Russian Disinformation and Western Scholarship E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 617

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Western academics, experts, and journalists specializing in Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia have grappled with two fundamental analytical crises in connection with the 1991 disintegration of the USSR and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Both crises were brought about by a similar lack of understanding of Moscow’s inability to view its neighbors, in particular Ukraine, as not possessing sovereignty and not treating them as independent states. Typically, they downplayed the historic and current role of Russian imperialism and nationalism. The book’s contributors investigate how the Kremlin’s recent turbo-charging of Russia’s information warfare, 24-hour TV, and social media activity has expanded on traditional pro-Russian sentiments among Western academics, experts, and journalists. The authors analyze the downplaying of Russian nationalism, misinterpretations of the 2014 crisis, sympathetic portrayals of Crimea’s occupation, and the use of the term “civil war” rather than “Russian-Ukrainian war” for the Donbas conflict in academia as well as the think tank world and media in the UK, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Japan, USA, and Canada.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Verlag

Affiliations of the Contributors

Introduction

Aspects of Russian Active Measures Targeting Western Academia

“Academic Imperialism” Writing Soviet and Post-Soviet History without Ukraine

Russia’s Full Spectrum Conflict and the Myth of Civil War in Ukraine, 2014-2021

Conflict Studies and the War in Ukraine, 2014-2022

Japanese Scholars on the ‘Ukraine Crisis’ (2014–2015) Russia-Centered Ontology, Aversion to Western Mainstream, and Vulnerabilities to Disinformation

Propaganda Targeting Foreign Audiences A Comparative Analysis of Soviet and Russian Propaganda in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic / Czech Republic

Collusion and Conspiracy Theories US Domestic Politics and Russian Active Measures

German Self-Images and Russia’s Influence

Empire, Sonderwege and Russia The German Historical Debate about Ukraine

Poland and the Russian Question Prior to the 2014 Crisis Between Naïve Pragmatism and Accusations of “Russophobia”

Western Russophilism, Russian Disinformation and the Myth of Ukraine’s Regional Divide

Russian Narratives, Ukraine, and US Right-Wing Punditry How Kremlin Propaganda Used a 2021 Washington Think-Tank Debate

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ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Affiliations of the Contributors

Olga Bertelsen Tiffin University

Sergei Zhuk Ball State University

Taras Kuzio National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy

Paul D’Anieri University of California at Riverside

Sanshiro Hosaka University of Tartu

Veronika Krátka Špalková European Values Security Centre

Andrei Znamenski University of Memphis

Andreas Heinemann-Grüder University of Bonn

Martin Schulze Wessel University of Munich

Michal Wawrzonek Jesuit University in Cracow

Petro Kuzyk Lviv National University

Andreas Umland National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy

 

Introduction

Taras Kuzio

This book brings together twelve chapters about the influence of Russia’s information war on Western scholarship after the 2014 crisis and up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Western scholars, think tank experts, and journalists were unprepared to understand and write about Russia’s military aggression and often followed the Kremlin’s templates.

One major reason they were unprepared for a Russian–Ukrainian war in 2014, and especially in 2022, was that Western historiography of Russia since World War II uses a nineteenth-century Russian imperial nationalist framework that fits the Kremlin’s imperial nationalist templates. Both Western historians of Russia and the Kremlin’s propagandists portray Ukraine as an error of history, an appendage of Russia, that was born together with Russia and Belarus in Kyivan Rus’. Both credit Russia with being the main inheritor of Kyivan Rus’ through Vladimir-Suzdal’, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Federation. Ukraine appears only occasionally in this imperial nationalist framework, leading to the abnormal outcome of the sudden appearance of an independent Ukrainian state run by Ukrainian squatters on ‘Russian land.’ Thus, the Western approach to ‘Russian’ history mirrors that propagated by the Kremlin (Putin 2021); firstly, portraying the eastern Slavs as a united group confusingly identified as ‘Russians,’ and secondly, interpreting Ukraine as an accident of history.

An outgrowth of this has been a long tendency among Western scholars and policymakers to tie Ukraine’s fate to that of Russia’s. This was especially the case through to the launching of the EU’s Eastern Partnership in 2010. Prior to this the EU had viewed Ukraine as an appendage of Russia and believed it could not invite Ukraine into membership without Russia. It took the Euromaidan Revolution, 2014 crisis, and 2022 invasion for the EU to grudgingly change its attitudes and come round to viewing Ukraine as separate to Russia. NATO meanwhile always argued that inviting Ukraine into membership would antagonize Russia while south-eastern Ukrainians did not support membership. Both factors are no longer applicable after Russia’s invasion which has increased support for NATO membership to high levels in Ukraine’s south-east.

Closely tied to the use of a nineteenth-century imperial nationalist framework is a view about Crimea among Western historians of Russia that excuses Russia’s 2014 illegal land grab. Many Western historians of Russia, and their fellow historians, see Crimea as having been ‘unnaturally’ included in Ukraine and therefore agreed with the Kremlin line that Crimea’s return to Russia rectified an historical injustice.

This line is an anomaly in Western historical scholarship, and it is one that could open accusations of racism against Western historians of Russia. Beginning Crimea’s history in 1783, when the Russian Empire annexed the peninsula, they ignore six centuries of life under the First Nation who were Tatars. Present-day Western historians of Canada, the US, and Australia would never deem it fit to begin their histories with Quebec, Jamestown, and the arrival of Captain Cook respectively as such an approach would ignore the First Nations who already lived there. In contrast, the approach taken by Western historians of Russia towards Crimea is an outgrowth of their adoption of outdated nineteenth-century imperial nationalist frameworks. No Western history of Russia is based on the Russian Federation nation-state; all are based on the Russian and Soviet empires. In continuing to pursue this approach Western historians serve to reinforce the weak Russian support for a (non-imperial) civic identity grounded in the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, Western scholars tend to write the histories of Ukraine and the other non-Russian former Soviet republics as histories of those nation-states that came into existence in 1991.

This should not be surprising. Western university departments and think tanks devoted to the former USSR are run by Russianists who overwhelmingly dominate the field of post-Soviet studies and Eurasian affairs. Russianists provide the bulk of the external reviewers to specialized journals and therefore act as gatekeepers (in reality, censors), determining what is and is not published. Since 2014 I have experienced this firsthand in my dealings with numerous Western journals devoted to the post-Soviet space.

If a scholar or expert is an expert on Brazil or China, they do not usually claim to be also expert on all of Latin America or Asia. The situation is different in the case of the former USSR where many Russianists believe they are experts and therefore have a right to comment, publish, and lead analysis not only on Russia but on the other fourteen former Soviet republics as well. Russianists have predominated among those experts invited to comment about the 2014 crisis and Russian invasion via TV, radio, webinars, and podcasts.

