Perceptions of Alexander III in Modern Russia

I was out of the country for a bit, attending the annual conference of the British Association of Slavic and East European Studies (BASEES), after which I was mysteriously locked out of WordPress for a while. However, I am now back in, and thought it would be good to post here my BASEES conference paper, as it is unlikely to be published anywhere else. So here it is:

Perceptions of Alexander III in Modern Russia

Presentation to BASEES Conference, April 2024

It is probably fair to say that Emperor Alexander III of Russia does not have a very good reputation in the English speaking world. In Russia, though, the emperor has been rehabilitated in the post-Soviet era. In November 2017, for instance, Russian president Vladimir Putin unveiled a statue of Alexander III in Crimea, commenting that “The reign of Alexander III was called the age of national revival, a true uplift of Russian art, painting, literature, music, education and science, the time of returning to our roots and historical heritage.”

= Monument to the Peacemaker Tsar Alexander III =

In December 2023, Putin then attended the launch of the Russian navy’s latest ballistic missile submarine, the Emperor Alexander III. Alexander is in official favour.

 For this paper, I have decided to look at how historians have represented Alexander in the past 20 or so years. Alexander hasn’t received much attention from English-speaking historians – there is in fact not a single English language biography of Alexander other than one published in the year of his death in 1894 and a privately published one that isn’t available in any library anywhere. In Russia, by contrast, a huge number of works related to Alexander have been produced in recent years. The earliest one I have examined for the purpose of this talk is a biography by Alexander Bokhanov. This was originally published in 1998, but the copy I have is a sixth edition, published in 2019, indicating that there is still a lot of interest in this book.

Next are a couple of biographies by Olga Barkovets and Alexander Krylov-Tolstikovich, the first of which was produced in 2001 and the second in 2007, the latter being a slightly bigger version of the former.

Then there are further biographies by Alexander Miasnikov and I. E. Dronov from 2016, S. V. Ilyin from 2019, Nina Boiko from 2022, and V. A. Grechukhin from 2023. That’s eight biographies in about 25 years, and five in just the last 10 years. On top of that, there are a bunch of other books, for instance Tocheny and Tochenaia’s Russian Autocrats: Alexander III, Lenin, Stalin, and there are also a number of source books which publish documents about Alexander dating from his life. These include the 900 page long collection Alexander III: Pro et Contra and several volumes of correspondence between Alexander and Prince V. P. Meshchersky.

So what do these books tell us?

Quick reaction to Putin’s speech recognizing DPR/LPR

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a long speech at the end of which he expressed his intention to recognize the independence of the rebel Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) in Donbass in Eastern Ukraine. Here’s some very quick thoughts.

The speech was a massive outpouring of grievances, beginning with a long diatribe against Lenin, Stalin, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a sensible world, that would knock on the head the idea that Putin wants to rehabilitate Stalin and restore the USSR, but of course won’t do anything of the like. After his rant against the communists, Putin then moved on to express all his various complaints about the West and the behaviour of post-independence Ukraine. None of it was new, but it’s rare for it all to coming pouring out at once.

The purpose of the long list of grievances was clearly to justify the final decision – recognizing the DPR and LPR – but it’s interesting that so little of it had anything to do with the situation in Donbass. The overall sense I got was enormous frustration. Putin kept sighing, and every now and then would rap his palm on the table. It was like he was doing something that had very much not been his desire, but that he felt was the only thing left for him to do. I very much doubt that this has been his plan all along, and that all the incidents that have taken place in recent weeks have been carefully orchestrated to lead up to it. Rather, one gets the sense of something having snapped.

Of course, there was in all this a total lack of self-reflection – no indication by Putin that maybe things he’d done might have contributed to the current crisis. It was all kind of self-pitying. In this regard, Putin and his counterparts in the West who similarly swim in a sea of self-pitying grievance strike me as rather alike. Everyone is blaming everybody else for everything. It’s not very healthy.

The question now is what next?

Recognition of the DPR/LPR requires ratification by the Federation Council, but that will just be a rubber stamp and can be expected in the next couple of days. Along with recognition there are to be treaties of friendship with the rebel republics. A lot will depend on what those say and what sort of aid from Russia is envisioned in them. Economic and humanitarian aid will be one thing. Military aid will be another. But the act of recognition will provide legal cover should Moscow decide that military aid is required. For it can say that it is not sending weapons/troops or whatever into Ukraine but into independent states. After all, if Western states could recognize Kosovar independence and then provide Kosovo with support, Russia can do likewise. At least, that will be the argument.

