the war against Ukraine has brought about in Europe. In their eyes, Putin’s mistake is to have tried to impose himself on both the United States and Europe. Yet the example of 1943-1945 shows that Moscow can only extend its domination in Europe once it has Washington on its side. Stalin understood this before the “vertigo of success” clouded his judgment. The idea of Russian disinformers is therefore to make the United States nostalgic of a remake of the Soviet-American condominium. Several arguments are put forward to encourage Washington to lift sanctions and get down to the task of resurrecting Russian power. The first is well known, and has been trumpeted for years by Russian agents of influence and their dupes on both sides of the Atlantic. Russia must not be thrown into the arms of China. This theme is repeated in exchanges in the secret channel, because the Russians know how sensitive the Americans are to it: “On the subject of Russia’s deepening relationship with China, completely severing ties between Moscow and Beijing was unrealistic. However, efforts should be made to limit the extent of this relationship”, confides the American interlocutor quoted in the Moscow Times.
But this argument is now overshadowed by a second one: if Russia does not win in Ukraine, Putin’s regime will collapse and there will be chaos, of which we already have a foretaste with Prigozhin’s march on Moscow. And in the event of the dissolution of the Russian Federation, what will happen to the many nuclear weapons stored on Russian territory? This theme had already worked admirably in 1991, when the West, fearful of chaos, did everything in its power to keep Gorbachev’s head above water and dissuade the nations of the USSR from proclaiming their independence. But here again, the story goes back much further. In his first interview with French ambassador Joseph Noulens on December 18, 1917, Trotsky had a powerful argument to interest France in the survival of the Bolshevik regime: “In any case, if we succumb, Russia is doomed to anarchy for ten years, and the Germans will become its masters”1 . At the same time, the Bolsheviks were persuading the Germans that it was in their interest to support Lenin’s regime, otherwise the Entente countries would take advantage of Russian chaos to install a White general in power who would be favorable to them! Today, as we have seen, they brandish the threat of a Sino-Russian alliance. From the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime, the Kremlin’s leaders masterfully used Russian chaos to manipulate the West. In March 1953, instead of rejoicing at Stalin’s death, Western diplomats panicked… at the idea of the strongman’s demise. French Ambassador Louis Joxe wrote in a dispatch dated March 4, 1953: “Insofar as only a strong man was capable of imposing moderation and even accepting certain setbacks, insofar as the small group of men who are going to take power will need to assert themselves, we can admit that the situation created by Stalin’s death portends difficult times”2 . Foreign Office chief Anthony Eden was no less concerned, believing like many others that Stalin exerted a balancing influence that his successors would lack3 . President Eisenhower said he was convinced from personal experience that, had Stalin had a free hand after the war, Russia would have sought more peaceful and normal relations with the world4 . The CIA believed that it would be dangerous to take for granted that Stalin’s successors would have his prudence, his respect for the power potential of the United States, or his control over all USSR agents5 . All these precedents should make us think twice before accepting as self-evident allegations about the perils entailed by the demise of the strong man in Russia.
Lately, the theme of Russia’s apocalyptic collapse in the event of military defeat has become the obligatory commonplace of almost all experts, Russians from the establishment, theoretically anti-Putin Russians from the diaspora, and Western observers with a propensity to be influenced by Russian analyses, even when those observers are critical of Putin’s policies. The Russian diaspora is particularly mobilized. Tatiana Stanovaya, a Carnegie Fund expert, writes in Foreign Affairs: “Prigozhin’s mutiny has pushed the situation to the extreme and could pave the way for the emergence of a more radicalized, warmongering and ruthless state. … The order Putin has built will become messier, and the world will have to deal with a more dangerous and unpredictable Russia.” Influential columnist David Ignatius echoes her view: “In their disorientation, Russians are looking for order and victory. According to confidential polls cited by Stanovaya, Russians support Putin more strongly than before the war, they are angrier at the West and they express strong support for their troops. Russia’s internal disarray poses a serious dilemma for Putin, but it is also very dangerous for the West.”6 So Russia threatens us with both autocracy and chaos, and the only way to avoid these apocalyptic scenarios is to hand over Ukraine. Note the use made of so-called polls in Russia, which, confidential or not, are merely indicators of the Kremlin’s will. The Kremlin is a master at manipulating sociology as a tool for influencing Westerners.
Before moving on to the second part of the Kremlin’s psychological warfare, let us do justice to the West’s irrational phobia of Russian chaos. The disintegration of Russia that we hear so much about is highly unlikely to happen (the only region likely to be destabilized is the North Caucasus). The Russian population has reached such a degree of inertia and fatalism that it is hard to imagine it launching into a civil war. You only need to look at the way the mobilized allow themselves to be obediently led to the slaughterhouse in an absurd war. In the event of Putin’s demise, we can expect gang warfare, “a great criminal redistribution of property,” as economist Igor Lipsits puts it. We can expect a collapse of law and order, with all the convicts released by Prigozhin and police numbers plummeting. But Prigozhin’s march on Moscow must be correctly interpreted. It shows that, contrary to all the hype and bogus polls, the war has not encouraged Russians to rally around Putin. In the event of a crisis at the top, Putin would be abandoned by everyone, including the siloviki, just as Nicholas II was in March 1917. Above all, it shows that the Russians, disappointed with Putin, are already looking for a new strongman, and many of them were ready to follow Prigozhin - as in La Fontaine’s beautiful fable « The Frogs Who Ask for a King »: “He whom they thought was a new giant./But he was a log […] Give us, said these people, a king who stirs.” Such a state of mind makes civil war unlikely. As soon as the elites agree on a new leader, the Russians, broken into servitude by 70 years of Sovietism and 23 years of Putinism, will stand to attention before him.
But there is no reason why the West should encourage this resurgence of Russian autocracy under the pretext of “stability.” The experience of Putinism should have taught us that nothing is more dangerous than an uncontrolled autocrat with nuclear weapons. Russia was chaotic from 1917 to 1919. It was too busy installing dictatorship on its own territory to do any serious harm in the West. But as soon as the Bolsheviks had triumphed over the White armies and established their tyranny in the country in the spring of 1920, we find the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw, and Lenin busy destabilizing Central Europe and Germany. In the event of chaos in Russia, the best policy is that of the cordon sanitaire, advocated by Clemenceau on December 11, 1919, when the failure of the White Armies was obvious: “surround Russia with barbed wire” to prevent it from doing any harm to the outside world, “and wait”7 . In January 1918, French diplomat Louis de Robien was of the opinion that order would be re-established in Russia “by foreigners, since it has been demonstrated that the Russians know only how to destroy”8 . In the months that followed, Westerners were convinced that it was better not to meddle in Russian affairs, as they were unable to find reliable and capable partners. This lesson is still valid today. The best way to remedy the “anti-Western paranoia that has long been the temptation of Russia’s leaders” (quoting former French President Nicolas Sarkozy) is to stand firm and refuse to cave in to the Kremlin in all things, contrary to what Sarkozy implied in his recent interview with Le Figaro, an anthology of the topoi of Russian disinformation. Let Russia stew in its own juices, preventing the Kremlin from doing any harm outside its borders. Isolating the sick and putting them on a diet is often the best therapy. Let us take advantage of the fact that Putin has done the work for us. Instead of allowing the Kremlin to project fear abroad by brandishing the nuclear threat, let us improve our missile defenses. And if there really is chaos in Russia, to the point where the risk of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation becomes real, it is more rational to think of ways, military and otherwise, to secure nuclear sites than to seek to recreate a strong power in Moscow that will once again use nuclear weapons as an instrument of intimidation.
By this orchestrated blackmail of chaos the Kremlin wants to make sure that the West will forbid the Ukrainians from defeating Russia. The theme of chaos is reinforced by that of an allegedly dangerous nationalist reaction in Russia if Russian troops are forced to leave occupied Ukrainian territories. Here again, historical precedents tell a different story. The withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 1989 was greeted with relief in Russia, as was the compromise peace with Chechnya in 1996. The same is likely to happen if Russia were to evacuate the occupied regions of Ukraine.
Today, the men of the Kremlin still harbor the hope of being able to achieve their initial objectives in Ukraine. The war of attrition led by Moscow is a Katyn in slow motion, pursuing the same goal as the execution of Polish officers in the spring of 1940: to destroy the cadres of independent Poland (now Ukraine). Russian leaders believe they have succeeded in convincing the West to prevent Ukraine’s victory. While they were worried stiff in the spring, the divine surprise for them was the fact that the West refrained from supplying Kyiv with sufficient weapons to ensure victory for the Ukrainian army in their summer counter-offensive. They feel the time has come for them to exploit the understandable bitterness of Ukrainians, who are forced to fight with their fists and feet tied against an adversary to whom the West has granted a monopoly on escalation, - and to move on to phase 2 of their psychological warfare, fanning in Ukraine the flames of the feeling of betrayal by the Western “partners” to pave the way for a political crisis that will catapult camouflaged pro-Russians to power in Kyiv.
We have already mentioned the publications highlighting the so-called secret talks between American and Russian emissaries. The convergence between these “leaks” and a multitude of articles appearing in the American press repeating over and over again that the Ukrainians will not be able to reconquer the occupied territories, in spite of all the military help given by the West, strongly resembles a joint enterprise orchestrated by the appeasement party and the Kremlinophile networks mobilized in the West. Professor Valery Solovey, whose videos on YouTube are very popular in the Ukraine, has his place in this scheme. For years, Solovey has been able to indulge with impunity in criticisms of Putin a hundred times more devastating than those of Navalny. He therefore fulfils an important function in the Russian establishment. At least since 2019, he has been spreading the theory that Putin has one foot in the grave, and that he will be succeeded by a team of very good people, Chekists and technocrats, including himself: the conclusion is that the concessions made to Moscow will be of no consequence, since we are heading for imminent de-Putinization. Lately, his murky role has become more obvious: it is clear that he has to give credence in Ukraine to the thesis that Ukrainians are going to be abandoned by the Americans in favor of the old, comfortable Russian-American relationship that existed during the Cold War. Solovey insists that contacts between Russians and Americans are on the increase, with Russian interlocutors including Patrushev, Chemezov and Abramovich. In his view, the West would like nothing better than to come to an agreement with a coalition of siloviki and technocrats, as long as they do not include personalities involved in the Russian-Ukrainian war. These will have to be content to remain behind the scenes. Russia will make the lifting of sanctions a condition for the payment of reparations to Ukraine. “If the exaggerated hopes pinned on the Ukrainian counter-offensive are disappointed, the West will put pressure on Kyiv for peace negotiations”. In support of his thesis, Solovey asserts that the Americans, who in September 2022 were determined to inflict a resounding military defeat on Russia, changed their policy as early as November, as became clear when a missile fell on Polish territory. “If the Americans had immediately called a NATO meeting to discuss the implementation of Article 5, I can assure you that the [Russian] military operations would have ended immediately and President Putin would have been driven from office. All it would have taken was for NATO to show that it intended to take this incident seriously. […] Thus, for the first time, the Americans clearly demonstrated that they had given up on inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. What followed only confirmed to Russian leaders that the Americans were much more hesitant than they had thought in September.” It became clear, Solovey continued, that the Americans had switched to “a policy of containment of Russia, and that they wanted a peace that would spare the Kremlin”. As a result, they are handing over old weapons to the Ukrainians, and effective systems such as Himars are only being supplied piecemeal. “If these high-tech systems had been granted in larger quantities, the Ukrainian summer offensive would have been much more effective, even without air superiority”. The Americans were afraid of Russian chaos. They were afraid “of throwing Russia into the arms of Beijing”, whereas Russia, Solovey points out, “can become the strategic partner, if not the ally, of the United States, sooner than we think”. What is more, continues Solovey, distilling his venom drop by drop, the Americans, despite their pro-Ukrainian rhetoric, cannot tell the difference between the Russians and the Ukrainians: in their eyes, the Russians and the Ukrainians are barbarians ripping each other apart on the bangs of the civilized world. As for European countries, “some of them don’t want Ukraine to be victorious under any circumstances”. These are the countries of “old Europe”, unwilling to see the weight of “new Europe” reinforced by Ukraine. The Ukrainians were wrong to believe in massive military aid from the West. They will not be able to snatch victory. “Ukraine will be demographically exhausted faster than Russia”. And Solovey goes on: “The West does not believe in the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive”. Better still, “the West has no intention of dismantling Putin’s regime […] for it, the most important thing is that there should be no chaos in Russia, and that nuclear weapons should be under the control of the central power […] the West is only interested in stability, and will only deal with those who seem capable of preventing chaos”. Washington’s objective is to weaken the Russian regime while keeping it afloat. It is the Ukrainians whom the Americans are cynically sacrificing to achieve the first goal.
On Russian television, we hear new notes, which make Solovey’s participation in the Kremlin’s propaganda machine even more obvious, Solovey playing on a more insidious register. Whereas the Solovyov /Skabeeva family used to yap that the West was not denying Ukraine anything, Colonel Khodaryonok recently pointed out on air that of the 500 Himars produced by the USA, some twenty [actually only 34] have been delivered to Ukraine. Of the 700 M-270 multiple rocket launchers available to NATO countries, 15 have been supplied to Ukraine. The Americans have 500 Abrams tanks and have not delivered a single one to Ukraine. They have announced their intention to deliver seven in the autumn [actually 31], and still an obsolete version, Khodarionok points out with relish, pretending to sympathize with Ukrainians. “The Ukrainians are totally dependent on these deliveries from Western countries. If these supplies stop, the war will end.”
As we have seen, one of the aims of the systematic leaks concerning the secret channels is to persuade the Ukrainians that the Americans will come to an agreement with the Russians behind their backs, just as Stalin and Roosevelt did with the Poles. The head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, has just confirmed that “rare, but regular” consultations continue between the SVR and the CIA. The heads of these intelligence services “discussed what to do with Ukraine”. Naryshkin also hints that “once Russia achieves the objectives of the special military operation” in Ukraine, the Americans will return to business as usual - just as Solovei likes to repeat that the Europeans will scramble to get back into the Russian market, as soon as the Ukrainian question is settled.
The second part of the plan is to demonstrate the power of the pro-Russian lobby and the party of Western appeasers mobilized by the Kremlin for this purpose in the West. Hence the barrage of publications and interviews in the Western media. Anonymous sources report disagreements between the US military and the Ukrainian command. We are told that US intelligence officials no longer believe in the victory of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Stian Jenssen, NATO Secretary General’s Chief of Staff, suggests that Ukraine could join the Alliance if it gave up territory to Russia. Sarkozy proposes to organize a new referendum “incontestable, i.e. organized under the strict control of the international community” in Crimea, taking up an initiative formulated on June 11 by Margarita Simonyan, the voice of the Kremlin: a referendum which would be as credible as the elections organized in 1946 by Stalin in the future People’s Democracies, with the results desired by the authorities being obtained by the same methods, i.e. systematic repression of opponents, a regime of terror, deportations, propaganda bludgeoning, corruption, etc. In this vein Pope Francis tops the list. He did not know better than to praise Russian imperialism before the young believers of Saint Petersburg: “You are the heirs of Great Russia, never forget this heritage.*” *
Such is the gigantic psychological war machine deployed in Russia that Westerners and Ukrainians alike must be aware of this. Once the Kremlin’s objectives and modus operandi are understood, the game can be won. On the battlefield too.
Joseph Noulens, *Mon ambassade en Russie soviétique, Plon 1933, t.1, *p. 176 ↩
MAE Europe 1944-1960, sous-série URSS, 114, f. 7 ↩
MAE Europe 1944-1960, sous-série URSS, 114, f. 11 ↩
K. Larres, K. Osgood (éd), The Cold War after Stalin’s death, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 80 ↩
P. Grose, Gentleman Spy, London 1995, p. 351 ↩
David Ignatius, “Putin chokes on the Ukrainian ‘porcupine’”, Washington Post, 8 Aug 2023 ↩
George A. Brinkley, *Allied Intervention in South Russia, *University of Notre Dame Press, 1966, p. 209 ↩
Louis de Robien,* Journal d’un diplomate en Russie, Vuibert 2017*, p. 256 ↩
The tragedy of the Second World War led most states to create a system of international humanitarian law to subject wars to minimal rules. The aim was simple: to reduce human suffering. The Geneva Conventions and their Protocols fulfilled this objective for several decades, even if the situation continued to deteriorate. The Syrian war was the first clear signal of the failure of international humanitarian law, and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine showed that the system was not working.
On March 3, 2022, some 500 meters away from me, I saw a Russian infantry fighting vehicle fire at two cars on the Zhitomir highway, a few kilometers from Kyiv. From a military point of view, there was no need to kill the passengers in these cars, which were shredded by 30-mm shells. I knew what had to be done. On the day of the invasion, the members of the Expert Council of the Ukrainian Organization for the Defense of Human Rights and the Center for Civil Liberties had met online with the President of the Organization, Mrs. Oleksandra Matviïtchouk, and had decided to set up a vast information platform on war crimes. The Civil Liberties Centre already had experience of these issues, having dealt with them since 2014.
After the Russian military convoy had passed on the highway, we were able to take photos of what had happened and record the license plates of the cars. It was only when we saw the legs of the passengers who had remained in the cars that it became clear to us that three people had died in each one: a child, a woman and a man. Traces of this were scattered by the following military convoy. It was the first time I had gathered evidence of a war crime. After March 3rd, I did so on an almost daily basis. As the fighting raged in the Kyiv region, I investigated the bombing of apartment blocks, power lines and civilian infrastructure. After the liberation of the Kyiv region, I interviewed people who had been victims of war crimes during the occupation.
Russian aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, has given rise to numerous violations of international humanitarian law. The Russians are killing and leaving to die prisoners of war and civilians in detention. They practice torture, capture non-combatants and imprison them illegally. The aggression launched in February 2022 has considerably increased the scale of these violations. Ukrainian human rights organizations and authorities have already recorded some 80,000 cases of violations of international humanitarian law. Most of these will be qualified as war crimes after investigation.
This new phase of aggression has highlighted a number of problems.
The Russian Federation’s violations of international humanitarian law are massive. They are flagrant and systemic. They are not excesses committed by agents who have lost their nerve. When I interviewed victims of war crimes in Boutcha, I came to wonder why, from the very first moments of the invasion, Russian soldiers were prepared to kill civilians. Wartime violence has a cumulative effect. It gradually takes hold as events unfold. But that’s not what happened. All it took was for a man to step out into the street and be hit by a hail of bullets. In Boutcha, in Iabloneva street, corpses lay on the sidewalks and on the road. Residents took the risk of asking a Russian officer to bury the dead. The only possible explanation is that Russian personnel have been trained in mass brutality by state propaganda, which deliberately incites hatred of Ukrainians.
The crimes are, for the Russian Federation, a means of waging war and keeping the population of the occupied territories in check. Sergueï Lyubytch was transporting water from Boutcha to Gostomel last March. His neighbors had asked him to bring some as they didn’t have any. Sergei was arrested by a Russian patrol; a bag was put over his head and he was taken to Russia via Belarus. He’s still in a detention center. Why is he there? According to the Russian authorities, people like him are dangerous. They show a willingness to help others, are active and can form a nucleus of resistance against the occupier. The Russians, for whatever reason, believe that they will destroy the potential for resistance by eliminating all those who show themselves to be active. In Russia, Putin’s regime applies the same strategy: active citizens are imprisoned or forced to leave the country. The aggressor state claims to respect international humanitarian law, yet blatantly violates it and denies allegations of violation. When two mass graves were discovered in a churchyard after the liberation of Boutcha, Russia’s ruling camarilla declared that it was a “hoax”. The crimes in Boutcha and other towns and villages in the Kyiv region were committed by members of the 64th Motorized Brigade of the Russian Federation. In April 2022, Putin awarded this unit the title of “Guard Brigade”. This was a demonstrative response to facts constituting war crimes. No surprise there. The leaders of the Russian regime always lie. For example, they have repeatedly claimed that they withdrew their troops from the Kyiv region as a gesture of “goodwill”. But when they left Boutcha, the Russian soldiers were telling the locals: “We’re leaving because we’ve run out of bullets. The management has no more ammunition to give us”.
Signature of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 // British Red Cross
The Center for Civil Liberties records war crimes of all kinds. Including crimes committed by non-military personnel. I analyze interviews with Ukrainians who have returned from captivity. They are prisoners of war or, sometimes, civilian prisoners. While prisoners of war are exchanged, and some 2,500 have already returned to Ukraine, there is no procedure for releasing civilian prisoners. Russia simply refuses to release them, in violation of international humanitarian law. Most of the time, the investigation reveals that these people are systematically tortured during interrogation by Federal Security Service officers and beaten by officers from special units of the Federal Penitentiary Service.
Torture methods include electric shocks, Z-shaped scarifications on the back, burns on the skin of tattooed persons, insertion of needles under the fingernails, simulated drowning and confinement in a cramped metal cupboard. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 91% of repatriated Ukrainian non-combatants have been tortured. Ukrainians also suffer abuse in Russian detention centers. The mildest form is to force people to sing the Russian anthem and “patriotic” songs. If they refuse, they are beaten.
During the Russian aggression against Ukraine, international humanitarian law ceased to function as a brake on war crimes. The key factor here is the good faith of states that have undertaken to respect their commitments. The Russian regime is a double violator. It does not respect its commitments to the Russian people, nor does it respect its foreign policy commitments. This regime is not the only one of its kind on the planet. With the rapid development of information technologies and the emergence of new possibilities for massively abusing entire social groups, more and more non-democratic regimes will resort to similar simulacra when it comes to applying the norms of international humanitarian law, in both international and domestic conflicts. The case of the Russian Federation, which has not been stopped by international humanitarian law in its war against Ukraine, is a strong motivation for these regimes.
International organizations are forced to treat the Russian regime as if it were normal, because they have no choice: their policies and procedures were designed for normal partners. But the Putin regime is not normal. It has already overstepped the bounds of morality. For example, a statesman must not lie openly. And if he is caught in a lie, he apologizes and rectifies the situation. Russian officials, including the most senior ones, lie brazenly. And when they are caught in a lie, they maintain that they are right anyway. Yevgeny Guryanov was arrested at his home in Butcha in March 2022. He is a garage mechanic and his hands, despite the soap, bore the marks of grease. That’s all it took for the occupants to arrest him. When questioned, representatives of the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that he had been detained “for resisting the special military operation”. Ukrainian human rights activists and his Russian lawyers insisted that Yevgeny, as a civilian, should be released in accordance with international humanitarian law. Then the official Russian responses changed: “We’re not sure about his civilian status, that’s for the court to decide.” There has been no court decision, and there won’t be. Yevgeny has been detained and abused for almost a year and a half, and he is not the only non-combatant in this situation. The exact number of people imprisoned “for opposing the special military operation” is unknown. Expert estimates put the number at around 4,000.
Yevgeny Guryanov with his wife // agents.media
What’s more, staff from international organizations are simply afraid. Some of these organizations are acting as if the Russian regime remains normal. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has referred to what the Russians are doing in Ukraine as “internment”. Last October, in a press release entitled “Russia-Ukraine: the ICRC is ready to visit all prisoners of war - but must be granted access”, the ICRC stated that “it still does not enjoy unrestricted and permanent access to all prisoners of war in this international conflict. This is despite the fact that our teams have been insisting for nearly eight months that they be allowed to visit all places of detention and internment.” But internment is subject to a specific procedure. The Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War provides for a regular internment procedure, with the right to appeal. Russia has made no such provision. Non-combatants have been forcibly deported, which constitutes a war crime. What is the Red Cross’ fear, then, in the way it presents the abnormal as normal? No doubt it fears that the Russian authorities will further reduce its already diminished capacity to come to the aid of civilian POWs and hostages.
What’s needed is a fine-tuning of international humanitarian law, to clarify its norms and reinforce its right of scrutiny over the belligerent parties. The risks and harms for those who violate international humanitarian law should be increased. Otherwise, the rules of war will be increasingly violated, with extremely serious consequences. The means of warfare are becoming increasingly destructive.
Display in Boutcha on the war crimes committed there by the Russians // president.gov.ua
The idea of campaigning to promote the idea of reforming international humanitarian and criminal law arose from the many specific problems encountered by Ukrainian and Russian human rights defenders dealing with prisoners of war and civilians during the Russian aggression. The proposal to set up a working group on the reform of international humanitarian law was first put forward by participants in the Solidarity Talks international human rights defenders debate on November 16, 2022. These online debates are organized by the Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine) and the International Helsinki Association. In January 2023 a working group was set up to prepare an outline for a reform of international law in the light of the lessons of Russian aggression. It brought together representatives of civil society from Ukraine, Russia and France. Almost all the Russian participants were already living in exile at the time.
We are working on proposals to modify the norms of international humanitarian law. There is a mechanism for making such adjustments. It is provided for in Article 97 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, which states that “Any High Contracting Party may propose amendments to the present Protocol. The text of any amendment shall be communicated to the depositary who, after consultation with all the High Contracting Parties and the International Committee of the Red Cross, shall decide whether a conference should be convened to consider the proposed amendment or amendments.”
Protocol I concerns all the Geneva Conventions relating to prisoners, shipwrecked persons, prisoners of war and the protection of civilian persons. Consequently, amendments to the Protocol can cover all these issues. Ukraine, alone or together with other countries, may propose amendments to Protocol I. The Swiss Federal Council is the depositary of the Geneva Conventions. The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (Eidgenössisches Departement fûr auswärtige Angelegenheiten - EDA) assumes that, in most cases, no specific amendments to international humanitarian law are necessary. However, it is sometimes necessary to clarify declarations in order to adapt the principles of application to new realities.” Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has created a frightening new reality.
But if our ideas for amending international humanitarian law are to become the rule, this reform must have broad support. Neither the Center for Civil Liberties nor any other human rights organization can initiate a reform of international humanitarian law. Only states have the right to do so. This means that voters in different countries must know and understand what is going on, and must exert influence on the elected members of national parliaments.
]]>Today, instead of the “Putin consensus”, we are witnessing the slow crystallization of two groups. Opposed to the unyielding Putinists are the networks of “systemic liberals” and “intelligent imperialists” (they do exist) both of whom who are conscious of the regime’s catastrophic trajectory. This group includes heavyweights such as certain oligarchs (leaked telephone conversations attest to their highly critical attitude towards the “national leader”) and the “siloviki” (security services and military) if we are to believe the political scientist Valeri Soloveï. He has become a virulent Putin critic, regularly emphasizing in his YouTube videos that many FSB officers are unhappy with the president’s policies and that the FSB is the only organization capable of ridding Russia of its deranged dictator. The very fact that Soloveï can make such bold statements indicates that he must have powerful friends in high places.
This group has emerged only recently. It believes that the calamitous Ukrainian adventure must be ended as soon as possible, sanctions lifted and bridges with the West restored. Even on Russian television and on YouTube, people who were once in favor of intervention in Ukraine, such as Konstantin Zatulin, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee for CIS Issues, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots, acknowledge that none of the announced objectives have been achieved and Ukraine will continue to exist. As Zatulin states “We don’t have enough forces to overpower it, given the support it receives”. He advocates a return to the policy of subversion: “We must propose another path […], intelligent propaganda, correct behavior, a better attitude towards those who have ended up inside on our territory”.
Another example is Alexander Kolpakidi, a historian of the Russian secret services and keen supporter of “eradicating fascism in Ukraine” who regretted that “this had not been done in 2014”. He rebuked those who threaten the West with a nuclear strike: “I don’t think we will find evildoers in the West […] who want to destroy the planet. […] I wonder if those making such remarks realize what they’re saying, or if they’ve completely lost their minds. They’re totally crazy […]. And they expect to go to paradise, with their mistresses, their illegitimate offsprings, their dirty money! […] Do they think by any chance, that all these threats of nuclear apocalypse will leave no trace and be forgotten? […] How could it have come to this? In Soviet times, we were leading the way, building a new world, and now what do we look like? […] We’re no longer a model for anyone. The problem is that for a large part of the Ukrainian people, our country is not an ideal. We are champions only in thieving and lying […]. Our policy oscillates between idiotic threats and an obvious willingness to negotiate peace. […] For 23 years, we were told that we had the most powerful diplomacy in the world, that the economy might leave something to be desired but that, when it came to foreign affairs, we were unbeatable… Now we blush with embarrassment even before the Chinese, who never expected things to turn out this way…“.
The even more outspoken Boris Nadezhdin, Director of the Institute for Regional Projects and Legislation, suggested on the NTV channel that Russia should rebuild normal relations with Europe. He nevertheless stressed, “under the current political regime, we won’t be able to return to Europe. All we need to do is choose another president to build a normal relationship with European countries and everything will fall back into place. The presidential elections take place next year. I won’t say any more.” In short, more and more voices are calling for the “special military operation” to be abandoned.
Despite raving about the supposed success of the “import substitution” policy, the Russian elites have gradually been forced to face the facts. Without Europe, the Russian economy is regressing and wasting away. Oligarchs and even wealthy Russians cannot enjoy their fortunes. Farewell to the villas in Florida, the yachts on the Côte d’Azur, the palaces in Tuscany, the stays in Courchevel. Middle-level apparatchiks recall with nostalgia the pre-February 24th, 2022, era, when they could shop in Milan and bask in the sun in Cannes. They realize that the pivot to China was a dangerous illusion, with Beijing only intent on exploiting its weakened partner. Worse still, they are aware that Russia’s military capability has been seriously damaged by sanctions.
Many Russians tacitly feel that their country is dependent on Europe and that flirting with the “global South” will bring Moscow little more than meagre gratification of its vanity. If Soloveï is to be believed, the nascent “party of peace “ is unanimous on one other point. No armistice is possible if Putin is in power. At the same time, opinions diverge on the sacrifices for the armed conflict to end and, above all, for sanctions to be lifted. Few are prepared to go back to the borders of February 24th and none envisage returning Crimea to Ukraine. There appears to be a full consensus on that point.
As the swelling protest gathers pace, the core of die-hard Putinists is seeking ways to counter-attack. Putin himself is back in public view, worried that Prigozhin has eclipsed him in the news. Sergei Karaganov’s article “A difficult but essential decision”, published on June 13th, 2023, is intended as a manifesto for these die-hards of the Russian president and his hardline stance. According to Karaganov, Ukraine’s return to Russia’s orbit was only the first phase in an awesome process of redistribution of power among the world’s elites. This first phase was supposed to include the expulsion of Americans from Europe and the establishment of Russian hegemony from the Atlantic to the Urals. But then the West consolidated, and the elderly Karaganov returned to the ideological folds of his youth, ranting about an “aggravation of the class struggle” on a global scale, with Russia showing the way to the emancipation of peoples who had suffered from “500 years of Western exploitation”. This is a remake of Stalin’s thesis according to which the resistance of classes condemned by history becomes ever fiercer as socialism succeeds.
For Karaganov, Russia has only one way out of the Ukrainian quagmire: to subdue the West so it stops helping Kyiv. The problem, he explains, is that the West is no longer afraid of Russia. Consequently, “we need to restore the instinct for self-preservation it has lost […]. The enemy needs to know that we are ready to launch a pre-emptive retaliatory strike for all its current and past aggressions, in order to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war. […] I have said and written many times that if we devise the right strategy for deterring and even using nuclear weapons, the risk of a “retaliatory” nuclear strike, and indeed of any other strike on our territory, can be minimized. Only if a madman sits in the White House, a madman who also hates his country, will America decide to carry out a strike ‘in defense of’ the Europeans, leading to retaliation and sacrifice, for example, Boston for Poznan. […] But what if they don’t back down? What if they’ve completely lost the instinct for self-preservation? Then we’ll have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries to bring those who have lost their minds back to their senses.” And all this in the name of what? A “bright future” where Russia can make its “pivot to Asia”, hiding behind China’s back, after rendering the grateful world the priceless service of ridding it of the West’s age-old oppression?
Thus, the differentiation process we are starting to observe in Russia is, on the one hand, between those who share the Russian president’s delusional vision and try to consolidate it with an ideological framework derived from a blend of Sovietism and Slavophile Messianism, resigning themselves out of hatred for the West to subjugation by China, and, on the other hand, those with their feet firmly on the ground and still able to discern causes and their consequences. In this context, Prigozhin would be more attuned with the second group, even if he gives the impression of being a loose cannon able to be used by both. It is noteworthy that dissonant notes can be heard within the first group. While all wish to put the country on the path to total war until victory, some are reluctant to use the nuclear threat.
The real division is over the question of relations with Europe. But let’s not kid ourselves. Critics of the policy of breaking away from Europe are by no means converts to European liberal democracy. Their positions suggest that they have not learned the real lessons of today’s tragedy. For there is a huge gap between denouncing Putin for his crimes — which would lead to an in-depth inquiry into the Kremlin’s entire policy since the 2000s — and the disappointment after the setbacks suffered in the last sixteen months and frustration caused by Russia’s isolation. Let’s not forget that even the ultra-patriots don’t mince their words when talking about Putin’s inability to assume his role as commander-in-chief. The attitude of the “Peace Party” to the question of evacuations from Ukrainian territory shows that there is no fundamental rift with Putinism. These apparatchiks and oligarchs want Putin himself to be replaced, as an effective foreign policy cannot be conducted when the president is unable to show himself abroad, which is the case for Putin. For them, it’s a question of saving or restoring the foundations of Russian power, the sale of oil and gas to Europe, and scope for attracting investment and technology from Europe, notably to modernize the army. They dream of returning to the golden age of Putin’s first terms in office.
Their difference with the Putinist core also lies in their idea of empire. The Kremlin is obsessed with the country’s demographic decline, believing that a depopulated country must renounce its imperial ambitions. Without Ukraine, “Russia is a trunk without arms and legs”, as Igor Girkin once said. In 2021, the ultranationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin emphasized the demographic gain that would result from annexing Donbas: “In 2020, Russia’s population will have decreased by 500,000. If Russia takes the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk into its fold, we’ll make up for all the losses of last year, this year and, in short, we’ll increase our population. Four million new Russians.”
What will these “new Russians” be used for? Putin’s conception of imperial policy dates back to the 16th century. It consists of setting up garrisons in conquered territories or on the margins of the empire, with a view to future conquests. Russia has always co-opted, conquered or allied peoples as part of its expansion policy. Thus, the Zaporozhian Cossacks were transplanted to the Kuban region by Catherine II and used to conquer and subjugate the Caucasus. Today, Chechens defeated by Putin in 2005 are deployed in Ukraine to serve as “janissaries” [Editor’s note: elite infantry units of Ottoman Sultan’s household troops] for the occupying authorities. Men from the Donbas annexed by Putin are sent to the front as a priority, to the point where blood-soaked Donbas has become “a region without men”. In this anachronistic view, Ukraine is seen above all as a reservoir of future soldiers for the “Russian world”: hence the abduction of Ukrainian children and their systematic Russification.
