The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

CHAPTER FIVE TRUTH OR LIES (2015)

He who is deceived is turned into a thing.

—MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, 1943

Black milk of daybreak we drink in the evening

we drink in the evening we drink in the morning

we drink and we drink

we dig a grave in the air, there’s room for us all

—PAUL CELAN, 1944

Russia arrived first at the politics of eternity. Kleptocracy made the political virtues of succession, integration, and novelty impossible, and so political fiction had to make them unthinkable.

Ivan Ilyin’s ideas gave form to the politics of eternity. A Russian nation bathed in the untruth of its own innocence could learn total self-love. Vladimir Surkov showed how eternity could animate modern media. While working for Putin, he wrote and published a novel, Almost Zero (2009), that was a kind of political confession. In the story, the only truth was our need for lies, the only freedom our acceptance of this verdict. In a story within the larger plot, the hero was troubled by a flatmate who only slept. An expert issued a report: “We will all be gone,” the expert confided, “as soon as he opens his eyes. Society’s duty, and yours in particular, is to continue his dream.” The perpetuation of the dream state was Surkov’s job description. If the only truth was the absence of truth, the liars were honorable servants of Russia.

To end factuality is to begin eternity. If citizens doubt everything, they cannot see alternative models beyond Russia’s borders, cannot carry out sensible discussions about reform, and cannot trust one another enough to organize for political change. A plausible future requires a factual present. Following Ilyin, Surkov spoke of the “contemplation of the whole” which enabled a vision of “geopolitical reality”: that foreigners tried to draw Russians away from their native innocence with their regular attacks. Russians were to be loved for their ignorance; loving them meant perfecting that ignorance. The future held only more ignorance about the more distant future. As he wrote in Almost Zero: “Knowledge only gives knowledge, but uncertainty gives hope.”

Like Ilyin before him, Surkov treated Christianity as a gateway to his own superior creation. Surkov’s God was a reclusive colleague with limitations, a fellow demiurge to be bucked up with a few manly slaps. As Ilyin had done, Surkov invoked familiar biblical verses in order to invert their meanings. In his novel, he has a nun refer to First Corinthians 13:13: “Uncertainty gives hope. Faith. Love.” If citizens can be kept uncertain by the regular manufacture of crisis, their emotions can be managed and directed. This is the opposite of the plain meaning of the biblical passage Surkov was citing: hope, faith, and love are the trinity of virtues that articulate themselves as we learn to see the world as it is. Just before this passage is the famous one about maturity as seeing from the vantage of another: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” The first thing we learn when we see from the perspective of another is that we are not innocent. Surkov meant to keep the glass dark.

In the Russia of the 2010s, the dark glass was a television screen. Ninety percent of Russians relied upon television for their news. Surkov was the head of public relations for Pervyi Kanal, the country’s most important channel, before he became a media manager for Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. He oversaw the transformation of Russian television from a true plurality representing various interests into a false plurality where images differed but the message was the same. In the mid-2010s, the state budget of Pervyi Kanal was about $850 million a year. Its employees and those of other Russian state networks were taught that power was real but that the facts of the world were not. Russia’s deputy minister of communications, Alexei Volin, described their career path: “They are going to work for The Man, and The Man will tell them what to write, what not to write, and how this or that thing should be written. And The Man has the right to do it, because he pays them.” Factuality was not a constraint: Gleb Pavlovsky, a leading political technologist, explained, “You can just say anything. Create realities.” International news came to substitute for regional and local news, which all but disappeared from television. Foreign coverage meant the daily registration of the eternal current of Western corruption, hypocrisy, and enmity. Nothing in Europe or America was worthy of emulation. True change was impossible—that was the message.

RT, Russia’s television propaganda sender for foreign audiences, had the same purpose: the suppression of knowledge that might inspire action, and the coaxing of emotion into inaction. It subverted the format of the news broadcast by its straight-faced embrace of baroque contradiction: inviting a Holocaust denier to speak and identifying him as a human rights activist; hosting a neo-Nazi and referring to him as a specialist on the Middle East. In the words of Vladimir Putin, RT was “funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position.” That position was the absence of a factual world, and the level of funding was about $400 million a year. Americans and Europeans found in the channel an amplifier of their own doubts—sometimes perfectly justified—in the truthfulness of their own leaders and the vitality of their own media. RT’s slogan, “Question More,” inspired an appetite for more uncertainty. It made no sense to question the factuality of what RT broadcast, since what it broadcast was the denial of factuality. As its director said: “There is no such thing as objective reporting.” RT wished to convey that all media lied, but that only RT was honest by not pretending to be truthful.

Factuality was replaced by a knowing cynicism that asked nothing of the viewer but the occasional nod before sleep.

—

“Information war is now the main type of war.” Dmitry Kiselev was in a position to know. He was the coordinator of the Russian state agency for international news, and the host of a popular Sunday evening program, Vesti Nedeli, that led the information offensive against Ukraine.

The first men the Kremlin sent to Ukraine, the spearpoint of the Russian invasion, were the political technologists. A war where Surkov commands is fought in unreality. He was in Crimea and Kyiv in February 2014, and served as Putin’s advisor on Ukraine thereafter. The Russian political technologist Alexander Borodai was the press officer for Crimea during its annexation. In summer 2014, the “prime ministers” of two newly invented “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s southeast were Russian media managers.

A modest affair in military terms, the Russian invasion of southern and then southeastern Ukraine involved the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare. The propaganda worked at two levels: first, as a direct assault on factuality, denying the obvious, even the war itself; second, as an unconditional proclamation of innocence, denying that Russia could be responsible for any wrong. No war was taking place, and it was thoroughly justified.

When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2014, President Putin lied with purpose. On February 28 he claimed, “We have no intention of rattling the sabre and sending troops to Crimea.” He had already sent troops to Crimea. At the moment he uttered these words, Russian troops had been marching through Ukrainian sovereign territory for four days. For that matter, the Night Wolves were in Crimea, following Russian soldiers around in a loud display of revving engines, a media stunt to make the Russian presence unmistakable. Even so, Putin chose to mock reporters who noted the basic facts. On March 4, he asserted that Russian soldiers were local Ukrainian citizens who had purchased their uniforms at local stores. “Why don’t you have a look at the post-Soviet states,” Putin proposed. “There are many uniforms there that are similar. You can go to a store and buy any kind of uniform.”

Putin was not trying to convince anyone in that post-Soviet world that Russia had not invaded Ukraine. Indeed, he took for granted that Ukrainian leaders would not believe his lie. The provisional Ukrainian government understood that Ukraine was under Russian attack, which is why it pled for an international response rather than reacting with military force. Had leaders in Kyiv believed Putin, they certainly would have ordered resistance. Putin’s aim was not to fool Ukrainians but to create a bond of willing ignorance with Russians, who were meant to understand that Putin was lying but to believe him anyway. As the reporter Charles Clover put it in his study of Lev Gumilev: “Putin has correctly surmised that lies unite rather than divide Russia’s political class. The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin power.”

Putin’s direct assault on factuality might be called implausible deniability.^* By denying what everyone knew, Putin was creating unifying fictions at home and dilemmas in European and American newsrooms. Western journalists are taught to report the facts, and by March 4 the factual evidence that Russia had invaded Ukraine was overwhelming. Russian and Ukrainian journalists had filmed Russian soldiers marching through Crimea. Ukrainians were already calling Russian special forces “little green men,” a joking suggestion that the soldiers in their unmarked uniforms must have come from outer space. The soldiers could not speak Ukrainian; local Ukrainians were also quick to notice Russian slang particular to Russian cities and not used in Ukraine. As the reporter Ekaterina Sergatskova pointed out, “the ‘little green men’ do not conceal that they are from Russia.”

Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap.

Western editors, although they had the reports of the Russian invasion on their desks in the late days of February and the early days of March 2014, chose to feature Putin’s exuberant denials. And so the narrative of the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted in a subtle but profound way: it was not about what was happening to Ukrainians, but about what the Russian president chose to say about Ukraine. A real war became reality television, with Putin as the hero. Much of the press accepted its supporting role in the drama. Even as Western editors became more critical over time, their criticism was framed as their own doubts about Kremlin claims. When Putin later admitted that Russia had indeed invaded Ukraine, this only proved that the Western press had been a player in his show.

After implausible deniability, Russia’s second propaganda strategy was the proclamation of innocence. The invasion was to be understood not as a stronger country attacking a weaker neighbor at a moment of extreme vulnerability, but as the righteous rebellion of an oppressed people against an overpowering global conspiracy. As Putin said on March 4: “I sometimes get the feeling that across the huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing.” The war was not taking place; but were it taking place, America was to be blamed; and since America was a superpower, all was permitted in response to its omnipotent malice. If Russia had invaded, which it was somehow both doing and not doing, Russians would be justified in whatever they were doing and not doing.

The choice of tactics in the invasion served this strategy of innocence. The absence of insignia on Russian uniforms and the absence of markings on Russian weapons, armor, equipment, and vehicles did not convince anyone in Ukraine. The point was to create the ambience of a television drama of heroic locals taking unusual measures against titanic American power. Russians would be expected to believe the preposterous: that the soldiers whom they saw on their television screens were not their own army but a ragtag band of can-do Ukrainian rebels defending the honor of their people against a Nazi regime supported by infinite American power. The absence of insignia was not meant as evidence, but as a cue about how Russian viewers were supposed to follow the plot. It was not meant to convince in a factual sense, but to guide in a narrative sense.