Beyond that, the issue is whether this is a step on the path towards a full-scale invasion of Ukraine or rather an alternative to it. Obviously, those who have been boosting the prospect of such an invasion will believe the former. As someone who has always felt that an all-out attack on Ukraine out of the blue was unlikely, but also felt that it was very probable in the event of a major Ukrainian assault on Donbass, I see this as something of an alternative to war – as one of the ‘asymmetrical’ measures Moscow promised if the West failed to respond to its demands for security guarantees. The danger is that by seeming to rip up the Minsk agreements which looked to reintegrate Donbass into Ukraine, the act of recognition brings Russia and Ukraine more openly into conflict and so possibly raises the likelihood of all-out war between them.

Certainly, the situation is far from healthy. As I say, my strong impression is that this is not what Moscow had planned all along. Rather it’s a product of a realization that the West is not interested in meeting its demands (which to my mind were never very realistic) and also that Ukraine will never implement the terms of the Minsk agreements. Blocked from any other path, the Kremlin has therefore taken this one. Where it will lead, I do not dare to predict.

Mocking the Media

There’s a truck outside the Desmarais Building at the University of Ottawa, where I work, which has the words ‘Main Stream Media’ painted on its side, with a big red cross through them. The truck’s part of the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ that has been occupying much of our downtown for about three weeks now. I can’t say that I support it, and like most people I know I think it’s high time that the truckers drove off back to wherever it is they came from. But the truck I mentioned raises an important question – why the distrust of the ‘mainstream media’? If you want to know the answer, you have only to look at this week’s coverage of all things Russo-Ukrainian.

On the bus, off the bus, again!

‘On the bus, off the bus,’ as they say in the army, a phrase that sums up the frustration soldiers feel at the confusing and sometimes contradictory orders that seem to make up military life. It’s felt a bit like that this week with the on again, off again Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We first heard about this invasion back in November, at which point the US government informed us that the Russian attack was likely to come in January. That month came and went without any sight of Russian tanks charging across the Ukrainian border, and as if to acknowledge that reality, the White House eventually backtracked a little and declared that it did not consider the invasion ‘imminent.’

Invasion off, or so it seemed for a bit. But as this week comes to an end, all of a sudden it’s back on again. Western diplomats have been racing out of Kiev in fear of their lives, advising their fellow countrymen to do the same. The United States, Canada, the UK, Israel, and a whole bunch of others have suggested that their citizens get out of Ukraine while they still can.

‘The Russians are coming!’

At least according to anonymous ‘US officials’.

For according to PBS defence correspondent Nick Schifrin, who Tweeted: ‘The US believes Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine, and has communicated that decision to the Russian military, three Western and defense officials tell me.’ Schifrin then followed up with extra Tweets, in which 3 officials miraculously expanded into 6: ‘The US expects the invasion to begin next week, six US and Western officials tell me,’ he wrote, adding that, ‘US officials expect a horrific, bloody campaign that begins with two days of aerial bombardment and electronic warfare, followed by an invasion, with the possible goal of regime change.’

Invasion on!

Or maybe not.

Let’s face it, anonymous officials ‘believing’, ‘expecting’ and ‘anticipating’ isn’t really much by way of evidence. Do these officials actually know anything? Or do they just ‘believe’? I have to say that I was immediately sceptical.

And then, all of sudden, everything turned around 180 degrees. ‘The White House is not saying that Putin has made a final decision to launch an attack on Ukraine, [spokesman Jake] Sullivan says,’ reported the Washington Post’s John Hudson. ‘Sullivan underscores that it’s not the Biden administration’s understanding that Putin has made a decision to invade,’ he added.

Invasion off!

Or maybe not. Who knows. Perhaps tomorrow, they’ll be briefing us that it’s back on again. At this point, one begins to wonder if these people are serious or are playing some sort of weird mind game with us or are just total clowns who don’t know what they’re doing.

Suffice it to say that I’m on the doubtful side when it comes to these invasion stories. My position has long been that Russia will most definitely attack Ukraine if the latter decides to launch a major military offensive against rebel Donbass, but short of that will keep its powder dry.