This is despite the fact Russianists have a poor understanding of Ukraine. They tend to view the country through Moscow’s eyes, and to rely exclusively on sources from Russia in their commentary in Ukraine, using Ukrainian sources only very rarely. One of the first books to be published about the 2014 crisis by a British scholar, for example, extensively used Russian sources but only the Kyiv Post from Ukraine. There are of course some exceptions, such as Paul D’Anieri who has traced the origins of the 2014 crisis to Russia’s long inability since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 to accept an independent Ukrainian state.

A second factor is that Western journalists continue to cover the former USSR from Moscow—just as they did during the Soviet period. This reinforces the viewpoint commonly found in the West that Moscow-based journalists are also automatically ‘experts’ on the fourteen non-Russian republics. In fact, there is no reason why this should be the case; such journalists usually visit the other republics only very rarely, perhaps once in every few years to follow elections. There are of course exceptions, such as The Guardian’s Luke Harding who has been based in Ukraine throughout the time since the Russian invasion.

Given the above, it is perhaps not surprising how much of the writing about Ukraine in 2014–2022 drew, wittingly or not, on the Kremlin’s disinformation templates. A long-time favorite was the notion that Ukraine was a severely divided country and therefore more brittle than a ‘normal’ country. This Western media cliché was remarkably like the Kremlin line for the last two decades that Ukraine is a ‘fake’ artificial country that had been cobbled together.

According to the Western stereotype, Ukraine is supposedly composed of two different civilizations, one of which in the south-east has always been closely tied to Russia and is a natural part of the ‘Russian World’. This is music to the ears of the Kremlin as it reflected the Russian view of Ukraine as an artificial construct whose south-eastern part comprised ‘ancient Russian lands’ wrongfully incorporated into Ukraine by Vladimir Lenin with the western territories taken from Poland, Hungary, and Romania.

Over the past three decades the greatest number of Western scholarly articles on Ukraine dealt with regional diversity in Ukraine and the alleged conflict between Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Numerous studies focused on the fate of Russian speakers in Ukraine and whether they were being subjected to Ukrainianization by a ‘nationalizing state’. No Western studies ever condemned Russia’s pursuit of Russification in occupied Crimea and the Donbas, or earlier in Russian official statements condemning Ukrainian language policies. Some scholars bizarrely portrayed the DNR (Donetsk People’s Republic) and LNR (Luhansk People’s Republic) as examples of ‘multiculturalism’, while claiming that Ukraine was run by ‘nationalists’ (effectively synonymous with ‘Nazis’ as per Russian disinformation) who had come to power violently in 2014.

With little or no grounding in theories of nationalism, when it came to Ukraine, Western Russianists used the Kremlin’s definitions of terms such as ‘nationalist.’ This had nothing to do with the scholarly understanding of ‘nationalism’ and everything to do with anti-nationalist propaganda in the Soviet Union. In the USSR, and later in the Russian Federation, the label ‘Ukrainian nationalist’ was applied to anybody, irrespective of their position on the political spectrum, who did not support Ukraine’s future in the USSR or the ‘Russian World’ and instead opposed Russification and Soviet nationality policies and backed greater sovereignty for the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union or Ukrainian independence and European integration. A political science definition of nationalism would show Ukraine has the one of the lowest levels of electoral support in Europe for populist nationalists and the far right.

The above factors came together in the early days of the 2022 invasion when Western ‘experts,’ who influenced the views of policymakers, agreed with the Kremlin that the ‘mighty’ Russian army was certain to defeat Ukraine within two to three days. Again, there are some exceptions, such as Lawrence Freedman whose insightful analysis is a product of a long career in international security studies that took place outside the field of Russian and Eurasian studies.

Western ‘experts’ held rose-tinted views of the Russian military, believed the Putin regime’s propaganda about its military reforms, and ignored deep levels of corruption in what has been described for over a decade as a ‘mafia state’. As Russianists they had always been assumed—especially after the 2014 crisis—to be also ‘experts’ on Ukraine, which of course they never were. Their approach to Ukraine as an appendage of Russia made them unable to explain or analyze why Ukrainian society was so resilient and displayed such high levels of national integration, or why most of Ukraine’s Russian speakers were Ukrainian patriots. Indeed, both Kremlin propagandists and Western Russianists find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to get over their view of Ukraine’s Russian speakers as disloyal and ‘pro-Russian.’ Yet sustaining this view will become even more untenable in the wake of the invasion as opinion polls show there are no longer regional variations in attitudes to language policies, memory politics, and foreign policy orientations.

Ukrainian society is so much more resilient than Russia’s because it has a deeply imbedded civil society that is a product of three popular revolutions (1990, 2004, 2013–2014) that have successfully demanded the country’s rulers deal with them as citizens and have become involved in local politics after the decentralization of the state following the Euromaidan Revolution. Since the late 1980s, Ukraine has undergone de-Sovietization and de-Stalinization and, since 2015, de-communization. In contrast, Russia’s last revolution was in 1917 and its people have stagnated even further into subjects with no rights during Vladimir Putin’s re-Sovietization and the revival of the religious cult of the Great Patriotic War and Joseph Stalin. Ukraine’s extensive volunteer movement and better performing armed forces are the product of a horizontally organized society of citizens with agency. Russia is a vertically organized society of subjects with no volunteer movement and is unable to function without the boss barking orders.

Being only able to view Ukrainians through Moscow’s eyes, drawing as they do on the Kremlin’s disinformation templates, Western Russianists find it very difficult to understand both Ukraine’s fight back during the 2014 crisis and especially the successes of the Ukrainian armed forces since the 2022 invasion. Ignoring two decades of dehumanization of Ukrainians in the Russian media has made it impossible to analyze the roots of Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. Barely any of the many studies of the Russian media focused on its obsession with dehumanizing Ukraine and Ukrainians. Meanwhile, downplaying and denying the existence of nationalism in Putin’s Russia was all the vogue among western Russianists; indeed, two major book-length studies of Russian nationalism published in 2016 and 2020 ignored the dominant influence of White Russian émigré imperial nationalist perceptions of Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Taken together these developments produced the intellectual vacuum that formed the backdrop to the publication in July 2021 of Putin’s long essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.’ Western Russianists had no intellectual resources or tools to explain the ideological drivers behind Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine and the brutality of Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians. Putin’s essay, published at the same time as the decision was made to invade Ukraine, did not appear from nowhere but was a product of the transformation of Russian imperial nationalism over the previous two decades that now culminated in an ideological treatise justifying Russian imperialist territorial claims towards Ukraine and denial of the existence of a Ukrainian nation.

The stagnation of Russian nationalism, which still relies heavily on the ideas prevailing among pre-war White Russian émigrés, has been accompanied by a loss of memory. For all their widespread and growing Soviet nostalgia, Russians have forgotten—or have chosen to ignore—the fact that Ukraine was not a peasant nation in the latter decades of the USSR but in fact an urbanized, industrialized, and modernized republic. The Soviet Ukrainian republic was a major industrial and intellectual center for the Soviet Union and the home of a large military-industrial complex. The first Encyclopedia of Cybernetics in the USSR was published in the 1960s in Soviet Ukraine. Pivdenmash (Yuzhmash), which employed fifty thousand people in the closed Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, was the biggest producer of nuclear missiles in the world. Studies published by the Rand Corporation think tank in the 1980s described Ukrainians as prized soldiers in the Soviet army who dominated the rank of sergeant and were disproportionately found among middle-ranking officers. Taking all this into account, it is striking how much Russians had been made to forget to be convinced liberating Ukraine would be a cakewalk; presumably they believed that Ukrainian peasants would only have pitchforks to hand!