But a different idea of imperial expansion exists in Russia emphasizing cooperation with European countries (without neglecting military resources). Educated Russians know deep down that the Russian Empire was built as a great power thanks to the contribution of many Europeans. Peter the Great invited hundreds of Dutchmen to work on his fleet. The Admiralty shipyard welcomed famous Dutch and English shipbuilders. Catherine II, under whose reign the Russian Empire underwent a prodigious phase of expansion, was a German princess. The Baltic Germans provided invaluable cadres for the Russian army and administration. The case of the Ukrainian provinces now claimed by Putin is a perfect illustration of the benefits Russia derived from co-opting European elites to build its empire. In 1803, Tsar Alexander I appointed the Duc de Richelieu, a French aristocrat who had fled the revolution, as governor of Odessa. Historian Alfred Rambaud explains: “In 1805, he appointed him governor-general of New Russia, i.e. the region stretching from the Dniester to the Caucasus, including the countries of Odessa, Kharkiv, Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Crimea, Kuban and the Caucasus coast. It was a whole empire, the very one over which Richelieu had seen Potemkin reign with the pomp and nonchalance of an Oriental despot, and which he was now to govern with the simplicity, energy and probity of a European administrator educated in the economic doctrines and philanthropic ideas of 18th-century France. Whereas his predecessor had maintained the traditions and customs of Asia, he was to introduce Western civilization.”1
“Adopting Catherine’s traditions, Richelieu issued a call to French settlers, essentially from Alsace, and German settlers, essentially from Württemberg. The turmoil in the Turkish Empire generated flows of Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Armenians… […] He protected [the Crimean Tatars] from the suspicions of the Russian government. During the war in progress against the Turks, the Russians had contemplated disabling the Tatars by taking away their horses. This would have ruined the Tatars. It’s worth noting how warmly Richelieu pleaded their cause with General Viazmitinov, Minister of War…“. At the time of the Russo-Turkish war of 1810, “Richelieu obtained from his government that trade would not be interrupted. He showed how the grain that Odessa no longer exported would be brought to Constantinople by the ships of other nations; how among Turkish subjects, it would above all be the Christians who would suffer from this measure; how Russian traffic there would register a net loss, without any political compensation. For most of the war, while fighting continued on the Danube, merchants from both empires traded peacefully in the port of Odessa. “2
But by February 1811, Richelieu became aware his work was in jeopardy, writing to his sister: “Poor Odessa! Poor country on the shores of the Black Sea, to which I flattered myself I would attach my name in a glorious and lasting way! I fear they will lapse into the barbarity from which they were only just emerging. What an illusion it was for me to want to build in a century of ruin and destruction, and to found, the prosperity of a country when almost all the other countries are the scene of misfortunes which, I fear, will soon be upon us!”3
Richelieu feared that Russia’s imperialist ambitions, the main obstacle to an armistice with Turkey, would spoil everything, and pleaded for a swift peace with Constantinople, expressing his concerns to Tsar Alexander: “The continuous relations we have with Constantinople confirm me in the opinion I had that the Turks will never consent to peace on the terms we demand. This is a fact which can no longer be doubted, any more than the indefinite extension of a war which occupies six divisions and costs Your Majesty annually, through disease alone, a third of the men employed in it. […] If you are seen to be strong and free of any concerns, France will respect you, and Austria and Prussia will regain a little confidence. What benefits, Sire! And could they be outweighed by the sad advantage of acquiring the devastated Wallachia, giving yourself a very bad military frontier and embittering the Turks forever?”4
Lastly, Rambaud made this assessment of the Duc de Richelieu: “Although he made his conquests not against the enemy, but against the desert, he deserves to take his place among those who made the empire great. Two of the monarchy’s eight universities, Odessa and Kharkiv, trace their origins back to him. This Frenchman was one of Russia’s great statesmen.”5
This is in stark contrast with what is happening today in the occupied territories. Astonishingly, even previously fanatical Z patriots are beginning to have doubts about the benefits brought to the “new territories” by integration with Russia. In a remarkably frank report, blogger Maxim Kalashnikov, who is close to Girkin, met with Donbas inhabitants in their ruined villages, such as Tochka, which once had 4,000 inhabitants and now has just 170, 60 of whom are unemployed. The village was shelled by Russian artillery. Kalashnikov recalls being challenged by a villager: “What have you liberated us from? Our homes? Our jobs? Our lives?” Indeed, says Kalashnikov, “there’s no electricity, no gas, no pipes. There are no means of subsistence. Humanitarian aid arrives once a month… To get papers, you need a Russian passport. But how do you do that? No photo booths. People can’t afford a cab to the town… We aren’t freeing them, we are punishing them. […] We tell them: everything is mined and we don’t have the means to clear the mines. People are going through hell in an apocalypse… If it goes on like this, everyone will flee the Russian world like the plague… You can’t fight a war like that. Instead of liberated territories, we’re leaving a scorched earth zone.” Kalashnikov describes the drinking and brawling, the looting as Russian soldiers take from the survivors their meagre possessions. In short, “What did we bring with us? What do we want to substitute in place of Euro-integration, the liberal model that exists in Ukraine? What is this war for?”
The Europeans not only helped the Tsars to structure and administer their empire. They even formulated the empire’s ideology. They also contributed to Russian expansion in Europe. Germain de Lagny, an almost forgotten French observer of Russia, wrote a remarkable analysis of how the Russian Empire expanded thanks to “moral and material collusion on the part of Europe”. It was the Europeans who opened up “all the avenues which, alone, Russia would certainly not have been able to go down […]. We find Russia colluding with one or other state, aiding and abetting projects to satisfy its own ambitious plans. While Germany today dreads Russia’s strength and power, it is Germany that has worked hardest for the rapid growth of this northern giant”6. The French observer cites other examples. Austria came up with the idea of partitioning Poland in the (vain) hope of distracting Russia from Crimea and the Danube provinces (1772). To appease Tsar Alexander I, Napoleon “served up Finland to him”, Finland being wrested from Sweden in 1809. Basically, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was another illustration of Lagny’s thesis. It was Germany that gifted Stalin the Baltic provinces.
Russia’s entire historical experience shows that the Europeans played an essential role in maintaining, stabilizing and expanding the Russian empire. Indeed, it was when the cosmopolitan nature of the Petersburg bureaucracy was increasingly challenged by Slavophiles, under Alexander III and Nicholas II, that the empire entered a crisis that would lead to its collapse in 1917. As Lagny writes, “everywhere and always, Russia has borrowed help from its neighbours. Alone, it has undertaken nothing, achieved nothing.”7 Part of today’s Russian establishment is becoming aware of this bitter truth. It is felt that Putin’s policy of breaking away from the West is undermining the very foundations of Russian power. That in turn is driving this group towards rebellion and more or less covert attempts to sound out Western elites.
It is a constant in Russian history that considerations of state power always prevail. That’s why we can predict that, after various twists and turns, the “systemic liberals” will find themselves back in charge. It is they who will set the limits for the future “deputinization” of Russia. We will likely see a denunciation of the “cult of personality”, a thaw with the release of political prisoners, a return to dialogue on strategic arms control, while Putin’s successors will try to preserve the Kremlin’s levers of power, control financial flows and manage resources from the centre. They will pursue the same goals of destroying the Ukrainian nation and softly vassalizing Europe, having learned the lessons of twenty-three years of Putinism, namely as much as corruption and subversion work, threats and intimidation are counterproductive. Let’s hope Europeans don’t forget the lessons of Moscow’s horrific war to dominate Ukraine and Europe, and don’t rush back to serve the Kremlin’s unchanged ambitions.
]]>On April 25, 2023, Fox News announced the departure of its star presenter, Tucker Carlson, the true “voice of Russia” in the United States since 2017. This journalist represents an emblematic illustration of those American elites on whom Vladimir Putin exercises such a fascination that they do not hesitate to put themselves at the service of Russian propaganda. Although they are a minority, these Putinophiles constitute an important influential intermediary for Russia because of their position and their reputation; in addition to journalists, they include businessmen, retired generals, former intelligence officers, elected representatives of Congress, diplomats and academics. This variety of people allows the Russian narrative to reach various social classes. Most importantly, the admiration for Vladimir Putin goes far beyond the traditional political division. While Russia’s influence operations with U.S. policymakers are not new, it was only recently, during the investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, that the presence of a “Russian lobby” was uncovered. Its existence is a crucial issue for the outcome of the war in Ukraine, as the United States is the largest provider of funds and weapons to the government in Kyiv. Since the midterm elections of November 2022, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives makes aid to Ukraine even more uncertain. In this unstable situation, the “Russian party” is increasing its pressure on the Democratic government to force the Ukrainian ally to accept a peace negotiated on Russian terms. We will try to outline the main features of the Russian lobby and identify its favorite themes. Then we will discuss the conditions that have allowed it to penetrate deeply into American society and political life.
The American Putinosphere is composed of several layers: at the top, Russian intelligence officers — who have sometimes emigrated to the United States for decades and adopted American nationality to better blend into society — operate undercover. Disguised as diplomats, professors, journalists or students, they forge relationships, recruit agents and mount special operations that the Russians call “active measures.” Since the Russian interference of 2016, the hunt for spies has intensified in the United States, as in most Western countries. The press periodically unveils the presence of “moles” such as the 37-year-old Russian national, Sergei Cherkassov, indicted for espionage in the United States, where he had been living for two years under a false identity1. Other recent revelations concern “agents”, American citizens “who knowingly and with compensation accept to provide secret information or clandestine support to an officer in charge”2. Finally, the “agents of influence” serve as relays for Russian propaganda and participate in its disinformation campaign. They are chosen according to their position and their capacity to “influence public opinion or the decisions of the authorities of [their] country”3. But unlike the previous ones, they are not all active agents paid by the Kremlin, acting out of greed or complicity with the regime. They are often prominent intellectuals who, out of naivety, vanity or conviction, express ideas that serve the Kremlin’s objectives. Lenin saw them as “useful idiots” because they spontaneously put themselves at the service of Moscow without always being aware of the role they are playing4. During the Cold War, the archetype was “the Western left-wing intellectual manipulated by the Soviet regime to praise its merits and, at the very least, to silence its crimes”5. Today, friends of Russia in the United States are, as in the rest of the Western world, more numerous among right-wing nationalists than among progressives, but they are also to be found in the circles of far-left politics.
“Immortal Regiment” procession in San Francisco, May 2018 // Slavic Sacramento’s Facebook page, screenshot
Among these supporters, it is not always easy to distinguish between agents of influence with real proximity to the Russian regime and those who act out of ideological sympathy. However, American journalists, both right and left, who have put their reputation at the service of the Russian news media RT America, launched in 2005, such as former CNN star interviewer Larry King, Chris Hedges and Bernie Sanders supporter Ed Schultz, have become de facto official propagandists. The fact that RT was banned from cable and YouTube in early March 2022 is a small defeat for Russia, as this channel was not its biggest propaganda tool. The American media and journalists of right-wing nationalism mainly perform this militant function. Since the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, they have systematically aligned themselves with Moscow’s speech. Although it is difficult to prove, Tucker Carlson is often portrayed by his detractors as a Kremlin agent. Carlson’s idolization of Vladimir Putin is reminiscent of that of another demagogue, the famous radio host Charles Coughlin, who was once devoted to Adolf Hitler. In the daily talk show he hosted from 2017 to 2023, Tucker Carlson Tonight, watched by more than 3 million viewers, “Father Carslon” became the zealous spokesman for the Russian government6. As Russia massed its troops on the Ukrainian border, he presented the conflict as a simple neighborly dispute and justified Russian aggression by “defensive” considerations: Russia could not risk Ukraine joining NATO one day, which would compromise its free access to the Sevastopol base. “How would we react if Mexico and Canada became satellites of China? “ Several themes of Russian propaganda can be noted here, such as the allusion to the alleged (and historically false) “unkept promises” of the West not to extend NATO to the East and the desire to make the majority believe that Russia is a “normal” power which only defends its strategic interests, as do democracies. Another of the demagogue’s tricks is to claim that Western sanctions are dictated by an irrational Russophobia, as if we were confusing the whole country and the Russian people with the current regime. Carlson is also up in arms with his government’s attitude toward Vladimir Putin, who has done nothing wrong to the American people: “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? … Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? … Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin did not do any of that.” The reference to the pandemic and “dog eaters” is clear. According to Carlson, the Democratic administration, obsessed with anti-Russian passion, fails to see that Russia is only a secondary threat compared to China. But should the long-term challenge posed by China dismiss the imminent peril Russia brings to democracies? Carlson’s agreement with the Kremlin’s conspiracy theories has made him the star Western journalist on Russian news channels. Night after night, he contested American aid to Ukraine, a position that faithfully reflects that of the Trumpist camp in the Republican Party, where Vladimir Putin has many allies.
Since the mid-November elections, the Russian lobby has grown stronger in the House of Representatives. The MAGA (Make America Great Again) faction, preponderant within the GOP, has openly expressed its opposition to aid to Ukraine. Republican Kevin McCarthy, the candidate in Florida, warned that if he won, he would not give “a blank check to Ukraine”. The elected representatives of the “Freedom Caucus” (Matt Gaetz, the representative of Florida or Thomas Massie, the representative of Kentucky) militate to stop financing Ukraine, supposedly for reinvesting these funds to secure their border with Mexico, while another controversial but influential figure of the Trumpist clan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, vituperates that the “Nazis of Ukraine” will not get “another penny”. These elected officials are following the line dictated by their mentor, former President Donald Trump. On the campaign trail for the White House, he portrays the war as an “act of genius” by Vladimir Putin and blasts the decisions of Joe Biden, whom he describes as weak, while opposing his efforts to deliver weapons to Ukraine that strengthen the country. Note that Republicans are not alone in questioning American aid. In the fall of 2022, some 30 lawmakers from the left-wing of the Democratic Party (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal) described themselves as “responsible legislators” concerned about “the expenditure of tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars in military assistance in the conflict” and wrote to Joe Biden asking him to intensify his efforts to end the conflict, before retracting their letter. This awakening of the “doves” in the House, on both the right and the left, reflects a certain fatigue in public opinion facing the bogged-down conflict. “Time is not on Ukraine’s side”7. While in July 2022, 58% of respondents wanted their government to help Ukraine for as long as it takes, 47% of Americans now think Washington should pressure Kyiv to end the conflict as soon as possible8. President Zelensky’s visit to the U.S. and his passionate plea to Congress were intended to motivate elected officials and public opinion. Since the mid-terms, the Democratic administration has avoided exposing itself to the criticism of isolationists of all sides who denounce the surge in military spending. Before equipping Ukraine with the most expensive and sophisticated weapons, it must first demonstrate that these deliveries do not waste American voters’ money. If the Democratic administration is showing restraint in conducting the war, it is not only because it fears escalation. It now has to deal with the Russian lobby.
Tucker Carlson // Fox News, screenshot
Apart from a few ultra-conservative proselytizers, these “peace advocates” do not openly declare their Russophile leanings. They prefer to hide behind the well-tested arguments of intellectuals who claim to be part of the realist or neo-realist movement in international relations. The latter are certainly not “active agents” but they nevertheless contribute to instilling through their discourse a “soft propaganda”, a little music that reduces the vigilance of the opinion and incites it to take for granted simple assumptions9. They are the third, but not the least important, pressure group because of the influence of their most prominent members in the Washington establishment, such as former diplomat and historian Henry Kissinger. The realist school states that foreign policy should be based on the analysis of facts, and not on ideological convictions or moral principles. The best way to guarantee the stability of the international system is to have a “balance of power” between the great powers so that they neutralize each other and are less likely to be at war. The return to peace would imply that Ukraine, the “bridge” between East and West, should give up its dream of joining NATO and accept its neutralization. This position was expressed at the Davos Forum on 23 May 2022, by Henry Kissinger, who invited both parties to resume negotiations for a ceasefire10. In particular, he urged the Ukrainians to accept territorial concessions, and the West to avoid the temptation to prolong the war unnecessarily to inflict a resounding defeat on Russia and a humiliating peace that would lead Russia to ally itself with China. As a European power, according to Kissinger, Russia is, given its history, a guarantor of continental equilibrium, but it also contributes to the preservation of the world order by counterbalancing the Chinese power. Far from seeking the attrition of Russian power, the West should negotiate peace based on respect for the balance in Eurasia, as Russia is sensitive to the language of national interest. However, this argument has many flaws: first of all, because “Putin’s Russia is anything but a normal power; his game has nothing to do with a classical diplomatic game” and is by no means based on “national interests”11. The claim that Russia is a stabilizing power must also be dismissed, because history teaches us that Russia always tips the balance to the side of the strongest, as the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (1918), the German-Soviet Pact (August 1939) and the Winter Olympics (February 2022) remind us.
In the aftermath of Kissinger, calls for “diplomacy” from various personalities, often from the academic world, have multiplied. Professor Kupchan’s article in the New York Times offers another variation of the realist dogma, one that plays on the fears and divisions of the Western camp. Although he condemns the Russian aggression, Charles Kupchan calls on his government to get Ukraine to the negotiating table to avoid a third world war and a nuclear apocalypse. According to him, the unnecessary prolongation of the conflict, which is a source of energy shortages and inflation, threatens the stability of democracies that, unlike during the Cold War, no longer present a united front against the enemy and are sinking into chaos12. This argument fails to emphasize that it is precisely the “active measures” deployed by Russia that exacerbate tensions in Western societies and encourage the rise of populism. In short, since the Kremlin is endangering the free world, we should do nothing.
Larry King on RT // RT, screenshot
Finally, Professor John Mearsheimer, a leading figure in the neorealist school, simply anticipated the Russian aggression of February 24, 2022, in an article in Foreign Affairs written in the aftermath of the 2014 annexation of Crimea13. Unlike classical realists who see the pursuit of power as governing state action, neo-realists believe that it is the need to survive in an anarchic international system that motivates it: “great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory… Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it”14. His philosophy of international relations allows John Mearsheimer to present Russia’s interventions in its near abroad as purely defensive actions. According to him, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and that of Crimea in 2014 are not due to Russian imperialism or revisionism, as Putin has no intention of restoring the USSR or the former tsarist empire. On the contrary, it was Western encroachments on his neighborhood that persuaded Putin that the United States and its allies were no longer seeking to contain Russia, but to push it out of its traditional zone of influence. The annexation of Crimea, and then the war in the Donbas, were, in his view, a defensive, not offensive, move and a warning that the West refused to take seriously. Shortly after the beginning of the invasion, in an interview with the New Yorker, he reaffirmed that the United States and the European Union, which wanted to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold, were the real “responsible for this disaster”15. After nine months of war, he once again cleared Russia of any imperialist intentions. The facts, however, demonstrated the limits of his theory of vital interests. If the Russians only wanted to secure their borders and prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, as Mearsheimer claims, they would not have tried to “erase Ukrainian identity from the territories they occupy, to replace Ukrainian textbooks with Russian ones”16.
This position is undeniably a boon to the Kremlin’s propagandists because it supports their victimhood discourse, which validates the thesis of a Western conspiracy. The historian Anne Applebaum suggests that Mearsheimer and a few of his fellow students simply provided the propagandists with the pretextual argument for the invasion of Ukraine. Of course, the fact that Russian propaganda instrumentalizes the theories of the neo-realists does not prove their allegiance to Moscow. But the case of John Mearsheimer is emblematic of those intellectuals who, by ideology or by pride, serve the interests of Russian power. Let us recall that this is not Professor Mearsheimer’s first provocation. The publication of his book, co-written with Stephen Walt, on The Pro-Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy — which the authors blamed for the U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 — sparked the biggest academic controversy since the publication of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations17. The attraction to conspiracy theories, the aversion to interventionism and, above all, the stubbornness to support his thesis of the so-called “vital interests”, which was invalidated by the war in Ukraine, inexorably led John Mearsheimer to justify Russian aggression. Thanks to his notoriety, the “defensive” thesis, although criticized by many experts, appeals to “a large part of the foreign policy establishment”. The video of his lecture to the University of Chicago’s alumni in 2015, posted on YouTube, has been viewed 18 million times.
The “realist” criticism of American foreign policy also finds a favorable echo among the old pacifists of 1968 and their heirs on the new American radical left. Thus, the former anti-war activist Robert Scheer, famous for his interview with Bertrand Russell in Remparts magazine, gives the floor to Professor Michael Brenner of the University of Pittsburgh in his weekly program, Scheer Intelligence. This international relations specialist claims to be the victim of a veritable witch hunt for having contradicted the “fictitious scenario of the war in Ukraine”18. According to him, if the American government was so well informed of the imminent Russian attack in the Donbas in February 2022, it is because it had deliberately provoked it! The dialogue between these American “dissidents” faithfully reconstructs the Russian argument: the United States is the real culprit of the war in Ukraine for having expanded NATO to the East; China is the real challenge to American “hegemony” but not a threat to the country; Putin is “demonized by the West” whereas he has nothing of a dictator and is not interested in territorial expansion. The interview is also an anthology of whataboutism, an old oratorical technique that consists in dodging criticism by referring to the opponent’s own shortcomings. This sophistry is frequently used by Kremlin propagandists. Yet, Brenner has recourse to the same artifice; in the name of rejecting double standards, he comes back to the atrocities committed by the GI’s in Vietnam to minimize the criminal conduct of Russia in Ukraine and qualifies as “ridiculous” the accusation of genocide. However, if Vietnam provoked numerous rebellions within American society and continues to haunt people’s consciences, no contestation of the war is possible in Russia, where the work of historical truth, that democracies engage in, is outlawed.
John Mearsheimer // CIS YouTube channel, screenshot
A nebula with uncertain ideological contours, the Russian lobby does not constitute a homogeneous movement serving the interests of the Kremlin in a conscious or concerted manner. But its iconoclastic character and its lack of a clear political line make its message invasive and effective. Because Putinism is not a doctrine; its discourse, protean, can be easily adapted to the most diverse environments and aspirations: to conservatives, it sells Russia as the guardian of Christian values, while it seduces the far-left with its denunciation of capitalism and neo-colonialism borrowed from Soviet rhetoric. The fact that there is no unified “Russian party” does not, however, allow us to consider Putinophilia as a spontaneous phenomenon due to Russia’s soft power, or the charisma of its leader. On the contrary, it is the result of an effort to infiltrate the American elites, of a long-term undermining whose origins go back to the Détente and which reached a climax in the election of Trump in 2016.
We know today that the threat of an infiltration of the various spheres of power by partisans of the USSR, which led during the Cold War to the excesses of MacCarthyism, was not pure fantasy. The 1970s, marked by the Détente, were a new golden age for Soviet espionage. As the USSR relaxed its emigration policy, dissidents found asylum in the United States. Among them were some KGB spies. The case of the founder of the Russian lobby, Edward Lozansky, is now well documented19. This famous physicist, a member of the prestigious Kurchatov Institute, who worked on the design of Soviet nuclear weapons, emigrated to the United States in 1977, posing as a dissident. The fact that the USSR had agreed to let a scientist of such a high level and a holder of atomic secrets leave the country did not arouse much suspicion. Thanks to his numerous anti-communist activities, Lozansky gained the trust of conservative circles in Washington: he made solid friendships with senators Bod Dole and Jack Kemp, the evangelist pastor Billy Graham and the famous radio host Mark Levin. With his friend, the sulfurous Paul Weyrich, known for his links with the European far-right parties (including the Hungarian neo-Nazi party), Lozansky helped to reorient the GOP in the most reactionary direction. In the 1970s and 1980s, Weyrich played a key role in the creation of conservative organizations — united in the Council for National Policy — from which most of today’s radical right-wing movements derive. At the same time, Lozansky united the American and Russian far right at the American University of Moscow. On the eve of the disappearance of the USSR, his consulting firm (Russia House in D.C.) allowed him to establish dependencies between the elites of the federal capital and the oligarchs of the post-Soviet era through the World Russia Forum. Lozansky uses a proven technique: “the KGB was very active in recruiting Western businessmen who were persuaded by Marxist ideology that big capitalists ruled in Western democracies, and that through them it was possible to create a pro-Soviet lobby in every Western country […]”20. Lozansky’s case is not isolated. Another “mole”, Dimitri Simes, infiltrated the United States in 1973, posing as a refusenik. Within the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom (The Center For National Interest), which he created in 1994, Simes pleads for American-Russian rapprochement on the invariable theme: “since Russia is a great nuclear power, it is better to have it as a friend than as an enemy” — a position widely supported, among the Republicans, by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky or Richard Burt, Ronald Reagan’s former advisor, long-time friends of Simes. Thus, these Kremlin’s intelligent officers contribute to debasing part of the GOP, which is now transforming: from a classic conservative party of government, historically hostile to totalitarian states, it is becoming a nationalist formation whose certain leaders do not hide their sympathy for authoritarian regimes. In a word, the GOP has become the “Grand Old Putin Party” and its leaders are ready to pledge allegiance to Moscow21. The Lozansky and Simes networks not only created the conditions for the success of the cyberwar against the United States in 2016, but they were also the kingpins. As the presidential elections approached, new agents were sent to approach Trump’s campaign team, such as the nefarious 29-year-old Maria Boutina. She acts under the orders of Alexis Torshin, president of the Central Bank of Russia, known for his links with the mafia and a long-time member of the National Rifle Association (NRA). This powerful gun lobby, a major provider of funds to the GOP, is the recipient of the Russian money that fuels the Trump campaign22.
Edouard Lozansky // Rossiya 1, screenshot
It was during the 2016 presidential election race that the ramifications of the Russian lobby were uncovered by the investigations of the media and intelligence agencies. The press revealed that the acquaintances of candidate Trump, known for his Russophilia, includes many of Vladimir Putin’s henchmen, of whom his campaign manager, Paul Manafort: a famous conservative lobbyist, who worked for the victory of Presidents Ford, Reagan and G.H. Bush in the primaries before offering his services to foreign dictators. Close to Russian oligarchs, especially Oleg Deripaska, Manafort is the architect of the electoral victory of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych in 2010. This first success convinced the Russians that the methods deployed in Ukraine between 2010 and 2013 (use of social networks, corruption of the elites, a docile head of state) have proved their worth and that Paul Manafort, a specialist in American political issues, is the right man for the job to get elected the man some of the American press is already calling “the Kremlin’s candidate”23.
Donald Trump’s first contacts with Russia date back to the Soviet era. In the 1970s, the Czech services of the STB (close to the KGB) began to take an interest in the career of the American billionaire, recently married to a Czechoslovakian model. The STB, which was already betting on Trump’s presidential victory to improve American-Czechoslovak relations, forced Trump’s father-in-law to become their informant24. The rest is now known: in 1988, Michael Gorbachev’s trip, “to charm the American public” as part of Perestroika, launched Trump’s career in Russia. He was invited to build luxury hotels and even gave his name to a brand of vodka. Although many of Trump’s real estate projects in Russia did not materialize, he acquired a reputation solid enough to frequent the circle of oligarchs, attracting their investments to real estate programs in Florida while the Trump Tower housed many godfathers of the Russian mob25. Dependent on the Russian capital, Trump became the servant of President Vladimir Putin. In fact, once elected, he entrusted the State Department to the boss of the oil giant Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, author of “huge contracts” with Russia, while the direction of the NSC fell to Michael Flynn, the former head of the DIA, discredited because of his proximity to Vladimir Putin. These appointments have provoked a wave of panic in Washington, not seen since the era of McCarthyism. The New York Times spoke of “the worst conspiracy since Kevin Kostner’s No Way Out”: the presidential entourage was largely compromised26. A month after taking office, Michael Flynn was forced to resign following a Washington Post article revealing his telephone exchanges with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The same newspaper then reported that the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., had met during the campaign with a Russian lawyer likely to support his father’s candidacy. Then, it was the turn of the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to be implicated for his contacts with Kislyak. Finally, the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey by Trump, whom the President had asked to abandon the Russia investigation, caused a political storm in Washington. After these series of cascading revelations, on May 17, 2017, the former FBI director, Robert Mueller, known for his tenacity and independence, was appointed by the Department of Justice as special attorney general in charge of the investigation into the role of Russia in the 2016 presidential election.
After two years of investigation and thirty-four indictments, Attorney General Mueller’s report sent to Congress on March 24, 2019, failed to prove that the Trump campaign team conspired with the Russian government. Regarding the president, “while the report does not conclude [that he] committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” In addition, Muller implicated or convicted six people close to Donald Trump, including his trusted lawyer, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, his deputy, Robert Gates, and Michael Flynn. The archives and testimonies published in this 448-page report reveal that Donald Trump’s Russian campaign was orchestrated from St. Petersburg, where the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a troll factory founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been operating since 2013, intending to spread fake news on the Internet to sow confusion among the opponent. As of 2014, several hundred employees focus on “controversial social and political issues in the United States” and a unit of 80 people prepares for the 2016 US presidential election. Agents are sent on missions to the United States to gather information relevant to the operation. The Kremlin troll firms create hundreds of accounts on social networks, some of which have thousands of subscribers. They target “users dissatisfied with the economic and social situation”, exploit the anger of racial minorities, and spread rumors about alleged irregularities in absentee voting. Fake Facebook profiles accuse the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton of receiving money from the House of Saud27. Others support the candidacy of Jill Stein, her Green Party rival. But the Russians don’t just act from St. Petersburg, they intervene directly on the territory of the United States, from their dachas in New York or Maryland, from where they organize demonstrations in support of Trump in American cities. They are particularly offensive in swing states like Florida, where the IRA financed the construction of a cage attached to a truck to display a fake Hillary Clinton in prison garb. According to studies by Stanford and New York universities, in the last three months of the campaign, fake news favorable to Trump outnumbered those benefiting Hillary Clinton by four to one. Facebook also acknowledged, in November 2017, that 126 million Americans had read messages posted by the IRA. Yet 115,000 votes were enough to swing the election28. Vladimir Putin had good reasons for favoring the election of Donald Trump: the arrival in the White House of Hillary Clinton, embodying the liberal interventionist trend, would have ruined his hopes of seeing the sanctions against Russia dismantled.
Thanks to the victory of Putin’s “puppet”, the Republican Party is carrying out a real “revolution” in foreign policy29. The alliance of isolationists, of libertarian inspiration, and nationalist — conservatives ensures that the Trumpists have control over the party and marginalizes the neo-conservatives and, more broadly, the internationalist trend from which Republican presidents, since Eisenhower, have emerged. From this union emerges a new vision of the world in which the United States is no longer the guardian of the liberal international system that it forged in 1945. In the name of defending the United States’ freedom of action, which has been set up as a supreme value, President Trump’s Jacksonian foreign policy rejects multilateralism and, in particular, traditional alliances such as NATO, which is considered obsolete. Yet, this foreign policy program is a godsend for Vladimir Putin, who is calling for “a new Yalta” and a return to the spheres of influence. From the Kremlin’s point of view, Trump is the providential man who will launch his country into a confrontation with China, offering Russia the opportunity to deploy itself in the Middle East and to have a free hand in Europe30. As for the unabashed Russophilia of the American President, who displayed his allegiance to President Putin at the Helsinki summit in 2018, it accelerates the ideological conversion of conservative circles traditionally hostile to the Russian bear since the Cold War. While in 2012, the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, described Russia as the “geopolitical enemy” of the United States, distrust is gradually giving way to admiration for the one that Newsmax nicknamed “Vladimir the Great”.
Favorable to the Kremlin’s international agenda, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 has other implications whose scope is not immediately apparent. It contributes to the discrediting of the American political class by exposing (via the publication by WikiLeaks of the hacked emails of the Democratic Party) the pressures of its National Committee to favor the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. It revealed the flaws in the democratic machinery and undermined the confidence of Americans in their institutions, causing the right-wing of the GOP to become more radical and challenging Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. From 2016 to 2020, the twists and turns of Russiagate, a veritable political-judicial soap opera, kept American opinion on its toes, exacerbating its internal tensions. Under President Trump, Vladimir Putin has become a divisive issue that polarizes political life. While his image is deteriorating among Democrats (from 69% to 79% of unfavorable opinions), it has evolved positively between 2016 and 2018 in the conservative electorate (1/3 of Republicans declaring themselves favorable to Vladimir Putin)31. The bipartisan consensus on the existence of a Russian danger following the intervention in Georgia in 2008, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, is now a distant memory32.
Under Trump’s presidency, Russia was able to deploy its influence in society without encountering real resistance from state institutions. Thus, the Russian news channel RT America — the main Russian media involved in the operation — was simply invited by the Justice Department to register as a foreign agent. But the Russian TV channel continued to receive $100 million from the Kremlin until its banning in 202233. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Between 2016 and 2022, Moscow spent a total of $182 million to fund its influence operations and propaganda in the United States34. In addition to these sums paid in by the government, there were also donations from personalities or foundations close to Putin’s power. Their generosity was not limited to the political sphere. No sector of American intellectual and cultural life is spared. Thus, over the past two decades, 7 of the 12 oligarchs involved in the 2016 interferences have spent between $372 million and $435 million to 200 of the most prestigious American non-profit institutions. Among them are also think tanks such as the Brookings Institution or the Council of Foreign Relations, museums (MOMA, Guggenheim Museum in New York) and universities. Significant Russian money, estimated at, at least, $100 million, is funneled to the college campuses where the American elites of tomorrow are formed (Yale, MIT). The Russian oligarchs hope to make people forget the mafia origin of their fortune by pretending to be philanthropists and to restore the reputation of the Putin regime by investing in the Russian cultural heritage. This generosity allows them to join the boards of trustees and to direct the activities of these institutions: the energy magnate Viktor Vekselberg can thus create a scholarship bearing his name and sit on the board of directors of MIT: “Stalin could not dream of getting such influence in broad daylight”35.
The fact that a foreign power could expand its empire and interfere in the political life of the United States, without the threat being anticipated or countered, raises many questions. A recent espionage case provides the beginning of an answer to this enigma: on January 23, 2023, a former New York FBI agent, Charles McGonigal, in charge of cyber counter-espionage and the Russian investigation, was arrested by his former colleagues. He is accused of having, after leaving the FBI, worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, former employer of Paul Manafort and a key player in Trump’s victory in 2016. The Putinization of the elites had reached such a degree that the services in charge of national security were not able to offer any resistance to Russian interference. In hindsight, it appears that the cyber war of 2016 was designed to petrify the country before the launch of the “special military operation.” In fact, the mastermind of Trump’s victory, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is now sowing death in Ukraine. America, which now measures the extent and price of its compromises, will long be haunted by “the specter of 2016”36.