As I’ve said before, my view is that the problem with the West’s policies is precisely that they do nothing to discourage Ukraine from launching such an attack. I tend to the opinion that the Ukrainians know that an attempt to recapture Donbass by force would result in their utter destruction at the hands of the Russian army, but it strikes me as unwise to test that theory out in practice. As it is, the situation in Donbass isn’t looking good, with a vast recent increase in the number of ceasefire violations (HT to commentator Lola for the graphic below).

All this raises the danger either of a Ukrainian offensive in Donbass which provokes a Russian response or of a unplanned spiralling escalation of violence which gets out of control and produces the same result. Just as the Americans are talking up the Russian threat, Russian intelligence chief Nikolai Patrushev has been issuing regular claims of a build up of Ukrainian forces near the Donbass frontline, sparking speculation that a Ukrainian attack is imminent.

Are his accusations any more plausible? Who knows? But one thing is sure – we are in dangerous territory. It’s just that the danger may not be coming from the direction everyone in the West is expecting. Let’s hope it all blows over and that the troops get back ‘off the bus’ once and for all.

Crosstalking Russia-NATO

You can watch me talking about Russia-NATO on RT’s Crosstalk show here:

And They Complain About Russian Disinformation!

In a couple of articles this week, for the CIPS blog and RT, I examined a new report produced by the US State Department’s anti-disinformation outfit, the Global Engagement Center. Entitled RT and Sputnik’s Role in Russia Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem, the report is, as the title suggests, a long denunciation of RT and Sputnik for being source of “fake news.” But as I point out in my articles, the report itself includes a number of false statements. These include a claim that the OSCE stated that a boy in Donbass was not killed by a Ukrainian drone (it said no such thing), and the assertion that RT was spreading the “false narrative” that Ukraine was a fascist state, an assertion backed by a link to an article I had written which specifically said that “Ukraine remains a relatively free and open society. It’s not remotely fascist.” (See my articles for CIPS blog and RT for full details.)  

In short, once again, we see an organization ostensibly devoted to fighting disinformation engaging in it itself. As I have said on multiple occasions, this is a regular problem with the “disinformation industry” – that network of institutions and individuals set up to “counter” alleged foreign “influence operations.”

The problem goes beyond that, though. As noted in my RT article, “RT is a news outlet, and sometimes it makes mistakes – they are unavoidable. The problem is that the disinformation racket is trying to present this as – uniquely among major media outlets – a form of organised deception.” And so it is that the information warriors make absolutely no effort to expose “fake news” emanating from domestic mainstream Western media, and certainly fails to label deceptive stories as deliberated “disinformation.”

But yet, such deceptive stories are all around us.

As an example, I bring to your attention this extraordinary interview conducted on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) regarding the truckers’ convoy that has arrived here in Ottawa and is said to be blocking off parts of downtown (I haven’t actually wandered over to check but can hear the honking of horns).

The convoy, consisting of several hundred trucks, has driven across Canada to protest vaccine mandates imposed on the trucking industry by the Canadian government. Personally, I can’t say that I have any sympathy for their cause. Apparently, 90% of Canadian truck drivers are double vaccinated, and even the truck drivers’ own professional association is against the protest. But be that as it may. The convoy has mightily annoyed a section of our governing elite, who are going beyond saying that the truckers’ are being silly and alleging that there are possible links with “extremist” groups.

And where you have “extremist” groups, inevitably you have “Russians.”

Or at least, that’s what CBC host Nik Koksal thinks. Interviewing Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino, she put on her conspiracy theorist hat. “We’ve heard references to potential outside actors. Who could these outside actors be? Where might they be from?” she asked the minister. Not satisfied with Mendicino’s answer, she then pointed him firmly in the desired direction, saying:

“I do ask that because given Canada’s support of Ukraine, in this current crisis with Russia, I don’t know if it’s far fetched to ask [YES IT IS!!] but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things, as this, as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating it from, from the outset.”

Mendicino ducked the question. “I’m going to defer to our partners in the public safety the of trained officials and experts in that area,” he replied. Koksal wasn’t too happy with this. Clearly, Russians were to blame. So she pressed the point further. “I certainly understand the need, or the interest in deferring the question to others who are involved, but I have to assume that you are being briefed on these concerns and on these issues, so what kind of conversations are happening on the kind of things that I’ve just asked about?” she asked.