 

Aspects of Russian Active Measures Targeting Western Academia

Olga Bertelsen

Numerous scholarly works have stressed the pervasive character of the ideological and psychological proxy war that the Russian Federation is waging against the West.1 This war has its roots in the Cold War and is conducted by non-military hybrid measures known as ‘active measures.’ An important component of Soviet, and since 1991 Russian, active measures has been promoting cooperation between Russian and foreign scholars and think tank experts. Sergei I. Zhuk writes that, under the close supervision of the Soviet secret services, the Institute of Slavic Studies and Balkan Studies (Institut slavianovedeniia) was founded as part of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1947. Its goal was to research and monitor Soviet international connections through Il’ia Solomonovich Miller (1918–78), a former officer of SMERSH (Smert’ shpionam/Death to Spies) under the NKVD. Such scholars not only represented the Soviet secret services in academic institutions in Moscow and the non-Russian republics but were also responsible for ties to foreign institutions.2Soviet and Russian active measures have included disinformation, and the manipulation of the media, politics, and public opinion of so-called ‘enemy’ countries through forgeries, front organizations, and agents of influence targeting foreign politicians, journalists, and academics.3

Under the leadership of Yevgenii Primakov, Head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (1991–96), Minister for Foreign Affairs (1996–98), and Prime Minister (1998–99), Russian foreign and security policy acquired a well-defined anti-American rhetoric. Primakov substituted Russia as part of the common European home, an idea promoted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from the late 1980s and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev in the early 1990s, with Russia as the center of Eurasia in opposition to the West. This trend has been strengthened under President Vladimir Putin, especially following his well-known speech to the February 2007 Munich Security Conference. Subsequently, Putin has on repeated occasions threatened the West in general and the U.S. in particular with ‘symmetrical’ and ‘quick and tough’ responses to the West’s attempts to ‘encroach’ on Russia’s security interests.4

The response to the West in the form of hybrid warfare seems more effective and less costly to the Russians than any type of conventional warfare. Jolanta Darczewska and Piotr Żochowski have aptly noted that Russia’s hybrid war is a persistent effort designed to subvert the West—a process that has required systematic reconceptualization, the mobilization of its agents on all fronts, and training new generations of professionals who assist in various ways, wittingly or otherwise, to successfully carry out the Kremlin’s foreign policy and implement its objectives.5

Information warfare in the domain of history has become especially important to the Russian political leadership. The Russian secret services systematically design (dis)information operations, promoting historical myths about Russia as a great power with a right to dominate Eurasia, denigrating Ukraine as a fake state, and claiming Ukrainians are one of three branches of the pan-Russian nation. This is done with careful attention to the cultural, ideological, historical, scientific, and philosophical complexities of the specific places where these operations are implemented.6 Their objectives are to change the adversary’s strategies and to shape public opinion and people’s psyches. According to Dmitrii Rogozin, former Director of Russia’s Roskosmos (May 2018–July 2022) and former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia for Defense and Space Industry (2011–2018), the major task of these operations is to achieve superiority in all spheres of human activity, to undermine political, economic and social systems of a target state, and to shape the views of military personnel and the political and intellectual elites.7

The formation and dissemination of historical myths has a special place among a wide range of Russian active measures. Reinforced domestically through Russian legislation and distributed abroad through active measures, state-sponsored historical narratives play a significant role in the Russian politics of memory.8 Since 2002, the Russian state has used anti-extremist legislation as an instrument of censorship and state control, including as part of its ongoing campaign to ‘counter the falsification of Russian history.’9 The anti-extremist law helps the state silence dissent and ban and criminalize historical publications and narratives inconsistent with Soviet and state-sponsored discourse. The law has been ‘improved’ through subsequent legislative amendments (the 2016 ‘Yarovaia Package’ and the 2017 expansion of the Criminal Code to include ‘propaganda of terrorism’) that employed a broad and all-inclusive definition of extremism that lacked clarity, inviting systematic misuse and arbitrary interpretations of the legislation.10 By 2017, more than four thousand publications had been included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials, in existence since 2004. This legislation has been used to close the Ukrainian library in Moscow, ban Ukrainian organizations in Russia, and declare a wide range of Ukrainian books to be ‘extremist.’ These included various texts that challenged Soviet and Russian historical narratives. Storage and distribution of texts included in the list are illegal in the Russian Federation.11

More recently, on 5 May 2021, following Putin’s instructions, the head of the State Duma Committee on Culture Yelena Yampol’skaia, the First Deputy Speaker of the Duma Aleksandr Zhukov, and senator Aleksei Pushkov registered a draft bill that prohibited any public statements that deny the ‘decisive role of the Soviet people in the defeat of Nazi Germany and the humanitarian mission of the USSR in liberating the countries of Europe.’ The obvious intent of the bill is to conceal the Soviets’ active collaboration with Nazi Germany and to obscure the goal and the content of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact.12 The official spokesperson of Russia’s Investigative Committee Svetlana Petrenko expressed the Committee’s support for the legislation in a rather transparent statement:

attempts to rewrite history must receive a warranted response in the legal realm, just like any other actions which denigrate the symbols of military glory and insult the memory of the victorious nation. The proposed additions to the law should become another effective and timely way of protecting historical memory and the conclusions of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg […] In conditions of a continuing information war, efforts have been seen to rehabilitate Nazism both within our country and abroad, false assessments of the role of our country in the victory over fascism.13

Russian propagandists are equally active abroad, reinforcing Soviet historical narratives in Western academia where, as the articles in this collection show, there already exist Russophile approaches to Russian–Ukrainian relations, the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and the 2014 revolution in Ukraine. A wide range of active measures are conducted to undermine Western scholars’ critical perspectives and to sustain historical myths about the nature of Joseph Stalin’s regime, the role of Russia in the Second World War, and contemporary Russia’s methods of governing. The ultimate objective of these disinformation operations is to shape the domestic policy of leading democracies, to co-opt and subvert their intellectual elites, and to influence public opinion that would make it easier to achieve Russia’s foreign policy goals. Importantly, Russia combines covert action and subversion with hard power and direct violence, a process that, in the view of the Russian political leadership, increases Russia’s chances to succeed in pursuing its economic and geopolitical goals.14 Russian information operations are pushing against an already open door with a large body of Western historians and political scientists being Russophiles, upholders of the view that ‘Crimea was always Russian’ (see Sergei I. Zhuk’s article in this collection), and portraying Ukraine as an appendage of Russia, rather than a country with independent agency.15

Over the last two decades, Moscow ‘disinformers’ and co-opted Russian academics have established and fostered relationships with Western educational centers and scholars who more frequently than not were unaware they were communicating with Russian agents of influence or supporters of Russian imperialism. The question of whether it was wise to cooperate with Russian academics only became a subject of debate after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, leaving open the question of why this had not become a critical matter in the preceding eight years following Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and Russia’s occupation and annexation of Ukrainian territory. Many Western and Ukrainian scholars continued to cooperate with Russian colleagues after 2014, uncritically distributing Russian official narratives, often being oblivious of their origin, falsities, and intent. Ultimately, they have become participants in Russian covert operations, contributing greatly to the popularity of pro-Kremlin narratives in the West.16Some, however, curtailed their collaborative work after Russia’s invasion.