Real soldiers pretending for dramatic reasons to be local partisans can use partisan tactics, thus endangering real civilians. As a tactic of war, this might be called reverse asymmetry. Normally, “asymmetrical warfare” means the use of unconventional tactics by a partisan force or terrorist group against a stronger regular army. In the Russian invasion, the strong used the weapons of the weak—partisan and terrorist tactics—in order to pretend to be the weak. During what was already an illegal invasion, the Russian army broke the basic laws of war, by design and from the outset. Putin endorsed this manner of warfare even as he denied that a Russian invasion was under way. On March 4, he predicted that Russian soldiers would hide among civilians. “And let’s see those [Ukrainian] troops try to shoot their own people, with us behind them—not in front, but behind. Let them just try to shoot at women and children!”

—

The battle for Crimea was easily won by March 2014. The subsequent Russian intervention in southeastern Ukraine continued. In this second campaign, implausible deniability would again test the fidelity of Russians and the courage of journalists; and reverse asymmetry would again cover an illegal war in the aureole of victimhood. The two tactics confirmed the politics of eternity, where facts vanish amidst the insistence that nothing ever happens except foreign malevolence and legitimate resistance. Assisted by Surkov, Putin invited Russians into a cycle of eternity in which Russia was defending itself as it had always done.

Eternity takes certain points from the past and portrays them as moments of righteousness, discarding the time in between. In this war, Russian leaders had already mentioned two such points: the conversion of Volodymyr/Valdemar in 988, which supposedly made of Ukraine and Russia a single nation forever; and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which somehow made a Ukrainian protest movement a fascist threat. To justify the extended intervention in Ukraine’s southeast, Putin in April 2014 added a third reference to the past: 1774. That was when the Russian Empire defeated the Ottoman Empire and annexed territories on the north shore of the Black Sea, some of which are now part of Ukraine. These territories were known in the eighteenth century as “Novorossiia,” or New Russia. Putin’s use of this term set aside the existing Russian and Ukrainian states, while shifting the conversation to ancient rights. In the logic of “Novorossiia,” Ukraine was the aggressor because it included territories that were once called Russian and therefore were eternally Russian. The radical reframing of the issue allowed Russians and observers to forget the banal facts of the present—such as, for example, the fact that Moscow had never once, in the twenty-two years of the common existence of the Russian Federation and Ukraine, issued a formal complaint about the treatment of Russians in Ukraine.

Most citizens of the Russian Federation had not heard of “Novorossiia” in this sense before March and April 2014, when Surkov and Dugin first propagated it and then Putin made it policy. The imperial territory of the eighteenth century was different than the regions defined by Putin and then the Russian media: the nine Ukrainian districts of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Mikolaiv, Odessa, and Kherson. When understood historically, the term also had implications other than those Putin had in mind. Empress Catherine spoke of “New Russia” much as British colonizers spoke of a “New England,” a “New South Wales,” and so on. In that age of empire, regions inhabited by people other than the colonizers were “new” from the colonial perspective. “New” meant that the region had not always belonged to the empire. Such places did not necessarily remain with the colonial power. New England and New South Wales are not parts of Britain, just as New Russia is not part of Russia.

As Surkov and Glazyev tried to organize armed rebellions in southeastern Ukraine in March 2014, maps of “Novorossiia” flooded Russian television screens. They displayed a span of territory that, if taken by Russia, would separate Ukraine from its ports on the Black Sea and unite occupied Crimea (which has no land connection to Russia) with the territory of the Russian Federation.

The Russian army gathered in March in the two Russian districts that bordered Ukraine, Belgorod and Rostov. The basic idea, consistent with Moscow’s plans that February, was to organize forceful takeovers of regional administration buildings in eight further Ukrainian districts, have followers declare secession from within those buildings, and make Ukraine disintegrate from within.

And so, in spring 2014, Russian political technologists arrived in Ukraine on a second mission: after Crimea, the much more ambitious and vaguely defined domination of the Ukrainian southeast. Alexander Borodai was made responsible for the political entities that Russia would subsidize. As Borodai explained, in invading Ukraine “we are fighting for the global Russian idea.” His friend Girkin was to handle the military operation in the southeast; he surfaced in April 2014 in the city of Sloviansk. Moscow denied that Borodai and Girkin were its men, or that they were in Ukraine, or both. For Girkin’s GRU men in the field in Ukraine, this denial was annoying and, in the end, too much to take. As they set up field headquarters in Sloviansk on April 17, Russian soldiers were irritated that locals believed the Russian propaganda that they were volunteers: “We are special forces from the GRU.”

The Ukrainian state was meanwhile under great pressure. Crimea had been occupied by Russia; Russian soldiers were in the southeast; some citizens had high expectations after a revolution that others had opposed; presidential elections had to be organized. Even so, the Russian attempt to seize “Novorossiia” collapsed by summer. The Russian coups in Ukrainian regional capitals in March and April mostly failed. As a rule, when Russians and local confederates tried to stage occupations of regional administration buildings, nothing much happened. To be sure, Ukrainian citizens in these southeastern regions were more likely to list Russian rather than Ukrainian as their first language, more likely to have voted for Yanukovych in 2010, and less likely to have been present on the Maidan. Yet this did not mean that they supported Russian rule or changes of regime by outside forces.

After the annexation of Crimea, the campaign for “Novorossiia” had success in only two of the eight districts concerned, and only in parts of these: Luhansk and Donetsk. Together known as the Donbas, these regions had coal, which Russia did not need. But both bordered the Russian Federation, and their local oligarchs hesitated at crucial moments. Russia failed to get a foothold in regions of much greater interest, such as Kharkiv, Odessa, and Dnipropetrovsk. Kharkiv and Odessa were areas that Russians regarded as centers of Russian culture, and Dnipropetrovsk was a hub of the two countries’ shared military-industrial complex. Dnipropetrovsk became a center of resistance to the Russian invasion under its new governor, Ihor Kolomois’kyi, who put a bounty on the head of Russian soldiers. Although the Russian flag was briefly raised over Kharkiv by a young Russian who liked to climb buildings and take selfies, the regional administration building was returned to Ukrainian control the same day. In Odessa, the initial attempt to storm the regional administration building also failed.

In March and April, local Odessans prepared for a Russian invasion. Prominent local citizens sent an appeal to Putin, explaining that they did not need Russian protection. Others took part in paramilitary training so that they could resist Russian special forces if they arrived. Russian television insisted, day after day, that Ukrainian nationalists were going to storm the province and wreak havoc, although no such thing was happening or would happen. Some Odessans (along with some Russian citizens) marched on May 1 to chant their support for “Novorossiia.” The next day, pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian groups fought on the streets, both sides armed, the pro-Ukrainian side more numerous. People on each side threw Molotov cocktails. When some of the pro-Russian fighters withdrew to a building known as the House of Professors, the battle of Molotov cocktails continued there. The building caught fire, killing a number of the pro-Russian protestors. So ended this particular Russian attempt to inspire internal rebellion within Ukraine.

Prokhanov compared Russia’s failed coup in Odessa to the Holocaust; an antisemite invoked the mass murder of the Jews to justify an offensive war. The politics of eternity consumes the substance of the past, leaving only a boundless innocence that justifies everything.

—

By May 2014, disaster was looming for Russia, even in the parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions under Russian control. The small Ukrainian army was more than sufficient to humiliate Girkin’s GRU mission in Sloviansk, and defeat the Russian volunteers and Ukrainian separatists whom he had managed to gather. Girkin pled for local help: “I admit that I never expected to find that in the entire region one cannot find even a thousand men willing to risk their lives for their own city.” It seemed as if all of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions would soon return to Ukrainian control. A meaningful response to the Ukrainian advance would require more Russian assistance. So the Vostok Battalion, composed largely of Chechens, crossed into Ukraine from Russia. On May 26, its men, together with volunteers from Russia, stormed the Donetsk airport. They were beaten back by Ukrainian defenders and took considerable losses.

At least thirty-one Russian volunteers died in the failed assault. They had left their friends and families behind in Russia because of the media fictions of “fascism” and “genocide” in “Novorossiia.” Their deaths went unmentioned in major Russian media. Maria Turchenkova, a Russian journalist who accompanied the corpses on the journey from Ukraine back to Russia for burial, made the point succinctly: “Not a single one of the domestic television channels, which for months have been creating a public notion of a genocide against Russians in eastern Ukraine, have reported that 31 Russians were killed in Donetsk on 26 May.”

One of these thirty-one was Evgeny Korolenko. He needed money and had told his wife that he had “perspectives” in the Donbas. Then his wife saw the photograph of his corpse on the internet. Her first and natural reaction was to deny to herself that it was him. “It doesn’t look like him,” she thought. But then she looked again. The chain that he wore. The shape of his nose. His corpse along with the others was brought to the city of Rostov. An undertaker refused to take the body, fearing it would be seen as provocation: “Please understand: this is a citizen of Russia who fell in combat. And our country is not at war.” From a figure of authority she received this characterization of her situation: “You are a mature person. Russia is not carrying out any organized military activities. Your husband went under fire voluntarily in that street.”

By the end of June 2014, authorities in Moscow had all but ceased to speak of “Novorossiia,” and had shifted to the strategy of making the parts of the Donbas it occupied a permanent source of instability for the Ukrainian state. Some of the Chechens killed in Vostok were replaced by Ossetians, who seemed to think that they had been sent to fight the United States. The name “Vostok” was preserved as the battalion accepted local Ukrainian citizens who found reasons to fight against the Ukrainian state. Some of them were former Ukrainian security officers who were ideologically motivated, such as Alexander Khodakovskii, who said: “We are not really fighting for ourselves here, but for Russia.” But it seems that most Ukrainian citizens who fought on the Russian side were drawn into the conflict by the experience of violence, the shelling of cities that resulted from Russia’s choice to fight a partisan war.

