For Putin, Disinformation Is Power

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/opinion/for-putin-disinformation-is-power.html

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MOSCOW — Fifteen years ago, a few months into his presidency, Vladimir V. Putin told Larry King on CNN that his previous job as a K.G.B. officer had been like that of a journalist. “They have the same purpose of gathering information, synthesizing it and presenting it for the consumption of decision makers,” he said. Since then, he has excelled at using the media to consolidate power inside Russia and, increasingly, to wage an information war against the West.

So the apparent hacking by Russian security services of the Democratic National Committee emails, followed by their publication by WikiLeaks, should come as no great surprise to Americans. It is only the latest example of how Mr. Putin uses information as a weapon. And the Kremlin has cultivated ties with WikiLeaks for years.

It has also used disinformation in its annexation of Crimea and in its war in Ukraine, launched cyberattacks on Finland and the Baltic States, and planted hoax stories in Germany to embarrass Angela Merkel. During the Cold War, the Kremlin interfered in American politics for decades. The K.G.B.’s so-called active measures — subversion, media manipulations, forgery and the financing of some “peace” organizations — lay at the heart of Soviet intelligence.

Then as now, Russia exploited real grievances in the West — discontent with the war in Vietnam and racial tensions in the 1960s; anxiety and fear of Muslim immigrants today. Nevertheless, Mr. Putin’s support of the likes of Donald Trump in America, Brexiters in Britain or the right-wing Marine Le Pen in France does not mean they are his creations.

What seems to puzzle the American public most is why Russia, having shed Communism, is working to undermine the West today. Didn’t America win the Cold War?

Actually, that question, which arose 15 years ago, is as alive today as it was then. While most Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a triumph over the Soviet Union, most Russians saw it as a victory of their own common sense over a senile and inept regime that had run out of money and ideas and had lost its appetite for repression. After Mikhail Gorbachev opened up the Soviet media, the contrast between socialist and capitalist economic systems had become too apparent. And when the K.G.B. attempted a coup against Mr. Gorbachev in 1991, not a single person came out on the street to defend Communism, while thousands risked their lives protesting the coup in Moscow, in defense of freedom.

Then came an American mistake: triumphalism, rather than congratulating the Russian people on their victory over authoritarian rule, and using a short window of opportunity to offer Russia sufficient economic aid to ease the pain of a collapsing economy. This was shortsighted and dangerous. It created a false sense of invincibility in America and paved the way for resentment in Russia. Eventually, it let revisionists like Mr. Putin portray the collapse of the Soviet Union as an American conspiracy.

Over the past decade, this narrative of defeat and humiliation has become a stalwart of Mr. Putin’s ideology of resurgence. If America won the Cold War, it must be responsible for the Soviet breakup and the impoverishment of millions of Russians. And if Russia was defeated, it could only be expected to one day seek revenge.

This narrative has become extremely popular in Russia. Anti-Americanism offers Russians a familiar outlet for their frustration and sense of impotence in the face of their own corrupt and oppressive regime. It gives Mr. Putin an ideological cover for his kleptocratic system of governance led by current and former security servicemen. To sustain this narrative, the Kremlin’s state-controlled media has excelled at reconstructing the centuries-old image of Russia as a besieged fortress.

Today, Mr. Putin presents Russia’s actions as responsive, not aggressive. Every time Russia attacks a former Soviet republic, the confrontation is portrayed as a proxy war started by America against Russia. When Russia attacked Georgia in 2008, the United States was in the midst of a presidential election that the incumbent Republican Party would soon lose, so the war was followed the next year not by tough sanctions against Russia but with a “reset” initiated by the new Democratic president, Barack Obama, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

That, too, proved a misstep. The idea was that two new presidents — Mr. Obama and Dmitri A. Medvedev, who had recently taken Mr. Putin’s place in the Kremlin — could put the past behind them. But Mr. Medvedev, who oversaw the war in Georgia, was only a place-holder appointed by Mr. Putin to circumvent a constitutional term limit. Policy makers in Washington and in Berlin knew this but decided to build up Mr. Medvedev, hoping to split Russia’s elites. Instead, Russia got away with the Georgia war cost-free, which ultimately contributed to Russian confidence that its later incursions into Ukraine would succeed.

Mr. Medvedev’s presidency ended with mass demonstrations in Moscow and other cities in the winter of 2011-12, with tens of thousands protesting Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency and demanding modernization of the state. At the time, Mr. Putin accused Mrs. Clinton of taking “active measures” to spur protesters on. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he said. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

Now Mr. Putin, who is known to bear grudges, appears to be disrupting Mrs. Clinton’s own presidential campaign with “active measures.” That the disclosures of the Democratic National Committee emails could benefit only Donald Trump is probably an added bonus. Mr. Trump’s main appeal within the Kremlin is not that he admires Mr. Putin, but that he has little interest in Russia’s sphere of influence. And Mr. Putin has long dreamed of a new Yalta-style agreement to let Russia and America divide Europe again.

To be sure, Russia’s ability to influence American elections is limited. Mr. Putin does not control the American media, and Russia lacks the financial and military resources that the Soviet Union had. Still, the effort points to a danger. An angry and declining Russia is far more perilous than an ascending economic power like China. Sanctions won’t change Mr. Putin’s behavior: He rates the security of his regime far above the economic good of the country.

Mr. Putin has reason to fear in one respect. His system does face an existential threat from the Western model of governance. Just as the economic inadequacies of Soviet Communism were exposed by comparison with the wealth produced by Western capitalism, Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism cannot match the appeal of an economy based on the rule of law, openness and competition. The best way for the West to resist Russia, now as then, is to uphold its own values.

“Russia, as opposed to the Western world in general, is still by far the weaker party and may well contain deficiencies which will eventually weaken its own total potential.” So wrote the master diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947. We know now that Kennan was right. The bad news is that it took 44 years for his prophecy to come true.