Peter Pomerantsev - This Is Not Propaganda

Then, one day in January 2015, an old journalist colleague asked Lyudmilla if she wanted to join a project for the ‘good of the motherland’. It dawned on Lyudmilla that she was referring to the troll farm. She was putting together a team for ‘special projects’ and needed good writers. Would Lyudmilla come for an interview?

Here was a chance to find out how the troll farm really worked. She hatched a plan with journalists from two of Russia’s last independent newspapers, Мой Раюон and Новая Газета. She would infiltrate the troll farm, film and download evidence on how it worked, and they would publish it.

The office was in a four-storey new build with square pillars propping up the second floor, its narrow black-framed windows like long arrow slits. There were no signs on the door. The friend met Lyudmilla at the entrance and took her to see the manager. To Lyudmilla’s surprise, it was someone she’d heard of before: a newspaper columnist. The farm didn’t appear to be run by secret service guys or PR gurus, but former journalists. A couple of motivations quickly became obvious: she was being offered several times more than a regular media salary and steady work. The manager was uncertain about Lyudmilla, however: he knew of her investigative background. Lyudmilla’s friend waved it off: ‘Oh, come on, who here hasn’t done that sort of work back in the past?!’

Inside the farm every floor was full of computers, crammed into thin lines and manned round the clock by changing shifts of employees with passes that clocked all arrival and departure times. Even smoking breaks were regulated.

The farm had its own hierarchy. The most looked down upon were the ‘commenters’, of which the lowest of the low were those who posted in the online comments sections of newspapers; a level up were those who left comments on social media. The more senior editors would instruct the commenters on which Russian opposition figures to attack, and they would spend their days accusing them of being CIA stooges, traitors, shills. Some of the commenters were not well educated and their written Russian could be imperfect, so a Russian-language teacher would come in to give them grammar lessons.

Lyudmilla was in another, more exclusive section. Her ‘special project’ involved the creation of a mystic healer, ‘Cantadora’, an expert in astrology, parapsychology and crystals. Cantadora was meant to be read by middle-class housewives who were not normally interested in politics. Lyudmilla’s job was to drop in the odd bit of current affairs in between blog entries on star signs and romance. There were four, sometimes five people working on the profile. Lyudmilla liked Stas the most. He seemed utterly depressed by the work. Every day Lyudmilla, Stas and the other writers would be sent Word documents containing political articles and the ‘conclusions’ they were meant to draw from them: that the EU is just a vassal of the US, or that Ukraine, which Russia had invaded, was run by fascists. It was up to them to integrate these conclusions into Cantadora’s blog. So Lyudmilla wrote, for example, how Cantadora had a sister who lived in Germany, and then related a nightmare in which she dreamt her sister was in a desert surrounded by deadly snakes, interpreting those snakes as US foreign policy endangering the EU. Some of the farm’s work reached a level of granularity that stunned Lyudmilla. Two trolls would go on the comments sections of small, provincial newspapers and start chatting about the street they lived in, the weather, then casually recommend a piece about the nefarious West attacking Russia.

No one who worked at the farm described themselves as trolls. Instead, they talked about their work in the passive voice (‘a piece was written’, ‘a comment was made’). Most treated the farm as if it was just another job, doing the minimum required and then clocking off. Many of them seemed pleasant enough young people, with open, pretty faces, and yet they didn’t blink when asked to smear, degrade, insult and humiliate their victims. The ease with which victims were attacked, the scale at which the farm operated, it all stunned Lyudmilla. She kept herself going with the thought that her research would help stop all this. But it was proving hard to gather the necessary evidence. There were CCTV cameras in every corner, and she would have to flick her long, curly hair over her shoulder so that it covered her hand when she reached down to put a flash drive into her computer to download documents.

Who gave the farm instructions as to what to do? Was it the Kremlin? Or were they churned out inside the IRA? No one discussed this. The farm, other journalists had told her, was owned by one Evgeny Prigozhin. He relied on the regime for his official business: he provided catering services to the Kremlin. He had known President Putin personally since the 1990s and had served nine years in prison for robbery. [13] Lister, Tim, Jim Sciutto and Mary Ilyushina, ‘Exclusive: Putin’s “Chef,” the Man Behind the Troll Factory’, CNN, 18 October 2017; https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/17/politics/russian-oligarch-putin-chef-troll-factory/index.html . Later, it would transpire he also runs mercenaries who fight in the Kremlin’s wars, from Ukraine to Syria.

There were moments when Lyudmilla could see that the farm was part of a much larger network. When the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered in February 2015, for instance, assassinated with a Makarov pistol on a bridge right underneath the towers and onion domes of Red Square, the farm’s middle management suddenly started running into every office, giving the trolls direct instructions on what to post under which articles printed in mainstream Russian publications. The farm was working in rhythm with the whole government disinformation complex. No one had time to read the articles, but they knew exactly what to post. The trolls were told to spread confusion about who was behind the murder: was it the Ukrainians, the Chechens, the Americans? The IRA, an agency whose connection to the Kremlin was purposefully blurred, was in turn purposefully blurring the Kremlin’s connection to a murder.

During the day Lyudmilla would see a fake reality being pumped out by the trolls. In the evening she would come home hoping to put the place behind her, only to hear relatives and acquaintances quote lines churned out by the farm repeated back at her. People who considered themselves hardened enough to withstand the barrage of television still seemed susceptible to social media messages which slithered into and enveloped your most personal online spaces, spun themselves into the texture of your life.

Lyudmilla spent two and a half months at the farm. Then, as planned, she gave the material to the newspapers. They published it as authored by ‘Anonymous’. The next day she went back to work to find the commenters were busy undermining the credibility of the material she had provided to the media. ‘No troll factories exist,’ the trolls wrote, ‘they are all fabrications by paid-for journalists.’ The management at the troll farm were already checking video cameras to find out who had been behind the leak. It was, she knew, only a matter of time before they worked out what she’d done.

Lyudmilla left thе farm. She also decided to admit publicly that she was the one who had infiltrated it. She wanted to give interviews about what she had seen there, to campaign to have the place shut down; she couldn’t do that as ‘Anonymous’. She gave dozens of interviews. She gave talks across the world.

The farm now turned on her. There were comments and posts claiming she was a sexual deviant, a spy, a traitor. There were phone calls to her relatives saying that people were often killed for what she had done.