Again, Mendicino avoided a direct answer. “Yes, we’re being briefed and we’re obviously looking very closely at the underlying motivations that we’ve seen from some of the organizers,” was all he was prepared to say.

So let me ask the question I always ask when such allegations of Russian involvement are made: “What’s the evidence?” And as always, the answer is “There is none.” One imagines that if Mendicino had any, he’d have seized upon the opportunity to provide it. Indeed, before Koksal brought up the possibility of a Russian link, nothing of the sort had ever been publicly suggested (or if it had, I can’t find it on the internet). In short, it’s misinformation.

Koksal’s line of questioning reveals the extent to which a deeply paranoid understanding of the world has seized control of much of the Western media. Underlying this is a view of Russia as a master puppeteer whose strings extend into every nook and cranny of our society, manipulating every act of political protest. But if you stop and think about it for a while, it’s an absurd idea, which exaggerates Russia’s potential to an extraordinary degree. It also reveals another negative consequence of the disinformation industry, which is that all the talk of ‘foreign influence operations’ ends up creating a conspiratorial mindset that in turns makes it much more difficult to undertake a serious analysis of our domestic problems.

But as they say, mud sticks. Although Mendicino failed to confirm the Russian connection, he didn’t tell Koksal that her question was nonsense either. Consequently, the allegation was left hanging in the air, and no doubt some viewers will have gone away thinking that a Russian link to the truckers’ convoy was a real possibility.

Apart from me, will anybody call the CBC to account for this shockingly poor piece of journalism? Will the well-funded disinformation industry produce reports about the fake Russia news coming out of mainstream media? Of course not. Such things are allowed to pass without comment, let alone condemnation.

And yet they complain about Russian disinformation and wonder why people tune into RT. If they really want to know the answer, I suggest that they just take a good long look in the mirror.

TV and the Failure of Russian Soft Power

Ever heard of R-Pop or R-Drama? Of course not. And therein lies Russia’s problem.

Squid Game – a dystopian South Korean TV show in which indebted characters risk their lives in a game – was the surprise 2021 hit of the year on Netflix. The show’s popularity had a knock on effect – a huge surge in the number of foreigners wanting to learn the Korean language. Language tutoring services in the UK reported a 76% increase in students learning Korean, and 40% in the United States. Furthermore, the language learning app Duolingo says it now has “more than 7.9 million active users learning Korean.”

Interest in all things Korean has been growing for some years, largely due to the immense popularity of the products of the country’s cultural industry. Back in 2018, for instance, the BBC reported that K-Pop was driving a “boom in Korean language lessons,” and that the South Korean government was “capitalizing on its cultural assets by setting up 130 language institutes in 50 countries.” “This type of centre may attract people who are interested in Korea because of pop culture at first, but they can also expose those students to other parts of Korean studies, including politics, trade, history, and more,” said Jenna Gibson of the US-based think tank the Korea Economic Institute.

K-culture is a model of soft power at work. Attractive popular products pull in the public, who then acquire a deeper understanding of the country in question, going away at the end of the process enamoured with the object of study.

Soft power of this sort is big business and immensely profitable. It also translates into a favourable international image, which theoretically should provide political benefits. Arguably it was crucial to American success in the Cold War. Hollywood as much, if not more, than the American army ensured that the United States came out on top.

It’s also something that modern Russia is not very good at. Speaking this week to the State Duma, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lamented that, “If you compare us with other countries who enthusiastically promote their national languages, the amount of money [we devote to the issue] is far from in our favour. We need to correct this. I hope for your support in this regard.”

Lavrov drew deputies’ attention to organizations funded by foreign countries to promote their culture, such as the British Council, the Goethe Institute, and Alliance Francaise. These receive far greater funding than analogical Russian organizations such as Rossotrudnichestvo and the Pushkin Institute for the Russian Language. Russia needed to do more, he said.

To my mind, Lavrov has a point, but I’m not at all convinced that the solution is to pump more into what you might call “official” or “semi-official” organizations dedicated to promoting Russian culture. To see why, let’s return to the case of South Korea.

The rapid advance of K-culture is the product of deliberate state policy following the 2008 financial crisis, when the South Korean government decided to invest heavily in the business of popular culture. The enactment of this policy fell upon private industry, and the aim was not soft power, but export-generated financial profit. This, as far as I can tell, is typical of how South Korea has grown: a close relationship between the state and business, in which the former points the way and provides backing, and the latter then generates goods for foreign markets in accordance with the general plan.