These dynamics will be evident from two examples. The greatest number of Western scholarly articles since 1991 on Ukraine have exaggerated its regional divisions,17 an approach which in many ways resembled a lighter version of Russia’s disinformation trope of an artificial and weak Ukraine. After 2014 this translated into upholding the Kremlin’s view of a ‘civil war’ taking place in Ukraine between Russian and Ukrainian speakers.18 In 2022 this lay behind the widespread Western view that Ukraine would be quickly defeated by an invading Russian force because eastern Ukraine would welcome them as liberators or at the very least remain passive towards them.19

A second example is the misuse of the term ‘nationalist.’ This term has been used in negative connotations and applied against one side, Ukrainians, but never against its Soviet or Russian opponents. This has been reinforced by Western scholars denying or downplaying the existence of nationalism in Putin’s Russia.20 Similar to various Western scholars, historian Georgiy Kasianov applies the label ‘nationalist’ to Ukrainian presidents whom he views through the lens of Russian propaganda.21 Such an approach, in turn, reinforces the Kremlin line on ‘nationalists’ having come to power in the Orange and Euromaidan Revolutions and having subdued pro-Russian voices and Russian speakers. Kasianov’s first foray into nationalism was far more objective in outlining theories of nationalism, nation-building, and nationhood, offering a historical survey of Ukrainian nationalism by using a wide range of Western literature.22 As with some other Russophile scholars in Ukraine, Kasianov presumably became more critical of Ukrainian nationalism after the Orange Revolution. He defended memory politics under President Viktor Yanukovych, arguing then that the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory had the best perspective to become a ‘serious academic and analytical centre.’23 Kasianov’s stand on this issue (his positive assessment of the activities of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance under Yanukovych) places him in an unenviable minority among Ukrainian (and even Western) scholars. Kasianov’s proposition that decommunization allegedly helped ‘liquidate the Soviet symbolic space of memory and simultaneously fill the now-free space with nationalist symbols’24 is not only an attempt to denigrate the efforts of Ukrainian patriots to shed the oppressive Soviet past, but, most importantly, was consistent with a pro-Kremlin narrative about Ukraine. According to this narrative, Ukraine, a US puppet state, has been ruled by a ‘fascist junta’ since 2014, which allegedly transformed the country into ‘anti-Russia.’

Furthermore, Kasianov sought to rehabilitate the odious Dmytro Tabachnyk, a fugitive wanted by the Ukrainian secret services since 2014, writing that, as Minister of Education during Yanukovych’s presidency, Tabachnyk only changed history writing in a ‘cosmetic’ manner while the fundamental basis of an ‘ethnocentric narrative remained unchanged.’25 This is simply not the case. In 2008, two years before Yanukovych’s election as president, Communist Heorhiy Kriuchkov and Tabachnyk published a book in which they attacked Yushchenko’s presidency as ‘fascist.’ This showed how the anti-Ukrainian camp had already begun echoing Russian propaganda and disinformation against Ukraine. Using ‘nationalist’ and ‘fascist’ in the above manner reveals a subjective and parochial understanding of the phenomenon and the realities in Ukraine, an approach consistent with the Kremlin’s misuse of these terms in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.26 In Putin’s Russia, anyone who is not in agreement with the Russian viewpoint has been identified as a Ukrainian ‘nationalist’ or a ‘Nazi.’ This is clearly seen in the ‘de-nazification’ policies implemented by Russian occupation forces who have kidnapped, tortured, and killed Ukrainian patriots of different political persuasions.

In this context, it is important to remember that in contrast to propaganda where the message and its intent are typically transparent for targeted audiences, in covert action and disinformation operations, the intent of ‘altering’ reality is camouflaged: to be effective, these operations must be covert, and their target must remain oblivious to their intent.27 Disinformation includes the spread of ‘false, incomplete, or misleading data passed on to groups or individuals in a manner calculated to inspire full confidence in the message carried.’28 Disinformation messages always contain elements of falsehood (‘deceptive portions’) that seem credible and believable to targeted audiences due to the efforts of specially trained disinformers who, by using certain techniques, are able to build a ‘climate of trust’ and confidence. Importantly, disinformation inflicts harm on the target whose action or inaction becomes self-destructive because the target’s perceptions of reality have been distorted by false messages.29

The openness and relatively free discussions in Western academia make it susceptible to false narratives emanating from the Russian Federation that can often build on long established Russophile positions and the sloppy use of terms such as ‘nationalism.’ To sustain these false narratives, the Russians have been using a variety of techniques: educational exchange and cultural diplomacy; oral and written disinformation distributed among Western academics whose nostalgia for an earlier period in their careers in the USSR makes it easier to sustain it;30 the use of mass and social media and agents of influence who persuade, co-opt, or recruit Western scholars, encouraging their Russophile views of Soviet and Russian history; and the establishment of international front organizations that assist the Russian secret services in subverting Western scholarly institutions.

Eugene Rumer, a realist scholar, has suggested that after 1991 Russia’s aggressive political course and active measures illuminate Russia’s attempt to restore a balance disrupted by the end of the Cold War in its relationship with the West, and to sustain a historical narrative ‘written by the victors,’ a narrative of the economic and military glory of the victorious nation, Russia, that won the Second World War.31 Rumer has clearly noted that in an attempt to restore this balance, ‘[d]eception and active measures have long been and will remain a staple of Russian dealings with the outside world for the foreseeable future.’32 Importantly, sustaining historical myths from the past helps Russia perpetuate more recent myths about wars in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (from 2014) as responses to NATO’s encroachment into Russia’s spheres of interest, and Putin’s military deployment in Syria (from 2015) as the restoration of ‘Russia’s traditional foothold in the Middle East.’33 Since as far back as 1993, Russian leaders have been demanding the West recognize Eurasia as their exclusive sphere of influence from which NATO and the EU are prohibited, and UN peacekeepers cannot be deployed in its frozen conflicts. Kyiv has fought an uphill struggle for decades to obtain Western recognition of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign actor, as opposed to being viewed as an appendage of Russia with whom its fate has been forever tied.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its invasion of the eastern Ukrainian region of the Donbas in 2014, and Russia’s full-fledged war against Ukraine launched on 24 February 2022 fundamentally broke U.S.–Russian relations and escalated tensions between Russia and the West, prompting Russia to intensify its hybrid warfare activities. Russian intelligence has identified Western academia and think tanks as pivotal targets of active measures.34 Moreover, because of their inability to cut ties to Russian scholars and experts after 2014, Western intellectual elites appear to be vulnerable and unprepared to deal with Russian ideological subversion. Russian front organizations, sponsored by the FSB and the Russian presidential administration, have been key players in Russian covert operations conducted in Western academia. As a result of their activities, Soviet and pro-Kremlin narratives have endured.