Greg Miller, “He came to DC as a Brazilian student”, The Washington Post, 3/29/2023. ↩
“Les Espions”, Le Monde, Hors-série, May 2023, p. 39. ↩
Thierry Wolton, La France sous influence, Paris, Grasset, 1993, p.13. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon, “La seconde jeunesse des idiots utiles”, Le Monde, 15/05/2019. ↩
William Saletan, “Father Carlson,” The Bulwark, 2/23/2022. ↩
Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, “Time is not on Ukraine’s side,” The New Yorker, 2/02/2023. ↩
47% of Americans now want Washington to urge Ukraine to end the conflict with Russia, Le Figaro, 12/12/2022. ↩
Nicolas Tenzer, “Soft propaganda, an invisible and invasive threat”, Desk Russie, 22/06/2022. ↩
Henry A. Kissinger, “These are the main political challenges facing the world right now,” World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Davos, 5/23/2022. ↩
Nicolas Tenzer, Ibid. ↩
Charles A.Kupchan, It’s Time to Bring Russia and Ukraine to the Negotiating Table, NYT, 22/01/2022. ↩
John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs, September-October 2014. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Isaac Chotiner, Why John Mearsheimer blames the United States for the crisis in Ukraine, The New Yorker, 1/03/2022. ↩
Anne Applebaum, “To accept the partition of Ukraine would be to accept a genocide”, L’Express, 15/09/2022. ↩
Philippe Grangereau, “Le lobby israélien au cœur de la polémique aux Etats-Unis”, Libération, 4/10/2007. ↩
Michael Brenner, “American Dissent on Ukraine is Dying in Darkness,” Scheer Post, 4/15/2022. ↩
Patrick Simpson, “The GOP’s favorite Professor Spent Decades Building Ties To Moscow,” Stern Facts, 5/17/2022. ↩
Françoise Thom, “The Globalization of Putinism,” Commentaire ,157, Spring 2017, p.151. ↩
Grant Stern, “Edward Lozansky’s Russia Lobby Compromised the Republican Party,” Stern Facts, 5/26/2022. ↩
Greg Olear, Ibid. In 2016, 86% of House Republican elected officials and 43% of senators received NRA funding. ↩
Michael Crowley, “The Kremlin’s candidate,” Politico, 4/27/2016. ↩
“Czechoslovakia Spied on Donald and Ivana Trump”, The Guardian, 12/15/2016. ↩
Franklin Foer, “Trump, Putin’s puppet”, Slate, 7/13/2016. ↩
Maureen Dowd, “White House Red Scare”, NYT, 7/1/2017. ↩
Martin Untersinger, “How Russia’s Internet Propaganda Agency Tried to Influence the U.S. Election,” Le Monde, February 17, 2018, “online.” ↩
Françoise Thom, Understanding Putinism, Paris, Desclée de Brower, 2018, p. 213. ↩
Franklin Foer, “Trump the Putin Pantin”, Slate, 7/13/2016. ↩
Françoise Thom, La Globalisation du poutinisme, art.cit. ↩
R.JReinhart, “Republicans more positive on U.S Relations with Russia”, Gallup Polls, 7/13/2018. ↩
Kristen Bialik, “Putin remains overwhelmingly unpopular in the United States”, Pew Research Center, 03/26/2018. ↩
Erin Baggott Carter, Bred L. Carter, “Questioning More: RT, Outward Facing Propaganda, and The post-West World Order”, Security Studies, vol 30, 2021. ↩
Anna Massoglia, “Russia pouring millions into foreign influence and lobbying targeting the U.S amid escalating Ukraine conflict”, Open Secrets, 2/2/2022. ↩
Peter Whoriskey, “Russian oligarchs have donated millions to U.S. charities, museums and universities analysis shows”, Washington Post, 7/3/2022. ↩
Timothy Snyder, “The Specter of 2016”, The New York Times, 01/26/2023 ↩
Mikhail Lesin’s life began like those of millions of Soviet people, then it became quite extraordinary, including elements seemingly taken, some from the biographies of Alexander Fadeyev, the leader of the Soviet Writers’ Union under Stalin, and of various Komintern agents, such as Otto Katz, others from Scott Fitzgerald’s and Paul-Loup Sulitzer’s novels, but in the context of Russia during the years 1991-2015.
Mikhail Lesin, whose name has already appeared in previous episodes of this series, was born on June 11, 1958 in Moscow into a family of Soviet Jews, and his father was a builder in the army. After his military service, the future minister went back to school at the not-so-prestigious Kuibyshev Institute, and became an engineer in 1984. It seems that he then joined the CPSU: he wanted to make a career in the existing system.
The turning point came during perestroika: from 1988 to 1990, Lesin was deputy director in charge of television programs in what seems to have been a gaming structure, where he met Konstantin Ernst, who was to become the all-powerful head of Russian Channel One. Then, from 1990 to 1993, Lesin managed RTV, a group of cooperatives organizing TV contests, and from this group emerged in 1991 an advertising agency: Video International. Advertising had barely begun in Russia; everything was yet to be done in what would become a huge market. Some occasional assassination — that of Vladislav Listiev (1956-1995), for example — will be attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the struggle to secure a share of this market, and Lesin’s name will remain associated with this enormous agency, although he is said to have left it quite early on — formally, it seems. In 2010, the agency was sold to Yuri Kovalchuk, the founder and head of Rossia Bank, and a friend and “wallet” of Vladimir Putin.
Does this explain his announced departure from Video International? From 1993 to 1996, Lesin was Sales Director, then Managing Director of TV Novosti, a government communication and press agency attached to RIA Novosti. In 1995, he and Gleb Pavlovsky (see here and here) set up the Fund for Effective Politics (FEP), at the suggestion of Andrey Vinogradov, ex-president of RIA Novosti. The desire to get involved in political communication was clear.
It seems however that, in 1993, Mikhail Lesin had sent his ten-year-old son Anton to live in Switzerland. This move shows a specific relationship with one’s homeland, roots and family, and attests to already well-stocked financial funds, but also, perhaps, to certain threats addressed to those who succeed too well, too fast, in a society in mutation.
Journalist Mikhail Zygar tells in one of his books how, in the early autumn of 1995, Timur Bekmambetov, who was just starting out as a film director, but who had already shot numerous commercials, was invited to the Kremlin to discuss a possible collaboration. He was accompanied by Mikhail Lesin, “a young producer and co-founder of Video International, an advertising agency”. Video International was already one of the most important companies on the national advertising market, at a time when, for lack of money, millions of Russians spent hours in front of the television, and it employed many fashionable directors. Today, Bekmambetov jokes: “Lesin entered [the Kremlin] with me, and never left.” Almost.
Bekmambetov and Lesin were initially commissioned to shoot a series of advertising films about Ivan Rybkin, one of the Kremlin’s favorites for the parliamentary elections of December 1995. However, the “party of power” — Our House, Russia — came only third with 10% of the vote, behind the Communists (22%) and the LDPR (11%). The presidential elections were looming, with what we’ve seen in previous episodes: the agreement with wealthy businessmen, notably media owners, and a campaign for Yeltsin, in which Pavlovsky intervened with the FEP, without respecting the slightest professional ethics.
In this campaign, as in that of 2000, two structures coexisted. On the one hand, Yeltsin’s staff, headed by Oleg Soskovets, Deputy Prime Minister, counted over forty people, including Boris Berezovsky and the President’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko. On the other hand, at the latter’s suggestion, an “analytical group” headed by Anatoly Chubais, but under the responsibility of Viktor Ilyushin, and including Dyachenko and her future husband Valentin Yumashev, was meant as providing business support for the campaign. At Gusinsky’s suggestion, Igor Malashenko, one of the top executives of Ostankino’s First Channel, was put in charge of the TV campaign. He decided that, for six months, Yeltsin should be shown on every channel in the country, and only in a positive light. Malashenko met almost weekly with Konstantin Ernst, then general producer of Berezovsky’s ORT channel, and supplemented the RTR (channel Rossia) teams with experienced publicists. RTR thus became Video International’s stronghold, and a team headed by Mikhail Lesin monitored the channel’s news and the way in which Yeltsin was shown. This team worked unofficially: it was paid by Lesin, and not by the channel, and everyone at RTR understood that they must obey him.
Yeltsin’s team also decided to launch a real advertising campaign, and Video International was asked to design, organize and monitor it. Lesin worked on it with Gleb Pavlovsky and validated the slogan “I believe, I love, I hope”. Because no rational argument could have justified voting for Yeltsin… As mentioned in Desk Russie (episode on Pavlovsky), the campaign had one major aim: to frighten Russians and make them fear a return to the USSR, if the Communists came to power. Everyone still remembered the queues, the deficits, the impossibility of traveling, the censorship, the camp sentences for those who tried to do business… The time for nostalgia had not come yet.
To reinforce concerns, Lesin prepared advertising films that included images of post-1917 destructions and warned: “Nobody in 1917 Russia thought there could be a famine. The Communists haven’t even changed their name. They won’t change their methods. It’s not too late to prevent civil war and famine.” In addition to Pavlovsky’s fake stickers (see the episode on Pavlovsky), the Lesin team decided to stick other stickers at stores entrances all over the country: “Buy food for the last time!” A group in Krasnodar even printed ration coupons and convinced store owners to remove everyday products from their shelves a few days before the elections, leaving only those present in the 1980s, i.e. almost nothing.
When rumors of Yeltsin’s poor health began to circulate, the President gave an interview to Mikhail Lesin (who was not a journalist, but the head of an advertising agency) and admitted that he needed heart surgery. The decision had already been made: Lesin and his Video International team would go to work in the Presidential Administration and set up there a public relations department. This team filmed Yeltsin after his re-election, and distributed the recordings: his image was thus under control.
Another recruitment pool for the Presidential Administration was Anatoly Sobchak’s team, who had just lost the elections in St. Petersburg: this was how Vladimir Putin arrived in Moscow.
From September 14, 1996, Lesin was officially in charge of President Yeltsin’s “relations with public opinion”, and in 1997 he was appointed First Deputy to the President of the VGTRK, a structure that oversees all Russian television and radio stations. Several sources claim that, in his position at VGTRK, Lesin had ample opportunities to embezzle money and send it abroad without the risk of being blocked by the Ministry of the Interior or the tax authorities. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund also believes that Lesin mastered then the ways of moving money to the West, but the Fund considers that a large part of this money came from Video International’s enormous profits, which were virtually unchecked by the State. On paper, Lesin was not even a co-owner of the company, but, when he worked on Yeltsin’s presidential campaign in 1996, he was already a multimillionaire, according to Gleb Pavlovsky.
Because Mikhail Lesin was being useful, he was appointed “Minister of Press, Television and Radio Broadcasting and Mass Media” on July 6, 1999, a post he held until March 9, 2004. During the 1999 parliamentary and 2000 presidential elections, he was a key member in the staffs, first of the party Unity, then of Vladimir Putin, and worked directly with Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovsky. Surkov and Lesin have real decision-making power, unlike Pavlovsky, who was merely an advisor and service provider.
Lessin and Putin in 2002 // kremlin.ru
An “ideological purge” began just after Putin came to power and, according to journalist Elena Tregubova, also targeted journalists accredited to the Kremlin: they were screened, even dismissed, by “Putin’s new PR team”. Lesin then oversaw the takeover of NTV and Media-Most, although Koch was pushed to the forefront. Lesin was already referred to by his closest circle, but behind his back, as “the man with the good face of a child killer”. He soon earned another nickname, for muzzling anti-Putin critics: “the bulldozer”. And most journalists who came into contact with him regarded him as a very rude man.
For several years, Lesin was to be number one in the policy that was launched the day after the March 2000 elections and aimed at controlling, buying off and restricting the Russian media. He also oversaw the new President’s image; it was Lesin who, as early as 1999-2000, reportedly encouraged the dissemination of photos of a topless Putin in the Russian press, while avoiding making these pictures available to the Western press: “We’ll leave Putin’s sports and biceps [images] to the people and the Third World.”
The ministry headed by Lesin was also actively involved in developing programs “to create a positive image of Russia in the West” and “to give the population a patriotic education”. Interviewed on this subject by Tregubova (before, that is, the beginning of 2003), Lesin said that, in his youth, he was very receptive to Soviet patriotism, including “military-patriotic games”. He wanted “respect for one’s country, for the national flag, for the army”, and “defense of the Fatherland”, and added: “We have been confronted with the fact that, at present, a whole lot of work is being done systematically in the West to form a negative image of Russia. That’s why we must no longer hesitate to propagandize our country.”
His son was still in Switzerland…
Tregubova asked the minister if, in his opinion, patriotism consisted in “praising the Russian army, despite the corruption of its ruling circles, despite the massive hazing, despite the crimes”, despite Chechnya. Lesin therefore accused her of hating the army: “And how would we have won the Great Patriotic War, if, from the very beginning, we had hated our army?” She replied: “And how much bloodshed could we have spared in this war if, under Stalin, we hadn’t blindly praised the Soviet army and the generals from the start?”
Two groups were already clashing, including about their relationship to Soviet history, and Lesin had kept the Soviet practice of saying one thing, doing another and thinking a third. Therefore, when Tregubova asked him whether he wanted his only son to serve in the Russian army, the minister replied with false lightness: “I don’t know, we’ll see. If he wants to study, he’ll study. If he wants to serve, he’ll serve…“. He won’t have the “desire” to serve in the Russian army.
The day after this interview, Lesin’s people did everything in their power to prevent it from being published. It was published anyway, but rewritten by them.
Shortly afterwards, Elena Tregubova published her first book, written in January 2003, where she showed, without mincing her words, that Vladimir Putin had already practically destroyed independent political journalism in Russia. By now, almost all journalists accredited to the Kremlin had gotten into the habit of talking about President Putin as if he were dead — to use a Russian expression: say nothing about him, or say positive things. The book tremendously upset Putin and his entourage: the young journalist lost her job at Kommersant, and Lesin informed her that it was “the end of her career”. Shortly afterwards, an explosion happened in Tregubova’s apartment building, and in 2008 she was granted political asylum in Great Britain.
Lesin’s career was only getting stronger: on April 6, 2004, following Putin’s re-election, he was appointed not minister, but advisor to the Russian President, a position he held until November 18, 2009. It was within this function that, in 2005, he conceived and founded Russia Today, which later became RT and was intended to counter Western narratives. Lesin was now at the very top of Putin’s propaganda machine, a machine he had designed himself.
However, on November 18, 2009, the former minister was removed from his post by a decree issued by Dmitry Medvedev, who had become President of Russia. Officially, Lesin had asked to leave. In fact, he was accused of “disregarding the rules of State service and the ethics of civil servants”. Some mentioned conflicts of interest: Lesin was said to have supported Video International too openly, giving thus to the company a virtual monopoly on the Russian advertising market. He may also have been too closely associated with Vladimir Putin’s image, at a time when Medvedev and Vladislav Sourkov were trying to attract artists and to give Russia a more creative image. In any case, Lesin’s career in the Kremlin seemed to be over.
The former minister embarked on what seemed to be a party without limits. He traveled the world, spent lavishly, bought himself — reportedly for $40 million — a yacht called the Serenity, and one of his associates would say that Lesin had “stuffed his yacht with girls” and was drinking more and more, alcohol binges seeming to have been his weakness for a long time. Margarita Simonyan, RT’s main propagandist, was invited on this yacht, but neither she nor her media mentioned the former minister’s tycoon lifestyle. He or, more accurately, companies linked to him were also buying real estate, for at least $28 million. Not just anywhere: in Los Angeles, in the prestigious Beverly Hills and Brentwood districts. In fact, Lesin’s son, Anton, raised in Switzerland, and his daughter, Ekaterina Lesina, lived in the United States, where their father was also spending an increasing amount of time.
But around 2010, the ex-minister was seriously injured while skiing. After undergoing surgery in Switzerland, he was confined to bed for several months.
And then, on October 1, 2013, just over a year after Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the Russian presidency, Mikhail Lesin was appointed Chairman and CEO of the Gazprom-Media holding company. It was a “triumphant return”, according to Forbes. But it would not last.
In the following months, Gazprom-Media bought media outlets from oligarch Vladimir Potanin, including three TV channels (TV-3, 2х2 and Friday!), four radio stations, some websites and the Central Partnership film company. Gazprom-Media also acquired a production company, Good Story Media, which produced popular series, as well as the Red Media group, which created thematic channels. Forbes pointed out back in 2014 that, in both cases, the owners of the absorbed companies were presented with a fait accompli: they were getting into Gazprom-Media. But Lesin shrugged it off, mentioning “myths”: “It may or may not please, but that’s how it was done”, and that’s almost the formula Vladimir Putin used before attacking Ukraine in 2022.
Interviewed by Forbes in August 2014, Lesin said that he had held every possible position in State structures and now wanted to “do business and make money”. But he also talked as a man in charge of controlling the media he ran. He thus declared himself “dissatisfied with the editorial policy” of the radio Echo of Moscow, in which Gazprom-Media held a majority stake. However, Lesin added, this radio station was not a huge problem. If it were, it would become a “music channel”: “They’d sing, and that’s it. What’s the problem?”
For him, there was none.
Other issues worried him much more. Indeed, U.S. Senator Roger Wicker had learned that Lesin was buying property in the U.S., and, in July 2014, he requested an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. In particular, the senator wanted to understand how a Russian official could have enough money to acquire two properties in Los Angeles, valued at $28 million. Especially since, he claimed, Lesin had registered offshore accounts in the British Virgin Islands and, through these accounts, had also bought “multi-million assets” in Europe, while still being a Russian State official. On August 1, 2014, Radio Liberty listed, in a detailed article, the Lesin family’s real estate investments in the United States and recalled the anti-American remarks expressed by the former minister. He told one thing and did another. Like so many others in Russia.
This time, Lesin admitted he was “worried”: some people, he claimed, were attacking his family. So he tried to justify himself in Forbes: his daughter was 35 and ran a Russia Today office (he didn’t say where, but it was in the U.S.). His son was 31 and an intern at the film academy (he wouldn’t say which, but it was in the U.S. too…). Expressing his indignation against Radio Liberty for having published their addresses, he asserted, without answering clearly, that the mentioned properties were not his: “My children are making a life for themselves, they have taken out loans from the bank. It’s clear that [this Radio Liberty publication] is a [political] commission and, in some time, I’ll find out who initiated it.”
He recalled that in the United States some people had wanted to include him in the Magnitsky list, a list of people who were implicated, to one degree or another, in the death in prison of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and who had to be punished for it. “But they didn’t [include you in it], since you’re constantly going there to see your family,” pointed out Forbes. Lesin retorted that he didn’t go that often to the U.S. and had nothing to do with Magnitsky. He also claimed to have no business of his own.
But the former minister knew that the information from Radio Liberty and the U.S. senator was accurate, and he understood that the beginning of his downfall was nearing. He mentioned that he had known for years half of the people working in the Presidential Administration, and that he could contact anyone in the media.
Photo : Marat Saytchenko, Izvestia
He also claimed not to be bothered by the fact that most Russian channels were under State control — and, in fact, this was the result of his own actions — and, when Forbes asked him if he was shocked by “propaganda tendencies in TV news”, he replied with two questions: “And where in the world don’t they exist? Don’t they also exist in the U.S. or the U.K.?” The usual whataboutism. What’s more, he continued, “it all depends on the society, what it wants to consume”; which is why, in his opinion, the opposition channel Dozhd’ was little watched. This last point is not entirely untrue, but it’s a classic argument among Putin’s Russian supporters: Russian society demands what Putin and his teams provide.
Could the scandal be hushed up? No, and on December 12, 2014, Lesin abruptly resigned from his post at Gazprom-Media. Unless, according to other sources, he was forced to leave. Indeed, following Senator Roger Wicker’s request for an investigation, the Deputy of the U.S. General Attorney had ordered on December 3 an investigation by the FBI, and he had informed the Senator accordingly. Not to mention that other agencies were interested in wealthy Russians’ fortunes, and that in Spain an investigation had been launched into Lesin’s funds and their possible links with money laundering.
The former minister then disappeared from Russia. According to an American intelligence source, he spent the summer of 2015 in the Swiss Alps, fearing he would be killed. According to unproven rumors, he may have contacted the FSB and the U.S. Department of Justice, because he feared for his life and his children’s lives.
There are other versions of this disappearance. Since leaving Gazprom-Media, Lesin had begun an affair with a very beautiful Siberian woman, Victoria R., a model and flight attendant. The two reportedly traveled the world — to Switzerland, but also to Greece, Bali, Italy and California, where Victoria dreamed to live — and the young woman posted on social networks photos of these trips and their yacht. In September 2015, a daughter, Tamara, was born to them, and Lesin was reportedly very happy about this birth. He wanted to divorce his wife Valentina — which would involve a division of real estate properties.
Mikhail Lesin, aged 57, was found dead on the morning of November 5, 2015, in his room at Dupont Circle, a very average hotel in Washington DC (USA), not at all in keeping with the former minister’s lavish lifestyle. Actually, Lesin had had another room, since November 2, at the much more luxurious Four Seasons in Georgetown. At first, there were talks of a stroke or heart attack, especially as the former minister had spent the previous three days drinking. But, and this would not be made public until March 2016, he had, according to the American authorities, numerous injuries, notably to his head and neck, and broken ribs: as if he had been hit with a baseball bat.
Mikhail Lesin, Russia Today’s creator, was buried even before these revelations. In Moscow? No, in Los Angeles, at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard: where many actors and personalities involved in the creation and running of American cinema are buried.
On March 11, 2016, the day after the U.S. authorities’ announcements, Kommersant published an interview with Sergei Vasiliev, general manager of Video International and Lesin’s friend of twenty years. According to Vasiliev (and his testimony should be taken with caution), Lesin had spent two weeks in Moscow, before leaving for the United States — “His family lives in Los Angeles”. He had been invited to Washington by the oligarch Pyotr Aven — one of Alfred Koch’s co-authors — who, on November 3, was receiving the Wilson Center Prize for the Development of Russian-American Relations. The two men had hoped to see each other, but Lesin did not attend to this even. Aven also took part, on November 4, in a private meeting organized by another Washington think tank, the Atlantic Council. Here again, Lesin apparently wanted to attend, but the organizers refused to include him among the guests. In Washington, the former minister nevertheless met up with old friends — whom Vasiliev claimed to know –, drank too much, left his friends and landed in the first hotel he could find.
In the opinion of investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Lesin was brutally beaten near his hotel. He managed to reach his room and died there. Those who beat him have never been found, and rumor in Moscow has it that Lesin had fallen out of favor with the Kremlin just before this incident.
As if the situation wasn’t already enigmatic enough, Alexei Navalny reported, also in March 2016, that, according to the U.S. Border Service website, a man with a Russian passport in Lesin’s name had left the U.S. on December 15, 2015, forty days after the former minister’s death. The information was picked up by various media outlets, while Vasiliev stressed that he had seen his friend’s body in his coffin. Back in November 2015, Navalny had speculated that Lesin’s death could be staged so as to protect a witness, ready to tell what he knew about Putin.
But an American official pointed out that this departure date had been entered to close the deceased’s visa, according to standard procedure, and did not prove a real departure. However, rumors of an organized disappearance to allow the former minister to change his life have continued to circulate.
On October 28, 2016, the U.S. federal prosecutor’s office declared that Lesin had died alone in his room after a series of falls due to excessive alcohol consumption over several days. It was therefore “an accident”, and the case was closed. However, in July 2017, as part of a series on murders possibly involving Russian secret services, the Buzzfeed website revisited Lesin’s death and asserted that, contrary to the official version, many in the U.S. secret services and law enforcement suspected a Russian involvement. Buzzfeed News had therefore filed a complaint in order to gain access to the entire investigation.
In this article, two FBI agents claimed that Vladimir Putin’s “ex-media tsar” had been beaten to death and that he had an appointment with the U.S. Department of Justice the following day. The latter had paid for the room at Dupont Circle and wanted to interview Lesin about RT. According to one of these agents, “everyone thinks he was beaten up, and that Putin or the Kremlin was behind it”. American officials were therefore worried: would the Kremlin start killing on American soil, as it had done, abundantly it seems, in Great Britain?
Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of radio Echo of Moscow, was interviewed shortly afterwards about Buzzfeed’s claims. Having known Lesin for a long time, he said that he immediately understood that the former minister had died a violent death, not a heart attack, “as the Kremlin told us and Margo Simonyan told us on behalf of the family”. But, curiously, Venediktov refered to the forced NTV takeover (see the episode on Alfred Koch): Lesin was the “main witness” for “annex number 6”, in case a trial was to take place. The journalist assured that he was closely following the Washington police investigation. He did not believe that Lesin had benefited from a witness protection program. According to him, two versions remained: either Lesin had fought with someone in the street, or he had been killed. For the moment, no clear answer could be given:
“I don’t know who had an interest in this death. Mikhail Yuryevich Lesin was a man with whom it was difficult to communicate, someone very abrupt. […] You could say that I had an interest in his death, even though this is not the case, of course. On the contrary, I repeat, we have lost a witness.”
It would be necessary, he added, “to understand what [Lesin] was negotiating with the American government” — and Venediktov thus seemed to validate this hypothesis. But he pointed out that the former minister was about to get a divorce and “had a lot of complicated relationships”: “Who benefits? Everyone and no one.” In any case, if Lesin was buried in the USA, it was because “his whole family” lived there: his children Anton and Ekaterina, his grandchildren, but also his wife Valentina. “He himself lived in the United States, he had left Russia, that’s what you have to understand”, declared Venediktov.
This gives the exact measure of the “patriotism” of those who create, in Putin’s Russia, propaganda channels and patriotic education programs.
In December 2017, the Washington DC police released 58 pages of their investigation into Lesin’s death. But some passages were blacked out, and this report revealed nothing about the beatings, or even the falls. Then, on January 26, 2018, the FBI unveiled part of its investigation: 56 pages that don’t add up to much. On March 27, 2018, BuzzFeed reported what Christopher Steel, a British secret agent who had written a report on links between Trump and certain Russians, was said to have told the FBI: Lesin was allegedly killed by thugs recruited by an oligarch close to Putin, because he had bad professional relations with this oligarch. However, the “thugs” had been instructed to beat and intimidate the former minister, not to kill him, and, according to some sources, they were agents of the Russian services. Three other independent sources confirmed Steel’s claims, but the FBI refused to take them into account.
One year later, on March 16, 2019, Radio Liberty reported that it had access to the report of Washington’s chief medical examiner. It stated that Lesin’s neck may have been fractured before his death, but also during the autopsy. U.S. authorities still regarded the death as an accident, but “media reports have stated that the former minister may have been killed because he agreed to testify about corruption in Russia”. His son, Anton, “who lives in Beverly Hills, told investigators that Lesin always got drunk on business trips”. Did U.S. authorities want to question his father about RT? About corruption in Russia? And / or about his relations with Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin and Yuri Kovalchuk, head of Bank Rossia, as some media wrote? Officially, there is no confirmation that Lesin was preparing to testify about anything before American authorities. But it’s a fact: he knew everything about the Putin system from the inside.
Meanwhile, the succession was beginning to be settled. On July 25, 2017, Ria Novosti thus reported that a mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, was up for sale. It had been purchased in 2012 for $9 million by the company Dastel Holdings, which on the papers was owned by Anton Lesin, and it was put up for sale in 2017 at $23 million. The approximately 980 m2 property featured seven bedrooms and eleven bathrooms, an elevator, a sauna and a wine cellar. The Dastel company was also offering, for $28 million, a mansion of around 1,200 m2, located in Beverly Hills, in a permanently guarded location also home to actor Samuel L. Jackson and basketball player Magic Johnson. The Dastel company was domiciled there.
Ria Novosti pointed out that, during his lifetime, Lesin had always denied owning any real estate in the United States, where his family lived. He claimed that these properties belonged to his children, but he had lost his position as advisor to the President in 2009 for “excessive activity in business, causing a conflict of interest”.
A well-documented article published on August 8, 2017, on the not necessarily very reliable website Criminal Russia, claims that, according to journalist Evgenia Albats — a reliable source — the capital of Lesin’s “gray business empire” — neither legal nor illegal — could be estimated at a billion dollars. Some sources — including former MP Konstantin Borovoy, who now lives in the USA — believe that a significant part of Lesin’s assets have been diverted from the hundreds of millions of dollars attributed to Russia Today. The properties in California could be just the tip of the iceberg: the former minister is said to have left millions of dollars in business assets in Finland and Switzerland.
He is said to have laundered some of his funds by helping his son produce films. The ones Brad Pitt and Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in? As for Lesin’s daughter, nothing can be found about her on the Internet, even though she headed RT US office. Was her title vague and her job fictitious? Or had the internet been wiped clean? Many mysteries remain around the life and disappearance of Mikhail Lesin, the man “with the good face of a child killer”.
More in the next issue…
]]>Alfred Koch said he wanted “all his life” to be a writer and, like Surkov and Pavlovsky, he wrote several books. He also lost his government post in what came to be known as the “writers’ scandal” and demonstrates that the definition of a writer can be broad and flexible in Russia. But in 2004, he assured that he had finally understood that he was and always would be “a kulak”. And he added: “I’m not a great capitalist. I’m Russian. Koch. Alfred. Son of Reinhold. The joy of loving you. My Homeland.” Touching, but complex. Since, for any Russian, Koch, Alfred and Reinhold are German names. In any case, as his friend the journalist Igor Svinarenko noted in 2005, while views on Koch may differ, he “really is one of those who built the present country. Whatever it may be. We’re living there.” Or, rather, they were living there. Igor Svinarenko, born in Mariupol, died on May 10, 2022, aged 64. And Alfred Koch has lived in Germany since 2015. So much for “My Homeland”.
His name is German, as was his father’s: Alfred Koch descends from these Germans who settled in Russia from the 18th century onwards. The place, he was born in in 1961, confirms it and implicitly points to one of the Soviet tragedies: the future politician came to this world in Zyrianovsk, Kazakhstan. During the Second World War, Stalin deported to this republic the Germans established in Russia, whom he suspected — for no other reason than their distant origins — of wanting to collaborate with the Nazis. Reinhold Koch remained there and married a Soviet woman of Russian nationality, so that by 2003 their son could barely speak German. At school, Alfred was called a “fascist”, although, in Kazakhstan, distinctions were based on a different criterion: there were the children of former camp prisoners, and those of camp guards.
At the age of eight, Alfred Koch followed his parents to Togliatti, where the future politician completed his secondary education. Later, he said that he had no good memories of this period, apart from his first love stories: “The rest was just survival tactic.” Then he studied economics in Leningrad (LFEI: Economic and Financial Institute) and began there a kandidate thesis, which he defended in February 1987. He wanted to teach and worked for a few years as a researcher in Leningrad.
From 1988 onwards, Koch organized economics seminars with Anatoly Chubais: the latter was born in 1955 and his father, a colonel in the army’s Political Directorate, held the philosophy chair at a higher military institute. As early as 1978-1979, Anatoly Chubais had set up a semi-clandestine study group on economic reforms in the USSR and some Central / Eastern European countries. Nonetheless, at the age of 25, he joined the CPSU, defended his economics thesis and became a researcher at a less-than-prestigious institute. Since 1980, he had been in contact with a group of Moscow economists led by Yegor Gaidar (1956-2009), who was the grandson of an extremely well-known Soviet writer and later became Yeltsin’s Prime Minister. Yegor Gaidar and future oligarch Pyotr Aven attended Koch’s and Chubais’ seminars, as did some twenty specialists in finance and sociology. Because of such meetings, Westerners believed that the transition and break with the Soviet system were prepared and led by young, well-trained and dynamic academics, and they failed to realize that the KGB was very much in control.
In 1990, Alfred Koch entered politics: he was elected the mayor of Sestroretsk, remained in that position for a year, then chaired the executive committee of the Council of People’s Deputies in Leningrad, before leaving his institute. In April 1991, he was appointed chairman of the commission responsible for implementing locally a ruble reform, and that same year he joined a structure set up by Gorbachev to oversee all State assets in Leningrad and its region. Koch was thus in charge of what some consider to be the core of his career: privatizations, and it was at this time, it seems, that he met Vladimir Putin, who was responsible for foreign investments at Leningrad City Hall.
That year, at the age of thirty, Alfred Koch, already married with children, obtained his first apartment as one of his job’s perks. Until then, he had had a room in a communal apartment. Almost all of these future “elites” had lived in the Soviet mire, and suddenly new prospects, including material ones, were opening up for some of them, who were in the right circles, had the needed skills and were young enough to adapt flexibly. Why do some Westerners talk of “humiliation”? The Russians in the right circles enjoyed their new possibilities. They had fun. For a good twenty years. And they cared about themselves, their families and the enrichments they could draw from this period of change. And, sometimes, about the country. As Koch pointed out in 2004: “Money doesn’t mean happiness, it means freedom.” This is not untrue, but many then reduced freedom to money.
The USSR disappeared in December 1991, or rather, gave way to fifteen independent, sovereign countries. In January 1992, Boris Yeltsin’s government launched reforms aimed at transforming the Russian economy into a non-State, market economy. This meant privatizing some of the State’s assets.
In practice, this privatization had begun, very discreetly, during the last years of the Soviet era. According to sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a specialist of this question, the first wave of privatization took place between 1986 and 1989: hundreds, if not thousands, of companies were set up under the aegis of Komsomol organizations and KGB control, and entrusted to young, dynamic Komsomol officials, who reaped the profits, even though the capital remained with the State. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who would become, some fifteen years later, Russia’s richest man, was one of the beneficiaries of this operation. The second wave of privatizations began in 1989 and ended in 1992: civil servants privatized for their own benefit the public assets they managed, and did so with the authorities’ approval. For example, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Minister of Gas, transformed his ministry into a joint-stock company, Gazprom, of which he became CEO. A number of banks also emerged from State-owned banks, while others were initiated and financed by the State, without the latter showing its support.
In 1991, even before the USSR demise, some Soviet people were already wealthy, endowed with initial capital that they owed, for the most part, to their links with State and Party structures. What was still “control” and “management” soon became “ownership”: in 1993, Khodorkovsky realized that the company he ran could be considered his own. Those who, like him, had business experience, initial capital and good contacts would be able to earn even more money, thanks to the reforms undertaken by the Yeltsin government.
Alfred Koch with a privatization voucher // His Facebook page
At the beginning of 1992, Alfred Koch was still living in Leningrad, and, as vice-chairman of the Municipal State Property Committee (Goskomimushchestvo), he organized the sale of State property. However, on June 1, 1992, his friend Chubais was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, and Koch became his deputy, overseeing at federal level the third wave of privatization, which was launched in the summer of 1992 and seemed to concern the entire population. It was based on the distribution of a ten-thousand-ruble voucher to every Russian citizen, who was supposed to use it to buy company shares. In reality, the population hardly benefited from these processes, while well-placed and well-informed individuals — including Boris Berezovsky — acquired major companies.