On July 5, facing defeat by the Ukrainian army, Girkin made the move that Putin had recommended: he turned the local population into human shields. He withdrew his men to Donetsk, and other GRU commanders did the same. This guaranteed, as Girkin noted, that civilians would become the main victims of the war. The Ukrainian side fought Russians and their local allies by shelling cities, while the Russians did the same. In the terminology of partisan war, this was the shift from “positive” to “negative” mobilization: if no one wants to fight for the partisan cause as such (positive motivation), then a partisan commander creates conditions in which the enemy kills civilians (negative motivation). This was Girkin’s chosen tactic, as he himself said. One of his Russian interviewers correctly described Girkin as a man who would willingly sacrifice the lives of women and children to advance a military goal. Destroying cities to win recruits was indeed Girkin’s signal achievement.

Naturally, Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas did not consider the totality of the situation as the shells exploded. Many blamed the Ukrainian army for using heavy weapons against Ukrainian cities. In interviews, parents spoke of their children learning to distinguish the types of artillery from the sounds of their shells. One mother joined the Russian fight against the Ukrainian army after the yard where her child normally played was hit by a shell. Over and over, Ukrainian citizens who joined the separatists in summer 2014 said that it was the death of women, children, and the aged from artillery that inspired them to take up arms. A survey suggested that this experience (rather than an ideology such as “separatism” or “Russian nationalism”) was the main motivation of Ukrainian citizens who chose to fight against the Ukrainian army.

Seeing violent death made people vulnerable to stories that imparted to these deaths some larger sense. These stories were provided by Russian television. It was impossible to know who had launched the shell that landed in your neighborhood; Russian television, all that was available in the parts of Ukraine controlled by Russia, blamed the Ukrainian side. As one Ukrainian citizen who fought on the Russian side remembered, the instruction that the Ukrainian army was a genocidal collective made it easier to think of individual Ukrainian soldiers as “beings in human form” who could and should be shot. Once separatists had brought about the same kind of death that they had seen, the stories of innocence became unimpeachable truth. It is hard to resist lies for which one has already killed.

Having brought the Donbas to this point by summer 2014, Girkin was withdrawn to Russia. The new head of security, Vladimir Antyufeyev, was Russia’s leading specialist in the form of geopolitical theater known as “frozen conflict.” In a frozen conflict, Russia occupies small parts of a nearby country (Moldova since 1991, Georgia since 2008, Ukraine since 2014), and then presents its own occupation as an internal problem that prevents its neighbors from having closer relations with the European Union or NATO.

In a frozen conflict, the sentiments of local people matter only as a political resource. Locals can be encouraged to kill and die, but their own aspirations cannot be fulfilled, since the point of freezing a conflict is to prevent any resolution. Antyufeyev had spent the previous stage of his career in “Transnistria,” a section of Moldova occupied by Russian soldiers, where he had been in charge of security for the unrecognized ministate. His arrival in Donetsk heralded a similar future for the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” It was to exist, Antyufeyev announced, in permanent limbo. He called it an “independent state,” although he also said that no one (including Russia) would recognize it as such. Unification with Russia was also “not a question for today.”

For Antyufeyev, the desires of the people of the Donbas were subordinate to the prerogatives of a far grander struggle against the European Union and the United States, which he portrayed as the Satanic West. He promised an offensive that would turn the tide in this global war. The Soviet Union had not collapsed, he said, because of its own problems, but because the West had deployed mysterious “destructive technologies”—this phrase, as in the Izborsk Club manifesto, meant “facts.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine, Antyufeyev said, must be understood as the self-defense of innocent Russians from an alliance between “the Freemasons of Europe and the United States” and “the fascists of Ukraine.” Antyufeyev had mastered schizofascism. Russia was at war against “fascists,” but these fascists were somehow in league with international “Freemasons.” The idea of a global conspiracy of Masons is fascist. Antyufeyev was using this fascist portrayal of the world to present himself as an anti-fascist.

Since Ukraine was the focus of the efforts of the global anti-Russian conspiracy, victory there, Antyufeyev thought, might change the world. The Russian intervention in Ukraine, Antyufeyev explained, was a defense of Russia’s natural gas and fresh water from a rapacious United States. It was all one struggle, but it could be won. In Antyufeyev’s view, “Ukraine is a disintegrating state. Exactly like the United States.” The destruction of the United States was both desirable and inevitable. “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”

—

The Russian counterattack against the Ukrainian army was launched in July 2014 from the territory of the Russian Federation. It began with massive artillery barrages launched from the Russian side of the border. Evgeny Zhukov, one of the Ukrainian soldiers clearing a stretch of the border in the Luhansk region, recorded the consequences of the first Russian artillery barrage of July 11. Writing on his Facebook page that evening, he wished to correct reports that he and his men had been in a battle. That was not the case. They had been targeted, as he correctly stated, in “a carefully prepared, precisely rehearsed, and successful artillery strike on our military base at the Luhansk border from the Russian side.” He described as many of the seventy-nine people who were killed as he could. At the end of his post, he offered them all “a low bow.”

Zhukov was describing the first strike in a massive Russian artillery campaign directed against the Ukrainian army. It lasted for four weeks. Until August 8, Russian artillery fired regularly from at least sixty-six positions on the Russian side of the border. Units such as Zhukov’s were helpless. Ukraine was at a permanent disadvantage in the information war—some European and American observers were still uncertain that a war was going on, or that Russia was the aggressor. In this fog of stupefaction, a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory would have been a political disaster. And so the information war determined the conditions of the war on the ground. Russia could shell Ukraine from its own territory without consequences, but Ukraine could not consider responding in kind. Some Ukrainian soldiers under artillery fire even fled across the border to Russia, because they knew that Russian territory would be safe. Meanwhile, Russian journalists at the Russian-Ukrainian border had no difficulty in seeing that “Russia is shelling Ukraine from Russian territory.” Russian citizens in the border zone took videos of Russian soldiers in action. The Russian soldier Vadim Gregoriev, stationed in Mateiovo Kurgan, in Russia, posted proudly that “all night we pounded Ukraine.”

Armies usually evacuate civilians from an artillery range so that they will not be killed by the enemy’s return fire. Russian authorities gave no such orders, presumably because they were confident no counterstrike was coming. Children on the Russian side of the border, unlike children on the Ukrainian side of the border, learned to sleep through shelling: it was not directed at them. Some local Russians felt ill at ease about this one-way war, in which their farmsteads were used to rain down death on people not so different from themselves. But a sense of safety combined with television propaganda helped to resolve guilt: “It’s awful, but we’ve understood already that the shooting is not at us, but from us.” And if the shooting is “from us,” it must be right and good: “Our people are cleansing the border of fascists.” After all, said a local Russian, if “Nazis are committing genocide” on the Ukrainian side, then such unusual measures must be justified.

The Russian journalists who reported on the shelling were placing themselves at risk. One of them, Elena Racheva, found herself speaking to FSB officers in Kuibyshevo as the daily cannonade began. “Is that a Grad?” she asked, after they had all paused to listen to the roar characteristic of that artillery piece. All the FSB men smiled. “It was thunder,” said one. “I didn’t hear a thing,” said a second. “It was my wife calling,” was the joke of a third. “It’s a military salute,” was the final witticism. “You understand,” said Racheva, “that I can write about this.” And the threatening reply: “And then my colleagues will come and explain more persuasively that this was a salute.”

The Ukrainian army could not shell Russia, but it could shell Russian soldiers and their allies inside Ukraine. The Russian artillery campaign began only six days after Girkin withdrew his men to the city of Donetsk, and continued thereafter for three more weeks. As Ukrainian soldiers were cut to pieces by Russian Grads firing from Russia, their comrades did not hesitate to aim their own Grads at Ukrainian cities where Russian soldiers, Russian volunteers, and their local allies were hiding. “The shelling so far in Donetsk,” admitted Girkin, “I am responsible.” The Russian journalist Natalya Telegina distinguished the fable of television, where heroic soldiers defend civilians, from the artillery war she saw: “But that reality exists only on television screens, not around you. Around you is simply war, where both sides are shooting, and no one spares the civilian population.”

That was a fact.

—

One day after Russia began shelling Ukraine, Russian television provided a compelling escalation in the competition for innocence. On July 12, 2014 Pervyi Kanal told a stirring—and entirely fictional—story of a three-year-old Russian boy who was crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk. No evidence was provided, and independent Russian journalists noted the story’s problems: none of the people in the story existed, nor did the “Lenin Square” where the atrocity supposedly transpired. When confronted with this, Russia’s deputy minister for communications, Alexei Volin, said that ratings were all that mattered. People watched the cruci-fiction, so all was well.

It seems that Alexander Dugin personally invented the cruci-fiction, a version of which had already appeared on his personal social media. The image of a murdered innocent made Russia the Christ of nations and its war of aggression a response to diabolical cruelty. The purpose of the Russian intervention was nominally to protect speakers of Russian, or as Putin said, “the Russian world.” Since everyone on all sides of the conflict spoke Russian, the Russian intervention was killing Russian speakers rather than protecting them. The inconvenience of the factual was overcome by what Dugin liked to call “an archetype,” the killing of Jesus. A bloody and confusing war started by flawed Russian leaders that killed thousands of Russian speakers became the martyrdom of an innocent Russian body.

Russian television was the instrument of implausible deniability. It denied the presence of Russian special forces, secret services, commanders, volunteers, and weapons. Prominent Russian citizens such as Girkin, Borodai, and Antyufeyev appeared on Russian television screens, described as activists of “Novorossiia” or administrators of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” The same Russian television channels that claimed Russian soldiers were Ukrainian volunteers released video of men at war in Ukraine with what were unmistakably advanced Russian weapons systems. The most modern Russian tanks, not available for foreign sale and never before seen outside Russia, appeared on Ukrainian territory. Russians were not meant to decide the factual question of whether or not their army was in Ukraine, which was obviously the case. They were meant to follow the cues of a television drama: if the voiceover instructed that Russians and their weapons were local, then that was the story to be followed.