Penetrating Western Academia

Russian active measures targeting Western academia remain largely under-investigated by scholars and practitioners, which is a major reason for this collection of essays. Unpacking the objectives of the Russians in this domain seems necessary to better understand their strategies and tactics vis-à-vis the West and to conceptualize effective counterintelligence strategies to mitigate the consequences of Russian active measures targeting Western intellectuals. Through covert action, Moscow pursues several general objectives:

undermining trust in democratic systems and their national governments;

fomenting chaos and division within Western societies;

promoting pro-Russian sentiment and popularizing Russian foreign policy goals in the West; and

inciting confusion and misperception by muddling the lines between fact and disinformation, thereby ultimately changing the perceptions of reality among academics and broader audiences in the West.35

Back in the 1980s, in a study of Soviet active measures, the former Head of the Active Measures Working Group36 Dennis Kux distinguished between:

‘white’ or overt operations that include diplomatic, trade, aid, and propaganda efforts;

‘gray’ clandestine disinformation activities that are conducted with the assistance of front organizations, ultra-left or ultra-right organizations, radio stations, and media outlets; and

‘black’ top-secret operations that use agents of influence who spread disinformation among foreign politicians, journalists, and scholars, forgeries and other doctored documents that help Russia deceive the ‘enemy’ and ‘mask Moscow’s hand in the operation.’37

Employing Kux’s classification of Soviet active measures, contemporary Russian covert operations targeting Western academia typically fall within the category of ‘black’ operations. Work with foreign scholars requires clandestine activities conducted by an army of agents of influence and scholars who seek to collaborate with and to co-opt Western scholars by cultivating in them trust and faith in Russian cultural, scientific, and political agendas. Yet contemporary operations conducted by the Russian intelligence services constitute a mixture of ‘white,’ ‘gray,’ and ‘black’ activities.

Secrecy is especially relevant in cases of industrial and technological espionage and recruiting activities and, as Daniel Golden has demonstrated, cutting-edge research centers and universities are especially vulnerable,38 with far less oversight by the Department of Justice (DOJ) of foreign donations to think tanks than to political consultants which has been monitored by the DOJ’s FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act). Foreign penetration of Pentagon-funded or government-funded research programs and initiatives severely damages American national security interests and defense systems.39 The American intelligence community and Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned American institutions of higher learning about national security threats and attempts by foreign students and faculty to steal intellectual property, calling on universities to initiate a ‘robust threat analysis and risk mitigation program to meet the challenge of the advanced persistent threat of academic espionage.’40

It is important to keep in mind that the threat posed by Russian scientific and academic espionage is not a new phenomenon; it has a long history, going back to the Stalin era.41 This threat persisted throughout the Cold War period. According to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, at the height of the Cold War in 1976, 25 percent of Soviet students, who were part of cultural and educational exchange and came to the United States between 1965 and 1975, were intelligence agents.42 Ladislav Bittman, an intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for the Czechoslovak intelligence service who defected to the United States in 1968, wrote that

the efforts of Soviet-bloc agents to penetrate U.S. scientific centers have intensified since the early 1970s, both in number and aggressiveness. Some 5,000 Soviet students, scientists, artists, and scholars, as well as commercial representatives, entered the United States, every year, and many of them came with specific secret assignments.43

As a result of these efforts, Soviet military achievements and scientific ‘discoveries’ during this time were tremendous, due to ‘stolen Western technological secrets.’44 These activities continued after the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. In his February 2012 interview in the FBI’s Washington headquarters, Frank Figliuzzi, FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, noted that there had been ample evidence to suggest that American universities had been consistently targeted by foreign intelligence services, including Russia and China.45

Under Putin’s leadership, Russian espionage operations designed to steal cutting-edge research conducted at American and European universities run parallel to active measures aimed at popularizing Russian narratives pertaining to Russian, European and world histories, and promoting pro-Kremlin talking points addressing Russian domestic and foreign policies.46 These operations require patience and vigorous research activities to identify and cultivate relationships with Western scholars who have the potential to serve as speakers at international scholarly forums and conferences defending pro-Kremlin narratives. The Russian intelligence services seek opportunities to establish ‘scholarly’ contacts with these individuals and offer handsome financial support for their research in the form of grants and paid conference trips. These initial stages are necessary to further control and manipulate scholars who, through their publications, talks, and conference presentations, help solidify Russian historical myths, and, ultimately, shape cultural perceptions and policymaking. This became especially important after the 2014 Ukrainian revolution when the Russian political leadership realized that Ukraine was leaving Russia’s sphere of influence.

Several approaches are instrumental to the success of these operations:

sending Russian citizens (undercover agents) to be educated at and/or employed by American universities;

using academic exchange programs for recruiting American students as agents of influence;

co-opting American scholars through grants, awards, scholarships, and other incentives that boost the scholars’ reputation and prestige;

using front organizations to facilitate ideological subversion of scholars and broader audiences, a subtle and lengthy process that shapes the scholars’ worldviews and inspires them to serve the Russian political leadership’s goals, including building on long-established Russophilia through the promotion of Kremlin-approved historical narratives.

The overarching objective of these activities is three-fold: first, to build on existing nostalgia for the USSR and Russophilia; second, to legitimize the Putin regime’s methods of governing and political behavior; and third, to undermine the arguments of Russia’s opponents and portray them as Russophobes, tied to Western intelligence agencies and Nazi sympathizers.47

In addition, social media, including Facebook, play a significant role in spreading disinformation and cultivating group thinking which assists the Russian secret services in the manipulation of American academia. Beyond being a means of social communication, Facebook (like any other social media platform) serves academic audiences as a networking and academic news platform, and most Western scholars are oblivious to the fact that the Russian secret services effectively employ Facebook to distribute divisive messages and disinformation across Western academic and professional groups created within Facebook.48 Indeed, Western governments only came to understand the power of information warfare in 2014 but took the step of banning Russian media outlets, such as RT (formerly Russia Today), only after the 2022 invasion.