A year after his arrival in Moscow, Koch was given a new apartment to go with his new job. One of his biggest operations was still to come: “loans against shares”. This was the fourth wave of privatizations, and it had been conceived by two men: Boris Jordan, an American banker of Russian origin, and Vladimir Potanin, a future oligarch and son of a Soviet Foreign Trade Ministry official. In 1995, Yeltsin’s entourage concluded an agreement with a number of bank-owning oligarchs. These banks — created with the support and financing of the State — were to lend the government two billion dollars and receive shares in Russia’s top industrial companies as guarantees. In 1997, once the presidential election would be over, these banks would be allowed to organize themselves, for their own benefit, the auctions at which the pledged companies would be sold. And everything was to be supervised by Alfred Koch, who was in favor of massive privatizations: for him, the State should not own anything.
On March 30, 1995, Potanin, accompanied by two other bankers, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Aleksandr Smolensky, presented his plan to the Russian government, and this plan was supported by Koch and Chubais. As Chubais would explain twenty-five years later, they aimed to tie the business world closely to Yeltsin and the reformist government. On September 25, 1995, Alfred Koch signed the list of companies to be auctioned off. According to him, these auctions took place within one month, and so discreetly that most of the Russian population only heard about them afterwards. Fewer than a dozen trusted businessmen were able to acquire industrial flagships at very low prices: public assets, which would be worth $14 billion on the stock market in July 1997, were sold for less than one billion. The main beneficiaries were structures linked to Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Potanin. With Alfred Koch’s approval.
After Yeltsin’s re-election, Chubais became head of the presidential administration, and on September 12, 1996, 35-year-old Alfred Koch took over as head of the Federal State Property Committee (Goskomimushchestvo), with ministerial rank. On March 17, 1997, he was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. This position lasted until August 13, 1997, and was brought to an abrupt end by the “writers’ scandal”, which also had consequences for Putin’s stifling of the media.
Koch had not yet been nominated Deputy Prime Minister when, around January 1997, businessman Vladimir Gusinsky went to see him and complained that he hadn’t benefited from the fourth wave of privatization, even though he’d helped Yeltsin a great deal. Therefore, he wanted Svyazinvest, Russia’s telecommunications monopoly, to be privatized for his benefit. Koch later claimed that he and the government’s “young reformers” had decided, however, that Svyazinvest would be sold “honestly” — which is a way of admitting that this had not always been the case within the “loans against shares” system.
Gusinsky also wanted Vladimir Potanin, then Deputy Prime Minister, to be excluded from the auction, which Koch refused. Koch was warned by Gusinsky and Berezovsky that, if Potanin were allowed to take part in the auction, the two men would use their media against Koch and Chubais. Chubais agreed to exclude Potanin, but in March 1997, the latter left the government. Chubais took his place and declared that, since Potanin was no longer in government, there was no reason why he shouldn’t take part in the sale of Svyazinvest, scheduled for July 1997. The consortium including Potanin, Soros and a few other investors won the bid: their offer was higher, but Gusinsky, furious, felt that there had been favoritism. Later, Koch considered that he had been violently attacked by the businessman’s media during the “writers’ scandal”, because Gusinsky wanted to take revenge on him.
Even today, this scandal remains obscure. Five leading figures from the government and presidential administration, including Koch and Chubais, received advances of at least $90,000 each from a publishing house controlled by Potanin’s bank, for then-unwritten books on the history of privatization in Russia. Such excessive kickbacks could conceal bribes, including for the sale of Svyazinvest. The media scandal was such that Chubais lost his post as Finance Minister, although he remained Deputy Prime Minister. As for Koch, he was accused of abuse of office and had to resign as Deputy Prime Minister on August 13, 1997. He claimed, however, that these perquisites were normal and had been donated to a fund for the defense of private property. The matter is all the more unclear since, according to Koch, there were in fact two sources of funding, including a New York publisher. And at least one collective book was published in 1999 by Vagrius: the legal case was closed that year.
Demonstration in Moscow in support of the NTV channel in 2001 // NTV, screenshot
The scandal did not end, however, when Koch left the government and took the helm of an investment company, Montes Auri. This company, claimed political scientist Dmitry Simes who was referring to rumors, made “enormous profits” by investing in the Russian stock market, and benefited from insider information from Chubais and Potanin. The legal machine was set in motion and, from September 1997, Koch had to face interrogations and searches “lasting ten hours, in the presence of the children”, for this “writers’ scandal”, but also for another concerning the allocation of his Moscow apartment. According to him, all this was done on the orders of Gusinsky, who orchestrated the attacks in the press against him, and had him followed and bugged.
While it’s hard to get to the bottom of these rumors, accusations and denials, it appears that, at the time, bribes of less than $100,000 seemed a good enough reason to remove someone from government and prosecute him, which would not be the case a few years later. Nevertheless, a wide variety of motives seem to have been involved, from the most legitimate to the pettiest ones. Koch claimed to have been attacked with particular violence by the NTV television channel, which belonged to Gusinsky. The question of motives came up again when, in 2000-2001, Koch oversaw the sale of NTV to Gazprom, marking the beginning of the disappearance of non-State-controlled media in Russia.
Another question pops up: where does Koch’s apparently substantial fortune come from? He was a State civil servant until 1997, and in 2003 he claimed to have earned his millions between 1997 and 2001, which was his way of denying any personal enrichment from the privatizations. But he immediately added that he had lost “almost everything” during the 1998 financial crisis. Did he earn his millions between 1999 and 2001? Not impossible in the Russia of the time, but Koch would not explain how, whereas he assured that he never received a “single kopeck of State funding”, never “took anything” and “sacrificed eight years” of his life “to create the necessary conditions for business in the country”.
His friend, the journalist Igor Svinarenko, pointed out to him in 2003 that many in Russia saw him as “someone who owed his rise to his relations with the authorities and used information he had as an insider to buy and sell treasury bonds (GKOs)”. Or even as someone who was biased in the “loans against shares” deal. But Koch assured that he was able to explain “to the competent bodies” how he earned his first million, although he had nothing to say to public opinion: “Fuck them.” With the same elegance, he added that he didn’t want to discuss his relations with “law enforcement agencies” either. Which leaves a few grey areas. Especially as Koch did not disappear after the “writers’ scandal”.
As soon as Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency, he and his teams set out to regain control of the media. Gleb Pavlovsky recounted how the campaign staff met, on the evening of December 30, 1999. The vodka flowed freely, and one of his friends, “a very liberal journalist who had made a dazzling career” and who had no links “either with Putin, St Petersburg or the FSB” — the three main access networks to Putin circles — said to him: “The first thing we’re going to do is crush NTV!” Pavlovsky pretended, he was surprised, but he admitted to having himself suggested attacks in the spring of 2000 “against one or two oligarchs”: Gusinsky, then Berezovsky. Taboos had been lifted.
In fact, according to Igor Malashenko — one of NTV’s founders, who was very active in supporting Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 and belonged to the team that prepared the 1999-2000 elections — Gleb Pavlovsky played a key role, at Boris Berezovsky’s request, in convincing the Kremlin that NTV and other media owned by Gusinsky were “the enemies who [wanted] to stifle Vladimir Putin’s political career”. Pavlovsky admitted that, as early as 1999, a “war to death” had been declared between NTV and the presidential administration, and, as he claimed, he understood only later that their then relationship with the media would spawn “the whole system of later on censorship”. One NTV program in particular irritated Putin’s team: the Kukly (The Puppets), inspired by the French Guignols de l’info. More generally, the channel’s news was of high quality and fairly critical of the government on certain points. It did not support the wars in Chechnya, either the first or the second.
Created in October 1993, NTV had one weakness: during the Yeltsin years, the channel benefited from “credits” by Gazprom. According to the famous journalist and humorist Viktor Shenderovich — a former NTV employee — these “credits” were a kind of bribe paid “for Yeltsin’s re-election”, as everyone involved apparently knew. Nevertheless, on paper, NTV owed Gazprom money, and Putin’s election on March 26, 2000 changed the previous rules of the game. On May 11, several establishments of Media-Most — Gusinsky’s group — were raided, and a Kremlin official set out in writing the conditions for ending the attacks: NTV had to change its editorial line on Chechnya, stop its attacks on Boris Yeltsin’s closest circle, and remove from the Kukly Putin’s puppet, a small, skinny and cruel monster.
The puppet did indeed disappear, but a new episode of the satirical program showed Alexander Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration, listening to instructions from an invisible God. God. The Lord God. In Russian: Gospod’ Bog (K)GB. After decades of Soviet censorship, everyone deciphered the message. Then, around April-May 2000, Alfred Koch met Mikhail Lesin, Gleb Pavlovsky’s associate and now “Minister of the Press, Television and Radio Broadcasting and Mass Media”, at the Russian baths. Lesin made him a proposal: the Media-Most group, of which NTV was a part, owed Gazprom almost half a billion dollars; Gazprom had therefore asked Lesin to recommend someone who could try to recover part of this debt; Lesin had thought of Koch: would he agree? Koch understood that this proposal did not come from Gazprom only, and that the new minister had undoubtedly been entrusted with this “project” by the new administration: “New master in the Kremlin, new rules”, wrote Koch, de facto recognizing the political dimension of this case. He also understood, as he admitted, that he was being approached because he had a vendetta to exact against Gusinsky. The journalist Shenderevich also understood it: “The authorities knew who to put in charge of destroying NTV.”
So it was very consciously that Koch accepted his mission: “To confiscate a man’s media without touching him.” The next day, Lesin promised him not to appear too involved in this negotiation, so that it wouldn’t seem political — which it was… — and could not be presented as an attack on freedom of expression. Money was no object: Koch could hire anyone he needed. Noting that the debts had been guaranteed, Koch decided to demand these guarantees, if the debts could not be repaid. On June 12, 2000, he was appointed Director of Gazprom-Media. Because he had accepted this mission.
The day after this appointment, Gusinsky was arrested, and Koch said he heared about it in Lesin’s office. Both were reportedly very surprised, and Koch, he said, did not approve of the arrest, which was — it’s not impossible — an initiative of the security forces. Or of Putin. Vladimir Gusinsky was accused of embezzlement, to the tune of ten million dollars, and abuse of power. Seventeen influential political and business figures — including Anatoly Chubais and Vladimir Potanin — took up his defense in a letter that Alfred Koch also signed: he could claim that he was involved in an ordinary financial mission and not in a repressive trap.
At the same time, Igor Malashenko, Managing Director of NTV, negotiated with Lesin. The latter then told Koch that, according to Malashenko, Media-Most and all its assets were worth a billion, while debts to Gazprom amounted to 700 million. Malashenko therefore proposed that Gazprom wrote off the debts and bought Media-Most for 300 million. Koch believed that Media-Most was not worth a billion and had debts other than those to Gazprom, but the new minister assured him that it was not important: he had already spoken about it “where necessary”, “in particular to Gazprom”. He added: “If they’re willing to pay 300 million, the issue is closed forever; there are no more debts, and no criminal cases.” Otherwise, Koch would continue his work.
Vladimir Gusinsky was released after three days in detention. In exchange for his freedom, he had agreed to sell NTV to Gazprom. So it was not without cynicism that Alfred Koch sighed, a few years later: “O, the vegetarian era of the early Putin years! Such things were still possible!” In fact, they soon wouldn’t be possible in the Putin system that Koch had helped to build.
Boris Nemtsov then proposed that Koch met with Gusinsky and, according to Koch, an agreement was reached with the businessman: to draw up a repayment plan in two stages, and, if the debts were not repaid, Gazprom would recover the guarantees. Except that this doesn’t really fit with the version according to which Gusinsky agreed to sell his company. For it was during these negotiations that “annex number 6” was drawn up, a piece of paper that guaranteed Gusinsky his personal freedom and security, provided he sold the assets belonging to him. Here, too, the situation remains unclear: NTV officials assured that this annex was drawn up by the Kremlin along the lines of “your actions for your freedom”; Lesin and Koch claimed, that it was drafted on Gusinsky’s initiative. Accusation of lying could be heard on all sides.
In any case, Koch was the first to sign this “annex number 6”, followed by Lesin, then Gusinsky, and the charges against the latter were dropped. In July, the businessman left for Spain, becoming, according to journalist Masha Gessen, “the first political refugee from the Putin regime, just five weeks after the inauguration”. There, he denounced the agreement which, he said, he had signed under threat. The reaction was swift: on September 19, 2000, Gazprom — headed by Alfred Koch — filed a complaint against Media-Most, stating that it wanted to recover new shares in NTV, in exchange for the “credits” granted and not repaid.
Here again, Koch gave a rather different version of these events. According to him, Gusinsky had taken refuge in London, as had Malashenko, who then asked Koch for not 300, but 500 million. Koch refused, and it was then, he said, that Gusinsky claimed he had been forced to sign an agreement. Koch cynically claimed, that Gusinsky counted on the reaction of the West, ready to “defend freedom of speech in Russia”. So Koch filed a complaint. But a similar raid was already underway to seize the media owned by oligarch Boris Berezovsky: the aim was to take control of the media.
On November 13, 2000, an international arrest warrant was issued against Gusinsky. The businessman was arrested, but Spanish justice refused to extradite him. On December 15, the Russian tax authorities demanded the liquidation of Media-Most and NTV. The tax authorities would also be responsible for bringing Khodorkovsky’s oil empire under State control.
Koch claimed to have seen Gusinsky in London beforehand, and a new contract was signed in mid-December 2000. However, the businessman refused to sell his shares and filed a complaint in London against Gazprom-Media. On January 29, 2001, NTV’s journalists were received by Putin, and said on leaving they had “no more illusions”. However, some of them tried to save NTV, and demonstrations were organized. American media magnate Ted Turner even offered to buy the channel, but, when Gusinsky informed Koch of this proposal by telephone in early February, the latter retorted that this was not the issue. It was then — he recalled — that Gusinsky told him: “You, Alfred Koch, are completely destroying yourself as a democratic figure.” That’s right. Except that, as it is often repeated, “reputation is not an institution in Russia”.
Koch visited the United States in early 2001, in particular to give his version of recent events. According to him, suspicion quickly disappeared, and he noted that he was being helped by “many people”: those “who didn’t take seriously freedom of speech ‘à la Gusinsky’, and who considered that such freedom of speech could not justify non-payment of debts”. Among them was political scientist Dmitry Simes.
Shortly afterwards, a Russian court recognized that Koch’s team had the right to seize the debt guarantees. The shareholders met on April 3, 2001: Gazprom took control of NTV, and Koch was appointed Chairman of the Board and Deputy Director of the channel. A nice toy. He even hosted a game show on the channel on two occasions, but said he had to stop due to lack of time. Boris Jordan, the American banker who devised the “loans against shares” system, replaced journalist Yevgeny Kiselev as NTV CEO. In a show of solidarity with Kiselev, NTV journalists occupied their premises, while two new demonstrations took place against what many understood as an attack on freedom of expression. Nevertheless, Mikhail Zygar noted that “only the somewhat older members of the intelligentsia” took part in these demonstrations, while “the middle class, young successful people, didn’t care about the fate of the channel”. They did not approve, but let it happen.
Alfred Koch met Viktor Shenderovich, a key figure at NTV. He was “correct and kind”, and assured him that he was “completely independent of the Kremlin” — which was not true. According to the journalist, Koch deplored the heated controversy, expressed his desire to be trusted, outlined his plans for the channel and proposed that Shenderovich took a part in it. The latter tried to explain the difference between their positions: “For you, it’s a business. For us, it’s about our reputation, and that’s all.” The journalist recalled that “something amazing happened then”. Koch, hearing the word “reputation”, switched to English: “Mother fucker! — he shouted — Reputation! Mother fucker!” Shenderovich concluded, “It seems I hadn’t said the right thing.”
On April 14, 2001, three days after this conversation, the new NTV management — Koch’s management, that is — moved in. At night. Koch recounted this episode in a very light-hearted way: “When our patience ran out […], we simply entered the company by night, having bought […] Gusinsky’s security service, and we began to run it”. Such procedures were not uncommon at that time, and in 2005 Koch still didn’t seem to grasp what they had opened the door to.
In addition to NTV, Gazprom restructured the Media-Most group: the newspaper Segodnia was no longer financed; the editorial staff of Itogui was thrown out and this magazine, published in collaboration with Newsweek, disappeared for good in 2014. Today, Shenderovich lives Poland, Koch in Germany, Kiselev in Ukraine (at least, before the 2022 aggression) and Vladimir Gusinky has long been living in Israel. Igor Malashenko committed suicide in 2019. Koch and Kisseliov cross paths, at least occasionally, at opposition forums.
Having played his part, Koch was fired from NTV in October 2001. According to Shenderovich, obtained, as a reward for his good work, a plot of land near St. Petersburg and abandoned the media for the construction and management of a commercial port.
In 2003, Alfred Koch set up his own company and explained that, as a service provider, he carried out “hostile takeovers”, taking over companies at the request of his clients. Claiming to be “a capitalist shark”, he claimed to have seized some thirty companies, including twenty-four belonging to Gusinsky, and thus presented the attack on NTV as an ordinary, legal and legitimate, action of capitalism, and not as an operation to stifle press freedom in Russia.
He went even further, claiming to have performed “a social task”. Indeed, for him, “the press” had “a serious impact on our freedoms”, and “it turned out that Mr. Gusinsky’s interpretation of freedom of expression was disturbing a lot of people”. He admitted, of course, that no one in the former Soviet Union really knew what freedom of expression meant, and he scoffed at the intelligentsia who claimed to appreciate it. A process had been set in motion, and not just by Koch: ironizing when some tried to defend democratic values. But this didn’t stop the former minister from asserting that he had “always considered [himself] to be profoundly democratic by nature”, and loved “all civil liberties”. Furthermore, he was “useful to the economy”: “For the economy, it’s preferable for companies to move from the weak to the strong.” This seemed to be his conception of the world: the law of the strongest.
That year, Alfred Koch headed the SPS [Union of Right Forces] campaign staff for the parliamentary elections and, together with Yuri Gladkov, headed the party’s list for St Petersburg. The elections took place just after Khodorkovsky’s arrest, to which SPS had hardly reacted, and Koch reportedly told journalist Elena Tregoubova that he was not bothered by this near-silence. SPS won 4.3% of the vote. Who wanted to fight for a “liberal” party whose candidates were involved in the destruction of Russian freedoms?
Koch’s political career was over.
In 2004-2005, he published several books of conversations with his friend, the journalist Igor Svinarenko, and these books provide valuable factual material for the study of Russia in the years 1989-2002. They are also useful for identifying certain psychological processes. One passage in the second volume is particularly striking. Rather childishly, Koch says he wants to go to Crimea: “It’s unfair! We conquered [Crimea] and the Ukraignos (khokhly) are using it. I want it to be ours.” Svinarenko comments, “You’re waiting for us to be given Crimea sooner or later.” And Koch continues: “I’m even ready to organize an invasion! If we conquer Crimea, what will be done to us? Nothing. I’m also in favor of justice. It doesn’t belong to the Ukraignos! Nikita [Khrushchev] gave it to them.” The same arguments that Putin will use from 2014 onwards… How does the self-proclaimed “democrat” differ from the autocrat he served?
Svinarenko suggested taking the case to an international tribunal, but Koch answered: “First you have to conquer [Crimea], then file a complaint. And by the time justice is done, Crimea will be ours. And everyone in Crimea will be happy. And we have to take Odessa at the same time.” He seemed convinced: “Crimea is ours, and we need it. Give it back to us. I’m all for justice.” It was also these expectations, Koch’s and others’, that Putin fulfilled, or believed he fulfilled, when he illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.
Yet Koch spoke of the Russian regime as a “dreadful Asian despotism”, and his assessment of Putin’s actions was negative in 2005: the president had only strengthened the “verticals” and lowered taxes. But what did the former minister do to change this situation?
Because he saw himself as an intellectual, he published other books. In one, co-authored in 2013 with the oligarch Pyotr Aven, they interviewed political figures involved in Gaidar’s reforms and attempted to understand how Russia had become what it now was. Elmar Mourtazayev, then first deputy editor-in-chief of Forbes Russia, remarked: “When you listen to the interviewees, you get the impression that they’ve all fought hard, refused to compromise… But when you look out of the window, you want to ask: if you’ve made so much effort, why is there this mess all around us?”
Yes, why?
Alfred Koch was spending more and more time in Germany, and in 2015 he settled there permanently. Should we speak of a “return to the historical homeland”, to use the Soviet and Russian formulation? Of a flight from what was happening in Russia since the annexation of Crimea? Of a more prosaic flight? Koch was under indictment at the time: he had been accused of smuggling into Germany a painting, the value of which was disputed by Russian customs. This was a warning.
The man who privatized Russia opened a small real estate and construction business in Bavaria. And, in August 2015, to celebrate Ukrainian Independence Day, he laid flowers on Stepan Bandera’s grave, as if in a final, rather futile provocation.
Alfred Koch is now a regular speaker at the “Free Russia Forums”, that are organized by Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Vilnius, and that Navalny’s supporters did not attend in 2021 and 2022. He is also invited by Russian-speaking opposition media, which sometimes provokes indignant reactions from those who remember his role in the Media-Most destruction. If a real union of Russian opponents seems so difficult in today’s diaspora, it’s also because some unspoken of ghosts haunt the last thirty years and raw wounds remain.
Yes, from Bavaria, Koch criticizes Russia’s war against Ukraine on an almost daily basis. Has he changed? No doubt. As so many have changed, one way or another. It can even be a game: take a look, for example, at what the incarnations of perestroika (Alexander Jakovlev, Vitali Korotich, etc.) were writing before perestroika. Their “before” words could often be published in today’s Russia, and perhaps they’ve come back because one thing and its opposite were said by the same people, at different times, as if words had no value.
On the other hand, the consequences of what Koch did in the early 2000s are before our very eyes.
As for Anatoly Chubais, he left Russia shortly after the attack on Ukraine began. He and his wife are said to have taken Israeli citizenship.
To follow in the next issue…
]]>After the success of the 1996 presidential campaign, the FEP (Fund for Effective Politics, see previous episode) continued to work for “the Kremlin” or, to be more precise, with the Presidential Administration where, as early as 1996, people close to Yeltsin were preparing for the 2000 election1. According to Gleb Pavlovsky, this team included Valentin Yumashev, Mikhail Lesin, Igor Malashenko and Anatoly Chubais, who had initiated the project. They did not talk (yet) about a “successor”, but about “strengthening power”: “How, after Yeltsin, can we re-establish a strong, reasonable power?”2 Between 1996 and 1999, the FEP and Alexander Oslon’s “Public Opinion Fund” formed a kind of tandem “with the mission of creating a strong power”3. Pavlovsky had already defined as one of his major goals the “vertical of power” — the concept that Putin would promote even before his first election — and the “political-technologist” would therefore claim, that “Putinism was beginning”, even though Putin was not yet in the game4.
In 1998, the FEP was occupying a few floors in a huge building on Moscow’s Zubovsky Boulevard, where the press agency Novosti had been in Soviet times and where Putin’s propaganda agency, Russia Today, is now located. Every Friday, Pavlovsky attended a meeting at the Presidential Administration, where he and Oslon usually presented an update on the evolution of public opinion over the past week. Putin, who was briefly appointed number two in the Presidential Administration in May 1998, before taking over the FSB, attended some of these meetings, and it was then that Pavlovsky actually met him.
Pavlovsky will recall that the new Prime Minister, Sergey Kirienko, “had achieved 20% of the voting intentions for the presidential elections within six months”: “This meant that, if we added another 30% with a strong pre-election campaign, we’d have the President of Russia!” Such was the level of political thinking. Marketing, devoid of any debate on ideas, to launch a president like a washing powder. Pavlovsky will confirm:
“This is how we saw the pattern of future elections: the president appoints a Prime Minister [presented as his] successor, this successor attracts 20-25% of the electorate, those who like people in power, and a brilliant media campaign adds the rest.”
But Yevgeny Primakov, who was not “their” candidate, was appointed Prime Minister in September 1998, decided to use this scheme and quickly achieved a significant percentage of voting intentions. However, after the financial crisis of August 1998, Yeltsin decided that the next candidate would be a “strong man in uniform” or, more accurately, a “man in uniform, close to the intelligentsia (intelligentnyï silovik)”. Evgeny Primakov fitted the bill, and his case was “often analyzed during brain-storming sessions”. In January 1999, two models of potential candidates remained on the table: a “young reformer” like Boris Nemtsov or a “man in uniform, close to the intelligentsia”5.
Pavlovsky, as he explained, was ready to lead the campaign of anyone chosen by Yeltsin and his inner circle. He was convinced he could get anyone elected, in particular by playing on people’s fears. He was ready to justify almost anything, and admitted, that he even suggested imposing a kind of state of war, that would give the government dictatorial powers. Pavlovsky was not a democrat. And, in the spring of 1999, a poll showed which audiovisual hero Russian citizens would like to see in the presidential chair: Stirlitz, a Soviet secret agent who had infiltrated the Nazi high command6. It was then, it seems, that Putin was definitively chosen as Yeltsin’s successor7, from among twenty candidates whom Yeltsin said he interviewed8 during a kind of “casting” — this very word was used.
Aleksandr Voloshin, the new head of the Presidential Administration, received the task to subdue Primakov, and was helped by Vladislav Surkov: they convinced the Duma to appoint Sergey Stepashin Prime Minister in May 1999. The Presidential Administration had already asked Gleb Pavlovsky to assist in building a new pro-government party and designing a campaign that would blacken the Kremlin’s opponents. Pavlovsky suggested, among other ideas, that Yeltsin should leave before the end of his term of office, and this decision too was taken, according to him, in the spring of 1999: Yeltsin’s resignation would be “a highlight in the scenario”, Pavlovsky recalled9. The term is significant: it’s all about writing scenarios, narratives. A form of sub-literature.
Still elaborating narratives, Pavlovsky decided to use Stirlitz’s model to create Putin’s image as a presidential candidate. This was made all the easier by the fact that, as the academic Karen Dawisha revealed, Putin had, as early as 1992, influenced a documentary made about him by Igor Shadkhan, so that this film would associate the (ex-)chekist with Stirlitz: the two agents were supposed to have sacrificed their personal lives to protect the fatherland10.
Putin was appointed Prime Minister on August 9, 1999, and his poll rating was then 2%: nobody knew him. Pavlovsky admitted to having initially considered him “only as the central figure in the scenario” and having thought that the new Prime Minister “didn’t seem the best choice for the lead role”11. Here again, this communicator spoke as a scriptwriter. The Prime Minister’s popularity began to rise on September 9, when a building exploded in Moscow, leading — it was the Kremlin’s decision — to the resumption of the war in Chechnya. At the same time, Pavlovsky stepped up the number of meetings between Putin and “opinion leaders”: from Internet entrepreneurs, to win over the new generation, to members of the PEN Club, to seduce intellectuals. As a result, by the end of November 1999, everyone in the Presidential Administration was convinced that Putin would be elected President. However, they had doubts about the success that the new “power party”, Unity (Edinstvo), created by Surkov with Pavlovsky’s help, could obtain in the parliamentary elections12.
Gleb Pavlovsky in 2007. Photo : Dmitry Borko
For these December 19 parliamentary elections, Pavlovsky remained faithful to some of his 1996 methods, notably the defamation of opponents. Thus, Primakov and his ally Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, created an electoral bloc Fatherland - All Russia (Отечество - Вся Россия) whose initials are OVR. So, before the parliamentary elections, the FEP set up a website with the name OVG, which sounded a lot like OVR, and published “suspicions” about Luzhkov: that he was involved in murders and corruption, and had links with the criminal underworld. Duped, the media use this site as a source. Pavlovsky also had the idea of circumventing the law prohibiting the announcement of exit poll results on election day, a law that did not explicitly cover the Internet. He set up a website to publish the results in real time, so that Unity’s victory was announced even before the polls closed, with “victory hysteria” spreading across the country in a matter of hours.
Putin’s popularity rating was already 45%.
Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, which, according to Pavlovsky, had the effect of destabilizing his rivals and creating a “feeling of victory before the elections” among Russians. A complete renewal seemed possible.
Putin’s presidential campaign was run by two parallel staffs. Officially, it was led by Dmitri Medvedev, who had been based for several months in the luxurious Alexander House on Bolshaïa Yakimanka Street. But another team took the main decisions: based in the Kremlin, it met four evenings a week. Vladislav Surkov, number two in the Presidential Administration, took part in these meetings, as did Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana Diachenko, Igor Sechin, who had worked closely with Putin in the Leningrad Town office, Djakhan Pollyïeva, the head of the “speechwriters” team, and Gleb Pavlovsky, now considered as the Kremlin’s “image maker”. According to Pavlovsky, his own concepts — the “dictatorship of law” and the “vertical of power” — were then incorporated into Putin’s speeches.
Pavlovsky admitted that he then felt a kind of nostalgia for the USSR, a feeling he shared with Putin, albeit for slightly different reasons, as Krastev noted. Both men felt the same “indignation at the country’s weakness”, dreamed of “revenge” and considered that Russia’s development could not be reduced to “imitating the West”13. Beyond personal ambitions, their ties were also ideological.
On March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia in the first round, with 52.9% of the vote. Vitali Mansky’s film, Putin’s Witnesses, shows images of this victory. That evening, they were all present at the campaign headquarters: the candidate and his wife, Dmitri Medvedev, Vladislav Surkov, Anatoly Chubais, Gleb Pavlovsky in his apple-green jacket — he was then, commented Mansky, “the country’s leading political consultant” —, Valentin Yumachev, Mikhail Kasyanov, who would become Prime Minister during Putin’s first term and has since emigrated, Mikhail Lesin, etc. Each of them pronounced a toast, as the crowd gathered around a table. Surkov’s toast was “For the sacralization of power”, and Pavlovsky admitted he was a little embarrassed by this, even though, he added, he shared this “cult of power”14. In fact, he recognized that the aim of his campaign was to revive among the Russian people “the habit of worshipping their national leaders”, a habit lost since the late 1980s15.
Mansky’s film also shows Boris Nemtsov. Interviewed on television, Nemtsov pointed out that no one knew Vladimir Putin’s program: “We voted with our hearts, without knowing what will happen to us tomorrow.” The politician was assassinated at the foot of the Kremlin on February 27, 2015, while opposing the war against Ukraine.
As Pavlovsky recalled, he was, after the presidential election, “a well-known media figure”, but also a model of success and “an icon of style”: cab drivers refused to charge him and young elites awaited his analyses. He was seen — by strange comparisons — “either as the Clausewitz or the James Bond of the new regime”16. He remained director of the FEP and political marketing advisor to the Presidential Administration, with Surkov overseeing all such experts. In 2018, Pavlovsky still considered that “the beginning of the Putin presidency was excellent”: there had been many reforms — which is not untrue —, Russia has regained its place on the world stage, and the risks of a “second Yugoslavia” had faded17.
Among other things, Pavlovsky helped create the Doctrine of Informational Security, which, drawn up by the Security Council under the direction of KGB General Sergei Ivanov, defined the “indispensable limitations” that had, supposedly, to be placed on the circulation of certain information. Signed by Putin on September 9, 2000, it provided for the strengthening of government media and for an increased state involvement in television and radio strategy. The bill was implemented, and Pavlovsky even justified the attacks on the media after the election:
“It’s unpleasant to remember, but at the time, I was convinced that Putin was obliged to sacrifice certain members of the old elites, in order to free the new power from the sins committed in the 1990s. I felt that the Kremlin needed its ‘XXth Congress’: to punish a few sinners and mark a clear separation between the old State and the new one.”
Gleb Pavlovsky in 2021 // His Facebook page
He even suggested that this separation between the two eras be marked by attacks “on one or two oligarchs”. And, he admitted, everyone understood that the people to be “sacrificed” were “Gusinsky and, after him, Berezovsky”, the owners of the country’s main media18, even though Berezovsky’s had played a major role in bringing Putin to the presidency.
Ten days after the signing of this doctrine, Putin paid a visit to the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and François Bonnet noted in Le Monde that Gleb Pavlovsky, the new president’s “image advisor”, had organized “this fine public relations operation”. According to the “polit-technologist”, “the fact that [Putin] belonged to the KGB, while he was a dissident, [was] not an obstacle: they don’t live in the past and have subjects to discuss”. The pictures are actually terrible, painful. At 82, the man who made the world aware of Soviet repression was physically very diminished, emaciated, sitting in a wheelchair. With what appeared to be an admiring expression, he looked up to the standing President, who, surrounded by his bodyguards, seemed all the more youthful and athletic. Putin seemed to beneficiate from an image of a reconciliation that could not be real without a serious debate on the past. Especially since, according to rumors reported by former minister Alfred Kokh, the writer actually received Putin “rather curtly” and “practically refused to speak with him”: “They discussed general themes on camera, and that was that.” And Solzhenitsyn was said “not to have reacted to the proposal of visiting Putin himself”19.
This visit was a propaganda/communication operation, and pictures can be misleading. But Pavlovsky seemed to be closing one of his personal circle: he betrayed some of his friends to the KGB, after the seizure of a samizdat copy of The Gulag Archipelago; in 2000, he appeared to be handing the very author of this text over to a KGB officer.
Natalie Nougayrède published a portrait in Le Monde on December 2, 2001, and the title speaks for itself: “Gleb Pavlovsky, the great manipulator”. She noted that the FEP was now based at the Alexander House, a luxurious mansion where, in the entrance, “a gilded plaque reads, as if it were a historical monument: ‘This was the headquarters of Vladimir Putin’s election campaign in 2000’“. Pavlovsky, “pudgy”, “wearing a heavy sweater, with professor’s glasses perched on the tip of his nose”, was “said to be Vladimir Putin’s great image manipulator, the man who [designed] the new power’s communication campaigns”. He was getting ready to give a series of lectures at Oxford and had just organized “a kind of forum at the Kremlin for representatives of several hundred Russian associations”, with the aim of “consolidating the ‘dialogue between power and society’“: “In fact, for Gleb Pavlovsky, Russian society is a kind of malleable material that needs to be worked on to bring about ‘a democratic and national Russia, in the civic sense of the term, which is Putin’s great task’”.
Already, the journalist spotted the main problem: “Democracy, but steered from above?” She was not fooled:
“In a way, this laid-back character, not devoid of charm, embodies, paradoxically, the coldest, most analytical approach there can be to politics in Russia, ten years after the great historical upheavals: not a debate on values after emerging from totalitarianism, but a technique for ‘achieving goals’.”