The thing is is that in order for the plan to work, this cultural business had to be able to sell its products, which meant that they had to be attractive and entertaining. And so the Koreans made sure that they were. K-Pop is hip and bouncy, with loads of beautiful people singing catchy songs. One might accuse it of being very low brow, but it does the job. It sells in truckloads.

The same could be said of K-drama. It’s formulaic, but addictive. The Korea of the K-drama world, whether it be today or ancient Joseon, is full of beautiful people in beautiful clothes in beautiful settings, and even if they’re being attacked by Joseon-era zombies, somehow the loving camera work makes it all look strikingly pretty. I imagine that I would horribly disappointed if I actually went to South Korea, as it would be a huge shock to realize that the average person doesn’t actually look like a supermodel.

So, yes, you can criticize the work of K-culture for being less than high art. If you like, you can call it pulp. But it’s addictive, attractive pulp. And along the way, you get to pick up a lot of Korean culture – you learn some words, you discover lots of foods, you get to know the country’s history, you pick up cultural quirks, such as Koreans’ obsession with relative age, and so on. As a form of soft power, it’s really good. It makes people like Korea and want to know more about it.

Compare this with what Russia offers the world. No doubt, there’s lots of good stuff on the domestic market, but what gets offered to people outside the country is pretty gloomy. A quick look at the Russian TV shows available on Netflix proves the point. The one item that pops up that could be said to be a successful cultural export is Masha and the Bear. Beyond that, though, the offerings are thin on the ground and also pretty grim: Metod – an anti-social detective hunting serial killers; To the Lake – death from disease; Sparta – ‘A game with no rules and no limits’; Locust ­– just the title is off-putting; and so on.

Depressing stuff. The same could be said of Russian films, at least those that get to the West. The most praised in recent years was Leviathan. I’ll confess I didn’t watch it. The reviews sounded just too gloomy, and I could do without spending lots of time just to feel rotten at the end of it. But judging by the reviews, the whole point of it is that Russia sucks.

You get the point. Watch Korean drama, and you think, “I’d like to go to Korea.” Watch Russian drama, and you think, “What a shithole.” And that, dear readers, is why Russian soft power is less than impressive. It’s also why pumping more money into cultural promotion, as Lavrov suggests, isn’t likely to achieve much. For you have to have something positive to promote. Masha and the Bear aside, Russia doesn’t appear to have a lot to offer, at least not of the sort most people want to spend money on. And that’s a problem.

Reporting on Russia – A Case of Rigid Orthodoxy

What a week it’s been! 80 days or so since we were told that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, it has yet to march its troops across the border. But the state of tension continues to rise, driven, it must be said, not by Russian officials, who have stated repeatedly that there are no invasion plans, but by those of Western states along with their enablers in the press.

Today, for instance, The Guardian’s Sunday edition, The Observer, was banging the anti-Russian drum as loud as possible with the thoroughly misleading headline “Russian ships, tanks and troops on the move to Ukraine as peace talks stall.”

Note the phrase “to Ukraine,” suggesting that Russian soldiers are actually heading across the frontier. The article itself is a little different from the headline saying merely that “Russia has sent troops more than 4,000 miles to Ukraine’s borders and announced sweeping naval drills,” which is not exactly the same as sending troops “to Ukraine.” But even this more moderate statement turns out to be not really accurate. For as The Observer goes on to tell us, the naval activity involves ships heading to the Mediterranean, while the ground forces “have arrived in Belarus … for joint military exercises set for mid-February.”

Maybe I’m being overly pedantic but the Mediterranean isn’t Ukraine and neither is Belarus. Besides, if the troops are going to be engaged in exercises in mid-February, they’re probably not going to be invading Ukraine in the meantime. The facts don’t back up the scaremongering.

Nevertheless, the Brits are sure that those evil Russkies are up to no good. For they’re not just planning to invade, they’re also plotting a coup in Ukraine – or at least so British intelligence would have us believe. According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, “Moscow may topple the [Ukrainian] government and install Yevhen Murayev, a former MP who controls a pro-Russia television station.”

