Russian Active Measures

5“Kontrrazvedka Chekhii zakryla delo ob ugroze otravleniia prazhskikh politikov,” Radio Svoboda , 13 June 2020, https://www.svoboda.org/a/30668588.html (accessed 17 June 2020); Georgii Kobaladze, “‘Vypolnial voliu Putina.’ Kto khotel ubit gruzinskogo zhurnalista?” Radio Svoboda , 16 June 2020, https://www.svoboda.org/a/30674132.html (accessed 17 June 2020).

6Redden, “FBI Probing.” This text was updated at 6:00 p.m. EDT, on Wednesday, 23 October 2013. The Russian Embassy provided this statement in an email to Mother Jones.

7Private conversation with an American scholar, 24 November 2019, the ASEEES Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA.

8Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020), 9.

9Rid, Active Measures , 11.

10Rid, 11; on the rebirth of Cold War-style dictatorship and Putinism in Russia, see Walter Lacqueur, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West , 1st ed. (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015).

11Edward Mickolus, The Counterintelligence Chronology: Spying By and Against the United States From the 1700s Through 2014 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 74.

12“‘Deception Was My Job’ or ‘Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press’ (complete interview of Yuri Bezmenov posted by Kevin Heine),” YouTube , 11 April 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFfrWKHB1Gc (accessed 18 June 2020); see also Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy (New York, NY: Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defense Publishers, 1984), 2.

13“‘Deception Was My Job.’”

14“KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov’s Warning to America,” YouTube , 1 February 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA (accessed 17 June 2020).

15Olga Bertelsen, “The Writers and the Chekists’ Discourse about the Holodomor,” in Crossing Ethnic Boundaries: Cultural and Political Labyrinths of the Literati in Kharkiv, Ukraine in the 1960s–1970s (Lexington Books, forthcoming).

16Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 291–305; Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; Slavoj Žižek’s, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, U.K.: Picador, 2008).

17Olga Bertelsen, “A Trial in Absentia : Purifying National Historical Narratives in Russia,” Kyiv Mohyla Humanities Journal , no. 3 (2016): 73.

18Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London, U.K.: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 31.

19Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 31.

20Huntington, 35.

21E. I. Stepanov, ed., Konflikty v sovremennoi Rossii: Problemy analiza i regulirovaniia (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), 228. I am grateful to Victoria Malko for sharing this source with me.

22On Russian genocide in Chechnya and responses to it in Russia and the West, see Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, trans. John Crowfoot (London: Harvill, 2001); Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002); Victoria A. Malko, The Chechen Wars: Responses in Russia and the United States (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015); Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin’s War: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 187–204; James Hughes, “The Chechnya Conflict: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?,” Demokratizatsiya 15, no. 3 (2007): 293–311; see also “Latvia: Latvian Parliament Member Accuses Russia of Genocide in Chechnya,” IPR Strategic Business Information Database/Business Insights: Essentials , 9 February 2000, https://bi-gale-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/essentials/article/GALE%7CA59278837?u=embry&sid=summon (accessed 14 June 2020); and “Czech Republic: Czech President Accuses Russia of Genocide in Chechnya,” IPR Strategic Business Information Database/Business Insights: Essentials , 29 February 2000, https://bi-gale-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/essentials/article/GALE%7CA59648000?u=embry&sid=summon(accessed 14 June 2020). In February 1999, Latvian parliamentary deputy Juris Vidins claimed that there were documents in his possession detailing Russia’s genocidal policies against Chechnya. These documents were signed by Russian Chief of Army General Staff Colonel-General Anatolii Kvashnin, ordering the “filtration of Chechens between the ages of 10 and 14” who were to be sent to Omsk for military training. The second document dated 15 December 1999 was a Russian Security Council report to then State Duma Speaker Gennadii Seleznev. This document ordered the destruction of mountain villages in Bamut, Itum-Kale, and Zandak Districts with the subsequent resettlement of inhabitants to northern regions of Chechnya or elsewhere in Russia. The Czech President Václav Havel shared Vidins’ claim, arguing that Russia’s operations in Chechnya should be identified as the “killing of a nation.” Gavel asserted that the Russian war in Chechnya had nothing to do with countermeasures against terrorism.

23Quoted in Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 90.

24Huntington, 20.

25Ibid., 125.

26Ibid., 130.

27Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019), cover page.

28The term “political warfare” was outlined in George Kennan’s 1948 Policy Planning memo. It reads: “Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, and ‘black’ psychological warfare.” See “George F. Kennan on Organizing Political Warfare,” History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Wilson Center , 30 April 1948, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114320.pdf?v=941dc9ee5c6e51333ea9ebbbc9104e8c (accessed 18 June 2020); also quoted in Stengel, Information Wars , 139.

29See, for instance, David V. Gioe, Richard Lovering, and Tyler Pachesny, “The Soviet Legacy of Russian Active Measures: New Vodka from Old Stills?,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 33, no. 3 (2020): 1–26.

30Rid, Active Measures , 13.

31Vladimir Putin, “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II,” The National Interest , 18 June 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982 (accessed 19 June 2020).

32Shane Harris, @ Wars: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (New York: An Eamon Dolan Book, 2014), 226.

33Stengel, Information Wars , 289.

34Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda , xi.

35Huntington, 156.

36Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West (New York: Mulholland Books, 2019).

37Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 443.