The use of ‘faceless sources’ and ‘faceless attributions’ (expressions such as ‘According to official sources,’ ‘According to unofficial sources,’ ‘According to well-informed sources,’ and ‘According to the best available information’) serve to boost the credibility of the ‘news’ being disseminated in this way.49 The goal is to reinforce narratives sponsored by the Russian state, and possibly to sow discord among Western academia.50 ‘Troll factories,’ such as the infamous Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, were successfully used to buttress state-sponsored historical or ideological narratives concerning the West, Ukraine, and other neighboring states in Eurasia.51

In addition, the Russian Federation employs a large and technologically sophisticated media propaganda apparatus that helps shape Western public opinion in general, and historical master narratives that influence Western scholarly discourse in universities and think tanks. Among Russian state-sponsored agencies are Rossiya Segodnya, a state media company that serves as an umbrella for other propaganda outlets, such as RT and Sputnik. Funding to these outlets jumped sharply in the wake of the 2014 revolution in Ukraine. The Russian press reported that ‘in September 2014, Moscow tripled Rossiya Segodnya’s budget to 6.4 billion rubbles and increased RT’s 2015 budget by 41 percent to 15.38 billion rubbles, which is equivalent to roughly $600 million.’52 Through TV and newspapers, RT and Sputnik, as well as Russia Beyond, promote pro-Russian and anti-Western narratives, shaping public opinion in many European countries and the United States.53

The use of women by the Russian secret services has been a reliable tradition, and the niche of human intelligence (HUMINT) in American academia has included women spying for the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), FSB (Federal Security Service), and GRU (military intelligence). Among them have been Lidiia Gurieva (cover name Cynthia Murphy), who received two undergraduate degrees from New York Universities and an MBA from Columbia Business School; Natalia Pereverzeva (cover name Patricia Mills), who earned a BA in Business at the University of Washington Bothell; and Maria Butina, who received a Master’s degree in International Relations from American University, Washington, D.C.54 They all had similar tasks posed by their handlers—to infiltrate U.S. universities and establish contacts with students and professors who were well connected with American policymaking circles or also worked or used to work for government institutions and the U.S. secret services. Collecting intelligence and expanding networks in academic and political circles were also part of their agenda. Butina’s ambitious goals seem to be the most interesting and elaborate scheme that included establishing close connections with the leadership of the National Rifle Association and gaining access to Republican presidential candidates Scott Walker and Donald Trump.55With governments more on alert following the invasion of Ukraine and with the deterioration of the West’s relations with Russia, Sergei Cherkasov was exposed as a GRU agent after he attempted to infiltrate the International Criminal Court (ICC), using the alias Viktor Muller Ferreira and pretending to be Brazilian.56 In Norway another Russian spy, José Assis Giammaria, was arrested after claiming to be a Brazilian ‘researcher.’57

A close analysis of the most recent patterns of tactics and strategies employed by the Russian secret services suggests that, rather than recruiting an American citizen who works for the State Department, Pentagon, or an intelligence agency, the Russian secret services favor placing a student or a professor at an American or European university, individuals who would potentially be hired by a federal agency or able to befriend a colleague with access to sensitive information.58 These information-gathering tactics, which have been further expanded under Putin, are also designed to build on and expand established pro-Russian and anti-Western narratives, which are endorsed and spread by some scholars in Russian and Eurasian studies.59 Again, the openness of Western and American campuses and the absence of any procedures in place that would prevent Russian active measures at schools of higher learning indeed make them targets for Russian and other international spies, including Russian scholars co-opted by the regime. Academic discussions about whether to no longer invite Russian scholars to Western academic conferences only began in 2022, and these have shown how many are still reluctant to impose bans, despite the fact that most Russian scholars, at least publicly, support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its goal of destroying the Ukrainian state.

Russian Front Organizations: The Izborskii Club

The Russian state has also pursued ideological subversion and the enactment of geopolitical change through front organizations (or NGOs). They have become key players capable of changing people’s perceptions of reality that in turn are transforming geopolitics, conflicts, and operational environments on an unprecedented scale in the new millennium.60 Over the lastdecade, Russian front organizations mushroomed in the West, and their agendas have become more conspicuous for intelligence analysts. These organizations try to conceal their ties with the Kremlin, as well as the sources of their financial support. Many of these propaganda associations and councils were established on Russian soil, albeit with truly extensive global reach and opportunities for coopting and recruiting Western scholars to advocate and popularize pro-Kremlin narratives. According to the Global Engagement Center (GEC) at the U.S. Department of State, Russia continues to be a ‘leading threat’ to U.S. national security, spreading disinformation and working through American academia to undermine the analytical strength of the intellectual and scholarly community.61

Today there are countless Russia-aligned outlets, organizations, and foundations in Europe, Canada, and the United States, as well as pro-Kremlin institutions created on Russian soil, that help the Russian political leadership cultivate ‘witting and unwitting proliferators’ of Russian propaganda narratives.62 Analyzing the profiles of these front organizations, the GEC report has demonstrated that, beyond their contribution to the Russian disinformation campaign against the West, these institutions and individuals affiliated with them ‘benefit greatly from an association with the Kremlin.’ Others try to distance themselves from them, yet nevertheless promote pro-Kremlin narratives and Russian state-sponsored historical myths.63

Beyond the well-known Rossotrudnichestvo (Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation), working with Russian compatriots in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Mexico among other states,64 and Global Research (a Canadian website that ‘has become deeply enmeshed in Russia’s broader disinformation and propaganda ecosystem’),65 several organizations were registered in Moscow that served the same purpose—spreading disinformation and establishing scholarships. These include:

The Strategic Culture Foundation (https://strategic-culture.org/): an online English-language journal registered in Russia that is supervised by Russia’s SVR and has close ties with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, publishing works by pro-Russian Western scholars and observers;

New Eastern Outlook (https://journal-neo.org/): a ‘pseudo-academic publication of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Oriental Studies that promotes disinformation and propaganda focused primarily on the Middle East, Asia, and Africa,’ serving as a platform for spreading pro-Kremlin and anti-American views of Russian academics;66

NewsFront (en.news-front.info): a Crimea-based disinformation and propaganda outlet publishing anti-Western and anti-American texts for Western audiences;67

SouthFront (https://southfront.org/): an online disinformation site registered in Russia, publishing analytical and intelligence texts in different languages based on Kremlin talking points;

Katehon (https://katehon.com/en): a ‘Moscow-based quasi-think-tank’ with close connections to the Russian secret services and other official Russian agencies that publishes anti-Western disinformation and propaganda texts in five languages;68

Geopolitica.ru (https://www.geopolitika.ru/): Russian-language disinformation and propaganda site that publishes anti-Western texts and op-eds inspired by the Russian neo-imperialist Aleksandr Dugin whose goal is to destroy Western institutions and to ‘exterminate the Ukrainians.’69

The role of these organizations in ideological subversion in Western academia is enormous. Ideological subversion, a pervasive process of brainwashing and co-optation of scholars, appears to be a quite effective tactic employed by the Russian secret services. Russian agents of influence, working for the secret services, collaborate with the members of these NGOs, and also attend reputable international scholarly conventions as keynote speakers, presenters, or guests, mingling with scholars of various ethnicities and citizenships.

