Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Typically, the failure of various special operations all occurred simultaneously: in the same months in which ‘Russiagate’ broke in Washington, the Russian doping scandal happened in WADA and the IOC, as did the judgement on the shooting-down of MH17, which revealed even more evidence about Russia’s participation. It may be that Russia’s exclusion from the Winter Olympics is just the first alarm bell, and there may yet be the collapse of the whole system of Russian hybrid gains, from Crimea to Trump, from the Donbass to Assad.

And here we have the third fundamental weakness of the special operations: they are irrelevant in the modern world. Yes, it is complicated, mutually dependent and vulnerable; it is a ‘risk society’ over which it is easy to place the hybrid ‘fog of war’. But it is also a society of radical transparency, a world of networks, video recordings and anonymous activists from Wikileaks to Bellingcat, where every step is tracked, every telephone call, every bank transfer; where you can no longer hide your account offshore, or your test-tubes, or your ‘BUK’ missiles, which, it is assumed, shot down MH17; where the special services are just as vulnerable, transparent and old-fashioned as the state they serve. Our Chekists operate as in days gone by: planning, operational development, recruitment, intimidation, disinformation – but in a global society of social networks and citizen control, they can be instantly found out by traces of polonium, urine samples and IP addresses, by tracking phone calls and selfies posted by soldiers on social media. And various observers rigorously point the finger of blame at their patron: the Russian state.

In exactly the same way, because of the interference of the special services, half a century ago, at the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union lost its place in the developing information revolution. At that time, under Brezhnev, the fatal decision was taken to pass responsibility for the Soviet computing sector from the scientists to the siloviki . At that time, Soviet computer technology was at least on a par with the USA, perhaps even ahead: we had progressive programming languages such as ‘Algol’ and machines such as the BESM-1, which was a worthy competitor. But the siloviki , trying to minimize the risk to a strategic industry, turned this into a special operation, involving the theft of technology from the West, the reverse engineering of American examples (principally IBM) and their production in Soviet enterprises. But what had been done successfully with missile technology and nuclear weapons ‘borrowed’ from the West didn’t work with computers, which were significantly more complicated and needed not secret constructors’ bureaux but an open code, independent development, testing in production and on the market. The well-known sociologist and also historian of the Soviet computing sector, Manuel Castells, gives a humorous example: because the sizes of transistors and the width of the wires in the microsystems in the USA were given in Imperial measures (i.e., inches), while in the USSR they were metric, the siloviki decided to round up the American sizes to a convenient number – as a result of which the stolen chips didn’t fit the Soviet connectors! Castells acknowledges that, because of this special operation, which lasted for several decades, the Soviet computer sector was about twenty years behind the USA by the time the USSR collapsed.

Today the special operations of the hybrid war are again throwing us decades back in our relations with the outside world, just as they did at the beginning of the 1980s and at the start of the 1950s. Once again, the world is afraid of Russia and is isolating it, but we can’t capitalize on this fear and the consequences of it hurt us, like with our athletes and our sports fans. The lesson to be learnt from everything that’s happened is simple and banal: everyone should mind their own business. Athletes should be coached by trainers, and not officers of the special services; relations with neighbouring countries should be worked out by diplomats and business people and not by Russian spetsnaz soldiers with no markings on their uniforms, as happened in Crimea; Russia’s ‘soft power’ should be conveyed by artists and tourists, and not hackers, trolls and propagandists. And representatives of the special forces should carry out their own direct tasks, such as catching terrorists, and should not be substituting special operations for all the existing institutions and procedures. But in a country that chose, for the fourth time, to have as its President a Chekist , this all remains a utopian dream.

Early in the evening on New Year’s Eve, Moscow was blanketed by a huge snowstorm. The city ground to a halt in solid traffic jams. There stood buses with steamed-up windows, delivery vans carrying presents for the holiday, family saloons and official limousines, yellow cabs and nippy Smart cars. Also stuck were the sinister-looking black cars with their blue flashing lights flanked by four-by-fours carrying their guards, helpless before the raging elements. Pot-bellied policemen in their sheepskin coats froze at their posts on the crossroads, like memorials to time, while little mounds of snow grew on their winter hats. Pedestrians laden down with bags full of presents made their way along the pavements, trying to avoid the snowdrifts, and the fairy lights of the New Year markets continued to twinkle. The streetlights shone brightly on the Garden Ring Road, on Gogolevsky Boulevard children were throwing snowballs, and along Tverskaya Street someone had even made ski tracks.

Above all this New Year hustle and bustle, unseen by the pedestrians, by the drivers and even by the air defence radar, high up in a cloud of snow, Santa Claus raced along with his frisky reindeer. He was hurrying to Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, where the grown-up children of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Parliament, were considering rewriting history. In his boundless sack, among the cuddly teddy bears and the Barbie dolls, Santa was bringing them a law that changed the 1954 Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet about the transfer of Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – a transfer from one Soviet republic to another. And Santa Claus also had to get to Okhotny Ryad, to visit the children of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Parliament, who wanted to change the 1989 Decree of the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies of the USSR, which condemned the USSR’s war in Afghanistan. [1] In 1954, Crimea was transferred from Russian jurisdiction to Ukrainian jurisdiction, as a gesture to mark three hundred years of unity between Russia and Ukraine. As both republics were part of the Soviet Union, at the time the gesture was largely symbolic. In 1989, following the withdrawal in February of that year of the last Soviet troops which had been conducting a military campaign in Afghanistan since late 1979, the Congress of People’s Deputies declared that the campaign had been a political mistake, ordered by a small group within the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo. Coming lower over the city, Santa’s sleigh circled and Rudolf’s red nose shone out like a landing light through the billowing gusts of the snowstorm…

The Russian political elite was seized by an epidemic of historical revisionism. Desperate to change something in the gloomy present, suffering humiliation after humiliation (even the annexation of Crimea was to prove a foreign policy defeat, leaving Russia with a problem asset on its hands, placed under painful sanctions by the West and having alienated its closest allies and neighbours), Russia’s politicians decided to play around with the past. The past wouldn’t be able to answer back and they could rewrite their own history. The proposal was put forward to reconsider everything, from Russia’s territorial losses – Crimea in 1954 and Alaska in 1867 (a petition to return Alaska was put by Russian activists on the website of the US White House, but failed to receive the 100,000 signatures it needed in order to be considered) – to colonial wars, such as that begun in Afghanistan in 1979. To justify Russia’s claims, the boldest historical analogies were put forward. So as a basis for justifying taking back Crimea, Vladimir Putin quoted the annexation of Texas by America in 1845. If one follows this route, one could use the genocide of the American Indians in order to justify Russia’s war in Chechnya. Or cite the Spanish Inquisition to show that chasing after ‘foreign agents’ in today’s Russia is not so cruel. Indeed, even deeper historical arguments are possible: as is known, in their summing-up of the case against the art group Pussy Riot for singing a punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, experts in all seriousness quoted the decrees of the Church Councils of the fourth and seventh centuries.