—

A crucial Russian weapons system delivered from Russia and deployed by Russian soldiers was anti-aircraft batteries. These changed the course of the war in May and June 2014. The Ukrainian army, small as it was, was routing the Russians and their local allies so long as it maintained control of the air. In May, Russia began to supply anti-aircraft weapons and the teams that operated them, and the Ukrainian air force was quickly depleted; four helicopters were shot down. In June, two fixed-wing aircraft were shot down; in July, four fixed-wing aircraft. The Ukrainian command had to cease flying over the Donbas, which gave the Russians their chance.

One of the numerous Russian military convoys left its base in Kursk on June 23, 2014. It was a detachment of the Russian 53rd Air Defense Brigade, bound for Donetsk with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system marked 332. On the morning of July 17, this Buk system was hauled from Donetsk to Snizhne, then brought under its own power to a farmstead south of that town. Meanwhile, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, was crossing over southeastern Ukraine. It was flying on an authorized route, at a normal altitude, in regular contact with air traffic controllers—until a ground-to-air missile suddenly destroyed it.

At 1:20 p.m., Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was struck by hundreds of high-energy metal projectiles released from the explosion of a 9N314M warhead carried by a missile fired from that Russian Buk launcher at Snizhne. The projectiles ripped through the cockpit and instantly killed the pilots, from whose corpses some of the metal was later extracted. The aircraft flew apart ten kilometers above the earth’s surface, its passengers and their possessions scattered over a radius of fifty kilometers. Girkin boasted that his people had shot down another plane over “our sky,” and other commanders made similar remarks. Alexander Khodakovskii told the press that a Russian Buk was active in the theater at the time. The Buk was hastily withdrawn from Ukraine back to Russia, and photographed along the way with an empty missile silo. What had happened was quite clear.

The law of gravity seemed to challenge, at least for a few hours on the afternoon of July 17, 2014, the laws of eternity. Surely the passengers who died were the victims, not the Russian soldiers who fired the missile? Even the Russian ambassador to the United Nations was thrown for a moment, using the excuse of “confusion” to explain how a Russian weapon had brought down a civilian airliner. Yet Surkov’s apparatus acted quickly to restore the Russian sense of innocence. In a typical mark of tactical brilliance, Russian television never denied the actual course of events: that a Malaysian airliner had been brought down by a Russian weapon fired by Russian soldiers taking part in an invasion of Ukraine. Denying the obvious only suggests it; defeating the obvious means engaging it from the flanks. Even under stress, Russian media managers had the presence of mind to try to change the subject by inventing fictional versions of what had happened.

On the very day the plane was shot down, all of the major Russian channels blamed a “Ukrainian missile,” or perhaps a “Ukrainian aircraft,” for the downing of MH17, and claimed that the “real target” had been “the president of Russia.” The Ukrainian government, according to the Russian media, had planned to assassinate Putin, but by accident had shot down the wrong aircraft. None of this was vaguely plausible. The two planes were not in the same place. The failed assassination story was so ludicrous that RT, after trying it on foreign audiences, did not pursue it. But within Russia itself, the moral calculus was indeed reversed: by the end of a day on which Russian soldiers had killed 298 foreign civilians during a Russian invasion of Ukraine, it had been established that Russia was the victim.

The following day, July 18, 2014, Russian television scattered new versions of the event. Myriad inventions were added to the multiple fictions, not to make any of them coherent, but to introduce further doubts about simpler and more plausible accounts. Thus three Russian television channels claimed that Ukrainian air traffic controllers had asked the pilots of MH17 to reduce their altitude. This was a lie. One of the networks then claimed that Ihor Kolomois’kyi, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch who was governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, was personally responsible for issuing the (fictional) order to the air traffic controllers. In an echo of Nazi racial profiling, another network later provided an “expert” on “physiognomy” who claimed that Kolomois’kyi’s face demonstrated his guilt.

Meanwhile, five Russian television networks, including some that had peddled the air traffic control story, claimed that Ukrainian fighter aircraft had been on the scene. They could not get straight just which kind of aircraft this might have been, providing pictures of various jets (taken at various places and times), and proposing altitudes that were impossible for the aircraft in question. The claim about the presence of fighter planes was untrue. A week after the disaster, Russian television generated a third version of the story of the downing of MH17: Ukrainian forces had shot it down during training exercises. This too had no basis in fact. Girkin then added a fourth version, claiming that Russia had indeed shot down MH17—but that no crime had been committed, since the CIA had filled the plane with corpses and sent it over Ukraine to provoke Russia.

These fictions were raised to the rank of Russian foreign policy. When asked about MH17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated the inventions of Russian media about air traffic controllers and nearby Ukrainian fighters. Neither of his claims was backed by evidence and both were untrue.

Russian media accounts were impossible not only as journalism but also as literature. If one tried to accept, one by one, the claims of Russian television, the fictional world thus constructed would be impossible, since its various elements could not coexist. It could not have been the case that the plane was shot down both from the ground and from the air. If it had been shot down from the air, it could not have been shot down by both a MiG and an Su-25. If it had been shot down from the ground, this could not have been the result of both a training accident and an assassination attempt. Indeed, the Putin assassination story contradicted everything else that the Russian media claimed. It made no sense to say that Ukrainian air traffic controllers had communicated with the Malaysian pilots of MH17 as part of a plot to shoot down the Russian presidential aircraft.

But even if all of these lies could not make a coherent story, they could at least break a story—one that happened to be true. Although there were certainly individual Russians who grasped what had happened and apologized, the Russian population as a whole was denied the possibility to reflect on its responsibility for a war and its crimes. According to the surveys of the one reliable sociological institute in Russia, in September 2014 86% of Russians blamed Ukraine for shooting down MH17, and 85% continued to do so in July 2015, by which point the actual course of events had been investigated and was clear. Russian media urged Russians to be outraged that they were blamed.

Ignorance begat innocence, and the politics of eternity went on.

—

Russians who watched television in summer 2014 learned nothing of the Russian artillery that continued to pound Ukrainian positions, nor of the Russian invasion force assembling at the Ukrainian border. As in Crimea in February, the face of Russia at war during the summer campaign would be a biker gang. On August 9, 2014, the day after the Ukrainian army had fled the border under Russian shelling, the Night Wolves staged a motorcycle exhibition in Sevastopol, a Ukrainian city that Russia had annexed along with Crimea. RT described it for Europeans and Americans as an “Epic Night Wolves Biker Rally.” In fact, the motorcycle tricks were mediocre and secondary. Most important was the long televised introduction, which brought fascist themes to millions of Russians.

The Sevastopol “bike show” began in darkness in a vast hall. A spotlight revealed Alexander Zaldostanov, the leader of the Night Wolves, as he was raised towards the rafters in a cargo elevator. Wearing a bandanna and a leather vest over tight black clothing, he began to intone: “My motherland delivered ten Stalinist blows to fascism’s hirsute body. Even as the earth still settled on the graves of thirty million heroes, even as the cinders of the burned villages still glowed, Stalin gave the order to plant orchards. And among the flowering orchards, we rebuilt the devastated cities, and we thought that the flowering would never end.” Zaldostanov was reciting Alexander Prokhanov’s manifesto of a few months earlier, “Our New Victory Day.”

In that text, Prokhanov was rehabilitating Stalinism by associating it with victory in the Second World War, and justifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine by claiming that it was like the defense of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Rather than a Soviet republic that was invaded by Germany, rather than the main target of Hitler’s colonial plans, rather than the major battlefield of the Second World War, rather than a land that lost three million soldiers and another three million civilians to the German occupation, Ukraine suddenly became a wartime enemy of Russia. In his text, Prokhanov made the war between Russian innocence and Western decadence explicitly sexual, dreaming of flowering without deflowering. At just this point in Zaldostanov’s recitation, the stage lights came on to reveal Russia’s pregnant virgins: a group of women with pillows under their clothes to create a baby bulge, others pushing empty prams.

Prokhanov blamed Russia’s problems on foreigners who intervened in what he called the “nightmarish 1990s.” His text implored Russians to ignore the facts around them and to fall instead into a trance before the “icon” of the “red flower.” He meant that the Soviet victory in the Second World War made Russians innocent of all wrongdoing for all time. Russians, as they dismember Ukraine, should bow down before the blossom in sensuous worship. “And on this icon once again the scarlet blossom began to open, a marvelous scarlet bud. We inhaled its scent, drank in its marvelous juices.” The invasion of Crimea was a climax. “As a gift for our patience and stoicism, our labor and faith, God has sent us Crimea. The Russian people, once divided by enemies, are again united in victorious embraces.”

Then Prokhanov (intoned by the biker Zaldostanov to a live audience of tens of thousands, and to a televised audience of millions) specified his fear of penetration. The enemy of the Russian idyll was the giant black penis of Satan. (Barack Obama was at this time the president of the United States.) Taking for granted the myth that Kyiv was the site of Russia’s virgin birth, Prokhanov imagined its cathedral as a Russian holy-of-holies. He then fantasized about a diabolical orgasm: “the black sperm of fascism splashed upon Kyiv, the mother of all Russian cities. In the golden apse of St. Sofia, among the temples and shrines, was conceived a deformed embryo with a hairy face and black horns, like the devil in a church fresco.”