Sometimes, through non-transparent channels and decision-making processes, the organizers of forums and conferences invite keynote speakers, Russian politicians and scholars with questionable political and scholarly reputations. For instance, Sergei Stepashin, who between 1993 and 1998 served as First Deputy Security Minister, Director of the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK), Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Head of the Administrative Department of the Russian Government Administration, Minister of Justice, and Minister of the Interior, was invited as a keynote speaker to the Ninth International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) World Congress held on 3–8 August 2015 in Makuhari, Japan, where he appeared in the company of two bodyguards.70 The organizers might have overlooked that during the terrorist act in the Budennovsk hospital, Russia in June 1995, where 166 hostages were killed and 541 injured in the special forces’ operation attack on the hospital, Stepashin, Director of the FSK at the time, played a key role in establishing priorities that served as a template for future special forces practices where the lives of civilian hostages became a secondary consideration.71 According to many observers, Japanese academics, like many others among the international scholarly community, fell victim to Russia’s memory politics aimed at the systematic erasing of collective memory about siloviki (security forces) and other federal forces operations in Budennovsk, the Moscow ‘Nord-Ost’ theater, and Beslan.72 This operation was one of many that Putin’s regime launched against Chechnya which amounted to genocide, and served as a template for Russian genocide in Syria from 2015 and renewed genocide in Ukraine from 2022.

In addition, the 2015 scholarly forum in Japan notoriously invited two ‘scholars’ from Donetsk who in 2014, supported by Russian siloviki, had taken over Donetsk State University. Kirill Cherkashin was one of them who, with automatic weapon in hand, later proclaimed himself Dean of the School of History; the other was Dmitrii Muza, professor of history at Donetsk State University and co-head of the Novorossiia branch of the Izborskii Club, established in the DNR in 2014 with the support of Russia’s Izborskii Club.73 Advocates of the projects of Novorossiia (‘New Russia’) and Russkii Mir (Russian World),74 Cherkashin and Muza carried out aggressive verbal attacks, bullying Ukrainian scholars at the 2015 Congress and labeling them and the current political leadership in Kyiv as ‘fascists.’

The Izborskii Club was initially founded in Moscow in 2012 by red (pro-Soviet)-white (pro-Tsarist and Russian Orthodox fundamentalists)-brown (fascist) backers of the 1993 coup against President Boris Yeltsyn and supporters of Putin. Stalinist and national-Bolshevik Russian writer Aleksandr Prokhanov and editor-in-chief of Russia’s neo-fascist newspaper Tomorrow (Zavtra) became the Izborskii Club Chair. Its goal was to offer the Russian political elite and Russian society analytical reports that would shape their ‘civic position’ and imperialistic nationalism. The organizers intended to create the Club’s branches in all regions of the Russian Federation and beyond to promote the Club’s red-white-brown agenda of destroying the Ukrainian state and to curtail the liberals’ and Western attempts to destabilize Russian society ‘ideologically and morally.’75 Through mass media, the Club was to form a new agenda and new leaders, nationalists with an imperial consciousness who were able to resist the manipulations of Russian politics by Western centers and a ‘fifth column’ active within the Russian Federation. The Izborskii Club has gathered under its roof the most extreme individuals in Russia who consistently used inflammatory rhetoric and hate-speech against Ukraine and Ukrainians, Russian liberal oppositionists, and Western democracies. Nearly two decades of Russia’s dehumanizing hate speech paved the way for the recurring genocide being committed by Russia’s invading troops.76 Through support and influential connections with the Kremlin, and through popularization of its views via international forums and publications, the Club was able to solidify its position and institutionalize its postulates. The national renaissance of Russia and the ‘Russian doctrine’ have been routinely discussed at various Izborskii Club gatherings attended by Patriarch Kirill, members of the nationalist movement Rossiia molodaia (Young Russia), and the Russian political elite.77

The DNR branch of the Izborskii Club was established to popularize similar ideas and, in particular, to promote the concepts of Novorossiia and the Russkii Mir. These ideas transcended the ‘borders’ of the DNR through Muza’s and Cherkashin’s publications and propaganda speeches at international conferences, including, again, the 2015 ICCEES World Congress in Makuhari, Japan,78 where both speakers mimicked the agenda of their patrons in Moscow, Aleksandr Prokhanov, Vitalii Aver’ianov, and Aleksandr Nagornyi.79

Delivered in Russian, Cherkashin’s passionate anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda speech at this academic forum had nothing to do with scholarship or scholarly analysis, but, sadly, was favorably received by several American and Japanese scholars. It is, alas, hardly surprising that scholars identifying as specialists in ‘post-Soviet Eurasia’ (a Russian propaganda term implying a common security zone and legitimizing a Russian sphere of influence),80 would draw their knowledge about identity politics and political dynamics in Russia and Ukraine from presentations by people like Muza and Cherkashin. What, however, comes as a surprise is that these same American professors receive prestigious prizes for their publications and Fulbright scholarships for their research. This raises a serious concern about the state of American academia and academic professional associations, and about the position of American governmental institutions.

Intriguingly, the final version of the Congress’s program did not include Cherkashin as a participant or as a presenter. According to then Vice-President of ICCEES Kimitaka Matsuzato, Cherkashin’s presentation was a late addition to the program, made at the final hour (long after the deadline for applications had passed).81 It is even more intriguing that, at the time of Cherkashin’s stay in Japan, he was wanted by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) for treason, and his photos with a Kalashnikov gun while taking over Donetsk State University in 2014 were available on the internet. Moreover, according to the Ukrainian Consulate in Tokyo, the SBU monitored Cherkashin’s and Muza’s activities in Japan but could do little, as they apparently traveled to Japan as Russian citizens, carrying Russian passports. After the Congress, Matsuzato published an article under the rubric ‘Special Cluster on ICCEES IX World Congress’ entitled ‘Slavic Eurasian Studies in the World after Makuhari’ in which he announced his resignation from his position as Vice President of ICCEES ‘because of some disagreement regarding organizational rules.’82 It is unknown whether this ‘bitter decision,’ using Matsuzato’s words, pertained to inviting people like Stepashin, Cherkashin, and Muza with deeply dubious reputations and biographies. Whatever the case might be, to the surprise of many serious scholars present who were aware of these individuals’ activities in Donetsk and beyond, most of the Congress participants never challenged the organizers or asked them inconvenient questions about either the keynote speaker or other Russian propagandists, participants of the Congress, whom they invited.