She also noted that he loved “conspiracy theories” and had used smear campaigns, “scandalous revelations” and kompromats. The fact that Russia was now “run by a Chekist” didn’t “bother him in the least”: “This is not the time to dig into the past, to demand accountability.” He even admitted having “always been in favor […] of establishing contact with the KGB”, and having considered that “the KGB was the most informed structure, the most able to influence things”. Another circle had been completed: the KGB was in power, including thanks to Gleb Pavlovsky, who had negotiated with this structure as early as the 1970s and 1980s.
However, the changes in political communication did not please everyone, and Marat Gelman, one of the founders of the FEP, left the organization in April 2002, complaining that the Kremlin was now the sole political player: “Candidates will no longer fight for voters in public, but, for example, in Vladislav Surkov’s office.”20 Another reason could also explain this departure: a conflict with Pavlovsky following the failed campaign for the Ukrainian parliamentary elections held on March 31, 2002. Yes, the FEP also worked on Ukrainian events. In this case, it collaborated with the party of Victor Medvedchuk, a close associate of Putin and the former KGB, but, because his Ukrainian partners didn’t follow Moscow’s recommendations, Pavlovsky left and it was Gelman, based in Kiev, who ran the campaign “alone, without Gleb”. The campaign was a failure, and Medvedchuk’s party’s poor results were said to have irritated the Russian Presidential Administration, the “main sponsor” of this collaboration21.
New parliamentary elections were held in Russia at the end of 2003, “the last ones to be partly free, but with television already under control”, admitted Pavlovsky. The main objective was to break up “the last ‘non-Putinist’ force” — Zyuganov’s Communist Party — and win back its electorate for United Russia. The goal was achieved, and since then the Russian Communist Party has been “serving the Kremlin’s objectives”22. However, Pavlovsky would later regret having contributed to the destruction of an independent Communist Party, and admitted that “there was no need for it”, since “nothing threatened Putin”23.
Unsurprisingly, Putin was re-elected president in March 2004. His victory was so certain that he never even visited his headquarters during the campaign.
September began with Beslan and continued with the liberticidal reforms announced by Putin on September 13. Three days later, “analysts close to the Kremlin” — including Gleb Pavlovsky, of course — held a press conference to respond to Western criticism of Russia’s authoritarian drift. Alongside Pavlovsky, Sergei Markov, also close to the Kremlin, assured that “everything [was] happening within the framework of the Constitution”, but conceded that “Russia [was] not a total democracy”. Le Monde noted, however, that in Russia “few voices [were] raised to criticize the political measures taken by Mr. Putin” and that a demonstration organized in Moscow had “mobilized only about forty people”.
Some Russians will regret bitterly this passivity after February 24, 2022.
At the end of 2004, Pavlovsky was working on the Ukrainian presidential election, heading a team that included Sergei Markov: their task was to get Yanukovych elected against Yushchenko. Pavlovsky would later claim that he had not been Yanukovych’s advisor, but had merely been tasked with ensuring that a “dogma” would be respected: “Putin’s support is the condition for the candidate’s victory in the Ukrainian presidential election.”24 And Putin supported Yanukovych. Boris Nemtsov, on the other hand, was advising Yushchenko pro bono.
The battle between the two candidates was a knife fight. Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, and even Pavlovsky later admitted that after this poisoning attempt, fear set in: this was no longer a game between “political-technologists”, but a fight in which one could kill25. And yet, in the midst of the Orange Revolution, Pavlovsky mocked Yushchenko’s “paranoia” and claimed that the candidate only had a “very severe form of herpes”26. During the campaign, Pavlovsky also disseminated “in the Russian media - very popular in the Eastern regions of Ukraine […] — the image of an opposition ready to sow chaos in the country”. In an interview with Vladimir Solovyov, he even implicitly compared Yushchenko to Hitler and refered to “a rather repulsive ideology, which is really frightening”. He also claimed that an attack by the West on Russia was happening in Ukraine, and that it was a sign of the West’s desire to test “revolutionary technologies” destined for Russia27. In short, as early as 2004, Pavlovsky formulated some of the arguments with which the Kremlin, eighteen years later, would attempt to justify its military attack on Ukraine. So it did not matter if some people accused him — and still do, but without proof — of having misappropriated part of the budget allocated to his team’s work in Ukraine…
Gleb Pavlovsky in 2021 // His Facebook page
Yushchenko was elected, thanks to the support of thousands of Ukrainians who took to the streets to contest the election falsifications. Pavlovsky later claimed to have had disagreements with Putin over this Orange Revolution: “I considered that we had lost and that we had come up against a revolt of the apparatus and the cities, an unidentified revolution of a new type. He felt that we had allowed an American plot to take place in Kiev.” But the former Odessite also thought that Russia was next on the list, and that it was therefore necessary to “build a bloc of opposition to revolutions”28. Indeed, as soon as he returned from Ukraine, Pavlovsky was “all over the Russian media, warning of the risk of contagion of the Ukrainian scenario”, and calling on the authorities to “take ‘preventive measures’” against opponents who were trying to unite. But here again, noted Le Monde, Russian opinion remained “largely apathetic to the measures implemented by President Putin”.
On the other hand, when President George Bush met Putin in Bratislava in February 2005, he expressed concern about Russia’s authoritarian evolution. Putin defended himself, but at the same time, in Moscow, his former Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, also denounced violations of democratic values in Russia. Who was the first to speak out? Gleb Pavlovsky. On Russia’s public television channel Rossia, he claimed that Mr. Kasyanov’s statements were “part of an American maneuver to weaken Mr. Putin”. How convenient.
Gleb Pavlovsky continued to proclaim “the need to fight the revolutionary virus with strong methods”, and the FEP became, as Zygar wrote, Surkov’s “main think-tank” for combating social unrest. In particular, Pavlovsky helped create the Nashi [a pro-Kremlin youth movement], and in July 2005 he told these young people gathered on the shores of Lake Seliguer:
“European civilization is so constructed that it continually needs an enemy […]. Objectively speaking, the Russians are today the main pariahs for the West, even if we behave very well. The Russians are the Jews of the 21st century, and we have to take that into account.”29
Here again, such arguments will be of great use during the Russian attack on Ukraine. As have been the affirmation that Russia is surrounded by enemies.
Between autumn 2005 and spring 2008, Pavlovsky even had his own political program: “Real Politics” (or “Realpolitik”), scheduled on NTV channel every Sunday in prime time. In Zygar’s words, he was “Surkov’s main full-time propagandist”, something Pavlovsky claimed to regret. Many have not forgotten, however, and in August 2022, in the midst of the war, a Ukrainian FB-user reminded him:
“I remember your speech on Russian television in 2005. You said that Putin was ‘the way’ (Путин, это путь.). I was visiting Moscow at the time and was very impressed. Since then, you should have kept your mouth shut forever. And even more so when it comes to Ukraine after 2004 and the activities you had there.”
But the fight against possible Orange revolutions was a career gas pedal, as Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev noted in an article in November 2005: “The ‘loss of Kiev’ propelled men like Gleb Pavlovsky, for example, into the upper echelons where Russian foreign policy is shaped”. Although “Pavlovsky and his colleagues are hated and mocked by liberal circles in Moscow”, their ideas “are at the heart of the ‘post-orange’ consensus currently at work in Russia”. Krastev called on the West to take these men seriously:
“They are anti-Western Westernized, former liberals, anti-communists, imperialists. They sincerely believe in the virtues and future of ‘managed democracy’, a subtle blend of soft repression and hard manipulation. Most of them know the West well and draw inspiration from it. Their vision of politics is totally elitist: it’s a strange combination of French postmodernism, dissident mannerism, KGB-style dirty tricks and post-Soviet cynicism, all mixed up with very business-like efficiency and traditional Russian grandiloquence. They embody the new generation of empire builders.”
It could not be better said.
With this in mind, Gleb Pavlovsky founded Evropa (Europe) Publishing House in 2005, along with two of his colleagues, the “polit-technologist” Modest Kolerov and the architect Vyacheslav Glazytchev. In June 2007, this publishing house published The Plan of President Putin, a collection of the eight annual speeches Putin had adressed to the Federal Assembly, with an introduction by United Russia’s number one. Another book, also in 2007, entitled Putin’s Enemies, focused on Russia’s seven “internal enemies”: the three oligarchs Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and four political opponents — Garry Kasparov, Eduard Limonov, Mikhail Kasyanov and Andrey Illarionov. They were “absolute nobodies, compared to the one they’re taking a stand against. Compared to Vladimir Putin”30. Yet Pavlovsky knew most of them personally, in some cases since the 1980s. An appendix added names to the previous seven: Leonid Nevzlin, dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov, political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky and journalist Evgenia Albats.
This kind of book revived the image of the enemy, both internal and external, divided society, fed the cult of personality and spread the idea that some people rejoiced in Russia’s failures. It thus implicitly justified political repression.
Other books — history textbooks, in fact — were launched in 2007 and caused a scandal because, de facto, they rehabilitated Stalin and justified the purges. The first book, signed by a certain Alexander Filippov, was aimed at teachers and entitled Russia’s contemporary History. 1945-2006. It was quickly adapted for other periods of the 20th century and other audiences. However, Alexander Filippov had a specific profile: although he had completed history studies in 1984, he had joined in 2001 Gleb Pavlovsky’s FEP and had become deputy director of a pro-Kremlin Moscow think tank, linked to the FEP and headed by Nikita Ivanov: the son of KGB general Ivanov. What’s more, at least one of the six authors, thanked by Alexander Filippov, Pavel Danilin, also collaborated with the FEP and was the editor of the Kremlin.org website and one of the authors of the book Putin’s Enemies. According to numerous sources, Filippov’s manual had been “commissioned directly by the Russian Presidential Administration”, which gave precise instructions on the content to be developed. Surkov’s influence is very much in evidence: the manual repeats, almost word for word, some of his public statements.
Still an “ultra-Putinist” in his own words, Pavlovsky claimed in 2008 that he was opposed to the idea of Putin leaving power. He admitted that he could not imagine “the Putin regime without Putin”31. When the decision was taken to elect Medvedev president, Pavlovsky still suggested that Putin should be Prime Minister, defense minister and foreign minister all at the same time. “All of them”, according to him, were then convinced by what Vyacheslav Volodin, Duma chairman since 2016, would formulate in 2014 and again in 2017: “If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.”
Pavlovsky was astonished by Medvedev’s easy election. He was then decorated for his “services to the Fatherland”, but was no longer considered by the Kremlin as its main “polit-technologist”32. Nonetheless, he remained one of the presidential administration’s consultants and — oops, a jacket turned inside out! — he said he had understood by 2009 that “Putinism is not just Putin”33. During the winter of 2010-2011, he also noticed that Putin and Medvedev were no longer talking to each other. Intrigues multiplied and rumors spread. Pavlovsky now publicly maintained that Putin’s return to the presidency would be a bad idea.
The reaction was swift: on April 21, 2011, when the political scientist arrived as usual at one of the Kremlin gates, his pass no longer worked. The FEP was closed in May 2011 and its staff dismissed: the Presidential Administration had broken its contract. Pavlovsky was a little disoriented to find himself suddenly without a job. Especially since, as Marat Gelman would say: “There’s nothing to be proud of. […] In fact, nothing worked.”34 Pavlovsky maintained that he and his “friends” aspired to the “resurrection of a great State”: “Not a totalitarian State, of course, but a State that could be respected.”35 The war against Ukraine demonstrates, if proofs were needed, that the current Russian state cannot be.
After his dismissal, Pavlovsky continued to work as a consultant, notably for Mikhail Prokhorov, who ran for president in 2012. A spectacular, and double, evolution was taking place. Not only Pavlovsky was becoming increasingly critical of Russian authorities — and he knew what obscure formulations to use, so as to claim that, even if he was wrong in the past, he wasn’t really wrong — but he was also increasingly seen in Russia as an opponent. As a result, he was regularly interviewed on non-governmental channels. As if the recent past didn’t exist. As if it didn’t matter. As if reputation didn’t exist “as an institution”, a phrase often repeated in Russia. As if successive betrayals and compromises weren’t of the slightest importance. Which is a little chilling.
Certainly, in March 2014, Pavlovsky criticized Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in Ukraine, and he noted that the Russian president had “violated several international status quos”. He already understood that this would lead “to war, even if war [was] not in the plans”. Indeed, he understood that the Kremlin’s attitude was worrying several of its allies, starting with Kazakhstan and Belarus, and that Russia had just destroyed “all [its] communication and image progress of the last fifteen years”. Nevertheless, he too spoke out against Western sanctions, and called on Europe to intensify “political dialogue” between leaders.
In November 2018, interviewed by Zhanna Nemtsova on Deutsche Welle, Pavlovsky admitted to having been “politically in love with Putin”, ever since the 2000 election: “I became someone who wanted to strengthen his revered president ever more.” In this interview, he stated that he was “not sorry” to have been “one of the builders of Putinism” — although he apparently said the opposite earlier — and that he believed that this system would survive Putin and several perestroikas. The former “polit-technologist” was therefore “on the whole satisfied”, even if he had “committed some very bad deeds”, and he deplored the fact that “a group of self-interested bastards” had taken over the state system. In his view, Putin did not “run the country”, but delegated “his powers as president to a small group of people”:
“When we say ‘Putin did this’, we’re talking about Sechin, the Kovalchuk brothers, Rotenberg, the cook Prigozhin. Of course, the heads of the presidential administration, Vaino and Kirienko. They are destroying my state. That it still supports their policies is proof of the quality of our past work, but it’s hard for it to bear.”
Blindness, real or feigned, remained total.
From then on, Pavlovsky multiplied texts and interviews, denouncing misinterpretations, his own and some of others. Bingeing on long sentences and ill-defined concepts, he pretended to explain Putin’s perceptions. But journalists continued to interview him, as if he were particularly capable of understanding and explaining this “system” he had helped to create, and that seemed to have escaped him. And it wasn’t until 2021 that his discourse again became of real interest: in June, in an interview with Evgenia Albats — whom he had listed among Russia’s “enemies” in 2007 — he declared that he could no longer see “any scenario that would not end in a major war”, even if it wouldn’t be “World War III”. He had no doubt: “We’re heading for war, and this war will break out before the new presidential elections.”
Was it a hunch? Tips from on high? Excellent political acumen combined with an intimate understanding of the logic of the “system”? Or, more pragmatically, an attempt to influence Western countries?
Pavlovsky repeated it again, and again: Russia had reached an impasse, and there would be another war. This one, a “death trap for Russia”, would initially be “indistinguishable from an ordinary special operation”: “It will be a decision to protect something nobody needs — either trampled values, or the Donbass.” In fact, this is what happened from February 2022 onwards. Pavlovsky was the only one, it seems, to warn against a full-scale war, although for years he had cultivated this image of the “enemy”, which, as he finally admitted, was a constitutive element of the logic leading to war.
On February 22, 2022, he spoke on Ekho Moskvy radio, and his interview was announced on social networks as follows: “Prepare yourselves to lose the war”. The Russian attack on Ukraine took place less than 48 hours later. On April 5, 2022, Pavlovsky told RFE/RL’s Georgian service that the decision to invade Ukraine made “no political sense” and could only have been taken by Putin: “We underestimated the extent of decay of the Russian government.” Recalling his time working for the Presidential Administration, he expressed certain regrets:
What I regret is that I switched off my brain as an analyst during that time and, in a way, donated my brain to ‘Kremlin and Putin franchising,’” he explained. “Now I realize that I should have had a wider perspective of things, that I should have recognized the features of the system that we were building.
The price of this blindness can now be counted in tens of thousands of human lives.
To be followed…
EIDMAN Igor, Das System Putin. Wohin steuert das neue russische Reich?, München, Ludwig, 2016, p. 66. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, Eksperimentalnaïa rodina. Razgovor s Glebom Pavlovskym, Moskva, Evropa Publishing, 2018. Bookmate, p. 65 / 222. ↩
Ibid., p. 183 / 222. ↩
Ibid., p. 188 / 222. ↩
Ibid. p. 70-71 / 222. ↩
See : VAISSIÉ Cécile, “False Nazis and True Chekists, Treacherous Allies and Close Enemies: The Soviet Series Seventeen Moments of Spring”, MAGUIRE Lori (ed), The Cold War and Entertainment Television, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, p.107-120. ↩
In fact, this confirms what was observed in the case of Nikita Mikhalkov. It was towards the end of May 1999 that he understood that he would not be a candidate in the Russian presidential elections. See : VAISSIÉ Cécile, Le Clan Mikhalkov. Culture et pouvoirs en Russie (1917-2017), Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019, chapter 8. ↩
Film by Vitali Mansky, Putin’s Witnesses, 2018. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 68-69 / 222. ↩
DAWISHA Karen, Putin’s Kleptocracy. Who owns Russia?, New York, etc., Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014, p. 203-204. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 74 / 222. ↩
See the 1999 campaign clip. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 9-10/222. ↩
Ibid., p. 84 / 222. ↩
DAWISHA Karen, op. cit. p. 261. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 195 / 222. ↩
Ibid., p. 84 / 222. ↩
Ibid., p.85 / 222. BEKBOULATOVA Taisiïa, “Dissident, kotoryï stal ideologom Poutina”, Meduza, July 9, 2018. ↩
Kokh Alfred & SVINARENKO Igor, Iachtchik vodki, Tom 3, Moskva, Eksmo, 2004, p.155. ↩
BEKBOULATOVA Taisiïa, op. cit. ↩
Ibid. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 88 / 222. ↩
BEKBOULATOVA Taisiïa, op. cit. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 200-201 / 222. ↩
ZYGAR Mikhail, Vsia Kremlevskaïa rat’. Kratkaïa istoriïa sovremennoï Rossii, Moskva, OOO Intellektual’naïa literatoura, 2016, p. 114. ↩
(Interview with Gleb Pavlovskyj), SOLOVIEV Vladimir, Russkaïa ruletka. Zametki na polakh noveïcheï istorii, Moskva, Eksmo, 2006, p. 510-511. ↩
SOLOVIEV Vladimir, op. cit. p. 511, p. 513, p. 516. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 88-89 / 222. ↩
ZYGAR Mikhail, op. cit. p. 123-124. ↩
DANILIN Pavel, KRYCHTAL’ Natalia, POLJAKOV Dmitri, Vragui Poutina, Moskva, Evropa, 2007, p. 11. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p. 90-91 / 222. ↩
BEKBOULATOVA Taisiïa, op. cit. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p.91 / 222. ↩
BEKBOULATOVA Taisiïa, op. cit. ↩
DAWISHA Karen, op. cit. p. 34. ↩
However, concern to give Ukraine the means to wage this war must not be a pretext for overshadowing the higher part of the strategy, i.e. the political aims of the conflict: the full independence of Ukraine and the restoration of its territorial integrity, in a united and free Europe. Over and above the strength of our armed forces and the success of our military operations, such a goal implies the integration of Ukraine into Euro-Atlantic bodies: NATO and the European Union are the two pillars on which the freedom, prosperity, and security of Europe rest, from the Atlantic to the Don basin (the Tanais of the Ancients).
Despite some people’s hopes of using the European Political Community (EPC) as a way out, Ukraine’s application to join the European Union is now official (Brussels European Council, June 24, 2022). The question of joining NATO remains unresolved. At the Atlantic Summit in Bucharest (April 2-4, 2008), France and Germany turned down applications from Ukraine and Georgia, which were supported by the United States and several Central and Eastern European countries. Failing that, NATO reiterated its open-door policy, but without setting a deadline for the two candidates (see Article 23 of the Bucharest Declaration).
The concern of Paris, Berlin and a few other European capitals was not to upset Vladimir Putin, who, since his speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007, had been openly displaying his anti-Western geopolitical project. This policy of appeasement, or “accommodation”, was a failure. After Bucharest, the master of the Kremlin felt he had the green light to mistreat Ukraine and Georgia, which remained in a dangerous gray zone (Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not cover them).
In August 2008, Russia attacked Georgia, depriving it of one-fifth of its territory and, ultimately, of a system of government genuinely free to make its own external choices. In February 2014, it was the start of a long war in Ukraine, to which the offensive of February 24, 2022 gives a new dimension (from hybrid warfare to high-intensity warfare). In the meantime, Russia conducted coercive diplomacy, decreed several energy embargoes, instrumentalized the Party of Regions, and infiltrated the Ukrainian state and its security forces, which explains the lack of reaction when Crimea was seized manu militari (the Ukrainian army took over the Donbas).
At the time, Ukraine withdrew its application to join NATO, positioning itself as a “non-aligned state” (2010). On the other hand, it remained committed to the European Union, within the framework of the Eastern Partnership, with a free trade and association agreement on the horizon. This was the starting point for an economic war waged by Russia from the summer of 2013, a conflict followed by a real war that started at the beginning of the following year, after the fall of Viktor Yanukovych (February 22, 2014). At the time, however, there was no question of Ukraine joining NATO.
In fact, neutrality and non-alignment, presented by the diplomats of the main European countries as a “wild card”, proved illusory. This solution was based on the false idea that Russia’s strategy in Ukraine, and in what Moscow considers its “near abroad”, had only negative aims: to counter NATO and prevent Ukraine from turning toward the West. However, its goals were primarily positive: to regain control of Ukraine and, through the Eurasian Union, reconstitute the Soviet geopolitical envelope (the USSR, without the Communist utopia). The goal is not one of middle ground, but of possession.
Yet some insist on explaining Russian aggression in Ukraine by the latter’s application to join NATO. It doesn’t matter that it was raised four years before the start of the war; the mere fact of having thought of it would constitute a kind of original sin. And point 23 of the Bucharest Declaration - i.e. Ukraine’s theoretical vocation to join NATO but the indefinite postponement of its application - would be the worst kind of compromise. In fact, the Allies had merely reaffirmed the validity of Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO is in principle open to all European countries).
Since the extension of the sphere of warfare from February 24, 2022, Ukraine and its de facto allies have been searching for a politico-diplomatic “formula.” After briefly exploring the possibility of a neutral status, albeit with more substantial security guarantees than the Budapest Memorandum (1994), President Zelenski and his government have renewed their application for NATO membership. This position is far more logical and coherent.
Le président Leonid Koutchma et le secrétaire général Javier Solana signent une Charte de partenariat spécifique entre l’Ukraine et l’OTAN au sommet de Madrid le 9 juillet 1997 // nato.int
NATO is still hesitating, and with only a few weeks to go before the Vilnius summit (July 11-12, 2023), the Allies have not yet reached agreement. The Baltics and Poland are the most enthusiastic. They support Ukraine’s accession, not in the midst of the war, but once it’s over. The French and Germans are more reserved, believing that it would be possible to negotiate a third solution, within the framework of an elusive “pan-European defense architecture.” The Biden Administration says it is concentrating on providing military support to Ukraine and ensuring that the counter-offensive goes smoothly (it’s putting resources into it).
For the time being, various alternatives to NATO are being discussed. According to some analyses, an accelerated accession to the European Union would ensure Ukraine’s security. True, the Lisbon Treaty introduced a mutual defense clause, but this vast, cowardly pan-European commonwealth lacks the substance, the will, and the military means to protect Ukraine from future aggression by the Russian armed forces, after a more or less lengthy strategic pause. In such a scenario, since most EU member states are also members of NATO, it would be hard to imagine the latter not becoming involved in a new war in the heart of Europe.
Another geopolitical scenario is to imagine the formation of a coalition of the willing (“like-minded countries”) that would bring together some of NATO’s member states, hypothetically reinforced by allies from the Asia-Pacific region. But doesn’t this exercise miss the point, namely the actual content of the security guarantees they would have to provide to Ukraine?
Even if NATO as such is not officially involved, several of its members will be, and this is likely to be the case in the event of Russian aggression. Unless, of course, a coalition of the willing is a roundabout way of providing security guarantees that fall short of the North Atlantic Treaty’s mutual defense clause: political, diplomatic, and financial support, arms supplies and military advice, but without the promise of direct intervention, as in the case of the alliance between the USA and Israel (which has no “Article 5”).
This would more or less perpetuate the current situation, with Ukraine as a second-tier ally outside NATO. But it is hard to see how such a status would be compatible with full membership of the European Union, since the defense of the vast majority of its members, especially those most exposed geographically, is organized and assured within the framework of NATO.
On the other hand, the ambiguity of Ukraine’s politico-military status could once again lead Russia into temptation, with its leaders believing they can dissociate its case from that of its allies and partners. It is the fact of having left this country in a gray zone that has exposed it to the Kremlin’s subversive maneuvers and warlike ventures. It is therefore important to learn from the strategic and geopolitical mistake made in Bucharest fifteen years ago.
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Minister of Defense of Ukraine Oleksiy Reznikov // nato.int
In short, playing with words, concepts, and various scenarios cannot hide one certainty: NATO is irreplaceable, and woe betide anyone who remains outside its security perimeter. What’s more, Ukraine’s destiny will have repercussions as far afield as the Far East, the Taiwan Strait, the “Asian Mediterranean” (South and East China Seas) and North-East Asia. The United States does not have to make a mutually exclusive choice between the Russian threat and the European theater, on the one hand, and the Chinese threat and the Indo-Pacific theater, on the other: it’s all a question of resource allocation, burden-sharing, and geopolitical pace. In return, Euro-Atlantic strategic solidarity must be extended to the risks and threats posed by China. This is fortunate, since the United States’ European allies are present in the Indo-Pacific, and their prosperity depends on the freedom of the seas. Finally, Beijing’s shadow reaches as far as Europe.
]]>Last year, we saw the ruins of Mariupol, followed by those of the many villages that Russian artillery pounded to dislodge Ukrainian troops, until not a stone remains standing. Now there are those of Bakhmut, which had some 70,000 residents before the start of the war in Donbas. It’s forgotten, but Moscow had a revenge to take there. In April 2014, separatists aided by Moscow had seized this town almost without a fight, but in July, the Ukrainian army, though not what it has become today, took it back, after fierce fighting. The town was then called Artemivsk (Artyomovsk in Russian), a name it had been given in 1924 to honor the memory of Comrade Artyom, a Bolshevik close to Lenin. His real name was Fyodor Andreyevich Sergeyev (1883-1921), who had organized a military coup in Kharkiv in 1917, before holding high political office in the Donbas region, as well as in the Communist Party of Russia. In February 2016, the Ukrainian authorities returned the town to the name of Bakhmut, which it had borne since its foundation in the 17th Century.
By May 2022, the town of around 20,000 residents came under Russian fire. On August 1, Moscow’s troops, including the Wagner militia, launched an offensive to retake it, hoping to cut off important Ukrainian army supply lines and open the way to Kramatorsk — then a major command center for Kyiv forces across Donbas. It would also have opened up access to Sloviansk, following the capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in early summer 2022. From Fall onward, Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin made it his personal business to succeed where “Moscow bureaucrats” and Russian army chiefs had failed. Since then, the Battle of Bakhmut has become both an appalling human tragedy and a spectacle projected daily on screens the world over, via social networks and 24-hour news channels.
On this stage, Prigozhin has camped out day in day out, blowing hot and cold — and very often ignoble. He set himself up as President Zelensky’s media rival, in contrast to the Kremlin’s very “Soviet” communication style, displaying growing political ambitions, with decidedly populist overtones, even if it meant gilding his armor on the backs of Russia’s Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and his Chief of Staff, Valery Gerasimov, by insulting them copiously. He even seemed, with barely concealed words, to take aim at Vladimir Putin, in order to obtain the extra ammunition and support he needed to conquer the whole city and proclaim that he controlled it “legally” — as if the most savage brutality should have the force of law.
A great actor, Prigozhin has played every part. He has been seen recruiting inmates in Russian prisons; as a promoter of the “meat grinder” he deployed in an attempt to overwhelm the Ukrainian resistance with waves of assaults designed simultaneously to exhaust their ammunition and morale, and to pinpoint pockets of artillery resistance; as a leader moved to the very depths of his being by the sacrifice of his men — in stark contrast to Vladimir Putin, who coldly let the crew of the K-141 Kursk nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine die in August 2000, refusing foreign help to rescue them; as a ruthless kingpin, threatening cowards with a sledgehammer after a video of a deserter’s execution was broadcast; as a magnanimous commander praising the Ukrainian resistance; as a furious gnome barking, in close-up, against Moscow bureaucrats, calling the Russian people to witness their incompetence, cowardice, spinelessness, and greed.
In Bakhmut, Prigozhin not only fought a fierce battle but also put on a show of unimaginable nihilism, the equivalent of which has only been seen in the ranks of al-Qaeda and, above all, IS. The emblems brandished by his militia are as black as those of the henchmen of Islamic State. His color is that of death, and when he claimed the final victory on May 23, after announcing it many times, he did so by framing the Russian flag with his own, on either side, like two wings as dark as they are sinister.
Ruins of the residential area of Bakhmout, March 2023 // dpsu.gov.ua
This is where the battle of Bakhmut differs from that of Mariupol, which was already appalling. It has apocalyptic value, revealing the Putin project beyond the loquaciousness and cynicism of Wagner’s leader, who, whatever his ambitions, is only one of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s instruments. It’s not just a question of restoring the Soviet empire, which has collapsed in on itself, in a long agony that began in Poland in August 1980, with the birth of Solidarity. Nor even a return to the Holy Russia of the Tsars. And if Stalin is a claimed model, it’s for his ability to make himself feared urbi et orbi, stopping at nothing to make his power felt. The images from Bakhmut say it all: the will to rule by death. As long ago as 2006, Putin imposed a black uniform on the FSB, in reference, in particular, to that of the Oprichniki to whom Tsar Ivan The Terrible had entrusted the task of sowing terror to reduce any hint of opposition.
The landscape of Bakhmut is one of total devastation, the stark manifestation that for those who perpetrated this horror and those who willed it, the death of others is preferable to life and liberty. This disaster is not a secondary effect of political will, nor is it merely the tool by which political will manifests its implacable character. It seems that in Bakhmut, ends and means are one and the same. What is intended is death as the very essence of power. It’s not just a question of bringing Ukraine back into Moscow’s fold, but of subjecting it to the most nihilistic logic of all, by implementing death on a massive scale. What Putin wants, since the setbacks from which he has not recovered in 2004 (the “Orange Revolution”) and 2014 (Euromaidan), is to make Ukraine pay for its claim to live free, outside his power. The ruins of Bakhmut bear the message that, for him, life outside his will is permanently impossible. This is why what he calls “Western hegemony” is unbearable for him. Because it is opposed to the transformation of the world into a hunting ground for predators of all kinds, who recognize one another and occasionally ally themselves whenever it suits them.
The nihilism exemplified by the total destruction of Bakhmut has long found room to flourish in Russia. Dostoevsky set out to make this point in 1869, when he wrote Devils. At the start of the novel, we learn that Stavrogin, the central character, is driven by love of his homeland, just like Putin, who never stops repeating that he is acting for the good of Russia and the world. But the very nature of this love, so to speak, that Stavrogin claims, is that he sees no other way to realize it than to choose the death of others. Starting with those he manipulates and embroils in his mad passion. He himself ends up hanging himself after cowardly fleeing. We’ll see what happens to Putin when his mad race comes to an end.
The Russian writer’s preference for death, including that of loved ones, had already been dramatized at the end of his previous novel. In The Idiot, Rogozhin murders Nastasya Filippovna to be the only one to possess her. “We won’t let anyone take her away,” he tells Prince Myshkin in front of her corpse. But how can we not think, from this scene, of the words Putin addressed to Volodymyr Zelensky during the news conference he held in the Kremlin with Emmanuel Macron on February 7, 2022: “Like it or don’t like it, it’s your duty, my beauty”? Note that in this vulgar chastushka, inspired by Sleeping Beauty, the one who has to endure “sleeps in the grave”.
This apocalypse of death, of which Prigozhin is the first rider, is not confined to Ukraine. In Bakhmut, over the last five months, according to US figures, 20,000 Russian fighters are believed to have died in combat and another 80,000 to have been wounded. Since the start of the so-called “special military operation”, Russian losses have exceeded the volume of troops massed on the border in the preceding months and weeks. Vladimir Putin is bleeding his own people dry, in addition to the massive flight of all those who have chosen, for good or bad reasons, to keep their distance from this madness. Russia lacks so many vital forces at a time when, simply because of a war that is turning into a nightmare for the army, its economy is suffering a considerable drain on its production capacities and reserves — not to mention the effect of international sanctions. The whole country is caught in the deadly grip of Putin’s madness. The immediate effects may be appalling but the long-term consequences will be no less so, not only materially, but also psychologically for millions of people, and not only for those who have returned from the front or for families who have lost one or other of their loved ones: the delirious propaganda rolled out like a steamroller by the official media disseminates the Kremlin leader’s death wish and fantasy of omnipotence in people’s minds. This poison — which is spreading far beyond Russia, notably in the so-called “Global South”, but also here at home, via social networks — will be felt for a long time to come. In addition to the considerable mental damage inflicted by Stalinism, as described by Svetlana Alexievitch in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, we must already add that of Putinism.
]]>Russia’s spectacular failure to achieve its declared goals on the first days, weeks and eventually months of the all-out military invasion of Ukraine was attributed primarily to Moscow’s miscalculation: a profoundly wrong assessment of both its own strength and Ukraine’s weakness. Experts generally agree that the blunder was determined by two intertwined factors: the rigidity of Putin’s authoritarian system that frustrates the effective flow of information, especially if that information is unflattering for the bosses; and secondly, Russians’ fundamentally biased, ideologically distorted view of themselves and — especially — of Ukraine that precludes an adequate response to the situation on the ground.
That view was quintessentially articulated by Vladimir Putin in his notorious dictums that Ukraine “is not even a country” and that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” Russian politicians and ideologists parroted that mantra vehemently and developed it at length, including Putin himself who indulged in producing quasi-historical treatises to prove that Ukraine has never existed and should not ever exist as a nation separate from Russia.
“Ukraine denial” was certainly not invented by Putin. It has been a cornerstone of Russian (imperial) identity since the very invention of “Russia” in the first quarter of the 18th Century. Ukraine was a centerpiece of that construction insofar as a transformation of Eurasian Muscovy into European “Russia” under Peter the Great required appropriation of the name and legacy of Kievan Rus which was primarily Ukrainian and partly Belarusian but only remotely and marginally Muscovite. To that aim, the political continuity between 12th Century Kyiv and 17th Century Muscovy was invented, the quasi-Latinized name of “Russia” was coined to semantically equate Moscow tsardom with Kievan Rus (a medieval entity that ceased to exist five centuries earlier under the nomadic assault), and claims to the old Rus legacy were made with far-reaching consequences.