It’s time people retired this “pro-Russian” label for every Ukrainian politician who happens to disagree with the Ukrainian nationalist agenda. As Murayev told The Guardian, “You’ve made my evening. The British Foreign Office seems confused. It isn’t very logical. I’m banned from Russia. Not only that but money from my father’s firm there has been confiscated.” Murayev is not only not “pro-Russian” and not much liked by the Russian government, but his Opposition Bloc party is so unpopular that it failed to get the 5% of the vote required to get seats in parliament in the last Ukrainian election. A more improbable candidate for coup leader it would be hard to find.

Besides which, one has to wonder how this proposed coup would work. First, the plotters would have to amass sufficient firepower to seize control and then they’d have to defend themselves against the inevitable counter-coup. It beggars belief, given the current state of affairs in Ukraine, that a “pro-Russian” force could do this.

That doesn’t mean that some people in Russia might not be muttering into their beer glasses that a coup in Kiev would be jolly good thing. And it doesn’t mean that Russian intelligence isn’t doing all it can to recruit spies and supporters within Ukraine. But a coup is not a serious prospect. Again, it’s pure scaremongering.

The problem with all this is that the stories of invasion, coups, and so on generate a lot of headlines, raising international tensions along the way, but when they then fail to occur, the headlines are absent. “Russia fails to invade Ukraine again,” isn’t exactly clickbait.

Much the same applies to all the other conspiracy theories concerning Russia – lots of noise when the initial accusations are made, and then more or less silence when it turns out that the theory isn’t true. And certainly, the conspiracy theorists are never held to account for misleading everybody.

Take, for instance, the case of Havana Syndrome, which I cover in an article this weekend for RT (here). For some time now, we’ve been led to believe that the mysterious health problems experienced by scores of American diplomats around the world are the product of Russian microwave weapons that have been frying their brains. But now the US media reports that, according to sources in the CIA, “The idea that widespread brain injury symptoms have been caused by Russia or another foreign power targeting Americans around the world, either to harm them or to collect intelligence, has been deemed unfounded.”

Will all those who spread the story about Russian microwave weapons now repent? I doubt it. Careers rarely suffer from falsely exaggerating the scale of the Russian threat (or indeed any other alleged threat to Western security from actors deemed for some reason to be malign). By contrast, challenging the prevailing narrative that Russia is a deadly and immediate threat to our safety is a career-killer.

If you have any doubts, observe the fate of the head of the German navy, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schoenbach, who had to resign (involuntarily, one imagines) after having had the temerity to tell a conference in India the obvious truth that Ukraine had lost Crimea for good. In my opinion, anybody who thinks otherwise is utterly deluded, but God forbid that this truth be said out loud.

Schoenbach dug himself deeper into a hole by saying that Russia sought “respect” and it would be to the West’s benefit to give it what it wanted. One can agree or disagree with this, as one wishes, but the idea is hardly a radical one, and it is surely important that military policy be drawn up in an atmosphere in which different hypotheses are carefully considered and not dismissed without consideration as beyond the pale. Rigid orthodoxy is not conducive to sensible decision-making. Unfortunately, it seems that rigid orthodoxy is now a requirement for senior office.

In fact, this goes far beyond senior officials. As the other stories mentioned in this post illustrate, in much of the West a very narrow orthodoxy has set in regarding all things Russian. Those who challenge it, are dismissed, sidetracked, or blackened as agents of “Russian propaganda.” An example of the last of these comes in a report published last week by the US State Department that seeks to expose “Russian disinformation and propaganda,” and in the process engages in some definite disinformation of its own. But that’s something for another post later this week. It’s a rather disgraceful story, but then again, given everything else, hardly surprising.

Spooks, Russia, and Disinformation

Jeremy Morris has an interesting post on his Postsocialism blog about the malicious role played by Western intelligence services in shaping narratives of Russia. I’m somewhat sceptical about his thesis – or at least the extent of the phenomenon he describes – but as if by chance, today I also came across a story that kind of backs him up.

Morris complains of two “elephants in the room,” who together distort our understanding of Russia. The first is the “clear leveraging of latent public sympathy abroad for the Russian regime by our friends at the English-language offices of RT.” I guess that would be me.

The second is “academic and think-tank contacts with the security services in the West.” Given my former involvement in the intelligence world, and the fact that I’ve taught courses at the University of Ottawa with members of the Canadian security and intelligence services, I guess that would be me too.

Double elephant!