Like other Russian ‘subverters,’ Cherkashin and Muza freely spread pro-Russian and anti-Western historical narratives at other scholarly conferences, reenforcing the Soviet and Russian emphases on Russian victimhood, the perfidious nature of the West, and a ‘civil war’ brought about by Ukrainian ‘nationalists’ (fascists) coming to power in a ‘putsch’ in the Euromaidan Revolution and launching a war against Russian-language speakers. Blaming Euromaidan nationalists rather than Russia for causing a ‘civil war’ in Ukraine in 2014, a narrative emanating from the Kremlin, was also part of Serhiy Kudelia’s argument,83 and of an array of Russophile scholars.84 The vitality and the longevity of this historical myth circulated at various conferences confirms observations and analyses by Western analytical think tanks and national security agencies, arguing that history matters in the ‘invisible’ information war between Russia and the West.85

Similarly, Kasianov has argued that the best way to understand the war in Ukraine is through a clash of historical myths promoted by Ukrainian ‘nationalists’ and those with a Soviet or Russophile outlook (the latter are never defined by him as nationalists).86 His approach ignores the central driver of the war which is the stagnation of Russian nationalism from a Soviet recognition of Ukraine (albeit within the USSR) to a White Russian emigre denial of the existence of Ukraine.87 By not applying the term ‘nationalist’ to Putin’s Russia, Kasianov has implicitly included himself in the group of Western Russophile scholars who have downplayed and denied the fact that the Putin’s regime is nationalist.88 It is difficult to define this approach as objective on Russian-Ukrainian relations; nor is such a framework capable of fully embracing Putin’s obsession with Ukraine and the brutality of his invading forces committing genocide against Ukrainians.89

The Russian state, its interlocutors, and scholars who have adopted its official narratives, skillfully manipulate facts, writing revisionist history and shaping an imperial-minded discourse. This discourse promotes Russian geopolitical goals, undermines Ukrainian statehood, and discredits the West.90 Russia’s long-standing grand strategic aims under its last two presidents have included uncontested control of a Eurasian sphere of influence, US recognition of Russia as a great power, and promotion of a view on the war in Ukraine as Russia’s struggle against a US-led unipolar world and US global hegemony. The promotion of a sanitized historical record plays a major role in enabling Russia’s propaganda and hybrid warfare against the West, which have dramatically expanded since the mid-2000s as Putin’s Russia evolved into an extreme nationalist regime. Russia’s need for sanitizing historical records was further augmented by the 2020 changes in the constitution that made Russia a totalitarian dictatorship with Putin as president for life, and by the 2022 invasion and atrocities committed in Ukraine.

The Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP)

According to Sergei I. Zhuk, in the 1990s, the successor structures of the former Soviet secret service sought to influence the appointment of the heads of the Russian and Ukrainian offices of international organizations, such as the Carnegie Endowment and Soros Foundations, with the aim of ensuring that only ‘KGB-checked, reliable and loyal scholars’ were accepted. Zhuk cites Leonid Leshchenko, a former Soviet Ukrainian Americanist, who noted:

the KGB and its successor organizations (FSB and SBU) always promoted the careers of so-called reliable scholars, especially in international organizations which funded research in humanities and social studies. During the Cold War, these were IREX and Fulbright, and during the late 1980s and 1990s it became the Soros Foundation in both Russia and Ukraine.91

Zhuk writes that historians Vladislav Zubok, Alexey Miller, and Kasianov became the first exchange scholars during perestroika. Zubok’s close encounters with the KGB during perestroika led to his first experiences of travel to the West.92 Later, in 2008, he became a recipient of funding from the ‘Russkiy Mir’ Foundation. In 1995–97 and 2010–2011, Miller received grants from Soros’s Open Society Institute (Moscow).93 Miller, as well as Dmitri Trenin, former GRU colonel and director of the Carnegie Moscow Center office from 2008 until early 2022, were also regular participants in Putin’s Valdai Discussion Club, an annual gathering that brought together Russophile Western and Russian scholars and think tank experts.94 Zhuk analyzes how after the disintegration of the USSR, close personal connections between Russian and Ukrainian heads of international organizations became a common ground for collaborative projects of which the most popular was the Soros Foundation’s Higher Education Support Program. From 2009, through its summer schools, Kasianov, who became director of the education program of the International Renaissance Foundation in Kyiv, closely cooperated with Miller and Zubok.

It is important to keep this pre-history in mind, if we want to better understand the objectives and collaborative patterns of another Russian front organization, known as the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (Sovet po Vneshnei i Oboronnoi Politike, SVOP). This Moscow-based organization was established in February 1992 by a group of Russian politicians, oligarchs, military, scientific, and intellectual elites, siloviki, and Russian mass media tycoons with the explicit goal to study and shape public opinion favorable to Russia among academics and broader audiences.95 While it is officially an NGO, its members have close ties with the Kremlin, and they actively engage in collaboration with the Russian secret services. One of its founding members, Sergei Karaganov, who has been a spokesperson for Russian hard-line foreign policy towards the West and Ukraine, has been a regular invitee to Western conferences and for interviews with Western media outlets. Karaganov has denigrated Ukraine for over a decade and called for its subjugation and defeat in the war.96 Karaganov has supported Russia’s war in Ukraine and unashamedly argued that Russia is at war with the West in Ukraine.97 This argument is shared by Trenin, a regular participant in Western conferences, who camouflaged his support for Putin’s aggressive foreign policies until the invasion when he came out in support of the war.98

Another Carnegie affiliate Fyodor Lukyanov is the chairman of the presidium of the SVOP and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club. He was also hired as editor-in-chief of a state-sponsored outlet, the Russia in Global Affairs magazine. Lukyanov had gained valuable experience prior to these appointments in the US-based Sawyer Miller Group.99 The Sawyer Miller Group’s staff have been identified as ‘spin doctors to the world: the Sawyer Miller Group uses the tricks of political campaigns to change the way you think about foreign governments, big business and any client in need of an image lift.’100 Many of SVOP’s board members are sons and daughters of former KGB associates, who served as heads and presidents of major Soviet cultural and educational institutions or were part of the Soviet intelligence community.101 According to SVOP’s charter, the organization can establish chapters in the Russian Federation and abroad, and Russian and foreign citizens can be members of the organization, if they so desire. Its major objectives are consistent with those of Russian foreign policy, which includes the conduct of Russian active measures targeting the West and the organization’s close cooperation with Russia’s Presidential Administration.102 One of SVOP’s routine practices is organizing scholarly conferences and webinars. The participants and presenters are awarded honoraria, and their proposals and research projects are financed from SVOP’s budget.103

On 14 May 2020, six years after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas, SVOP sponsored a webinar entitled ‘Memory Wars: Truce in the Time of the Quarantine?’104 It is no coincidence that, among other scholars, the organizers invited Miller, a historian from the European University in St. Petersburg, Russia and a SVOP board member, and Kasianov, head of the Department of Modern History and Politics in the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. Miller and Kasianov co-authored several texts and organized panels at international forums, expressing views about Ukrainian memory politics and recent events in Ukraine that often promoted Soviet and Russian historical narratives. They denigrated Ukrainian narratives by labeling them ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘nationalistic.’105 Both scholars regularly used the terms ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘state-sponsored’ narratives, arguing, among other things, that such policies dominated contemporary Ukraine, but not, it would seem, Putin’s Russia. Obviously, such an approach, implying that Russia, a country that denies the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians, did not pursue nationalistic memory politics while Ukraine, a country that has never denied the existence of Russia and Russians, did pursue ‘nationalistic’ memory politics, could not be understood as balanced.106 Moreover, Miller took this illogical argument to the extreme by claiming, with all the evidence pointing in the opposite direction, that in the Russian Federation, there is freedom of expression, and historians ‘are practically free,’ writing whatever they want.107