A tricky semantic manipulation (Rus = Russia) legitimized Moscow’s alleged entitlement to the entire Rus history (which was only minutely Muscovite), enhanced its demands for the whole Rus territory (which had for centuries been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and, worse of all, delegitimized the very existence of Ukrainians and Belarusians who were inevitably downgraded to a regional brand of “Russians” (in fact, of Muscovites rebranded as “Russians”) within that mythical narrative. Ukrainians who insisted on their distinct identity, maintained their language as a fully-fledged means of communication, and strove to develop high culture beyond permitted ethnography, were reasonably perceived as enemies, a subversive force that undermined the empire’s integrity and legitimacy. Ukraine thus remained a dangerous witness of an historical theft, an unsurmountable obstacle in a smooth appropriation of the Rus legacy. It was indeed an alien body in the otherwise wonderful mythical picture. That nuisance should be definitely absorbed, digested, and appropriated — or destroyed.
Since then, Russian attitude and policies vis-à-vis Ukraine were determined by some sort of existential anxiety — not only because without Ukraine Russia would cease to be an empire in geopolitical terms, as Zbigniew Brzezinski famously put it, but also because it would cease to be an empire in its essence — culturally and psychologically. Without Ukraine, Russians would have to undergo a painstaking review of their identity, to invent a new historical narrative stemming from Moscow rather than Kyiv, and to develop a new idea of Russianness that does not include Ukraine as its constitutive part. In sum, Russia would have to become a “normal” European nation-state within fixed, internationally recognized and universally accepted borders, rather than an ever-expanding empire with messianic claims and ungrounded resentment.
Putin did not invent anything new in his ardent denial of independent Ukraine, he merely reinvigorated the Ukrainophobic ideas of Russian philosophers from the 19th and early 20th centuries — ideas that were wisely replaced by the Soviets with a much subtler (and more perfidious) theory of “rapprochement and ultimate fusion” of “brotherly” nations. Putin, who castigates Bolsheviks as alleged destroyers of the empire and inventors of various Soviet nationalities, in particular Ukraine, is fundamentally wrong. Bolsheviks, in fact, rescued the empire by making some (temporary) concessions to nationalists in the empire’s peripheries, something that their opponents-monarchists with Putin’s pet hero Anton Denikin staunchly refused to do and therefore lost. Putin, like his monarchist predecessors, is really “obsessed with Ukraine and its unique significance for Russian national identity,” as Igor Torbakov observes. “For him, the 1991 ‘schism’ that resulted in Ukraine’s independence cut right through the Russian national body, having deprived Moscow not only of the millions of its kin and vast ‘historical Russian lands’ but, more crucially, of the most precious and ancient part of ‘Russia’s’ own history.”1 The only novelty he introduced into that Ukrainophobic world view was not in theory but in practice. He decided to solve the “Ukrainian question” once and for all by launching a genocidal war.
Predictably, the heavily biased, ideologically distorted view of reality precluded both the adequate perceptions of facts and their reasonable interpretation. Since Ukraine was programmatically declared “not even a country” and Ukrainians defined as “one people” with Russians, anything that ran contrary to this view was ignored or downplayed as insignificant, temporary, exogenous, and artificial — a minor deviation from the imaginary (“all-Russian”) normality, easily fixable by appropriate social engineering.
Ukraine itself sent mixed messages to Russian ideologists, inasmuch as only some Ukrainians (roughly one third of the population) stood firm in the 1990s for a radical break with the communist past (seen also as colonial) and for a rapid and fully-fledged integration into Euro-Atlantic structures. The other part, a “silent majority”, was rather reluctant to give up their habitual way of life and change their convenient, however uncomfortable, environment. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush; a familiar post-Soviet kommunalka prevailed over a hazy “European Community” where “nobody waits for us” (as post-Soviet politicians recurrently emphasized). Ukrainians had never been anti-Western, like many Russians. But they hoped, rather naively, to have the best of both worlds: to access European modernity but retain mental ties with archaic imaginary Orthodox/East Slavonic ummah; to embrace European democracy, freedom, and rule of law but maintain the informal institutional practices of increasingly authoritarian post-Soviet “Eurasia.“
Many observers confused this ambivalence with “pro-Russian” orientation, and Russian politicians and ideologists were the most eager to believe it. They neglected, however, two underlying phenomena that ultimately determined Ukraine’s drift. One was grassroots Ukrainian patriotism that in all critical situations (e.g. in the 2003 conflict with Russia over Tuzla Island) offset residual East Slavonic attachment and led ultimately to a radical break with that imaginary community. And the second underappreciated phenomenon was a different, more individualistic, and non-authoritarian political culture that Ukrainian society preserved despite centuries of Russification/ Sovietization. It remarkably came to the fore in the 2000s, when Ukrainian rulers tried to emulate the authoritarian practices of their Russian and Belarusian counterparts.
By 2012, pro-Western attitude in Ukrainian society, for the first time, prevailed over “East Slavonic” attitude. This reflected the growing attractiveness of the EU, a broad impact of its soft power, but also internal changes in Ukrainian society that remained throughout the post-Soviet years relatively free, open, and pluralistic. Generational change probably also played a part, as well as increasing authoritarianism in neighboring Russia which further undermined the attractiveness of that country and of the “Eurasian” choice. The Revolution of Dignity (aka Euromaidan, 2013-14) was the result of that pro-European shift rather than its cause, though it undoubtedly catalyzed past mental developments in society and accelerated Ukraine’s political Westernization. Russia’s 2014 invasion put an effective end to Ukraine’s protracted ambivalence, dealing a deadly blow to the “East Slavonic” attachments of many people and relegating those attitudes to the realm of infantile fantasies and wishful thinking.
Yet remarkably, the entire Russian elite appeared to be blind and deaf vis-à-vis those developments. They simply ignored or downplayed everything that did not fit their habitual view of Ukraine as “not even a country” and Ukrainians as “one people” with Russians. Overwhelming support (over 90%) for national independence in the 1991 referendum was interpreted as a purely economic vote masterminded by opportunistic postcommunists and nationalists who tricked the gullible population into something they never cared for. The 2004 Orange Revolution was understood not as a spectacular surge of civic activity and “people’s power” but as a Western conspiracy against Russia. (Ukrainians, within this supremacist logic, could not themselves stand for ideals of freedom, justice, and dignity, but had to be paid for this by some Western masters). The same interpretative frame was applied to Euromaidan in 2013-14. Nor even the failure of “the Russian Spring” and “Novorossiya“ project in Ukraine’s southeast in 2014-15 made Russian ideologues review their habitual view of Ukrainians as “almost Russians” who were tricked or forced by nationalists (proverbial “junta”) into an artificial state-building project, where they presumably had no stakes to care for and defend. The Russian elite apparently projected upon Ukrainians their own situation — of a political clique that captured the state and imposed unchecked dominance over the pliable population.
All these distorted views and biased interpretations of Ukrainian reality go far beyond sheer supremacism, rather typical for all imperial nations vis-à-vis their colonies (seen as a “lesser people of the lesser world” in Edward Said’s words). In this particular case, Russia’s dismissive view of Ukraine is based on the coherent, elaborate system of quasi-historical assumptions and arguments that create quite a powerful imperial ideology and assign peculiar meaning and value to anything it encounters. That ideology oddly places Ukraine at the very center of Russian identity and makes its holders agonize over the perceived incompleteness of that identity as long as Ukraine (and Kyiv, the most precious part of Russia’s imaginary self) is off. Russian imperial thinkers articulated that feeling long before Putin. As early as 1911, Petr Struve envisioned Ukraine’s (possible) secession in apocalyptic terms: should it happen, he wrote, the result would be the “gigantic and unprecedented schism of the Russian nation (…), a veritable disaster for the state and for the people.”2
We may define that system of imperial, ideologically informed and driven narratives as “imperial knowledge”, — a set of facts, inventions, and interpretations that aims, on one side, at a glorification of the empire, its supposedly great, universal culture and unique historical role, and, on the other side, at a depreciation, marginalization, and sheer appropriation of cultures of subordinate nations, and monopolization of a God-given (or history-given, under the Soviets) right to speak on their behalf. This enables the empire to silence subaltern groups and make them completely invisible.3
Since the 18th Century, the empire had institutionalized all those narratives in schooling and scholarship, high and mass culture, political discourses and church practices, imperial laws and civic rituals. It developed “imperial knowledge” as a holistic explanatory frame for anything in its history and in current relations with the external world and its own colonies. It can be defined, after Edward Said, as a peculiar Russian style for “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over” subaltern people.4 Or, as Larry Wolff may have put it, a “style of intellectual mastery, integrating knowledge and power, perpetrating domination and subordination” and suitable therefore not only for rhetorical exercises but also for “real conquest .”5
In the most tragic twist of events, toxic — supremacist, jingoistic, and simply fraudulent — “imperial knowledge”, produced and disseminated by Russian imperial institutions and gentrified and legitimized by obsequious imperial intellectuals, became international. It strongly influenced Western academia, media, mass culture, and common wisdom. The world both adopted and normalized it; the international public tuned its sensors to imperial messages as presumably the most comprehensive, ‘important’ and authoritative — rather than to the marginal voices of minor, subaltern and ‘less important’ nations. Common wisdom does not require any proof; it is something that everybody knows. There is no need to question or problematize it. This explains why Ukraine had been invisible to the Western gaze for a few centuries and why, even after its emergence on the political map of Europe in 1991, it remained a big blind spot on mental maps. This also explains why Ukraine’s bravery and resilience under the Russian assault came as a big surprise not only for Moscow, but also for most Westerners: they shared the same view of Ukraine as a highly corrupt, almost dysfunctional state, and a deeply divided, almost irretrievably broken society.6 This explains why Ukraine had been invisible to the Western gaze for a few centuries and why, even after its emergence on the political map of Europe in 1991, it remained a big blind spot on mental maps. This also explains why Ukraine’s bravery and resilience under the Russian assault came as a big surprise not only for Moscow, but also for most Westerners: they shared the same view of Ukraine as a highly corrupt, almost dysfunctional state, and a deeply divided, almost irretrievably broken society.7 Their attitude toward Ukraine differed politically but not epistemologically. And this graphically illustrates how deeply Russian “imperial knowledge” penetrated Western society, how its most toxic myths and clichés were uncritically accepted and normalized, and how this facilitated for years, until recently, the global spread of Russian propagandistic discourses. To deconstruct that “knowledge” and exorcise its malignant spell is a primary task that we, as intellectuals, encounter today, however belatedly.
Igor Torbakov, The Kremlin’s Nationalist Utopia. Eurozine, 26 April 2023, https://www.eurozine.com/the-kremlins-nationalist-utopia/ ↩
Petr Struve, “Obshcherusskaia kul’tura i ukrainskii partikuliarizm: Otvet Ukraintsu,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 1 (1912), 85. ↩
Ewa Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2000). ↩
Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), 3. ↩
Larry Wolff, *Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment *(Stanford, 1994), 8. ↩
Taras Kuzio attributes this to an excessive influence on the Western policy makers from the Russianists who have no expertise in Ukraine, Georgia, or Estonia but do not hesitate to make far-reaching judgements on any development in any post-Soviet country. This is why the Westerners got Ukraine wrong, Kuzio contends, — and they got it wrong exactly in the same way and for the same reasons as Russians did. Taras Kuzio, If you’re an expert on Russia it does not make you an expert on Ukraine, Georgia, or Estonia. Youtube, 24 April 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGNBhqsetGM. ↩
Taras Kuzio attributes this to an excessive influence on the Western policy makers from the Russianists who have no expertise in Ukraine, Georgia, or Estonia but do not hesitate to make far-reaching judgements on any development in any post-Soviet country. This is why the Westerners got Ukraine wrong, Kuzio contends, — and they got it wrong exactly in the same way and for the same reasons as Russians did. Taras Kuzio, If you’re an expert on Russia it does not make you an expert on Ukraine, Georgia, or Estonia. Youtube, 24 April 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGNBhqsetGM. ↩
“When the third deceit comes — it is darker than night
It is darker than night, more than war is affright.”
Boulat Okoudjava
In a book of interviews with Gleb Pavlovsky, Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev reports that Pavlovsky was, in 2012, “one of the most hated people in Russia,” “considered a traitor by the power and the opposition”1. The Meduza website, having highlighted the abrupt turns that punctuated Pavlovsky’s path, considers that his life “is a manual of contemporary Russian political history and a guide to its innumerable paradoxes.” As a matter of fact, this “political-technologist” was “one of the architects of Vladimir Putin’s regime”, but is still considered by some people as a dissident. A “dissident” on whom, notes journalist Valery Panyushkin, “the authentic heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance” cast glances that range “from contempt to disdain” 2. But, as late as 2022, a few months before his death, Pavlovsky regularly appeared as an expert on Russian TV channels associated with the opposition. It is therefore important, before discussing his years of commitment to Vladimir Putin, to return to his past, often forgotten in Russia: the past of a man who contributed to get this unknown Chekist elected as president.
Gleb Pavlovsky was born on March 5, 1951, exactly two years before Stalin’s death, in Odessa where, he said, people lived “more happily than in the rest of the USSR.” His father was an engineer, his mother a meteorologist, and neither was a member of the CPSU. After high school, the teenager began studying history in his hometown. He would later say that he was then a Marxist, and was fascinated by Che Guevara, whose photo Sourkov would display in his office. The future “polit-technologist” participated in a commune of four people: they talked about philosophy, and their favorite topic, as it seems, was the end of history. Pavlovsky admitted that he had understood since childhood that he was living “between two apocalypses”: the one of 1917 and another one to come, not yet clearly identified.
The “lord of samizdat in Odessa” was Vyacheslav Igrunov, who, born in 1948, would much later become one of the founders of the Yabloko party and a deputy in the Duma. He managed the largest clandestine library in this western-southern part of the USSR, a library that contained a wide variety of books, from Solzhenitsyn’s to Nabokov’s, via Jung’s and Orwell’s. Pavlovsky borrowed samizdat texts from him, which drew the attention of the KGB, but he assured that he only realized that he was being watched when he was not allowed to defend his degree. So he taught history for a year in a Transnistria village, so that he could afterwards get his degree.
In early August 1974, Vadim Alexeyev-Popov, a lecturer at the University of Odessa, was stopped in the street by KGB agents: they asked him to hand over the photocopied copy of The Gulag Archipelago that they knew he had in his possession3. The teacher complied and declared that he had received this text from Gleb Pavlovsky. Questioned for several days in a row, Pavlovsky revealed that he had borrowed this samizdat copy from Vyacheslav Igrunov4. Years later, he explained that only Alexeyev-Popov and Igrunov knew where this particular copy was, and he did not fully trust Igrunov:
“Igrunov was ‘an anti-Soviet’ person, and I had this equation in mind: an anti-Soviet person is often a provocateur. So I betrayed him. I said I had received Solzhenitsyn’s and many other books from him. I signed everything they needed.”5
The “lord of samizdat” was taken to the KGB for interrogation on August 9; others were interrogated after Pavlovsky’s confession. Shortly afterwards, Pavlovsky spoke with Igrunov and agreed — that was their deal — not to testify and to refute, at the trial, what he had already admitted to the KGB. Igrunov was arrested on March 1, 1975, and accused of preparing and distributing “defamatory and anti-Soviet” works. During the summer, he underwent a psychiatric expertise, while about thirty people were summoned as witnesses. Only two — including Pavlovsky — testified against Igrunov. He was transferred to the terrible Serbsky Institute in Moscow, which declared him schizophrenic and considered that he needed to be treated by force in a “hospital of special type”, i.e. a psychiatric hospital controlled by the KGB.
Gleb Pavlovsky. Early 1970s // Vyacheslav Igrunov Archive
Igrunov was judged in March 1976, in his absence. Witnesses were interrogated, including Gleb Pavlovsky who refused to answer and said, as if he knew nothing about the history of his own country: “I am a Communist by conviction and consider that such a trial is impossible in a socialist society.” He also disavowed the testimony he had previously given, and assured that his relations with Igrunov was of no concern to the KGB. It turned out, however, that the future “polit-technologist” had, during the investigation, provided detailed information on Igrunov, but this information could no longer be used by the court, since it was refuted by its author. Igrunov was sentenced to be forcibly treated, but in a regular psychiatric hospital, and he was released from it on January 22, 1977.
Even in 2018, he defended Pavlovsky, explaining that “not everyone is morally ready for a confrontation” and that he himself had, in 1968, “betrayed a comrade in front of the Chekists” because he had considered him as a provocateur: “I understood [in 1974] that I was going to be imprisoned, and I was ready for it. Pavlovsky behaved quite firmly at the trial. But many consider that he betrayed a comrade. And I say that this is an unfair reproach.”6. For Krastev, however, Pavlovsky did not “live up to his ideals” in his first encounter with the KGB, and it caused him a trauma that influenced the rest of his life. Pavlovsky confirmed in 2018 that he was not then “ready”: “In a staggering way for myself, I shamefully failed the exam.” It was still difficult for him to talk about it: “My failure in front of the KGB was a strong blow to my ‘ego’.”
Not to mention that, after the trial, Pavlovsky was no longer allowed to teach and his marriage broke up. The young man then left for Moscow. He had previously trained as a carpenter: he would have liked to no longer depend on the State.
In Moscow, Pavlovsky met the historian Mikhail Gefter, a specialist in the revolutionary movement of the 19th century, who became his mentor, but often compared Pavlovsky to Stavrogin, the depraved hero from Dostoyevsky’s Demons. The ex-student worked on building sites, frequented circles close to dissidents and was one of the few young people to proclaim himself a Communist. One of his texts circulating in samizdat, “The Third Force”, was a hermeneutic of the 1977 Constitution and a reflection on power. Because it was of interest to many readers, it was included in the first issue of a new samizdat review, Poiski, in the spring of 1978, along with a text by Gefter and excerpts from Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Barbarism with a Human Face. Moreover, Pavlovsky was invited to join the editorial board of this review. Under the pseudonym of P. Pryjov, he collaborated there with Raisa Lert, a convinced Communist born in 1901, Valery Abramkin (1946-2013), an enthusiast of the poet Kharms, and Piotr Abovin-Egides. They were later joined by Vladimir Gershuni, Yuri Grimm and Victor Sokirko.
This is the version that Pavlovsky gave. But Igrunov has another one. When he was released from the psychiatric hospital, he wanted to create a samizdat review that would look for possible points of agreement with the authorities and for an alternative path of development for the country. He told Pavlovsky about it and introduced him to potential authors. Three months later, the texts commissioned by Igrunov were published in Poiski’s No. 1, without the “lord of samizdat” having been informed. Pavlovsky seemed to be very surprised by the reproaches that were addressed to him.
The KGB soon became interested in Poiski and, from January 1979 onwards, increased the number of searches and interrogations of people close to this review, including Pavlovsky: the repressive machine was launched. On November 16, 1979, police officers and/or Chekists told the young Odessite that his activity in Poiski was “against the law” and asked him if he did not want to leave the USSR. Pavlovsky answered that he had no intention of doing so and, on December 3, during a new interrogation, refused to say whether he would stop his activity in Poiski or not. The next day, he and six other people connected to the review were searched, and Abramkin was arrested.
Gleb Pavlovsky and Vyacheslav Igrounov in 2018 // YouTube channel of the Gefter review, screenshot
In January 1980, the day when Sakharov was illegally sent to relegation, Pavlovsky was searched and interrogated at the Lubyanka, where Mr. Putin’s colleagues showed him the order of arrest concerning him and advised him to leave the country. The future “political-technologist” committed himself in writing to emigrate within thirty days, but he changed his mind once he was released. He was summoned again by the KGB and ended up signing a three-page note in which he renounced any political activity, official or unofficial. However, he continued to play an active role in Poiski.
Yuri Grimm and Victor Sokirko were arrested on January 23; Vladimir Gershuni was committed to a psychiatric hospital on July 15, 1980. On September 3, Victor Sokirko admitted having carried out an “activity discrediting the Soviet social and State system”, and said he was ready to redeem his fault. He was released the next day until his trial. The deal was clear: the Soviet State wanted above all to obtain recognition of the defamatory nature of certain samizdats. The dissidents refused to give in on this point, and it was a matter of principle for them, because it would have meant admitting limits to the freedom of expression they were trying to reclaim. Valery Abramkin, Yuri Grimm and Victor Sokirko were accused of having prepared and distributed Poiski.
All three were tried successively in the fall of 1980. Referring to his statement of September 3, Sokirko declared that he was “aware of [his] great guilt before the State” and promised not to engage in samizdat activities anymore. He was therefore sentenced to three years’ detention, but with a suspended sentence. On the other hand, Valery Abramkin, who did not recognize his guilt, was sentenced to three years’ unsuspended imprisonment, and Grimm, who had already been sentenced in 1964 for a caricature of Khrushchev, was sentenced to three years’ harsh imprisonment. The issue at stake was therefore whether or not to acknowledge guilt in connection with samizdat activities.
During Abramkin’s trial, a stone was thrown against a court window and broke the glass. This stone was thrown by Pavlovsky, who was standing on the roof of a nearby house. He fell from this roof and was taken to the hospital under a false name, and according to a journalist who interviewed him at length in 2018, he was, “in his hospital bed, permanently disillusioned with a struggle against power.” He considered that the lifestyle of the dissidents was “vulgar”: “Animal feeling of deadlock: a block in my personal biography. I decided to run away from my biography.”7 He would then defend the idea, as he explained, that the dissidence should find a agreement with the power. Actually, the dissidence movement had tried to do so at its beginning, if the notion of “agreement” implies a dialogue — whereas Pavlovsky thought rather of concessions — but the dissidents had quicky given up, since the authorities responded only with increased repression. The majority of dissidents therefore disagreed with Pavlovsky’s position, but a few supported it, including, it seems, Igrunov.
Vladimir Putin’s future “political-technologist” was arrested and imprisoned on April 6, 1981. He spent almost a year in the Butyrka prison in Moscow, and, unlike Abramkin, agreed to testify, justifying his behavior by his new conviction: it is necessary to look for a way to get along with the power. He made a sort of deal with the investigators: he would plead guilty and condemn both the concept of Poiski and its co-founder, Piotr Abovin-Egides, who then lived in France.
Pavlovsky was judged on August 18, 1982, under article 190-1 (Preparation and diffusion of “notoriously false allegations, denigrating the Soviet political and social system”). He admitted being guilty, thus gave full satisfaction to the authorities, and was sentenced to five years of relegation (no camp…), which was less than the sentence provided for by the law. He had three years left to serve, but, having just admitted publicly that samizdat activity could be defamatory and anti-Soviet, he had, in the eyes of the dissidents, “sold out” or gone mad. Even if, this time, he had not “given anyone away”, as he emphasized. Pavlovsky, having realized that he could not live up to the ideals of his youth, then “conceptualized his betrayal as a freedom of action”, as Krastev believes: the disgust that the future “political-technologist” felt for himself and that others felt for him explains his actions in the 1990s. Perhaps. This and/or, more pragmatically, connections with the KGB.
Pavlovsky’s place of relegation was the Komi republic, where he worked as a painter and driver. According to Peter Pomerantsev, a dissident’s son, the future “political-technologist” continued to write letters to the KGB, as he had done when he was imprisoned, stating that the KGB should collaborate with dissidents for the good of the Soviet Union. Pavlovsky, for his part, recalled the private letters he sent to his friends and relatives, in which he tried to “demonstrate that [his] compromise with the State [was] political and not moral”: “These letters are appalling, it’s really strange, why did I have to write all this to my friends? They had forgiven me without this.”8
He admitted to having also written “some memoranda for the authorities”:
“In the first one, in 1983, I wrote that the USSR was not fighting Reagan properly: the anti-American propaganda [was] crude, it had to be made more skillful, not like that! Today, one of the analysts attached to Putin can write something like that. My last note, in 1985, and it was even funnier, was about the optimization of energy complexes, communications and housing in the Komi republic.”9
According to him, these texts were read by the head of the local KGB and then sent to Moscow. He admitted to meeting with the Moscow chiefs of this local official in 1984 during a vacation in the capital, and he assured: “Yes, one could grant a vacation to a relegated person if this person ‘behaved well’.” In fact, such relations with the KGB — and such vacations! — were quite exceptional and, in the eyes of the dissidents, were a sign of surrender.
His relegation ended on December 25, 1985 and Pavlovsky returned to Moscow, while genuine dissidents who had served their sentences were not allowed to live in the capital. Perestroika would soon begin. A time when all the rules seemed to change.
According to Gleb Pavlovsky, he and Gefter did not accept the “anti-Stalinism” of perestroika. They had therefore something in common with those in the CPSU and the KGB, who understood the need for economic reforms, but did not criticize the repressive methods used, even in the worst times of the USSR. Could this country be reformed without Stalinism and its violence being denounced? No.
As early as September 1986, Pavlovsky, together with a few other people, created the Club of Social Initiatives (KSI), the “first legal independent political club in Moscow” , and he tried to gather other clubs around it to create an “Soviet informal movement” 10. He himself admitted it: when the KSI was set up, Sakharov was still relegated to Gorky and Anatoly Marchenko had just begun a hunger strike, from which he would die in prison. But Pavlovsky and his comrades were already inviting for debates the academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya, who was advising Gorbachev. Times were changing, but some people were entitled to incomparably more indulgence than others. This, in the USSR even more than elsewhere, imposed a question: with what support? Pavlovsky was even officially allowed to live in Moscow, and he gave at least two different versions of how he had obtained this right.
The first national meeting of “informal” clubs took place in August 1987 in the former Palace of Culture of the Comintern. It was opened by Gleb Pavlovsky, who called for “fair play with the State” and for stopping being an opposition. The researcher Carole Sigman noted that perestroika was “an opportunity to test the idea of a dialogue with the authorities, an idea defended in the 1970s by minority dissidents (G. Pavlovsky and V. Igrunov, among others) against the dominant current of human rights defenders.” 11 A dialogue, may be, but on what basis, in what alliances and with what room for manoeuvre? Especially since, as Sigman continued, these clubs had for main supporters two departments of the Central Committee of the CPSU: the Department of Propaganda and Culture, headed by Alexander Yakovlev, and the Department of Science. Igrunov confirmed that Pavlovsky and others from the KSI had, as early as this period, “contacts at quite high levels.” 12 Some dissidents, including Sergei Grigoriants, accused therefore the “informals” (neformaly, members of informal political debate “clubs”) of collaborating with the regime, that is, with the CPSU, but also with the KGB.
Some testimonies are, indeed, striking: thus, one of the members of the organizing committee of the August 1987 conference participated to “the first press conference of the informals at the [official] Novosti News Agency” , and he said that an “important KGBist” had “given them instructions on what to say or not to say”13. In short, Pavlovsky could not have been among the leaders of the KSI and of this meeting if the KGB had not, at the very least, given its approval, or even selected him for these purposes, given their previous contacts.
The role Pavlovsky had in the magazine Vek XX i mir (The Twentieth Century and Peace) seems to confirm this.
As Pavlovsky himself explained, this review was created “as an organ of the reptilian Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace.” Reptilian? The Peace movement, like all Soviet structures with foreign links, was infiltrated by the KGB at all levels. Notably in its press organs. Moreover, as Pavlovsky specified, this small bulletin did not go through the Glavlit, the organ officially in charge of censorship, but depended directly on the Party, like the Pravda. Pavlovsky was introduced to this magazine at the end of 1986 by his comrade Andrei Fadin, whose father was an executive in the Central Committee apparatus, and his recruitment was validated by the Central Committee of the CPSU. A few weeks later, he replaced the editor-in-chief. From then on, as Carole Sigman points out, the “informals” made the magazine theirs, “first transforming its content, then taking it over legally” . Certainly, perestroika shifted some lines, but everything seems to confirm Pavlovsky’s “good relations” with the KGB.
The ex-relegate thus became a journalist for the Committee for the Defense of Peace, which, he admitted, “was at the time close to the status of a Pravda journalist.” What a spectacular leap for a so-called opponent! All the more so, since he was given “complete carte blanche” for this magazine, which was published in several languages and had a circulation of 100,000 copies between 1987 and 1991: it was given plenty of paper. And because, in Russia, “reputation does not exist as an institution” , the first authors of the magazine were key figures of perestroika: the historian Yuri Afanasyev, the writers Yuri Kariakin and Ales’ Adamovich, the politician Galina Starovoitova, the journalist Len Karpinski, the dissident Larissa Bogoraz, etc. The 20th Century and Peace was even the first magazine to publish Solzhenitsyn’s “Do not live in a lie”. And in 1990, Anatoly Chubais, the future organizer of Russian privatizations, defended there the Chilean model of transition.
In a few months, Pavlovsky thus became — was made — one of the leaders of the “non-conformists” , while he aspired, as Peter Pomerantsev remarks, to a strong and centralized State. A wish that he concretized thereafter by helping Putin to become and remain president.
Around May 1987, the former Odessite met and befriended another journalist: Valentin Yumashev, who would become head of the Presidential Administration and Yeltsin’s son-in-law. And who, after February 24, 2022, settled in Saint-Barth with his wife in their luxurious villa. Pavlovsky said having also met, thanks to his new functions, Mikhail Khodorkovsky who passed by the editorial office on his way to work, and Leonid Nevzline, Khodorkovsky’s collaborator, the future oligarch Piotr Aven and Egor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s future prime minister, the ideologist Alexander Dugin and Sergey Kurginyan who would organize the pro-Putin meetings in 2011-2012, as well as the journalist Igor Malashenko who would be one of the creators of the NTV television, and the philosopher Igor Chubais, elder brother of Anatoly. A milieu was appearing in the apparent enthusiasm and, if its members were already taking very different paths, they would remain connected with each other: they had gone through the same periods and had evolved together. For the better, and sometimes for the worse. Pavlovsky was already involved in other large projects that would lead him to collaborate with the Kremlin.
As early as 1987, some KSI members decided to get closer to the emerging sector of cooperatives, a type of enterprise that had just been authorized by legislation, and they created two of their own: Perspektiva and, in 1988, Fakt, the latter specializing in providing information to cooperatives. In Fakt, Pavlovsky was already working with Vladimir Yakovlev, the future famous journalist, who was also the grandson of a prominent Chekist and whose father, Egor Yakovlev, editor-in-chief of Moscow News, was close to Alexander Yakovlev (no family relative) and Mikhail Gorbachev. On the basis of Fakt, Gleb Pavlovsky and Vladimir Yakovlev set up together — different dates circulate, but it seems that it was in 1989 — the first independent press agency, Postfactum. Pavlovsky was director of Postfactum that launched in December 1989, the newspaper Kommersant, of which Yakovlev became editor-in-chief. Postfactum and Kommersant were prepared by the same team, including the future gallery owner Marat Gelman, the historian Maxim Meyer, the political scientist Modest Kolerov, who would be charged by Putin to fight against color revolutions and be involved with Pavlovsky in the creation of a publishing house, and others.
On the other hand, Pavlovsky refused the proposal to run for the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. His motto, not always respected, was “to catalyze the process, while staying out of it” . But when the first democratic meeting took place in the Luzhniki Stadium on May 21, 1989, in front of tens of thousands of people, Putin’s future “political-technologist” sat on the podium alongside Sakharov and Yeltsin. In addition, he met George Soros in Moscow at the end of 1989, and became director of the “Civil Society” program and fund, which was supposed to help build a civil society. For two years, Gleb Pavlovsky offered, on Soros’ money, technical means — fax machines, photocopiers, computers, telephones — to various Soviet structures.
Hitherto hostile to Yeltsin, whom he accused of wanting the USSR collapse, Pavlovsky turned his coat during the August 1991 putsch: “For three days, I, the fiery counter-revolutionary, worked for Yeltsin’s revolution!” But, as he added in 2018, “in the crowd, in front of the White House where Yeltsin was, I quickly realized that these people were not mine”.14 According to him, when the USSR ceased to exist as a State, “the Fatherland was destroyed,” and he was not interested in the independence taken by Ukraine, or even in Russia as a State. On that day (which he placed at the end of August 1991), he noted: “We no longer have a State. There is a territory, populated by people who need the products of a foreign civilization: goods, rules, security. What is a Soviet cosmopolitan to do in Yeltsin’s racially pure State?” Pavlovsky was a supporter of the USSR, even of the empire. At least that’s what he said.
Gleb Pavlovsky between Boris Yeltsin and Andrei Sakharov at a rally in Moscow on May 21, 1989 // Vyacheslav Igrounov archive
That year, he claimed, he heard Putin’s name for the first time, without paying much attention to it: Igrunov, returning from a Baltic congress of “informals” , told him that he had met some interesting people there, including a certain Putin, “Sobchak’s representative” , who was sitting “sadly in a corner”. Igrunov, after talking with him, had thought: “This is who could become president instead of Gorbachev!”. This story may well be a total invention.
In the early 1990s, Pavlovsky, still director of the Postfactum agency, discovered “polit-technologies”: what we would call methods of political communication. Indeed, the Russian leaders were anxious to “sell” to the population the necessity of reforms. Besides, more and more media were owned by different individuals or groups, financial stakes were growing, money was circulating, and new knowledge had appeared — marketing, sociology, polling, etc. Interesting people evolved around Postfactum, including Anton Nosik, who would play a key role in the development of the Internet in Russia, and Constantin Ernst, the future CEO of the main official TV channel. As a journalist, Pavlovsky, like many others, went regularly to the Kremlin and the Supreme Soviet, and he also saw a lot of Grigori Yavlinsky. But in the fall of 1993, during the confrontation between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet, he left Postfactum, presenting his departure as a political gesture. Some noted however that, at the time, the agency was operating at a loss.
A scandal broke in March 1994: an article in the newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta suggested that a putsch was being prepared in Yeltsin’s entourage. The FSB and the Prosecutor’s Office got involved, and Yeltsin demanded arrests. Pavlovsky declared that he was responsible for this article, but left for a vacation in Greece. The scandal became nominative: “Pavlovsky against Yeltsin”. For the first time in ten years, the former relegate’s home was searched. However, times had changed and the case fizzled out, but on April 1, 1994, the dissident Alexander Podrabinek published an article in Express-Khronika — his newspaper with a very modest circulation — entitled “The great force of disinformation” . In it, he noted that many media had referred to Pavlovsky as a “former dissident” and even explained the polemical nature of the Obshchaya Gazeta text by Pavlovsky’s so-called “dissidence” . Furious, Podrabinek, returning to the past, recalled that in Odessa Pavlovsky had given names to the KGB and testified against Igrunov: “But there too Pavlovsky deceived the Chekists” , since at the trial he refuted his confessions. Podrabinek reminded of the Poiski case and how Pavlovsky also indirectly “testified against Alexei Smirnov”, for which Smirnov was sent to a camp for six years and then relegated for four more years. Podrabinek added:
“It will probably not be easy to establish how many times Gleb Pavlovsky duped the Chekists and how many times he duped his comrades? And should we try? If lying and betrayal become a way of life, does it really matter whom he fooled and how many times? The filth that accompanied Pavlovsky’s stories in the dissent days has not gone away today.”15
The words were said. They were reinforced by an article published in the same issue of Express-Khronika by Vladimir Gershuni (1930-1994), a former political prisoner who had been close to Poiski. He recalled the deals Pavlovsky had made with the KGB in order to obtain personal privileges: to be sentenced only to relegation and to be granted leave, “an extremely rare case for political prisoners.” Pavlovsky and others who present themselves as “democrats” and victims of the KGB, in fact, “take a stand against the Russian democracy that has just been born” and “rush to defend killers who are preparing massive repressions and a new super-Gulag for us” , in the hope of being rewarded for their good services, once these “killers” will detain power.