I imagine that Morris thinks that elephant number one distorts things in favour of Russia, and elephant number two distorts them against. That must make me some sort of push-me-pull-you doing both at once. Perhaps that explains why I always end up occupying the middle ground!

Anyway, I digress, because this isn’t meant to be about me. Back to the point.

“If you underestimate the hidden motives of those that comment on Russia – from both elephants, then you are guilty of the ‘fallacy of insufficient cynicism’,” writes Morris. I must confess myself guilty as charged. I can be pretty cynical, but I don’t think that everybody has “hidden motives.” People who write what one might call “pro-Russian” articles for RT aren’t doing it for the money or because the FSB has got some dirt on them any more than people writing Russophobic stuff for think tanks are doing it because they’re taking orders from the FBI, MI5, or CSIS. People tend to believe what they’re doing.

In any case, I worry less about spooks and more about the military industrial complex and its funding of think tanks and the like, all of which work together to inflate threats, keep us in a state of fear, and justify increased defence spending and aggressive foreign policies. But even there, the think tankers etc believe in what they’re doing. The problem is that believers get funded whereas non-believers don’t. I don’t think “hidden motives” are the issue.

That said, Morris has a point, in that security and intelligence services do maintain contacts with chosen favourites and feed them information that they hope will further their chosen narrative. The story I came across today illustrates how this works quite well.

A while back, I mentioned a law case in the UK involving Guardian journalist Carol Cadwalladr and British businessman Arron Banks. Banks is suing Cadwalladr for libel for having claimed that the Russian government offered him money for use in the Brexit referendum campaign, and that he lied about his relationship with the Russians. The case is now before the court, and Cadwalladr’s defence is becoming clear.

The Guardian journalist isn’t claiming that what she said about Banks was true, merely that given the evidence she had at the time she had good reason to believe that it was in the public interest for her to report it. So what was this evidence, and where did she get it from? This is where it becomes interesting. For as the Guardian reports,

In her written evidence statement, she [Cadwalladr] said she had obtained two intelligence files from an organisation contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation in Europe on behalf of a government agency, one file of which raised concerns about Banks’s Russian wife.

In other words, British intelligence fed the information to her via another source.

The accusation that Banks took Russian money to fund Brexit received widespread coverage. It was even repeated in a parliamentary report. Yet no evidence to support the claim has ever been produced, and as we have seen, Cadwalladr isn’t trying to say that it was true. In short, it was disinformation. And yet, what prompted it was in part documents leaked by British intelligence to a third party “contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation” and then in turn given by that organization to Ms Cadwalladr.

Doesn’t that strike you as a bit iffy?

In the first place, the story reinforces what I have said several times before, namely that the “disinformation industry” set up to “counter Russian disinformation” is itself a major source of disinformation. And second, it reveals an excessively cosy relationship between the media – supposedly an independent guardian of the truth that holds the state to account – and state organizations, including secret intelligence.

Personally, I find it more than a little disturbing.

Maybe Mr Morris is right after all!

If the Russians were in Scotland …

George:   The war started because of the vile Hun and his villainous empire-building.

Blackadder: George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think that we can be entirely absolved of blame on the imperialistic front.

George: Oh, no, sir, absolutely not. [Aside, to Baldrick] Mad as a bicycle!

I’ve mentioned before that two of the major problems in international relations are state leaders’ lack of self-awareness and lack of strategic empathy. Given their imperial history, as well as their awful recent history of invading, destabilizing, and generally messing up foreign countries, you might imagine that the Brits would have learnt to avoid these pitfalls and developed a bit of humility as well as some understanding that others might not view them positively. But it appears not. No matter how they (or should I say ‘we’, since I have a British passport) screw things up, they/we still think that they/we are on the side of the angels whereas others are the devil incarnate, and that all the world needs is a bit more Britain.

If you doubted this, I suggest you take a look at a new article published this week by the British Defence Secretary, who goes by the good Scottish name of Ben Cameron Wallace. The bulk of the article – which appears on the UK government website – is an attack on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s historical essay on Russian-Ukrainian relations, which argued that Russians and Ukrainians were in essence one people, or at least very closely related peoples. Given that Putin wrote his piece some months ago, it might seem a little strange that Wallace would suddenly decide to respond. But his reply coincides with a decision by the British government to send additional weapons to Ukraine. It’s clearly therefore designed to provide some sort of moral justification for that move.