In Prokhanov’s fantasy, fascism was thus not an ideology or an aesthetic. If fascism were such things, the spectacle of a man in black leather intoning a message of national blamelessness and necessary war would be its perfect instantiation. For the schizofascists, fascism was a substance from the dissolute outside world that threatened the virginal Russian organism: “Like a decadent dough it overflowed its Kyiv bowl and spread through all Ukraine.” Ultimately to blame for this unspeakable aggression were Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, “who smell of burnt flesh.” This last gesture of Prokhanov’s was the normal closing flourish of schizofascist prose. A fascist text written by an antisemite to justify a war of aggression exploits the symbols of the Holocaust—here, the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau—to direct blame towards others. The travesty was intentional: Prokhanov’s invocation of “black sperm” was a profanation of the most justly famous poem of the Holocaust, Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue.”

Ukrainian society and Ukrainian history were dismissed or suppressed in every line of Prokhanov’s manifesto—read by Zaldostanov as Russian artillery shells were exploding in Ukraine, and as Russian soldiers handed in their phones and checked their weapons while they prepared to cross the Ukrainian border. Kyiv was not a Ukrainian city, though it was the capital of Ukraine; Ukraine was an enemy, although Ukrainians suffered more than Russians during the Second World War; the Maidan was not a civic protest but a demonic bastard born of the rape of virgin Russia by black Satan. The drastic images had to overwhelm the prosaic reality of people who wanted a future with the rule of law.

The political preliminaries to the “bike show” went on and on: “A new battle against fascism is inevitable,” pronounced Zaldostanov. “The eleventh Stalinist blow is inevitable.” Then from the loudspeakers resounded the recorded voices of Obama, Merkel—and Hitler. On the stage, beneath a tarp, a shape began to move, summoned by the voices: the dough overflowing its bowl. From beneath the tarp emerged black figures, who danced in the form of a swastika. Then giant mechanical hands appeared above the stage, one finger bearing a ring with an eagle: the American puppet master. The black figures became Ukrainian protestors who attacked helpless riot police. Zaldostanov condemned “Europe’s eternal lackeys, its spiritual slaves.” Then the leader of the black demonstrators was lynched.

All of this gave the Russian band 13 Sozvezdie time to prepare its nationalist ska favorite “Why Do Ukrainians Kill Other Ukrainians?” The lyrics asked why Rus had been sold to Europe: an odd question, since Rus was a medieval European realm. As 13 Sozvezdie showed, popular culture could invoke the politics of eternity: Russia was Rus, history never was, invasion is self-defense. In the band’s determined if unartful presentation, Ukrainians of today could not have chosen Europe, because Ukraine was Rus and Rus was Russia. Ukrainians must have been manipulated: “Who lied to you today, Ukraine?” Cued by the song, two armored vehicles with Ukrainian markings appeared at the center of the stage and appeared to burn people to death. Heroic Russian volunteers fired thousands of machine-gun rounds at the vehicles while rappelling down cords hung from the rafters. Victorious, the Russian volunteers claimed the vehicles and waved the flags of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.”

Zaldostanov then spoke again. He linked the existence of Ukraine to the German invasion of the Soviet Union by asking for forgiveness from Red Army soldiers “sleeping in mass graves who, responding to a summons, covered Rus with their hearts.” It mattered not at all that a very large number of those Red Army soldiers had been Ukrainians. Russia needed a monopoly on martyrdom. In order to preserve it, Russia would make war on a nation with a far greater record of suffering (the Ukrainians), while abusing the memory of a people with a still greater record of victimhood (the Jews). As the rap group Opasnye now explained in their song “Donbas,” Ukrainians needed “fraternal assistance” from big brother Russia. “Fraternal assistance” had been Brezhnev’s term for military interventions to sustain communist regimes in other countries.

When this song was over, Zaldostanov called for the conquest of more Ukrainian territory by Russia. The motorcycle exhibition at long last began. Like the preceding ska and rap, the stunts were an unremarkable example of a North American art form. The “bike show” was exceptional only in its rehabilitation of a long-discredited European art form: the Nazi Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art meant to replace world with worldview, and history with eternity.

—

The cruci-fiction (July 10), the MH17 cacophony (July 17), and the “bike show” (August 9) were only three examples of the televised propaganda to which Russians were exposed in the summer of 2014. This creative ignorance invited Russians into a sense of innocence. It is hard to know what effect all of this had on Russian citizens in general. It certainly persuaded men to travel to Ukraine to fight.

After Russian artillery had cleared sections of the border of Ukrainian troops (by August 8), the way was open for still larger deployments of Russian volunteers (and weapons). As Russian recruiters said (even as Russian spokesmen denied it abroad), the Russian government used unmarked white trucks (which it called “humanitarian”) as troop transports. Russian volunteers started their journey because of what they had seen on Russian television about the war in Ukraine. One recruiter, a special forces veteran, explained: “Our press and television present the dramatic facts.”

Some of these Russian volunteers assumed that Ukraine did not exist. One Russian from distant Asia—from the point where Russia meets China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan—declared that Russians and Ukrainians were a single people. Real for these men, by contrast, was “Novorossiia,” a construct vanishing from Russian television screens even as the volunteers arrived in Ukraine. Some volunteers imagined that they were preventing the United States from starting a world war, others that they were hindering global Sodom. When asked why they fought, Russian volunteers spoke of “fascism” and “genocide.” The cruci-fiction proved unforgettable. Young men spoke of a “call of the heart” to rescue children.

Russian volunteers arriving at the frontier were massively outnumbered by regular Russian troops. In July and August 2014, Russian officers were giving orders to Russian soldiers at twenty-three camps established near the Ukrainian border. By early August, elements of about thirty units of the Russian armed forces had encamped at the frontier and made their preparations for an invasion of Ukraine. Russian villagers grew accustomed to the presence of young recruits from all over Russia, just as they had gotten used to the sound of artillery fire.

Every now and then the soldiers might attract attention. Young men who are about to go under hostile fire can behave unusually in the days before. On the night of August 11, for example, the villagers of Kuibyshevo, just on the Russian side of the border, watched some unfamiliar dancing. The dancers were soldiers of the 136th Motorized Infantry Brigade, based in Buinask, Dagestan—a Muslim-majority district of the Russian Federation in the Caucasus, bordering Chechnya, a place where less than 5% of the population is Russian. Like many of the soldiers of the Russian Federation sent to kill and die in Ukraine, these soldiers were members of non-Russian ethnic minorities, men whose deaths would not register in media markets. Not long after August 11, the 136th Motorized crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border and engaged the Ukrainian army. By August 22, the corpses of the dancers were arriving in Dagestan.

The 18th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, based in Chechnya, was one of the first Russian units to cross during the summer invasion. It was composed largely of refugees from Russia’s wars in Chechnya, and had just seen action in Crimea. On July 23, six days after Russia shot down MH17, its men got their orders to report to their base in Chechnya. Three days later they were on their way to a camp at the Russian-Ukrainian border. On August 10, one of the unit’s soldiers, Anton Tumanov, told his mother that “they are sending us to Ukraine.” The next day he was given ammunition and grenades. He posted on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook: “They took my phone, and I went to Ukraine.” Tumanov was one of about 1,200 comrades from the 18th Separate Motorized who entered Ukraine on August 12.

On August 13, the men of the 18th Separate Motorized were in Snizhne, where four weeks earlier Russian soldiers had shot down MH17. Ukrainian artillery fire set their ammunition dump aflame, killing some 120 men and wounding about 450 more. Anton Tumanov’s family received a report: the place of death was listed as “location of unit”; the time of death as “time of performing military service”; the cause of death as “blood loss after having lost his legs.” His mother learned more about how her son died because one of his comrades took the risk of telling her. “What I don’t understand,” Tumanov’s mother said, “is what he died for. Why couldn’t we let people in Ukraine sort things out for themselves?” It pained her that her son was killed in a war that was not officially taking place. “If they sent our soldiers there, let them admit it.” When she posted the facts of her son’s death on social media, she was attacked as a traitor.

Konstantin Kuzmin, another soldier of the 18th Separate Motorized, probably died at the same time. He had called his parents in a rush on August 8: “Mama, Papa, I love you. Hi to everyone! Kiss my daughter for me.” His mother was told nine days later by an emissary of the Russian army that her son had died in exercises on the Ukrainian border. When she asked, “Do you believe the words you are telling me?” he had the decency to reply that he did not.

One of Kuzmin’s comrades, the tank driver Rufat Oroniiazov, survived that artillery strike of August 13. His girlfriend was able to follow the progress of his unit through social media, and knew about the artillery strike and fatalities. The next day, he called her to say that “many of ours have died before my eyes.” After August 14, he never called again. “We were waiting for marriage,” his girlfriend remembered. “Whenever I said something, he smiled.”

On or about August 17, 2014, elements of the 76th Air Assault Division, based in Pskov, crossed into Ukraine. Of the two thousand or so of its men deployed against the Ukrainian army, about one hundred were killed in action. The funerals in Pskov began on August 24. People who tried to photograph the graves were chased away. On August 19, the 137th Parachute Regiment of the 106th Airborne Guards, based in Ryazan, joined the invasion. Sergei Andrianov was killed in action not long thereafter. “Forgive me, my son,” wrote his mother, “that I could not shelter you from this evil war.” A friend posted on VKontakte: “May he who sent you to fight in a foreign land be damned.”

The 31st Airborne Assault Brigade, based in Ulyanovsk, had been summoned for training on August 3. Its men knew that they would be sent to Ukraine: everything was following the pattern of their recent deployment to Crimea. One of them, Nikolai Kozlov, had spent his time in Crimea in a Ukrainian police uniform, apparently as part of Russia’s deception campaign. By August 24, the 31st Airborne had entered Ukrainian territory. On that day, Kozlov lost his leg in a Ukrainian attack. At least two of his comrades, Nikolai Bushin and Il’nur Kil’chenbaev, were killed in action. The Ukrainian army took ten soldiers of this unit prisoner, including Ruslan Akhmedov and Arseny Il’mitov.

