Putin Sees a Happy New Year

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/opinion/putin-sees-a-happy-new-year.html

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CHICAGO — These days President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia cannot hide his glee. This is unusual for a man trained to deceive and mislead, a man who is practiced in his profession. In an interview with the Russian television program “Weekly News” on Dec. 4, Mr. Putin said it was obvious that the West had failed to create a unipolar world and that balance was being restored. He had reasons to feel triumphant: His years of supporting anti-establishment movements in the West, mostly on the right, by hacking and leaking private information, spreading fake news and financing parties and individuals ready to do the Kremlin’s bidding all seem to be paying off.

Russia’s methods are hardly new. Remember, for example, “The Protocols of the Elders of the Zion,” a notorious forgery concocted by the czar’s secret police and published in Russia in 1903. Purporting to describe a Jewish plot to dominate the world, it became a bible for anti-Semites everywhere and was widely used by the Nazis. Throughout the 20th century, disinformation and propaganda disseminated by the Communist Party’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation, alongside its intelligence services, became part and parcel of the Soviet regime. During the Soviet-Finnish war in the winter of 1939, for instance, as Soviet planes bombed the Finns, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, said Moscow was dropping humanitarian aid — food and water. In response to the lie, the Finns sarcastically named their own bombs — bottles filled with flammable fuel — Molotov cocktails.

In post-Soviet Russia, the same cynical mendacity has become the Putin government’s hallmark. On July 9, 2014, in a meeting with public leaders at the Kremlin, Mr. Putin referred to Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi minister of propaganda, as “a talented man who knew that the more incredible the lies, the quicker people believe them.” The quote, which he was using to condemn the West’s supposed misrepresentation of Russian history, was in fact the best indication of Mr. Putin’s own creed.

Now, in addition to undermining the legitimacy of the American presidential election campaign, Russia has been a frequent source of fake news that targeted the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, during a recent referendum and muddled a Swedish debate last summer about joining NATO.

Throughout Eastern Europe, Moscow has been implicated in cyberattacks and election interference from Estonia to Bulgaria. Germany, which will hold elections in September, is experiencing cyberattacks and fake news.

Even more surprising than Russia’s aggressive behavior has been the timid response of the West, which has let Moscow engage in cyberwarfare with impunity. President Obama said this month that during their meeting last September, he told Mr. Putin “to cut it out.” That hardly sounds like a president concerned with a grave threat to American democracy. His warning to Mr. Putin may have forestalled even more brazen Russian attacks, but enough damage had already been done. In Italy, Mr. Renzi’s campaign privately complained about Russia’s interference but declined to go public. And when Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was asked on Nov. 27 about Russian meddling in Germany’s electoral campaign, she replied, “We just have to learn to live with it.”

To live with it? This is not routine cyber intelligence, which many nations practice. Russia’s cyber activity seeks to confuse, destabilize and ultimately bring to power foreign governments pliant to Russia’s aims. That is an attack on the values and institutions of democratic societies, and, if successful, it achieves the same result as a military invasion to install a new government.

In his recent interview on Russian television, the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, Dmitri Kiselev, stated it in bald, cynical terms: “Today it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” adding that “if you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him.”

The Russian military views an information war as part of its military doctrine, and Americans need to consider Russia’s cyber activities as an act of war that requires a forceful and united response. President Obama’s response — at least until now — has proved inadequate.

Unlike the Cold War, this one has no Iron Curtain and no ideological battleground. In this new hybrid warfare, former K.G.B. men have become oligarchs, Mr. Putin refers to Western nations as “partners,” and the government sells stakes in state companies to Western businesses and relies on Western markets and other financial institutions. Yet behind the smoke and mirrors, Russia remains a Potemkin village that hides a police state and an expansionist empire, steeped in systemic corruption and governed by up-to-date techniques of repression and manipulation.

This, too, is not new for Russia. Unhindered by public opinion, laws and opposition political parties, Russia’s autocrats have historically derived strength from territorial expansion and geopolitical aggrandizement. Starting with Ivan the Terrible, the Russian empire expanded for at least five centuries — by some calculations annexing each year territory the size of Belgium — until the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991. That dramatic denouement is what Mr. Putin is desperately trying to reverse, resorting to the same tool kit used by Soviet leaders since the formative days of the Soviet state in the early 1920s. At that time a destitute and hungry Russia was recovering from revolution and civil war. Still, the Bolshevik government spared no resources when it came to propaganda and repression.

Today, Mr. Putin focuses the shrinking resources of a beleaguered Russian economy on the twin agendas of restoring Russia’s position among the world’s powers and undermining Western institutions. For him it is a zero sum game. Moscow can easily deploy thousands of hackers and trolls to achieve maximum disruption while Western democracies awaken too slowly to the dangers. And the dangers are grave. From state-sponsored mass doping in sports to corrosive business practices, from silencing political dissent at home to supporting brutal regimes abroad, Russia’s policies are rooted in deceit, graft and violence — a combination that presents an existential challenge to democracies.

Mr. Putin’s greatest success has been to help place in the White House a man who shares many of his values and seems happy to do his bidding. But Mr. Putin is not done yet. He seeks to promote anti-establishment candidates in next year’s elections in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany. If this new cold war comes to an end with a Putin-Trump alliance, it will do so on Russia’s terms, with Russia no more democratic and the United States becoming a little more like Russia.

Next October will mark a century since the Bolsheviks violently seized power. That first totalitarian regime, in which Mr. Putin would later be trained, arguably provoked the rise of other political movements that together defined the rest of the 20th century, leading to unprecedented political violence and wars that took the lives of tens of millions.

We simply cannot allow Moscow to define the direction of another century by orchestrating a parade of Western democracies on their way to becoming corrupt, autocratic societies.