Wallace starts out by saying that Russia’s belief that it is threatened by NATO is a ‘straw man’. Why? Because – and you’ve heard this before – ‘NATO, to its core, is defensive in nature. … It is a truly defensive alliance.’

Really?

How was NATO defending itself in Yugoslavia? Or in Libya? Or even in Afghanistan, for that matter? The idea that NATO is ‘to its core, defensive’ is, of course, ridiculous. At the very least, as I noted in a recent post, even if NATO is in some objective way defensive, others have very good subjective reasons for viewing it differently.

Not only has NATO attacked countries that posed no threat to it, but so too have NATO members acting outside the alliance. The UK itself is a prime example. After invading Iraq in 2003, the cheek of British politicians portraying their country as ‘defensive’ and others as ‘aggressive’ is quite something.

But all that is fairly obvious and has been said time and time again. For whatever reason, the Brits don’t want to acknowledge their own aggressive behaviour or how it might look to others. I guess it would make them feel bad. So let’s put it aside for now, and continue on with what Mr Wallace has to say about Putin’s essay on Ukraine, for that’s what constitutes the bulk of his article.

Now, to be fair to Wallace, I wasn’t a huge fan of Putin’s piece myself. All this ‘brotherly nations’ stuff, based on distant historical ties when modern nations as such didn’t exist, strikes me as rather dubious. Still, there are some things about Wallace’s analysis that are worthy of note.

First, he accuses Putin of ‘ethnonationalism’ saying that in his article the Russian president ‘puts ethnonationalism at the heart of his ambitions’ in order to achieve ‘the subjugation of Ukraine and at worse the forced unification of that sovereign country.’

Obviously, Wallace hasn’t read a lot of Putin. If he had, he’d be aware that the Russian leader has regularly denounced ethnonationalism and called for a Russian state which respects the multiplicity of ethnicities and religious that make up its population. Putin’s nationalism is a state nationalism, i.e. it’s founded on loyalty to the Russian (Rossiiskii not Russkii) state. Wallace is a bit out of his depth, I think.

Second, and this is where I think it gets interesting , the British Defence Secretary comments that ‘Ukraine has been separate from Russia for far longer in its history than it was ever united.’ This is just bad history. For what do you mean by ‘Ukraine’? If you mean the lands that now make up Ukraine, then Wallace is right. But if you mean Ukraine as a nation, then he’s wrong, since Ukraine, like most nations, is a fairly modern construct. There was no ‘Ukraine’ until recently. In fact, there was no independent Ukraine until 1918, and then only for a few months. And there was no Ukraine with its current borders until 1945.

But – and now I’m getting to my point – one would be telling the truth if one noted that ‘Scotland has been separate from England for far longer in its history than it was ever united’. The Kings of Scotland date back to the ninth century, giving the country some 800 years of independent existence compared to 300 years of unity with England.

Why do I say this? Because Wallace is not only a Scot, but a former Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, ‘Unionist’ being the word in point. Wallace views England and Scotland as one. He’s a fierce opponent of Scottish separatism. Speaking in the House of Commons, he once denounced a member of the Scottish National Party by saying, ‘The honourable lady is making a brilliant argument for why we don’t want to put borders between countries.’

Wallace and his fellow Tories should have thought of that before backing Brexit, of course. But that’s not why I bring it up. The point is that Wallace doesn’t think that it’s a good thing to split up peoples that have long lived together – at least where Britain is concerned. You’d think, therefore, that he’d have a bit more empathy towards Russians (and Ukrainians) who feel that efforts to further divide Russia and Ukraine are to be regretted. In short, you’d think he have a bit of understanding of Putin’s position. But it seems that what applies to us doesn’t apply to you.

Let’s take this a bit further. Imagine that Scotland became independent. And imagine that it then asked to join the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and that it invited Russia to deploy military forces on its soil. And imagine that the prospect arose of Scotland becoming a base for Russian missiles capable of reaching London in five minutes. What do you think Wallace’s reaction would be then?

He’d be leaping up and down with fury! He’d be demanding action. He’d be screaming about Russian aggression (as he does already, in fact, even though there are no Russian troops within 1,500 kilometres of London). That’s what he’d be doing. In short, he’d be doing everything that Putin’s doing, and maybe even then some.

As I said, a lack of self-awareness and strategic empathy. Britain needs better than this.