At about the same time, on or about August 14, Russia’s 6th Separate Tank Brigade, based in the Nizhegorod region, joined the battle in Ukraine. Its soldiers posed for photographs in front of Ukrainian road signs. Vladislav Barakov was killed in action in his tank, and at least two of his comrades were taken prisoner by the Ukrainian army.

At some point in August 2014, the 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade, based in Pechenga, entered the battle for the city of Luhansk, the second city (after Donetsk) of the Donbas. The young men of the 200th Motorized painted FOR STALIN!, USSR, and the hammer and sickle on their tanks, and DEATH TO FASCISM! on their howitzers. A self-propelled artillery piece was christened STALIN’S FIST, a reference to the eleventh Stalinist blow that Prokhanov had promised. On one Grad artillery piece the soldiers wrote FOR CHILDREN AND MOTHERS, and on another CHILDREN OF DONETSK. The very real civilian casualties of the Ukrainian army’s shelling of cities had been killed by that very weapon: the Grad. The Russian Grads labeled FOR CHILDREN AND MOTHERS probably killed children and mothers in their turn.

Evgeny Trundaev of the 200th Motorized was killed in action in Ukraine and posthumously decorated as a Hero of Russia. His comrades took part in the victorious campaign for the Luhansk airport, and then joined other Russian units in the decisive Battle of Ilovaisk, where much of the Ukrainian army was encircled and destroyed by Russian armor. Despite promises of safe passage, Ukrainian soldiers attempting to exit the pocket were killed.

This Russian victory led to a truce at Minsk on September 5. It specified only that “foreign forces” withdraw. Since Moscow denied that Russian troops were in Ukraine, it interpreted this provision as requiring no action. Russian soldiers remained in Ukraine after the Minsk agreement, and new ones were deployed. Some units that had seen combat during the August invasion were rotated out to the camps at the Russian-Ukrainian border or to their bases, only to return to the war in Ukraine a few months later.

In early 2015, Russian armed forces carried out a third major offensive on the territory of Ukraine. The initial objective was the Donetsk airport. After eight months of combat and siege, the airport no longer existed as such. But its long defense by Ukrainian soldiers (and members of paramilitary militias) was symbolic on both sides of the border. Ukrainians called the defenders “cyborgs,” since they seemed to live on despite everything. So in Moscow a decision was taken that these men had to die. After the airport was finally taken by overwhelming Russian force in mid-February, Ukrainian prisoners of war were executed.

The second objective of Russia’s January 2015 offensive was Debaltseve, a railway junction that linked the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It was important to the functioning of the Russia-backed pseudostates known as the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Lugansk People’s Republic.” Among the Russian units fighting at Debaltseve was the 200th Separate Motorized Brigade, which had taken part in the August 2014 invasion. It was joined by two units based in Buriatia, a region inhabited by ethnic Buriats (most of whom are Buddhists), on the Russian-Mongolian border, about six thousand kilometers from Ukraine. These were the 37th Motorized Infantry Brigade, based in Kiakhta, and the 5th Separate Tank Brigade, based in Ulan-Ude.

Bato Dambaev, a soldier of the 37th Motorized, posted photographs on social media of the unit’s journey from Buriatia to Ukraine and back. Local people in the Donetsk region joked about the “indigenous Donbas Buriats.” Everyone in the Donbas, whatever they thought about the war, was aware that the Russian army was involved; people who made such a joke could be for the Russians, or for the Ukrainian state, or indifferent. Photographs of Buriats cuddling puppies or playing soccer in Ukraine were widely circulated. For their part, the Buriats laughed at the Russian propaganda that denied their presence in Ukraine. Other propaganda they accepted as true. They saw their mission as it had been presented to them in the Russian media: to defeat “killers of children.”

Though a second ceasefire was signed at Minsk on February 12, 2015, the Russian assault on Debaltseve continued. Once again, the agreement spoke of “foreign forces,” and Russia denied that its soldiers were in Ukraine. The fighting continued until the city was destroyed and the Ukrainian army was routed. As a Russian tank commander recalled: “They were breaking out of the pocket, they wanted to clear the road, they flee, and we have to crush them.” These words were spoken by Dorzhy Batomunkuev, one of the tank drivers of the 5th Separate Tank Brigade, who suffered severe burns when his tank was hit during the battle. Other Russians and Ukrainian citizens fighting on the Russian side were killed and wounded in the battle for Debaltseve. But the vast majority of the casualties were encircled Ukrainian soldiers. And so the latest major Russian intervention in the Donbas ended, not surprisingly, in a military victory.

Units of the Russian army remained in Ukraine, training locals and engaging in combat. The 16th Separate Special Forces Brigade of the GRU, for example, was stationed in Ukraine in 2015. At least three of its soldiers—Anton Saveliev, Timur Mamaiusupov, and Ivan Kardopolov—were killed in action in Ukraine on May 5. As a woman from Kardopolov’s hometown presented the situation: “I don’t know, they say on television that we are not at war, but guys keep coming home dead.”

This neighbor could contrast what she saw with her own eyes with what she saw on television. For most Russians most of the time, the essentials of the war were behind Surkov’s dark glass. Russians were told by their media that the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Lugansk People’s Republic” were independent entities, while separatists admitted that they were dependent upon the Russian taxpayer. This meant, as one separatist leader put it, that a “call from Moscow was viewed as a call from the office of Lord God himself.” By “Moscow” he meant Surkov. Media in the two “republics” followed instructions from Moscow to portray America as the source of fascist evil, to consult Dugin and Glazyev, and to give press credentials to European fascists. The suffering of Ukrainian citizens continued, with some ten thousand killed and about two million displaced.

—

Russia’s war against Ukraine was called a “hybrid war.” The problem with phrasings in which the noun “war” is qualified by an adjective such as “hybrid” is that they sound like “war minus” when what they really mean is “war plus.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a regular war, as well as a partisan campaign to induce Ukrainian citizens to fight against the Ukrainian army. In addition to that, the Russian campaign against Ukraine was also the broadest cyber offensive in history.

In May 2014, the website of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission was rigged to display an image showing that a nationalist (who had in fact received less than 1% of the vote) had won the presidential election. Ukrainian authorities caught the hack at the last moment. Unaware that the hack had been spotted, Russian television transmitted the very same graphic as it announced, falsely, that the nationalist had been elected president of Ukraine. In autumn 2015, hackers attacked Ukrainian media companies and the Ukrainian railway system. That December, hackers brought down three transmission stations of the Ukrainian power grid, knocking out fifty substations and denying power to a quarter million people. In autumn 2016, hackers attacked the Ukrainian railway, seaport authority, treasury, and the ministries of finance, infrastructure, and defense. They also carried out a second and far more sophisticated attack on the Ukrainian power grid, bringing down a transmission station in Kyiv.

This cyberwar made no headlines in the West at the time, but it represented the future of warfare. Beginning in late 2014, Russia penetrated the email network of the White House, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and multiple American nongovernmental organizations. Malware that caused blackouts in Ukraine was also planted in the American power grid. Only in 2016, when Russian hacks entered American presidential politics, would Americans begin to pay attention.

The most remarkable element of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine was the information war designed to undermine factuality while insisting on innocence. It, too, continued in the United States, with greater sophistication and more impressive results than in Ukraine. Ukraine lost the information war to Russia in the sense that others did not understand Ukraine’s predicament. In general, Ukrainian citizens did. The same cannot be said of Americans.

—

Throughout the war in Ukraine, the Russian leadership engaged in implausible deniability, telling obvious lies and then daring the Western media to seek the facts. On April 17, 2014, Putin categorically denied the Russian presence in southeastern Ukraine in these terms: “Nonsense. There are no Russian units in eastern Ukraine—no special services, no tactical advisors. All this is being done by local residents, and proof of that is that those people have literally removed their masks.” The curious thing about this claim is that April 17 was the very day when Russia’s special forces in Sloviansk indeed removed their masks and said the exact opposite: “We are special forces from the GRU.” On August 23, at the very height of the summer campaign, as Russian units began to close the circle on Ukrainian soldiers at Ilovaisk, Lavrov said: “We view all such stories [of the presence of Russian troops] as part of an information war.” On August 29, he claimed that photographs of Russian soldiers were “images from computer games.”

Lavrov did not really mean that the facts were other than they seemed. He meant that factuality was the enemy. This was the case made by the Izborsk Club in its manifesto and by the Russian commander Antyufeyev before the summer invasion: facts were “information technologies” from the West, and to destroy factuality was to destroy the West. Opinion polls suggest that the denial of factuality did suppress a sense of responsibility among Russians. At the end of 2014, only 8% of Russians felt any responsibility for events in Ukraine. The vast majority, 79%, agreed with the proposition that “the West will be unhappy no matter what Russia does, so you should not pay attention to their claims.”

After all of the goading of Russians to fight in Ukraine, silent terror greeted the returning corpses. The families of the dead and wounded were told that they would not receive benefits from the state if they spoke to the press. The St. Petersburg branch of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, which was keeping a list of Russian war dead, was declared to be a “foreign agent” by the Russian government. The head of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee in Piatigorsk, seventy-three years old and diabetic, was arrested. Most of the journalists who reported on Russian casualties were beaten. By the end of 2014, Russian reporters did not, or rather could not, cover the story. The lists of the dead trailed off. The war went on, but the lights went out.