Gershuni was very lucid. Podrabinek too, who on June 17, 1994, published on the front page of his newspaper an article headlined “The rebirth of the KGB” . He noted that the political police was “regaining strength”: “It is indestructible, it rises again even after heavy blows, it is eternal. Like the mafia. Perhaps it is the mafia?”16
Gleb Pavlovsky identified a very different danger, as he said in 2018: the Moscow intelligentsia that “attacked Yeltsin, as it had attacked Gorbachev.”17 According to him, the “liberals” — that is, the supporters of rights and freedoms, opponents of an authoritarian State — had brought down the USSR and were therefore “the agents of the catastrophe”18. Putin and his supporters will agree. Pavlovsky added that he had begun to dream of another State that would “combine Soviet and Russian” in a kind of synthesis19. This is what Putin will do. Moreover, the former Odessite became more and more interested in the Kremlin, where Yumashev, whom he had known since 1987, played an active role. And Pavlovsky took a new turn, that proved to be determining for the next fifteen years.
Upset by Gefter’s death in February 1995, Gleb Pavlovsky accepted the proposal of Andrei Vinogradov, ex-president of the very official press agency RIA Novosti: “to create a company for the elections with Mikhail Lesin” who was deputy director general of TV Novosti, a structure attached to RIA Novosti, and who would become the all-powerful Minister of Media in 1999. The Fund for Effective Politics (FEP) was born as a result of this proposal: this political communication agency was set up by Pavlovsky, Lesin and former Postfactum employees, including Maxime Meyer and Marat Gelman. A week later, the first client appeared: General Alexander Lebed (1950-2002), who had fought in Transnistria and had recently become close to the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO), led by Yuri Skokov and Dmitri Rogozin (the latter would manage RosKosmos, among other things, and be injured in Donetsk in December 2022). The FEP helped the KRO leaders in their campaign for the parliamentary elections, but the result was less than the 5% mark. A few more months and even the French press noted that Lebed had been “put into orbit” and financed by Yeltsin’s close associates, including Anatoly Chubais, to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election. The great maneuvers had begun, and the FEP was part of the new means put in place.
In fact, Yeltsin’s entourage was worrying about the 1996 presidential elections: everything indicated that Yeltsin would be defeated by the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, and that the Communists would reverse the reforms already carried out, including privatization. A double operation, based on a pact between the Kremlin and the country’s main oligarchs, was thus set in motion, the consequences of which are still being felt today. The oligarchs possessed fortunes, but also media: they would “lend” money to Yeltsin to finance his campaign, and put their media and their strike force at his service; in exchange, they would be in position to acquire the country’s main resources in 1997. We will come back, in our serial, on this operation. As for Pavlovsky, he played a role in this presidential campaign that became a decisive springboard for him.
The Kremlin, wrote Krastev, “was looking for ways to deprive the people of their vote, without depriving them of the right to vote” . Valentin Yumashev, who was already working closely with the Presidential Administration, contacted Pavlovsky even before the December 1995 parliamentary elections: he wanted the FEP to conduct polls on possible candidates. In addition, towards the end of January 1996, Pavlovsky proposed to Yumashev a campaign project for Yeltsin — whom until recently he could not stand, he said. Mikhail Lesin, then co-director of the FEP, was put in charge of the advertising campaign promoting Yeltsin. Igor Malashenko, general director of NTV, had to mobilize jointly the television channels of the two oligarchs Berezovsky and Gusinsky, while, from March 1996, the FEP took care of the other media — including the regional press and the Internet. It was then that the FEP invented a whole series of tools, effective, but not very glorious.
For example, the FEP published fake Communist programs in the press and sticked fake CP stickers all over Moscow. “I always had them in my pocket, and wherever I went, in every elevator, I put a red sticker, supposedly in the name of the Communist Party, “Your building must be nationalized”.” These stickers were sturdy and hard to tear off. The idea was to scare people with the possible consequences of a Communist vote. The FEP, Pavlovsky confided, also shot clips in which actors played mad Communists burning anti-Communist leaflets. It spread rumors about so-called “Communist prostitutes” and used astrologers and their horoscopes: they spoke of a coming war between Russia and Ukraine, of a “satanic ship that had brought Lenin’s body” , and claimed that in the Mausoleum laid not Lenin, but his double, “swimming in the blood of Russian children” 20.
Don’t such means destroy democracy at least as surely as they destroy the Communists’ chances of victory?
A text written by Pavlovsky was published on June 8 in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which belonged to the oligarch Boris Berezovsky: it asserted that the Communists would not accept their defeat, were already preparing for a civil war and collecting arms, and were in contact with Chechen separatists. Then the magazine Ogonëk, directed by Valentin Yumashev, claimed that the Communists were preparing to take power by force. Almost everything seemed to be allowed, if to show that Yeltsin was the only possible choice and that the victory of the Communists would mean Russia’s collapse, which Pavlovsky really believed. So there was no debate of ideas, just manipulated fears. Some of these methods — the use of actors, false rumors, images of dead children — would be reused by Putin’s propaganda, especially after 2013, and Pavlovsky admitted it.
Yeltsin won the presidential elections in the second round on July 3, 1996. Twenty-five years later, Mikhail Zygar, one of Russia’s best-known journalists, published a book: You are all free. How the elections ended in Russia in 1996 21. The Russian title (literally: “Everyone is free” ) means both that they are free and that they can disperse: there will be nothing more to see. After this victory, Anatoly Chubais was appointed head of the Presidential Administration, which, Zygar confirmed, would become “a new center of power” and even “gradually the key force in the State, much more important than the government or the Duma”. Gleb Pavlovsky would collaborate with this Presidential Administration till 2011.
More in the next issue…
KRASTEV Ivan, Eksperimental’naïa rodina. Razgovor s Glebom Pavlovskym, Moskva, Izdatel’stvo Evropa, 2018, p.2/222. ↩
PANIUSHKIN, Valery, 12 ne soglasnykh, Moskva, Zakharov, 2009, p.39. ↩
According to a later version, the dacha of Alexeyev-Popov was searched after a denunciation. BEKBOULATOVA Taisya, op. cit. ↩
The information on this case comes, for the most part, from the samizdat magazine Khronika tekouchtchikh sobytiï, #34, 35, 37, 38 and 40. See also: BEKBOULATOVA Taisiya, “Dissident, kotoryi stal ideologom Putina,” Meduza, July 9, 2018. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit., p.99 / 222. ↩
BEKBOULATOVA Taisiya, op. cit. ↩
BEKBOULATOVA Taisya, op. cit. ↩
Ibid, p.130 / 222. ↩
Ibid, p.130 / 222. ↩
Ibid, p.138 / 222. ↩
SIGMAN Carole, Political clubs and perestroika in Russia. Subversion without dissent, Paris, Éditions Karthala, 2009, p.146. ↩
Ibid, p.155. ↩
Ibid, p.174. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p.148 / 222. ↩
PODRABINEK Alexander, “Velikaïa sila dezinformatsiï” , Ekspress-Khronika, April 1, 1994, #13 (347), p.4. ↩
PODRABINEK Alexander, “Vozrojdenie KGB” , Ekspress-Xronika, 17 June 1994, #24 (358), p.1. ↩
KRASTEV Ivan, op. cit. p.166 / 222. ↩
Ibid, p.45/222. ↩
Ibid, p.167 / 222. ↩
Ibid, p.176-177 / 222. ↩
ZYGAR’ Mixail, Vse svobodny. Istoriïa o tom, kak v 1996 godou v Rossii zakontchilis vybory, Moskva, Alpina, 2021. ↩
Until recently, Sudan was a “pariah state”, subject to international sanctions for terrorism and war crimes. Independent since 1956, this former Anglo-Egyptian condominium has long been torn apart by ethnic and religious conflicts — no need to go back to the Mahdist insurrection in 1885 and Gordon Pasha. From 1983 to 2011, the southern part of the country experienced a long war of independence, interspersed with fragile truces. Following the 2011 referendum on self-determination, South Sudan gained independence, but not without fierce tribal conflicts within the new state.
This long ethnic and religious war reinforces the role of the military in Africa’s largest country1. In 1989, General Omar al-Bashir’s coup established a military-Islamist dictatorship that made Sudan a jihadist base in Africa. In addition to the terrorist Carlos, who had converted to Islam, the regime welcomed Osama Bin Laden, who had been unwelcome in the Arabian Peninsula since the Gulf War2. In 1996, combined pressure from Riyadh and Washington on the Sudanese regime forced the founder of Al-Qaeda to leave for Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban.
In western Sudan, starting in 2003, the people of Darfur rebelled against the central government. According to UN investigators, the massacres and abuse committed by the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and Arab militias, called “Janjaweed”, caused 300,000 deaths and led to the flight of 2.7 million people from Darfur3. It was in this deadly geopolitical context that Hemedti emerged. He asserted himself as a militiaman and warlord, then as a businessman and politician. Later, the Janjaweed became the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). This paramilitary group and control of part of the country’s gold mines form the basis of Hemedti’s power4.
The war in Darfur increased the isolation of the military-Islamist power. In 2004, a UN Security Council resolution established an arms embargo, which was not respected by Beijing and Moscow (China was the main buyer of Sudanese oil at the time). Several Western governments consider that the people of Darfur are victims of genocide. In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and war crimes. His international room for maneuver and his ability to travel abroad are reduced to the extreme.
Yet this is the man that Putin, on November 23, 2017, received very officially in Sochi. The Sudanese president came to propose an alliance to his Russian counterpart. Moscow and Khartoum then signed several agreements on nuclear energy. By 2025, Sudan was supposed to host a Russian civilian nuclear power plant. Moscow was expected to be the main beneficiary of the opening of the uranium sector to foreign investment (Sudan’s reserves placed it third in the world). Russian engineers and geologists were responsible for the precise mapping of Sudan’s mineral resources.
Finally, Omar Al-Bashir asked for more military aid (arms deliveries and the signing of a formal agreement). He asked for Russian protection against the United States. In return, the Sudanese president proposed the opening of a naval base in Port Sudan, in the Red Sea, on the Suez route (the old India route), the main route between Asia and Europe. Russia could thus try to regain the USSR’s geostrategic positions in these areas between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria, is located halfway between the Turkish straits and the Suez Canal).
A Wagner commander presents decorations to the Sudanese military, in 2019 // Telegram channel grey_zone
Omar al-Bachir also suggested to make his country, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, Russia’s relay on the African continent. Sudan borders Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Chad to the west, Libya and Egypt to the north. In fact, the Russians would use it as a gateway to the African continent, to the Central African Republic and then to Mali and other countries of the Sahel region.
It was in Sudan that Wagner’s men first set foot in East Africa5. In return for arms and military-security services, they opened up the mining sector and were able to use Sudan as a platform for the Central African Republic and Libya. Turkey and Qatar were also active in the area. Ankara intended to buy the island of Suakin, a former stronghold of the Ottoman Empire in the Red Sea. A tourist project was put forward but observers saw it as a facade for naval ambitions. Qatari money accompanied the Turkish diplomatic breakthrough6.
In 2019, the Sudanese revolt against Omar al-Bashir’s rule and his deposition by other military leaders seemed to threaten Russia’s positions and prospects in Sudan. A “Transitional Council” was supposed to lead Sudan in stages towards a civilian political formula. Opposed to the Turkish-Qatari axis, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt saw the period as an opportunity to strengthen their own positions. In fact, Hemedti had previously supplied men for the war in Yemen, which had allowed it to increase its war chest and gain power and influence.
Finally, the major Western democracies, primarily the United States, were banking on the ongoing political transition. With the active support of the United Arab Emirates, American diplomacy obtained Khartoum’s support for the Abraham Accords, signed in Washington on September 15, 2020. This was made official in January 2021. On February 2, 2023, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Elie Cohen went to Khartoum to prepare a future peace treaty7 (Hemedti said later that he did not meet the Israeli delegation). But the context had changed.
At the time of the Abraham Accords, the United States seemed to be able to expand its system of alliances in Sudan. The diplomatic breakthrough was all the more significant because this country belonged to the “refusal front”. It was in Khartoum, in 1967, that the declaration of the “Three Nos” had been signed (no to peace, recognition and negotiation with the State of Israel). Later, under Omar al-Bashir, Sudan served as a hub for Iranian arms to Hamas. Undoubtedly, Khartoum’s support for the Abraham Accords was a “tremendous reversal” (Benjamin Netanyahu).
On October 25, 2021, a new coup d’état against the government of Abdalla Hamdock jeopardized the political transition. General Al-Burhan, supported by the army, and Hemedti, at the head of his militia, shared power: the former presided over the “Sovereignty Council” and the latter was vice-president8. Their rivalry seemed to be contained. The coup d’état deprived Sudan of a certain amount of international funding, but donors from the Persian Gulf had the means to compensate for this loss: Riyadh and Abu Dhabi invested in colossal port projects and export-oriented agribusiness programs.
While most regional powers took care to maintain their relations with the two “strongmen”, the hierarchy of alliances was not always the same. Saudi Arabia favoured General Al-Burhan, who was also favoured by Egypt: Marshal al-Sisi intended to make Sudan an ally against Ethiopia9. He did not care that the Sudanese army was close to the Islamists, so hated in Cairo. The United Arab Emirates favoured links with Hemedti, a supplier of mercenaries to Yemen; Abu Dhabi was also a key place for the gold trade. Moreover, Hemedti preferred Ethiopia to Egypt. In this game of alliances, it appeared that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt were not quite playing the same game.
Russia, meanwhile, remained active in Sudan, taking care to be gentle with both. Hemedti was allied with the Wagner company, which exploited Sudanese gold mines and, in return, provided arms and military services10 (consulting and training activities). Shortly before the Russian “special operation” against Ukraine, in February 2022, the head of the RSF was in Moscow, probably to renew his agreements with Yevgeny Prigozhin. At the same time, the Russian state spared General al-Burhan and the army. On February 9, 2023, Sergei Lavrov was in Khartoum to resume negotiations on Port Sudan.
Vladimir Putin and Omar al-Bashir on July 14, 2018 // kremlin.ru
The war between al-Burhan and Hemedti, which began on April 15, 2023, surprised all the external players. Although political negotiations were stumbling over whether or not to integrate the RSF into the official army, neither man seemed to have an immediate interest in starting hostilities. 11 It is not impossible that an Islamist provocation precipitated this armed conflict. The men who were once at the heart of Omar al-Bashir’s military-Islamist dictatorship remain influential and they retain many supporters within the Sudanese armed forces, which are infiltrated by the “Shadow Brigades”.12
Moscow’s position in the current conflict is one of neutrality, especially since its ability to influence the course of events is weak. 13 Unilateral positions could ruin the work of influence that has been carried out for several years. However, the Wagner group still seems to be committed to Hemedti. Mutually profitable, the links forged with the RSF and the gold trade finance operations in Ukraine. There is no question of cutting ties.
According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, several flights between Wagner’s bases in Cyrenaica (Libya) and those of the RSF in Sudan have been spotted by American intelligence services. These are said to be arms transfers, which would explain in part the ability of Hemedti’s militia to confront the Sudanese military. Other transfers of this type could have been organized from the Central African Republic, in particular anti-aircraft weapons that could counterbalance the Sudanese army’s aerial domination.
Of course, the Russian presence and the misdeeds of the Wagner group alone cannot explain the situation in Sudan. Local strongmen, factions and the historical role of the army in political life are at the root of the wars that continue to tear Sudan apart. The uncertain calculations of the regional powers, which are now in a state of disarray, are also more important than the actions of Russia and its proxies.
At least this overview of Sudanese politics reminds us of the importance of “African games” in the Russian grand strategy, at the risk of further destabilizing East Africa, Chad, and Equatorial Africa. This goes far beyond the Islamist peril that the Muscovites are exploiting. In short, the main front is in Ukraine, on the Baltic/Black Sea axis, but the importance of Russian oblique strategies, in Africa and on the southern flank of Europe, should not be underestimated.
Sudan at the time covered some 2.5m km². Since the independence of South Sudan, its surface area is just under 1.9m km². Although it has overtaken Algeria as the largest African country in terms of surface area, it remains the largest state in sub-Saharan Africa. ↩
In 1994, Carlos was handed over by Khartoum to French services, more precisely to the direction de la Surveillance du territoire (DST). ↩
“Janjaweed” is roughly translated as “hordes”. These militias are raised in the Arab and pastoral tribes of Darfur and Chad. ↩
See “Hemedti. L’ancien chamelier qui rêverait de devenir président”, Jeune Afrique, March 12, 2022. ↩
For a perspective on Russian strategy in Africa, see “Wagner in Mali: we should not miss the forest for the tree,” Desk-Russie, October 8, 2021. ↩
A former Ottoman possession in the Red Sea, the island of Suakin (20 hectares), on the Sudanese coast, is possibly integrated into the Turkish geopolitical system. During a state visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Khartoum on December 26, 2017, Sudan announced that it had granted a 99-year lease to Turkey for the island, which is attached to the mainland by a breakwater. As late as the early 20th century, Suakin was home to one of the region’s main trading ports. It was also an important crossing point for pilgrims on their way to Mecca on the opposite shore. The port of Suakin did not withstand the emergence of Port Sudan, built 60 kilometers further north by the British in 1905, a deep-water port designed to accommodate larger vessels. Relegated to the background, despite a remarkable architectural and historical heritage, Suakin Island has been left abandoned. Erdogan’s stated ambition is to make this island a tourist and transit area for Muslim pilgrims. Because of its strategic position in the Red Sea, some believe that Turkey could set up a naval base there. The transfer of Suakin Island was accompanied by the signing of a dozen agreements on economic, agricultural and military cooperation. ↩
Cf. “Israel and Sudan on the road to normalizing their relations,” Le Monde/AFP, February 2, 2023. ↩
In December 2022, an agreement was signed with Sudanese political parties, with a view to a civilian government. It was supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. ↩
Cairo and Addis Ababa clashed over the Great Renaissance Dam, built in Ethiopia, on the Blue Nile, upstream from Sudan and Egypt. ↩
Wagner’s business in Sudan is conducted by Meroe Gold, which is linked to M-Invest, a company headed by the Concord holding company, which is controlled by Evgueni Prigozhin. The gold sand processed by Meroe Gold comes mainly from Darfur, where Hemedti, his family and the RSF are well established. The smuggling of Sudanese gold to Abu Dhabi is estimated to be worth billions of dollars. ↩
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are estimated to number between 140,000 and 250,000, while the RSF are estimated to number between 80,000 and 100,000. In view of these figures, the integration of militiamen into the SAF would change the nature and configuration of the latter. ↩
See Eliott Brachet, “Au Soudan, les islamistes en embuscade”, Le Monde, May 4, 2023. ↩
While the fighting ravaged Khartoum, a metropolis of five million inhabitants, and spread to other parts of Sudan, causing hundreds of deaths, thousands of wounded and tens of thousands of refugees, the representatives of the protagonists were negotiating in Jeddah, under the aegis of the Americans and the Saudis. Cf. “Soudan : pendant que la guerre fait rage, les négociations piétinent en Arabie saoudite”, Le Monde/AFP, May 9, 2023. ↩
The decline of the West is once again on the agenda. The strange alliance between Russia and China and the refusal of many countries of the South to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would be the expression of a loss of influence of liberal democracies, and the rise of a “global South” led by the BRICS and particularly China, which is rejecting “neoliberal globalization” in favor of other political models. Some even go so far as to say that the invasion of Ukraine has exposed a lasting isolation of the West. Putin’s Russia, despite its military setbacks, despite its damning crimes, would be in the process of realizing its dream of “de-Westernizing the world”, i.e. establishing a new international order that would break with Western supremacy1.
This order, called “multipolar”, is in reality the reign of uninhibited force and the inflation of border conflicts. This does not prevent “de-Westernization” from seducing a large number of countries. Liberal democracies, torn by their cultural contradictions, no longer offer a triumphant model, and the liabilities of the “global West” (another of Putin’s favorite expressions) are overwhelming for the rest of the world: African countries are reviving anti-colonial resentment after decades of independence, others (Gulf countries) are fed up with the lack of consideration and the withdrawal, voluntary or not, of the American gendarme (Sudan, Egypt), while others still (Iraq, Afghanistan) have been victims of the erring ways of its hyperpower. Finally, some countries (Brazil, Turkey) believe they have reached a degree of economic or strategic power that allows them to aspire to a regional hegemony free from the tutelage of the G7. Third World Marxism, thought to be buried, is resurfacing and reviving old links with the former Soviet sponsor, as far as South Africa, with the resurgence of the ANC’s pro-Soviet tropism during the Cold War. Last but not least, China’s immense power is an irresistible pole of attraction, spearheading the shift of the center of the world from the Euro-Atlantic space to Asia.
Public opinion in poor countries is particularly receptive to the promise of de-Westernization. The West is accused of all the evils of the world. Sanctions, not Russian aggression, are responsible for the food crisis. Putin is admired because he stands up to the West. The invader of Ukraine is seen as an anti-imperialist. China is praised for the infrastructure it has built in Africa, and its predatory policies — the grabbing of mineral resources and farmland to feed the Chinese, the debt trap — seem to be ignored.
In a recent column, insightful as always, Alain Frachon, notes that “the global South is diverse and behaves differently, sometimes backing the Sino-Russian bloc, sometimes the West. At the UN, in September 2022, the global South voted massively against Russia’s annexation of part of Ukraine.” But he adds: “Nevertheless, in the face of Putin’s aggression, there is a lack of political solidarity in the South, an absence of shared indignation, if not purely and simply the resumption of Sino-Russian propaganda (everything is always the fault of the West). Why?”2
As he left Moscow on March 22, 2023, Xi Jinping greeted his “friend” Putin with these words: “Geopolitical changes are now at work in the world, changes that have not been seen for a hundred years (…), and when we work together, we take the lead in these changes.» “I agree,” Putin replied soberly. The account (the narrative, as they say) of the de-Westernization of the world is a balm for Russia, which has gone from being a declining power entangled in an infamous and unwinnable war to being on the right side of history and claiming to be an equal partner with the Chinese giant. In Putin’s vision of the world, the pitiful performance of the Russian armies in Ukraine is a mere detail compared with the global geopolitical upheaval of which the war in Ukraine was the catalyst.
Alain Frachon hit the nail on the head when he warned us about resentment against the West in the countries of the South. But should we graft it onto the global narrative of de-Westernization? If we take one by one the facts that support this narrative and add them up without asking ourselves whether they are cumulative or not, we can believe that they represent a major trend. Add to this a dose of historical gravity — look at the demographic decline of the West, the growth of the BRICS, etc. — and a pinch of self-hatred — the global West is guilty, it is well deserved — and there you have the irreversible de-Westernization, whatever the fate of the weapons in Ukraine. The announcement of the decline of the West, although repeated by fine minds, is nonetheless premature. The signs that seem to attest to this are too recent to allow one to infer a lasting trend from the atmosphere of the moment. The decline of the West could well last as long as the definitive triumph of liberal democracy in 1989, one moment.
I will begin by recalling a massive contrary fact, which is nevertheless overlooked in the picture of de-Westernization: the strengthening of NATO, moral as well as material. Not only have two important countries, Finland and Sweden, decided to join the Alliance, but the Alliance has shown remarkable military efficiency and unfailing solidarity in defending a democracy under attack. Military effectiveness is not only due to the decisive material aid given to Ukraine, but also to the organizational and tactical excellence of the so-called NATO standards. Ukraine’s successes on the ground have indeed demonstrated the unity and courage of a people, but also the quality of the command, coordination and tactical intelligence model developed by NATO, which Ukraine has been able to assimilate for years, including since before 2014.
If decoupling between Europe and the United States is still possible, Euro-Atlantic solidarity appears revitalized, or rather, radiant: it has shown that it stands firm on principles, while China and Russia display their cynical disregard for the law and for promises. In doing so, it attracts Japan and the democracies of the Indo-Pacific, not only as a security asset, but also because of what I would like to call its moral consistency.
In terms of military strength, NATO’s superiority will remain overwhelming for a long time, given the destruction suffered and the weaknesses revealed by the Russian army. Moreover, the sanctions and the embargo on advanced technologies are already hitting and will durably impair Russia’s weapons production and export capacity. For this reason, it is not clear that its most loyal customers, starting with India, will remain so. Further east, China’s military-industrial growth is commensurate with its economic power, but a large number of nuclear submarines does not compensate for its lack of experience in warfare3.
The West, the EU in particular, has shown a unity and resolve in the face of war that was not necessarily expected. It has put an end to the disarmament that had been going on for 30 years, in the name of the “peace dividend”4. Democracies, supposedly consumerist, weakened by their divisions and loss of confidence in the elites, and incapable of thinking beyond the very short term, have mobilized for principles: international law, but also political freedom, “so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people will never disappear from the face of the Earth”. These principles are not only “values”, they are concrete forms of life that are threatened in their very existence by Russian imperialism. For the time being, Ukrainians alone are shedding blood for these principles. But the admiration they arouse could well awaken our democratic languor5.
As Alain Frachon writes in his column, disenchantment with the West observed in the global South does not make it a united front. India, which has just dethroned China as the most populous country in the world, is conducting a subtle Realpolitik. It has refused to impose sanctions and does not condemn Russian aggression, which seems to reinforce its pro-Russian tropism — in reaction to the supply of arms by the United States to Pakistan, a hereditary enemy —, but this does not put an end to its old conflict with China, on its borders and at sea. Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier has underlined the high level of these tensions for Desk Russie: among many other frictions, India intends to oppose Chinese maritime claims in the Indian Ocean. To this end, it has joined the informal Indo-Pacific alliance (United States, Japan, Australia, ASEAN states).
The BRICS claim to be the vanguard of the fight against Western “domination”, but will they be able to draw the poor countries into this crusade in the long term, given their divergent interests? The Brazilian ogre’s compromise with Putin will not be enough to win over the Bolivarian and Peronist countries of Latin America.
BRICS Summit in South Africa, July 2018 // kremlin.ru
The most fragile link of the global South is its keystone, China. Xi Jinping’s global ambition impresses and worries, but it stumbles on all sides with dilemmas. The alliance with Russia seems solid in terms of big strategic ideas, much less in detail: China wants to stop the war quickly, but Putin does not want to know and is ready for endless war, even without victory; China would like to see the lasting weakening of Russia — which is the goal of Ukraine and its allies — but fears its collapse; it has important positions in Iran as well as in Russia, but it certainly does not want to come across as the third thief of the axis of evil. Finally, “systemic rivalry” with Europe and the United States is a very narrow path for China, which diminishes the threat: it cannot push too far its hostility toward the West, by far its most important customer, at risk of losing the main driver of its growth. Similarly, it must be careful to keep up appearances with the poor countries it plunders and pollutes, or it will appear as a new form of imperialism. Several specialists analyze Xi’s dictatorship as a return to totalitarianism, all the more radical because digital technologies make it possible for the fantasy of total control over the population to come true. These analyses are convincing, but we know that totalitarianisms are vulnerable because of their propensity to replace reality with a self-destructive surreality, to overdo their goals beyond what is achievable.
The aging of the population is a strong argument for the declinist thesis, because demographic trends are considered the most inexorable. In reality, there are surprises or effects known only to specialists: China has just entered a phase of aging and rapid population decline, which will threaten its growth model in the coming decades. India has become the most populous country in the world and it is impossible to say whether this is good or bad news for it.
The UN has bad press. It is in the hot seat both for its impotence in the face of Russian aggression and because it represents an outdated and unjust international order, “Western domination”. The stalemate at the UN is indeed overwhelming: the composition of the Security Council and the rules for permanent members to exercise their veto power are no longer justifiable. The countries of the global South no longer accept being excluded from the group of permanent members, and Russia and China have stirred up this discontent[7]. In September 2022, two important states pledged before the General Assembly to promote the opening of the Security Council to new permanent members from all continents, and the reform of the veto power. It is tempting to assume that these are countries of the global South, India, for example, or Brazil. But they are France and the United States, which have proposed in similar terms to open the Security Council to new permanent members, “so that it is more representative” (Emmanuel Macron), and to limit the use of the veto power. Before the General Assembly, Joe Biden invited the permanent members of the Council, “including the United States”, to “refrain from using their veto power, except in rare and extraordinary situations, to ensure that the Council remain credible and effective”. France was more specific: it proposed a reform of the Council limiting the use of the veto power in cases of mass crimes. So far, France and the United States do not seem to be more popular with the countries of the South as a result of these proposals. We know that reforming the Security Council is very difficult. But if there is ever a broad enough coalition to decide on this reform, the poor countries and the BRICS will stand with the West.
I would like to end with an argument that is perhaps the most powerful against the thesis of de-Westernization of the world, although it is a moral argument — we know that morality in international politics arouses the sarcasm of “realists” even more when they are pro-Russian. The countries that play the card of the global South against the West on the side of Russia are forced, so to speak logically, to ignore, i.e. to tacitly accept, the crime of aggression committed by Russia and the assorted war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide that resulted from it. These crimes are not “blunders” that a country can pretend to ignore in the name of its interests. They cannot be considered as collateral damage inherent in international politics. They will be judged one way or another. For now, the inherent immorality of Lula da Silva and Xi Jinping’s attitude is covered by the fog of war. But the global South and its promoters will one day be held accountable for choosing evil. Their bad faith and their evasions in the face of Russian crimes and lies will then become politically untenable, condemned even by international justice6. Realism in international relations cannot be reduced to the cynical acceptance of the law of the strongest: if force plays an undeniable and ineliminable role in international relations, the same is true for legal and ethical principles. The absolute evil embodied by Putin’s imperial dream is, in short, the experimental demonstration of the effectiveness of principles in international life.
In an article mistakenly published in March 2022 and immediately withdrawn (it was supposed to appear after Russia’s lightning victory in Ukraine), the official Novosti agency stated: “Russia has not only defied the West, it has shown that the era of Western world domination can be considered completely and definitively over.” The article was picked up and translated by Fondapol. ↩
Alain Frachon, “A question should be on the minds of Westerners: why doesn’t the South mobilize more against the imperialist adventures of Putin’s Russia?”, Le Monde, May 4, 2023. ↩
Since its armed intervention in Tibet in 1950-1951, China has not waged any real war. Its most recent experience of naval warfare dates back to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and ended in defeat. ↩
Even the United States, which has maintained considerable military budgets since 1991, is suffering from a lack of troops and ammunition stocks. ↩
The war in Ukraine has entered its second year, and we are still waiting for the announced turnaround in Western public opinion against the risks and costs of supporting Ukraine. ↩
South Africa, compromised with Russia, and even Israel who refuses military assistance to Ukraine, will also be smeared by scandal when Russian crimes will be put on trial. ↩
In South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Russia’s strategic partner is the Union of India. These ties were forged in the Soviet era, under Indira Gandhi, and were renewed at the end of the 1990s, when Yevgeny Primakov, Foreign Minister then Prime Minister under Yeltsin, set up “anti-hegemonic coalitions”. The aim, it was believed, was to rebalance relations with the United States and the West in order to change the terms of trade. In truth, Moscow was already working to rebuild an opposition force.
The close relationship between Moscow and Delhi is reflected in energy cooperation agreements, a military-industrial partnership — half of India’s military equipment is of Russian-Soviet origin1 — and regular naval exercises (“Indra” exercises). Only last year, the Indian Navy took part in the “Vostok 2022” exercises. Other exercises are conducted within the multilateral framework of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
Russia, whose role was essential in promoting the BRICS format (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), also supported India’s SCO membership. This was done in 2017, along with the integration of Pakistan, a historical ally of China. For Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalists of the BJP2 (Bharatiya Jana Sangh), joining the SCO is part of the “Neighbourhood policy”; in a way, a policy of “zero problems” with its neighbors.
Before the war in Ukraine, however, Russia hardly had the will or the means to accompany India’s rise to power. The area of relevance of its grand strategy was and remains post-Soviet Eurasia, considered as a “near abroad”3. Russia’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean remained limited, unmatched by that of the United States and its main allies. In the 2000s, the “war on terror” even led to the deployment of Western armadas in the Indian Ocean, a platform for power projection toward Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom).
Western capitals, aware of the new balances in the making of what was not yet called the Indo-Pacific zone, were working to establish a new relationship with India4. In 2006, Washington and Delhi signed a cooperation agreement in the field of civil nuclear energy. Paris was working to export its warplanes and naval technology. As a result, the Soviet quasi-monopoly on arms sales to India was gradually ending. More broadly, Brussels began negotiating a free trade treaty with Delhi. Israel, Australia and Japan are also involved in the process. Since Brexit, the United Kingdom has been negotiating on its own behalf.
These prospects exceed what Russia would be able to offer India. All the more so since Moscow favors its links with China, without being able to benefit from a diplomatic counterweight in the great Asian theater (Moscow seeks to preserve a Vietnamese “sphere of privileged interest”). However, hostility between Beijing and Delhi prevails, due to major territorial disputes and the close rear alliance that China and Pakistan have forged.
Before the East Asian countries and their Western allies were confronted with Beijing’s territorial and maritime claims in the so-called “Asian Mediterranean seas” (South and East China Seas), India had to deal with Chinese ambitions at an early stage. It may have won the four wars that opposed it to Pakistan (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) but its army was defeated in the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Jeopardized as soon as the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) troops entered Tibet in 1950, Nehru’s Third World policy, which involved an agreement with China, revealed its vacuity. Beijing even argued that American aid to India would deprive it of the role it had claimed in the Third World, a claim that had been explicit since the Bandung Conference (18-24 April 1955).
In 1962, Chinese troops crossed the McMahon Line5 to take up positions on the Himalayan foothills, overlooking the Brahmaputra. Although the Brahmaputra loop and the Assam region were subsequently evacuated, China acted differently on the western edge of the Indo-Chinese borders, where Aksai Chin, a piece of Kashmir, was annexed (Aksai Chin corresponds to a part of the Ladakh plateau). Since then, Delhi has been demanding the return of this territory. In return, Beijing disputes the rightful membership of Arunachal Pradesh in the Indian Federation.
