The Russian Challenge

4. A War of Narratives and Arms
James Sherr
Introduction: a war of perception
In February 2014, the legal order and security system
of post-Cold War Europe collapsed. In retrospect, all
such breakdowns acquire an aura of inevitability. But
their immediate causes are unforeseen and, in the eyes
of those with reputations to salvage, ‘unforeseeable’. In
these two respects, February 2014 resembles August 1914.
There is a third resemblance: the belief that economic
interdependence makes such collapses impossible.
But the West is not at war with Russia and, in contrast
to 1914, no war fever exists. Chancellor Angela Merkel
speaks for the majority of European leaders when she says
that ‘there is no military solution’ to the crisis. In Poland
and the Baltic states Ukraine’s independence is seen as
existentially linked to their own. But to many others in the
West, its ‘pivotal’ role is a dubious abstraction, and Ukraine
itself is seen as a lost cause. Although Vladimir Putin’s
image was falling ‘precipitously’ in Germany well before
Crimea’s annexation, his stock is notably higher in Hungary
and Greece as well as within anti-establishment parties
in France and the United Kingdom. 91 In more mainstream
‘realist’ circles, there is a strong residual view that the
post-1991 security order can be repaired, or reformatted,
to ensure that a principal pillar of the antebellum system,
partnership with Russia, is restored. 92
The Russian state is not a disinterested observer in these
debates. Many of its current custodians, seasoned ‘special
service’ professionals, have brought Leninist traditions of
‘ideological struggle’ into the post-modern world. As Keir
Giles demonstrates in Chapter 6, Russian investment in
the ‘toolkit’ of perception management is unprecedented. 93
Yet this has come as a surprise to many in Europe. In the
age of the web and social networks, as in the age of radio
and television, the West has led the way in information
technology and its commercial application. But such
discoveries are not patentable. Nor do they confer a
genetic mastery of the political applications of information
technology, let alone the methodology of what the Russian
state calls ‘information struggle’.
The word ‘struggle’ (bor’ba) is not a Russian euphemism for
war, but a professional insider’s term denoting adversarial
activity in peacetime as well as in war. 94 Both the term and
the practice derive from the USSR’s intensive investment
in ‘ideological struggle’, ‘active measures’ and ‘reflexive
control’, all of them designed to influence opponents,
disorientate them and undermine their effectiveness. As
Keir Giles has observed elsewhere, these practices once
again constitute ‘a wide-ranging, holistic area of offensive
activity by the [Russian] state’. 95
In the peculiarly Russian sense of the term, ‘information
struggle’ is a defensive measure, the product of a belated
but intensive and long-term effort to ‘catch up and overtake’
opponents who have used advanced communications, soft
power ‘instruments’ and civic mobilization against target
states as early as NATO’s Kosovo intervention in 1999. The
publication of an ‘Information Security Doctrine of the
Russian Federation’ in September 2000 testifies to the depth
of interest accorded to these issues over a 15-year period.
According to the Ministry of Defence’s 2011 ‘Conceptual
Views’ of the information space, even the narrower concept
of ‘information war’ (voyna) encompasses the ‘undermining
[of] the political, economic and social system, and massive
indoctrination of the population for destabilizing the society
and the state, and also forcing the state to make decisions in
the interests of the opposing party’. 96
‘Undermining’ is not the same as persuading. A prime
purpose of Russian information campaigns is to sow doubt
in post-modern societies already distrustful of ‘certainty’.
Such campaigns also have a habit of deluding those
who devise them. Excluding the information dimension
of Russian policy might simplify things, but it does not
advance understanding of a conflict that will be decided by
intellectual and psychological factors as well as material
ones. The conflict in Ukraine is a war of narratives as
well as arms.
For all this, ‘the state is not pure spirit’, as Trotsky
reminded us, and politics and war are not purely subjective
phenomena. 97 They create facts, which can be a harsh
auditor of the performance of those who claim to be acting
in the national interest. The analysis that follows is an
attempt to interpose fact into a conflict where, seemingly,
‘nothing is true and everything is possible’. 98
91
Hannes Adomeit, ‘Collapse of Russia’s Image in Germany: Who is to Blame?’ Eurasia Outlook, Carnegie Moscow Center, 18 February 2014, http://carnegie.ru/
eurasiaoutlook/?fa=54540; Nigel Farage, ‘I admire Vladimir Putin’, the Guardian, 31 March 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/31/farage-i-admire-putin.
92
John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault’, Foreign Affairs, September–October 2014, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russiafsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault.
93
See pp. 45, 46–48 of this report.
94
The Russian terms are informatsionnaya bor’ba and informatsionnoe protivostoyaniye.
95
Keir Giles, ‘With Russia and Ukraine, is all really quiet on the cyber front?’, ARS Technica, 11 March 2014, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/with-russiaand-ukraine-is-all-really-quiet-on-the-cyber-front/.
96
‘Conceptual Views Regarding the Activities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Information Space’ [Kontseptual’nye vzglyady na deyatel’nost’
Vooruzhennykh Sil Rossiyskoy Federatsii v informatsionnom prostranstve], RF Ministry of Defence, 2011.
97
Lev Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter 11, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch11.htm.
98
A view prevalent in Russia itself. Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (London: Faber & Faber, 2015).
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