—

The underlying logic of the Russian war against Ukraine, Europe, and America was strategic relativism. Given native kleptocracy and dependence on commodity exports, Russian state power could not increase, nor Russian technology close the gap with Europe or America. Relative power could however be gained by weakening others: by invading Ukraine to keep it away from Europe, for example. The concurrent information war was meant to weaken the EU and the United States. What Europeans and Americans had that Russians lacked were integrated trade zones and predictable politics with respected principles of succession. If these could be damaged, Russian losses would be acceptable since enemy losses would be still greater. In strategic relativism, the point is to transform international politics into a negative-sum game, where a skillful player will lose less than everyone else.

In some respects, Russia did lose in its war in Ukraine. No memorable case for Russian culture was made by the peoples of the Caucasus and Siberia journeying for hundreds or thousands of kilometers to kill Ukrainians who spoke Russian better than they did. The Russian annexation of Crimea and sponsorship of the “Lugansk People’s Republic” and “Donetsk People’s Republic” did complicate Ukraine’s foreign relations. Even so, the frozen conflict was a far cry from the “disintegration” of Ukraine discussed in Russian policy papers and the massive expansion suggested by “Novorossiia.” Ukraine fielded an army while holding free and fair elections; Russia fielded an army as a substitute for such.

Ukrainian society was consolidated by the Russian invasion. As the chief rabbi of Ukraine put it: “We’re faced by an outside threat called Russia. It’s brought everyone together.” That overstatement suggested an important truth. For the first time in Ukrainian history, public opinion became anti-Russian. In the 2001 Ukrainian census, 17.3% of the inhabitants of the country identified themselves as ethnically Russian; by 2017, that figure had fallen to 5.5%. Some of that drop was a result of the inaccessibility of Crimea and parts of the Donbas region to the survey. But the bulk of it was the result of the Russian invasion. An invasion to defend speakers of Russian killed such people by the thousand and induced them to identify as Ukrainian by the million.

By invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and shooting down MH17, Russia forced the European Union and the United States to respond. The EU and U.S. sanctions were a rather mild response to Russia’s announced intention to remake “the world order,” as Lavrov put it; but they did isolate Russia from its major partners and deepen Russia’s economic crisis. Putin pretended that China was an alternative; Beijing exposed Russia’s weakness by paying less for Russian hydrocarbons. Russia’s power rests upon its ability to balance between the West and the East; the invasion of Ukraine made Russia dependent on China without forcing the Chinese to do anything in return.

Russia’s Eurasian ideologists claimed that the United States planned to steal Russia’s resources. Antyufeyev, for example, presented Russia’s war in Ukraine as a defensive campaign to prevent the United States from stealing Russia’s natural gas and fresh water. This reflected a healthy imagination rather than familiarity with American energy production. Indeed, this attention to resources seemed like a displacement. It was Russia’s neighbor China, not the United States, that lacked natural gas and fresh water. By claiming that international law did not protect state borders, Moscow opened the way for Beijing, when and if it so desired, to make a similar argument about the Chinese-Russian border. Almost everyone lost in the Russo-Ukrainian war: Russia, Ukraine, the EU, the United States. The only winner was China.

—

On August 29, 2014, the day when Lavrov compared Russia’s war against Ukraine to a computer game, Russian and European fascists and extreme-Right politicians gathered on territory seized from Ukraine to simultaneously deny and celebrate the ongoing Russian invasion.

Sergei Glazyev opened an international conference in Yalta under the heading of “anti-fascism.” He was (according to the program) joined by fellow Russian fascists Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov. The guests were the leaders of Europe’s extreme Right: Roberto Fiore from Italy, Frank Creyelman from Belgium, Luc Michel from Belgium, Pavel Chernev from Bulgaria, Márton Gyöngyös from Hungary, and Nick Griffin from Great Britain. Russian and European fascists considered founding an “Anti-Fascist Council.” They denied the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though they were meeting in a city Russia had annexed; they denied that Russia was still fighting in eastern Ukraine at the time, though featured guests included Russian military commanders who had left the battlefield to be present.

Within the European Union, it was rare to find a major political party that would take such positions. Yet such an option was emerging in Germany and would benefit from Russian support: a new German right-wing party called the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany). Standing somewhere between the radicals at Yalta and more traditional parties, it would become Moscow’s darling. Its leader, Alexander Gauland, a former member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, accepted Russia’s line on Crimea and positioned his party as a pro-Russian alternative—even as Moscow attacked the German establishment. In autumn 2014, Russia undertook cyberattacks against the German parliament and German security institutions. In May 2015, the Bundestag was attacked again. In April 2016, the Christian Democratic Union—Germany’s largest political party, led by Angela Merkel—was also attacked. But the most important campaign undertaken to support the German extreme Right against the German center would be in public. It would exploit an anxiety that Russians and Germans shared, Islam, against the common enemy of Moscow and the AfD, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Facing rising numbers of refugees from war in Syria (as well as migrants fleeing Africa), Merkel took an unexpected position: Germany would accept large numbers of refugees, more than its neighbors, more than her voters would have wished. On September 8, 2015, the German government announced that it planned to take half a million refugees per year. By no coincidence, Russia began bombing Syria three weeks later. Speaking at the United Nations on September 28, 2015, Putin proposed a “harmonization” of Eurasia with the European Union. Russia would bomb Syria to generate refugees, then encourage Europeans to panic. This would help the AfD, and thus make Europe more like Russia.

Russian bombs began to fall in Syria the day after Putin spoke. Russian aircraft dropped non-precision (“dumb”) bombs from high altitudes. Even if the targets had been military, non-precision bombing would have guaranteed more destruction and more refugees making their way to Europe. But Russia was not generally targeting ISIS bases. Human rights organizations reported the Russian bombing of mosques, clinics, hospitals, refugee camps, water treatment plants, and cities in general. In her decision to accept Syrian refugees, Merkel was motivated by the history of the 1930s, when Nazi Germany made its own Jewish citizens into refugees. The Russian response was in effect to say: If Merkel wants refugees, we will provide them, and use the issue to destroy her government and German democracy. Russia supplied not just the refugees themselves, but also the image of them as terrorists and rapists.

On Monday, January 11, 2016, a thirteen-year-old German girl of Russian origin, Lisa F., hesitated to return to her home in Berlin. She had once again had problems in school, and the way her family treated her had aroused the attention of authorities. She went to the house of a nineteen-year-old boy, visited with him and his mother, and stayed the night. Lisa F.’s parents reported her missing to the police. She returned home the next day, without her backpack and cell phone. She told her mother a dramatic story of abduction and rape. The police, following up the report of the missing girl, went to the residence of the friend and found her things. By speaking to her friend and his mother, finding the backpack, and reading text messages, they established where Lisa F. had been. When questioned, Lisa F. told the police what had happened: she had not wanted to go home, and had gone elsewhere. A medical examination confirmed that the story she had told her mother was untrue.

A Berlin family drama then played as global news on Russian television. On January 16, 2016, a Saturday, Pervyi Kanal presented a version of what Lisa F. had told her parents: she had been abducted by Muslim refugees and gang-raped for an entire night. This was the first of no fewer than forty segments on Pervyi Kanal about an event that, according to a police investigation, had never taken place. In the televised coverage, photographs were pasted from other places and times to add an element of verisimilitude to the story. The Russian propaganda network Sputnik chimed in with the general speculation that refugee rapists were loose in Germany. On January 17, the extreme-Right National Democratic Party organized a demonstration demanding justice for Lisa F. Although only about a dozen people appeared, one of them was an RT cameraman. His footage appeared on YouTube the same day.

The Russian information war had been ongoing for some time; most Germans had not been paying attention. The Lisa F. affair was thus a direct hit on a soft target. The Berlin police issued a tactful press release, explaining its findings, omitting names to protect the family, and requesting responsible use of social media. This was not the sort of thing that would slow a Russian propaganda campaign. The Russian media now proclaimed that “the rape of a Berlin Russian girl was hushed up,” and that “the police tried to hide it.” The story spread from Pervyi Kanal across Russian television and print media, told the same way everywhere: the German state welcomed Muslim rapists, failed to protect innocent girls, and lied. On January 24, a protest organized by an anti-immigration group was covered by Russian media under the headline “Lisa, we are with you! Germans rally under Merkel’s window against migrant rapists.”

The information war against Merkel was taken up openly by the Russian state. The Russian embassy in London tweeted that Germany rolled out the red carpet for refugees and then swept their crimes under the carpet. On January 26, Foreign Minister Lavrov, referring unforgettably to a German citizen as “our Lisa,” intervened on behalf of the Russian Federation. Lavrov claimed that he was forced to act because Russians in Germany were agitated; they were indeed, because of what they had seen on Russian state television. As in Ukraine, the Russian state was claiming to act on behalf of people who were citizens and residents of another country. As in Ukraine, a fictional wrong was used to generate a sense of Russian victimhood and an occasion for the display of Russian power. Like the image of a crucified boy, that of a raped girl was meant to overwhelm.

Not long before the “our Lisa” affair, Amnesty International had published the first of several reports on Russian bombing of civilian targets in Syria. Physicians for Human Rights was also documenting Russian attacks on clinics and hospitals. On December 8, 2015, for example, Russian airstrikes destroyed the al-Burnas Hospital, the largest children’s clinic in rural western Idlib, injuring doctors and nurses and killing others. The actual people who were killed and maimed in Russian attacks, the girls and boys and women and men who died under bombing, were shrouded by the specter of Muslims as a rapist collective. Refugees from Syria, like refugees from Ukraine, were subsumed in a fiction of Russian innocence. The imagined violation of a single girl was meant to reverse the valence of the entire story.