In the summer of 2017, China and India again clashed over the Doklam plateau in western Bhutan, which Beijing has decided to militarize6. In 2020 and 2021, there were incidents in Sikkim, a small state in the Union of India that borders Tibet (People’s Republic of China) and Nepal, as well as on the Ladakh plateau in the far north of India, bordering Tibet. The Chinese armed forces are challenging the Line of Actual Control (LAC). After clashes which probably caused several dozen deaths on both sides, it pushed its advantage. About 1,500 km² passed under the control of the Chinese armed forces7.
At the same time, Beijing has continued to strengthen its alliance with Pakistan. It has given it access to nuclear weapons and supports its position on the Kashmir issue. Launched in 2013, the vast “New Silk Roads” program has also given a major boost to the “string of pearls” strategy in the Indian Ocean8 , to the point of challenging Delhi’s role in the “Indian Lake” (the former “British Lake”).
The same project includes the opening of a logistical corridor through Pakistan to the port of Gwadar (financed by Beijing), and takes the form of a strategy of encircling India. Moreover, China has failed to firmly and explicitly condemn the terrorism of Islamist movements supported to varying degrees by the Pakistani “deep state”, in the name of the struggle for the reattachment of the part of Kashmir that is outside Islamabad’s control.
In sum, India is under attack on its Himalayan borders (3,500 km), while its naval and maritime ambitions in the Indian Ocean are countered by China. This leads Delhi, in agreement with Tokyo, to promote the Indo-Pacific concept . Established in 2007, the “Indo-Pacific Quad” is its strategic extension. After falling off the radar, it has been revived in recent years9. Delhi and Tokyo are driving the “Freedom Roads” agenda; Washington and Brussels are asserting their vision of East-West routes and infrastructure10.
Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi in 2019 // kremlin.ru
Without being a formal alliance, the Quad, the grouping between the United States, Australia, Japan and India, aims to counteract the People’s Republic of China. It is open to other powers in the region, including those of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), called the “Quad +”. Occasionally, France is not above joining military exercises conducted within this framework. The demands of Western unity and France’s desire to be a responsible power in the Indo-Pacific zone should lead it to join this “Quad +”. It is true that this requires greater clarity with regard to Taiwan11.
The Quad, the set of bilateral relations between India and Western powers, as well as the military-industrial cooperation established with the same in the post-Cold War period, thus open up perspectives for Delhi other than those proposed by “Russia-Eurasia”, which is obsessed with the post-Soviet area and the Arctic. All the more so since the failure of its troops in the Ukrainian theater exposes for everyone to see the limits of Russia’s military art, of its “combat proven” equipment (in Syria) and of the “brilliant strategist” who rules in the Kremlin. If only for economic and industrial reasons, it will in any case be difficult for Moscow to maintain its positions on the arms market12.
Also, and above all, the war in Ukraine is moving in the direction of closer ties between Russia and China, to the point that many commentators are finally willing to talk about a Sino-Russian alliance13. From Moscow, India can be seen as an example of a country that has been able to develop its own economy. From Moscow’s point of view, India can be of diplomatic and economic service, but it does not carry much weight in terms of grand strategy and global geopolitics. Faced with the “collective West”, the Russians and Chinese are driven by a shared hostility and the belief that the future belongs to them. They are following the logic of a great hegemonic confrontation.
In truth, Indian should be aware of the formation on its northern borders of a vast Sino-Russian Eurasia that would claim to speak and act on behalf of the whole of Asia and the “global South”. Especially since Beijing uses the SCO, which it supervises with Moscow, to reduce India’s diplomatic room for manoeuvre on the international scene. The BRICS forum, whose ideological oversight is provided by the same group, does not give it any more space14.
Finally, Beijing has allies within SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative), both of which focus on South and Southeast Asia15. Significantly, no country in the Indian subcontinent and its periphery has condemned Chinese actions on the Ladakh plateau. Thus, there will be no South Asian bloc, led by Delhi, that is able and willing to counteract China. It is in the West and its Asia-Pacific allies (see AUKUS) that India will find partners, and even allies, determined to counter Beijing.
Hindu nationalism would still have to distance itself from the “sublime lie” of autochthony (to the point of denying the Indo-European fact), and favor a maritime and global interpretation of the long history of the Indian subcontinent. As a regional crossroads of an Afro-Eurasian system of exchanges, medieval and modern India was situated between East Africa, the Islamic world, Upper Asia and the Far East. Only by turning toward the open sea, more precisely toward the maritime powers of the West and the Asia-Pacific, will it be able to face China’s grip, in Eurasia as in the Indo-Pacific. Putin’s “Russia-Eurasia” will never be more than an unreliable provider.
Indian diplomats and strategists should know that invoking an ancient collection of stratagems (the Arthashastra), or exploiting windfall effects on world markets (oil, fertilizer and grain), cannot be a substitute for high politics. As for Western powers, they will have to pressurize India, to exploit the situation in order to detach it from Moscow. Without aiming to get this “civilization-state” to switch purely and simply to the West, because India is too massive and self-centered for its leaders to make such a drastic choice. In short, it is a question of practicing the art of diplomacy, an exercise that combines persuasion, cooperation and coercion. An exercise in classicism.
It was about 80 percent until 2014. The first international sanctions taken after the manu militari annexation of Crimea and the start of a hybrid war in the Donbas, as limited as they were, still have an effect on the Russian arms industry today. ↩
Narendra Modi and the BJP won a majority in the lower house in 2014. Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalism marks a departure from the policy of economic openness that began in the 1990s. In fact, nationalism rhymes with protectionism. Nevertheless, the goal of transforming India into the world’s new factory and making its economy the third largest in the world requires international trade negotiations. ↩
We need to bear in mind that the doctrine dates from 1992. It therefore predates the first enlargement of NATO, decided in 1997 and carried out two years later. Similarly, the Tashkent Treaty (1992), on which the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) is based, preceded NATO enlargement. These facts are seldom mentioned. ↩
Although the concept of “Indo-Pacific” zone was used as early as 1924 by German geographer Karl Haushofer, it has only recently spread, taking on a new value and meaning with the rise in power of the People’s Republic of China. In 2007, during a visit to India, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the term Indo-Pacific for the first time before the Indian Parliament, evoking The Confluence of the Two Seas, the title of a book written by a 17th century Mughal prince (Japan and India are at the two ends of this Indo-Pacific region). The concept is also commonly used in Australia (White Paper on Defense, 2013) and even in Indonesia, two countries located at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Across the Atlantic, the expression was used by Hillary Clinton in 2010 (“Indo-Pacific Basin”). Since then, the Indo-Pacific region has been the United States’ “priority theater” (National Security Strategy, 2017). In France, the Indo-Pacific theme is becoming increasingly important on the strategic and geopolitical levels (an Indo-Pacific defense policy was presented in June 2018). In the background, the power ambitions of the People’s Republic of China, which, from the strategy of the “string of pearls” to the “New Silk Roads” (the Belt and Road Initiative), is developing power and influence, and this from the “Asian Mediterranean seas” (South and East China Seas) and the Strait of Malacca to the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Bab El-Mandeb as well as to the eastern coast of Africa. In short, “the Indo-Pacific is the former Asia-Pacific area, plus India, which is the rising power in the face of China” (Jean-Luc Racine), and the geopolitical challenge is to contain Beijing’s ambitions. Since 2020, the European Union has also had a strategy for the Indo-Pacific, a point of balance between the strategies of the member states in the region (France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy in particular). ↩
Established in 1914 on the basis of an agreement between the United Kingdom and Tibet, the McMahon Line delineates the North Eastern Frontier Agency (present-day Arunachal Pradesh, a member state of the Union of India), an outpost of the Indian Empire in the eastern Himalayas. On the other side of this line, Tibet then enjoyed de facto independence, its legitimacy reinforced by this agreement. In 1947, when India reached independence (Union of India and Pakistan), the McMahon Line separated Tibet from the Union of India. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, this boundary became one of the segments of the border between the Union of India and China (the Line of Actual Control is articulated on the Johnson and McCartney lines in the north-west and the McMahon Line in the north-east). By extension, the McMahon Line refers to the issue of India’s northern borders, the difficult Sino-Indian relations and the Tibet issue. ↩
See Julien Bouissou, “Face-à-face tendu entre la Chine et l’Inde au Bouthan”, Le Monde, July 31, 2017. ↩
See Sophie Landrin, “Dans l’Himalaya indien, l’implacable grignotage de l’armée chinoise”, Le Monde, August 9, 2022. ↩
A network of Chinese bases and support points, from Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf and Djibouti. The name is American. When it first appeared, it was a good idea to point out America’s paranoia. When tested by the facts, this “string of pearls” was one of the first signs announcing the “New Silk Roads”. ↩
The Indo-Pacific Quad is a cooperative structure that includes the United States, Japan, Australia and India. Founded in 2004 to address the effects of the Asian tsunami, the Quad was formalized in 2007 on the sidelines of an ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) summit. Re-launched in November 2020, the cooperative structure held a virtual summit the following year, with its heads of state and government issuing a collective statement (March 12, 2021). On the following September 24, Joe Biden and the United States hosted a real summit of the Quad. Beyond the joint military exercises in which France is sometimes involved, the cooperation also covers climate change, the current pandemic, digital technology and the issue of semiconductor supply chains. Its members are in favor of a “free and open Indo-Pacific region.” ↩
It was the United States that, as early as the 1990s, took up the theme of “silk roads” to open up the Caspian basin and Central Asia. ↩
See Sylvain Kahn, “Emmanuel Macron is mistaken, Europeans and Americans are on the same side in the face of China,” La Croix, April 18, 2023. ↩
See Jean-Michel Bezat, “Ventes d’armes : le complexe militaro-industriel russe ne cesse de céder du terrain aux États-Unis et à la France”, Le Monde, March 27, 2023. ↩
On this point, Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, from 20 to 22 March, was significant. It has since been followed by that of the Chinese Minister of Defense, received by Vladimir Putin. If some people in France are slow to realize this, the words of the Chinese ambassador in Paris, on April 21, live on LCI, should convince them. Lu Shaye challenged the fact that Crimea is part of Ukraine, as well as the legal validity of the borders of the various states stemming from the break-up of the USSR. France, through the Quai d’Orsay, said it was “dismayed”. ↩
Brazil and South Africa have already rallied to the Sino-Russian duo. ↩
Founded in 1983, SAARC includes the eight countries of South Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, The Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The People’s Republic of China, Japan, South Korea, the United States and the European Union have observer status. BIMSTEC is a sub-regional forum for nations in the Bay of Bengal, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal, which was established in Bangkok in 1997. Nepal and Bhutan joined in 2004. ↩
Before emigrating to Germany several years ago, Russian sociologist Igor Eidman worked as a “political technologist” (specialist in political communication), and he explained in January 2020 that Russian politics had gone through two phases under Putin: the time of games and the time of blood. The latter began in 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea, although blood had been spilled as early as 1999. During the first phase, the Russian economy seemed to be growing at a rapid pace, and “political technologists” were inventing “all sorts of manipulative techniques and shows” to make their candidates win, to get rid of others, and to distract voters from their problems: “It all looked like a relatively safe show,” said Eidman. But, as he pointed out, these “political technologists” and their sponsors in the Presidential Administration had been involved since 1995 in the destruction of the democracy that existed in Russia between 1990 and 19931.
And then came the time of blood.
For Igor Eidman, “Surkov, the aesthete”, was at the beginning of the two phases, the time of games and the time of blood. This statement needs to be nuanced: Surkov did not initiate the first phase, but he undoubtedly supervised and shaped it from 1999, when he became the number two in the Presidential Administration, and he did play a decisive role in the transition from game to blood. Designated in 2005 by the German Spiegel as Putin’s “main strategist” and the “second most powerful man in Russia”, he has been, according to the journalist Joshua Yaffa, “the architect of post-modern politics”, which consists of cultivating appearances at odds with reality, adding and juxtaposing incompatible elements, and multiplying dirty twists. All this, with the greatest cynicism and from behind the scenes, because Surkov likes staying in the shadows.
A slightly distracted observer could believe that Surkov and his teams simply put back in place the tools necessary to monitor society in an authoritarian, even semi-totalitarian mode: the control of the media, of political parties, of Justice, of social mobilizations; the recruitment in youth organizations, etc. But they also wanted to deprive discourses of their meanings, or, rather, to multiply contradictory actions and discourses, so that meanings disappeared. Atomized and disoriented, society would thus become unable of acting, especially since it did not have a long tradition of social mobilizations, not organized “from above”. An example of this deliberate confusion? Surkov claims to write “post-modern” novels, but as early as 2002 he was organizing “happenings” to destroy “post-modern” novels in public, this double approach seeming to be the peak of Putinism’s post-modernism.
Vladislav Surkov was born on September 21, 1964, and his real name seems to be Aslambek Doudaiev: he preferred his Russian mother’s last name to his Chechen father’s name. Several versions of his childhood circulate, with many mysteries and controversies. It seems that, after high school, the young man did his military service in the special troops (spetsnaz) of the GRU, and, two or three decades later, many claim that he remains linked to these military intelligence services. This modulates the image of “aesthete” that he cultivates, and/or the image of the GRU. In 1982, he began studying at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys — like the future oligarch Mikhail Fridman and, in the previous class, the future propagandist Vladimir Solovyov: all three attended the same club of English language. But Vladislav Surkov soon switched to a theater faculty, which he did not complete either.
It is probably during these unfinished studies that he started working for the future oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky: as a bodyguard, it seems. Then, in 1987, at the age of 23, he was appointed head of the advertising department in the structure headed by Khodorkovsky, which was still attached to the Komsomol (the Communist Youth) in a Moscow district. Here, several remarks are necessary. It was the Komsomol that, together with other official organizations — the KGB, first of all -— initiated the economic and political reconversion of the USSR, and gave to Khodorkovsky — and to a few others — the means to build his immense fortune. Fifteen months younger than Khodorkovsky, Surkov belonged to the same generation and, at a much lower level of responsibility, to the same team: those to whom the transformation, then the disappearance of the USSR, would offer career opportunities, inaccessible to most Soviet people. Surkov held then several management positions at Khodorkovsky’s, but later, as number two in the Presidential Administration, he would supervise the State propaganda unleashed against the arrested oligarch, and — as Vladimir Solovyov noted in 2006 — would never speak publicly about this arrestation.
Surkov speaks at the 5th congress of the Nachi movement, April 15, 2010 // Public domain
Between 1991 and 1996, Surkov was, as a specialist in public relations (PR), one of the senior executives in the Menatep bank created by Khodorkovsky. Then, between 1996 and 1997, he directed the PR department at RosProm, a structure linked to Yukos (Khodorkovsky’s group). After a quick passage in Alfa-bank — whose owner, Mikhail Fridman, he knew —, he was hired in 1998 by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky at the television channel ORT as deputy to the general director, in charge of PR. In this function Surkov — who did not participate directly in the 1996 presidential campaign — developed frequent contacts with “the Kremlin”. In 1999, he was recruited by the Presidential Administration (PA) and became its number two in August. That same month, Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister: the decision to make this unknown Chekist the future Russian president had already been taken by those close to Boris Yeltsin.
In a bar of a non-Russian, but formerly Soviet, capital, one of the experts who collaborated with this Presidential Administration explained me the milieu of “political technologists” and constantly mentioned “the Kremlin”. I asked him to clarify: “Who is ‘the Kremlin’?” — “The Presidential Administration,” he replied. Created in 1991, it is therefore far from being a simple administration: essential decisions are taken there, policies are defined by the permanent staff, helped by “political technologists”, then they are validated by the Russian presidency.
Surkov concentrated first on domestic politics and created from scratch a first party, “Unity” (Edinstvo), headed by Sergei Shoigu, the current Minister of Defense, and this party was supposed to support the government in everything. It obtained surprisingly good results at the parliamentary elections in December 1999, and Yeltsin was asked to step down, so that his prime minister could replace him as acting president and win the elections more easily. The Presidential Administration was working to create Putin’s image.
At that time, Surkov was known only to specialists and, as the journalist Elena Tregubova wrote, he claimed to be “one of those rare kinds of bacteria that die in the light”. However, he was brilliant when he felt appreciated, and he read a lot, which was not the case for anyone else in the Kremlin. His favorite book was Dostoyevsky’s Demons, and in 2003, Tregubova ironized that the small group of revolutionaries at the heart of this novel seemed “a parody of the current narrow circle of ‘revolutionaries’ in the Kremlin”. In 2020, Surkov even intervened, through a video, in the theatrical adaptation of The Demons by Konstantin Bogomolov, and his fascination for this novel — coupled with a profound misunderstanding, it seems, of what it warns against — is probably more revealing than any other analysis of this man’s psychology and systems of reference.
Surkov also wanted to become a writer, before admitting that he was not a genius in this field, and he became “an aesthete in life”, who, as Tregubova wrote in 2003, had tailor-made suits sewn for him and admitted to liking money “a lot”. He was surprised that the young journalist refused to write articles on political orders: “Don’t you like selling yourself?” At the time, Tregubova added, he “categorically refused any form of tyranny and violence, from, of course, an aesthetic point of view,” and considered “primitive” to force anyone to do anything. But he already hated journalists, whom he saw as “professional provocateurs who should be isolated as far as possible from the place where decisions are made”. Therefore, Tregubova described this apparently shy man as a “killer”. Using the English word.
Vladimir Putin was elected president on March 26, 2000. Almost immediately, he got rid of the national anthem adopted by Yeltsin, and returned to the music of the Soviet anthem, accompanied by lyrics written by Sergei Mikhalkov, who had already signed those of the 1944 and 1977 anthems: a return to Soviet references was thus affirmed. But Sergei Mikhalkov was 87 years old and, according to rumors, Surkov was the real author of the new lyrics of the Russian anthem. He also wrote songs for the pop group Agatha Christie.
The former advertising executive also set up a first youth movement, which appeared in July 2000 and quickly reached 100,000 members: a social demand existed. This movement - which prefigured today’s highly militarized ones - was called “Those who march together” (Идущие вместе), which expresses — in line with “Unity”, but also with the Soviet discourse — a desire for unity, which is not self-evident in a country that is actually extremely divided. This movement became very well known in 2002, when its young members offered “patriotic” books in exchange for Karl Marx’s or post-modernist Victor Pelevin’s books, that were declared harmful. A few weeks later, “those who march together” tear up novels by Vladimir Sorokin, a talented contemporary writer, and threw the debris into a huge toilet bowl in front of the Bolshoi. Surkov’s style is evident: a sense of spectacle and contradictions. Even if, at the time, this action propelled — or maintained — Sorokin at the first place in sales.
In addition, the Presidential Administration had its allies (notably Gazprom) buy media outlets, strengthened its control over information and intensified its manipulations. The journalist Peter Pomerantsev recalls that, from an unspecified date, Surkov met with the heads of the television channels once a week in his office and gave them instructions: whom to attack, whom to defend, who was allowed to appear on television and who was not. Surkov also supervised the creation of new parties, which were supposed to give an illusion of pluralism and to occupy the political field from which the opposition was increasingly excluded. Thus, “United Russia” replaced “Unity” from December 2003, and the nationalist bloc “Rodina” (Fatherland) was set up, with the active help of Marat Guelman, already a gallery owner, but still a political technologist. According to the academic Karen Dawisha, Surkov had already started to pay Duma deputies $5,000 a month on top of their salaries: for their loyalty.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on October 25, 2003. On that day, says journalist Mikhail Zygar, Andrei Illarionov, Vladimir Putin’s economic adviser, met Surkov in a corridor and said to him: “Slava! What should we do now? What are you going to do?” The former Khodorkovsky executive reportedly replied with a smile, “You know, Andryusha, there are no limits to human flexibility.” Since then, Illarionov, Zygar and Khodorkovsky have emigrated from Russia. Aware of the meaning of this turn, Alexander Voloshin, number one in the Presidential Administration, resigned on 30 October 2003. He was replaced by Dmitry Medvedev, who had been close to Putin since Leningrad’s times, but, according to Zygar, it was Surkov who, “shortly afterwards, became the Kremlin’s main ideologist”. A redistribution of roles had started, and most of Yeltsin’s former close friends were replaced by Putin’s friends.
Vladislas Surkov was appointed Vladimir Putin’s deputy in March 2004, while remaining the number two in the Presidential Administration. The same year, in August, he joined the board of directors of an oil company, Transnefteprodukt, and quickly became its chairman. From then on, the boundaries between the executive power, its civil servants and the very large Russian companies have blurred, which allowed many to become extremely rich.
On September 1, 2004, Caucasian terrorists took hostages in a school in Beslan. The police intervened two days later and 333 people were killed, most of them children. Emotions ran high, and Vladimir Putin took advantage of the situation to talk about “external enemies”, to increase his control over governors and local presidents, and to make it more difficult for small parties to enter the Duma. In addition, an interview with Vladislav Surkov was published on 29 September by Komsomolskaya Pravda, a popular newspaper, not highly regarded by intellectuals, but widely read. In it, Surkov explained that certain Western decision-makers were trying to “destroy” Russia and “fill its immense space with innumerable formations, quasi-State-like and unable to act”. Did he mean the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) against which the attacks would be relaunched a few months later, or the governments that manage the “immense space”, not of Russia, but of the former USSR? In any case, he assimilated all of them to Russia’s enemies and to terrorists, while the fear of the foreigner was again used as a force that was supposed to unite society.
Surkov also claimed that the external enemy had internal supporters, who were “child killers and kidnappers”, mainly in the Caucasus. But he also referred to other enemies: a “fifth column of radicals from the right and the left” — members of the National Bolshevik Party created by the writer Eduard Limonov, and some members of the liberal and democratic Yabloko party. The political opposition was thus equated with supporters of terrorism, on the basis of concepts and procedures that had been implanted in people’s consciousness at least since the Soviet period. On the basis of threats too. Thus, Surkov invited or summoned to his office deputies from “United Russia”, some of whom, as the journalist Valery Panyushkin noted, were still sometimes voting against laws proposed by the Kremlin. He forbade them to express any personal opinion: “Decisions are made without you. And those who don’t understand should look at the Yukos affair.” These deputies bended.
Portraits of Surkov and Putin at the Loussiné Djanian exhibition in Moscow, 2013 // Courtesy phototo
Furthermore, the first Orange Revolution had started in Ukraine in December 2004, and Surkov convinced Putin that they needed to fight against the “orange danger” in Russia and in the neighboring countries. With his collaborators, he analyzed the participants of the Ukrainian events, in order to be able to “work” with their Russian counterparts: the cultural circles, the already very controlled media, the youth and the NGOs. Thus, in April 2005, he organized a secret meeting with the most famous rock musicians in Russia — “to recruit them”, wrote Mikhail Zygar, using the verb designing recruitment by secret services. An operation aimed at seducing, controlling and instrumentalizing culture workers had begun. Surkov also met with Russian businessmen on May 17, 2005 and did not hide his hostility to the Ukrainian revolution, which, according to him, was supervised by Westerners. Associating the Color Revolutions with “the activity of humanitarian institutions,” he developed an amalgam between the latter and foreign spies. It did not take long: in the spring of 2005, the Memorial association was subject to a tax audit; it was closed down by courts in December 2021, just before Russia attacked Ukraine. The last Russian humanitarian associations disappeared in 2022. At that time, Surkov had gone underground, so as not to be devoured in his turn by the monsters he had contributed to create.
In 2005, he launched another pro-Kremlin youth movement, the “Nachi” (“Ours”), as an extension of “Those who walk together” and with the same leader, Vasily Yakemenko. The name of this movement evokes the desired unity and implies that, in front of “Ours”, there are “Others”, i.e. the enemy. The whole idea was to oppose, if necessary, these “Nachi” to other young people who would demonstrate to require changes. Yakemenko was clear: “As long as I exist in Russia, the ‘oranges’ will not come to power. And I am not going to leave the country under any circumstances”. In 2012, however, it turned out that Yakemenko bought a house in Bavaria for 16 million euros. These “Nachi” harassed the opposition, encouraged Russians to vote for the Putin clan, and carried out actions in which the Kremlin did not want to appear: for example, they threw eggs on the facade of the Georgian embassy in Moscow during the crisis of Russian-Georgian relations, harassed the British ambassador after Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning or besieged the Estonian embassy, when a memorial conflict broke out between Russia and Estonia. The Russian state generously financed the “Nachi” and promised them superb careers, while the most important State figures, including Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladislav Surkov, spoke several times at the camp organized by this movement every summer near Lake Seliguer.
In addition, the Justice was once again under control, and Surkov pretended to complain about it in 2005: “But what can we do if they are by nature dependent. If the people there are purchasable or fear the bosses’ phone calls. What do you advise to do with them? And who will resist the temptation to subject them to his power?” He would not. As for the media, they were so much under control, that in 2006, Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Union of Journalists, declared that the five federal television stations did not inform viewers of real events, but offered a mixture of “propaganda and show business”. Surkov’s style.
In 2006, the former advertising executive invented the notion of “sovereign democracy” to define the Putin regime: democracy could not be more important than sovereignty, and he thus justified the disappearance of certain freedoms. Dmitry Medvedev pretended he did not like this expression, but, according to sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, it was part of the “theater” that Russian politics had become: each actor recites the formulas that another has written and attributed to him, while “the impression is created that a kind of debate exists between Surkov and Medvedev”.
In the same logic, Surkov created new parties before the December 2007 legislative elections: “Fair Russia” and “Civic Force”. The goal was still to set up a fake opposition, to capture the available votes and occupy the political field. These parties show that the “Putin system” is not based on ideas or ideologies: what counts is allegiance to the leader. And even Vladimir Solovyov — not yet a raging propagandist, but not an opponent — noted in a book published in 2007: “Everyone understands that in our country any new political party is created in one of the Kremlin offices.” Shortly afterwards, still on Surkov’s will, “Civic Force”, “SPS” and the “Democratic Party” announced they were dissolving to create “Just Cause” (“Pravoe delo”), that would also be supervised by the Presidential Administration. This operation allowed to get rid of a previously independent party: “SPS”.
Surkov also organized campaigns to discredit opposition figures and intervened in the appointment of governors. He may have gone even further. In 2014, neo-Nazis from the BORN organization, already convicted in 2009 of killing anti-fascists, claimed in court that the Presidential Administration was behind the creation of BORN. And they mentioned Surkov’s name, with whom the creator of BORN would have had a fairly direct link. Should we believe it? In any case, Zakhar Prilepin told a similar story in his novel San’kia. In a very similar way, as Peter Pomerantsev points out, Surkov, on the one hand, created NGOs supposed to defend human rights and, on the other, supported nationalist movements that accused these NGOs of being tools of the West. On the one hand, he sponsored festivals showing provocative artists, and on the other, he encouraged Orthodox fundamentalists who attacked daring exhibitions. As the journalist explains, the Kremlin wanted “to own all forms of political discourse, not to let any independent movement develop outside its walls”. It thus spread the idea that everything had the same worth and was manipulated.
When Dmitry Medvedev became Russia’s president in 2008, he again appointed Surkov as the second in command of the Presidential Administration, then put him in charge of innovations, and gave him a free hand in domestic politics. Surkov then accentuated his policy of seduction towards artists and cultural figures. He wanted them to express their public support to the Russian leaders and to give Russia a positive and creative image. This form of soft power corresponds to his tastes: Surkov likes experimental theater, regularly flied to Salzburg to see an opera, and displayed in his office, next to the photographs of Putin and Medvedev, Che Guevara, Obama and Bismarck, those of John Lennon, Jose Luis Borges and the poet Joseph Brodsky.
As a result, when the “United Russia” Congress was held in April 2008, several important cultural figures were present, including the director Kirill Serebrennikov, whom the West would later perceive as a “dissident”, and the gallery owner and political technologist Marat Gelman, who would later emigrate to Montenegro. The temptation was palpable: to get closer to the power in the hope of using it, including for creative purposes. As if the 20th century had not already amply demonstrated, and not only in the Soviet Union, what such rapprochements entail. Medvedev’s presidency became therefore the period in which, thanks to the money of the State, of several municipalities and of some oligarchs, Russia gave the impression of encouraging avant-garde creation, especially in the theater and in the graphic arts. But under the control of the Presidential Administration.
The novel Surkov published in the summer of 2009 gives an insight into the ruling elites’ complexity. Entitled Okolonolia (gangsta fiction) — Close to Zero (gangsta fiction) — it appeared in a special issue of the Russian magazine Pioneer, whose editor-in-chief was Andrei Kolesnikov: the journalist who, along with two others, was commissioned in 2000 to write the book in which the candidate Putin, unknown to everyone, presented himself to the Russian people as he wished. Okolonolia was attributed to “Nathan Dubovitsky” — Surkov’s wife is called Natalia Dubovitskaja… — and the newspaper Vedomosti stated that the novel had probably been written by Vladislav Surkov, a hypothesis that was confirmed shortly afterwards by the writer Victor Erofeev. The secret was no longer a secret, but this identity mask was also part of the book’s career. Especially since Surkov neither confirmed nor denied anything.
Vladislav Sourkov et Dimitri Medvedev en décembre 2011 // kremlin.ru
Obscure and pretentious, this novel revolves around the relationship between reality and appearances, and around the questions of authentic or usurped identities, and it tells of swindles and murders in a context where money is flowing. The Russian elites are shown as corrupt, but an even more detestable image is given to the liberals — those committed to freedoms and rights. Cynicism reigns supreme, and the title seems to be a nod to Less than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, from which also seem to come both the description of the rich and famous (but “Russian style”) and a “snuff-movie” story. The Kremlin’s “grey eminence” writes “gangsta fiction” — written in Latin characters in the title —, publishes it in a magazine with a very Soviet title and draws inspiration from American literature for a novel where — in line with Soviet themes — people are not what they seem to be.
Kirill Serebrennikov, the theatrical idol of liberal Moscow, adapted this novel for the stage. A very public rapprochement was thus displayed between two worlds, the Kremlin and the artistic beau monde, and the premiere, on January 15, 2011, was surrounded by the flashy glamour that then characterized Russian power circles. Eleven years later, Serebrennikov emigrated to the West, and his closest assistant now claims that he didn’t know that Close to Zero had been written by Surkov. This is impossible: at least since 2010, everyone in Moscow was talking about it.
The replacement of Medvedev by Putin as president of Russia was announced in September 2011, at a congress of “United Russia”. Three months later, Surkov left the Presidential Administration, and one of the reasons for his departure could be that his “Nachi” did not prevent the demonstrations against Putin’s return. Juggling paradoxes, Surkov even proclaimed that these protesters were “the best part” of Russian society. However, the former advertising executive was not excluded from the ruling circles: he was appointed Russia’s deputy prime minister on December 27, 2011, and, after Putin’s re-election, also took over as head of the government apparatus. As if the system could not (yet) do without his skills and even if Vladimir Putin was turning to a conservative ideology, which advocates family values, and no longer avant-garde art.
Was it a part of a palace struggle? Rumors of embezzlement circulated around Skolkovo, which was intended to be a Russian-style Silicon Valley and was supervised by Surkov. An investigation was opened and, in May 2013, Surkov had to leave his post as deputy prime minister. The time of games was almost over.
The former PR-manager was appointed on September 20, 2013, as an adviser to Vladimir Putin on socio-economic development in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian territories whose self-proclaimed independence is not recognized by the majority of the international community. This position was “rather modest”, confirms Igor Eidman who adds that Surkov very quickly extended his functions to Ukraine. The attack on Crimea took place in February 2014, and in November 2015, Alexander Zakharchenko, head of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, thanked Surkov for the help provided “from the first minutes” of the armed conflict. When the illegal annexation of Crimea was underway and the Russian-initiated unrest had already begun in the Donbass, the Russian Pioneer magazine announced on its website that “writer Nathan Dubovitsky” had written a story titled Without Heaven: “A story about the Fifth World War, the first non-linear war, where everyone fights against everyone.” This war is supposed to have taken place thirty years earlier and has left enormous trauma to the survivors who are now planning a riot against people more complex than themselves. No doubt this game amuses Surkov: his literary texts not only reflect, but could also announce the coming changes; he creates, in his own literary way, a new reality for his Russian compatriots and for former Soviet people, as he created parties, slogans and youth movements.
However, he met competition in Ukraine where his men rub shoulders with those sent by Konstantin Malofeev. Ambitions and greed clashed, conflicts of persons and influences were revealed, while Putin played the referee. And it was Surkov who, with a smile on his face, represented Russia in the Group of Four on the Minsk agreements, then led the Russian delegation that negotiated with the American administration to, supposedly, try to settle the Russo-Ukrainian armed conflict. However, he stepped down as a president’s advisor on February 18, 2020 — and no clear explanation has been given for his departure. His political career appears to be over, and sanctions are supposed to prevent him from traveling to the West, including to attend operas. Vladislav Surkov was therefore no longer in charge, even behind the scenes, when Russia attacked Ukraine on the morning of February 24, 2022.
Surkov at a literary event organized by Russian Pioneer, in June 2021 // The Russian Pioneer Facebook page
A rumor ran on the Russian-speaking Internet on April 11, 2022: Vladislav Surkov had been arrested, put under house arrest, and even, according to some, imprisoned. Afterwards, he was not seen anywhere for months. When asked about this in September, some Russian journalists burst out laughing: Surkov had not been arrested, but he was not getting out of his house because, they said, he was threatened by Kadyrov’s Chechens. No one asked why Chechens would be after him, and if such questions no longer arise, it is also the result of Mr. Surkov’s two decades of work to blur the relationship between causes and consequences. However, the former adviser shortly reappeared in February 2023: he said in an interview that, when he was negotiating the Minsk agreements, he did not expect them to be respected. So much for the Kremlin’s supporters who, in the West, are claiming the good faith of the Kremlin in this matter!
The journalist Peter Pomerantsev reported as early as 2014 that, when he was working for Russian television, he kept meeting people who seemed “completely European” but produced the propaganda that suited the power. They explained that they had never believed in communism, had experienced democracy, a mafia state and an oligarchy, and realized that it was all an illusion: “Everything is PR,” were repeating these colleagues who did not understand that one could fight for ideas. Surkov’s objectives had been achieved, and they undermined from within an already fragile Russian society, which partly explains its credulity, disarray and passivity. Some of these cynics have since emigrated. Or died. But the war against Ukraine is raging.
To be followed in the next issue…
EIDMAN Igor, Das System Putin. Wohin steuert das neue russische Reich?, München, Ludwig, 2016, p.65. ↩