Merkel remained the leader of the largest party in Germany, and the only one capable of forming a government. Her position was weakened by the immigrant issue, in some part because of Russian intervention in German discussions. During the 2017 electoral campaign, Russian-backed social media in Germany portrayed immigration as dangerous, the political establishment as cowardly and mendacious, and the AfD as the savior of Germany. In the elections of September 2017, the AfD won 13% of the total vote, finishing third overall. This was the first time since the Nazis in 1933 that a far Right party had won representation in a German parliament. Its leader, Alexander Gauland, promised to “hunt” Merkel and “to take our country back.”

—

Other European politicians were still less fortunate than Merkel. The Polish government of the Civic Platform party under Prime Minister Donald Tusk had supported a European future for Ukraine. Polish flags had flown on the Maidan, as young Poles traveled to Kyiv to support friends. Members of an older generation, participants in the Polish anticommunist opposition, found on the Maidan something that they never thought they would see again: solidarity across social classes and political parties. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski had journeyed to Kyiv to seek a negotiated settlement between protestors and government.

That Polish government was then brought down. Tapes emerged of private conversations between Civic Platform politicians at restaurants. The problem was not that the tapes revealed scandals, although they did, but that they allowed Poles to hear how politicians speak in private. It is a rare politician who can survive his constituents knowing how he orders food or tells jokes. Sikorski was recorded issuing some rather sound political judgments, but in a language different from that which he used in public. The man who hired waiters to record the conversations owed $26 million to a company with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Two restaurants where conversations were taped were owned by consortia with connections to Semion Mogilevich, regarded as the don of dons of the Russian mob.

Crossing the line that divides public responsibility and private life was far more consequential than it appeared. The undesired exposure of private conversations was incipient totalitarianism, in a country that had been a focal point of Nazi and Soviet aspirations during the twentieth century. This point was rarely made. Polish memories of German and Soviet aggression tended to congeal around heroism and villainy. What got lost was the memory of how totalitarianism endured into the 1970s and 1980s: not by atrocities where the distinction between the perpetrator and victim is clear, but by an erosion of the line between private and public life that demolishes the rule of law and invites the population to participate in the demolition. Poles returned to a world of bugged conversations, unexpected denunciations, and constant suspicion.

Public life cannot be sustained without private life. It is impossible to govern, even for the best of democrats, without the possibility for discreet conversations. The only politicians who are invulnerable to exposure are those who control the secrets of others, or those whose avowed behavior is so shameless that they are invulnerable to blackmail. In the end, electronic scandals that reveal the “hypocrisy” of politicians who break rules help the politicians who disregard rules. Digital revelations end the careers of those who have secrets and begin the careers of those who promote spectacle. By accepting that the private lives of public figures are the same thing as politics, citizens cooperate in the destruction of a public sphere. This quiet emergence of totalitarianism, visible in Poland during the tapes scandal of 2014, was also on display in the United States in 2016.

It was perhaps no great surprise that Civic Platform lost the parliamentary elections in October 2015 to its right-wing rival, the Law and Justice party. Civic Platform had been in power for almost a decade; and Poles had other reasons, aside from the tapes scandal, for weary skepticism. Yet there was something unexpected about the government that was formed that November: the prominent place of the intemperate nationalist Antoni Macierewicz. During the campaign, Law and Justice had promised that Macierewicz, who over the decades had earned a reputation for jeopardizing Poland’s national security, would not be named minister of defense. Then he was.

A politician forever preoccupied with secrets and their revelation, Macierewicz was a natural beneficiary of the tapes scandal. In 1993, he had brought down his own government with his unusual treatment of archival records concerning Polish communism. Entrusted with the delicate task of reviewing communist secret police files to find informers, he instead published a random list of names. The “Macierewicz list” of 1993 left out most of the actual agents, including Macierewicz’s own political partner, Michał Luśnia. It did include figures who had nothing to do with the secret police, but who would long suffer trying to clear their names.

In 2006, when the Law and Justice party was in power, Macierewicz was entrusted with a second sensitive task: the reform of Polish military intelligence. He published a report that revealed its methods and named its agents, disabling it for the foreseeable future. He ensured that this report was quickly translated into Russian, employing a Russian translator who in a previous job had cooperated with Soviet secret services. In 2007, as head of the new military counterintelligence organizations that he had founded, Macierewicz transferred secret military documents to Jacek Kotas, a man known in Warsaw as the “Russian connection” because of his work for Russian firms linked to the Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich. As defense minister in 2015, Macierewicz arranged another spectacular breach of national security, organizing an illegal nighttime raid on a NATO center in Warsaw whose assignment was to track Russian propaganda.

Macierewicz, a master of the politics of eternity, managed to submerge Poland’s actual history of suffering in a political fiction. In office as minister of defense from 2015, Macierewicz translated a recent human and political tragedy into a tale of innocence that allowed for a new definition of enemies. This was the Smolensk catastrophe of April 2010, the deadly crash of an airplane containing Polish political and civic leaders on their way to Russia to commemorate the Katyn massacre. At the time, the Polish government was led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk of the Civic Platform, whereas the president was Lech Kaczyński of Law and Justice. Tusk brought a governmental delegation to Smolensk for an official commemoration. The leaders of Law and Justice hastily arranged to send a rival delegation to a different set of commemorations.

Only the living can commemorate the dead. The first mistake of the rival delegation was placing so much of the Polish elite on board two airplanes flying to the same place at the same time with essentially zero advance planning. The second mistake was to attempt to land those planes in prohibitive conditions at a military airfield for which the pilots were untrained. Although one found the airstrip through the fog, the second crashed in a forest, killing all passengers on board. In that second aircraft, elementary safety procedures had not been followed: the cockpit door had not been closed, denying the pilots their normal authority. Transcripts from the black box revealed that they had not wished to land, but had been pressured to do so by visitors from the back of the plane, including the commander of the air force. The black box transcripts suggested that President Lech Kaczyński had reserved the decision about landing for himself: his delegate spoke directly to the pilots of a “decision from the president.” This was not only inappropriate but disastrous, since it brought about not just his own death, but the death of all of his fellow passengers and the crew.

The catastrophe was caused by avoidable human error. That fact was difficult to face. In the atmosphere evoked by Katyn, emotions ran high. They ran higher still in the Kaczyński family, where twin brothers united by politics were suddenly divided in an unexpected and horrible way. Within the Law and Justice party, the accident brought a strange aftermath: one twin brother (Jarosław, who now became leader of the Law and Justice party) remained alive after the other twin brother (Lech, the president) had died in a confusing tragedy. It made matters worse that the two brothers had spoken a few minutes before the crash: whatever else might have been said, it seemed clear that Jarosław had not discouraged Lech from landing.

Macierewicz understood that the search for meaning after death can be channeled into useful political fiction. He created a mystery cult around the crash, floating implausible and contradictory explanations, with the general implication that Putin and Tusk had cooperated in a political mass murder. His technique was strikingly similar to the way that Russian authorities had treated MH17. In the case of MH17, Russians had shot down a civilian airliner, and sought to deny it. In the case of Smolensk, Russia had not shot down an airliner, but Macierewicz seemed eager to prove that it had. But this difference is less important than the similarity. In both cases, the trail of evidence was abundant and convincing, and led to investigations with clear conclusions. In both cases, politicians of eternity spun tales designed to suppress factuality and confirm victimhood.

Macierewicz required that the list of victims of the Smolensk accident be read in public places, and took part in spirited monthly commemorations. A word in Polish reserved for the heroic dead of wars and uprisings, polegli, was applied by Macierewicz and others to the crash victims. After 2015, Smolensk became more important than the Katyn massacre that Polish leaders had wished to commemorate, more important than the entire Second World War, more important than the twentieth century. The commemoration of Smolensk divided Polish society as only a fiction can. It alienated Poles from their allies, since no Western leader could believe in Macierewicz’s version of events, or even pretend to believe in it. A quarter century of efforts by historians to convey the horrors of Polish history was wasted in a matter of months: thanks to Macierewicz, the true history of Polish suffering was shrouded under nationalist lies. Tusk was elected president of the European Council, one of the top leadership positions in the European Union. It was difficult for European politicians to process Macierewicz’s suggestion that Tusk had conspired with Putin to plan a mass murder.

Macierewicz’s accusations of Russia were so outlandish that he seemed like the last person who could be a Russian agent. Perhaps that was the point. Macierewicz promoted his cult of Smolensk while promoting men with connections to Moscow. As his secretary of state he appointed Bartosz Kownacki, a man who had traveled to Moscow to legitimate Putin’s fraudulent election in 2012. As head of national cryptography Macierewicz appointed Tomasz Mikołajewski, a man about whom little was known—beyond his inability to pass security background checks. For other appointments, he relied upon Jacek Kotas, “the Russian connection.” Kotas had a think tank that prepared cadres for Macierewicz. One of its position papers recommended that the Polish army be deprofessionalized and supplemented by a Territorial Defense that would deter protests against the government. That paper was co-written by Krzysztof Gaj, who had spread Russian propaganda about Ukrainian fascism. Macierewicz made the Territorial Defense subordinate to him personally, thus avoiding the command structure of the Polish armed forces. Soon it was funded at the same level as the entire Polish navy. He fired the vast majority of Poland’s high-ranking staff and field generals, replacing them with inexperienced people, some of whom were known for their pro-Russian and anti-NATO views.

Warsaw meanwhile abandoned the one policy that had distinguished it among its NATO and EU peers: the support of Ukrainian independence. Under the Law and Justice government, Warsaw chose to emphasize episodes of Polish-Ukrainian conflict in ways that suggested the total innocence of Poles. This was the Polish policy Malofeev had subsidized in 2014, without much success. Now it seemed that no subsidies were needed. Western allies were confounded. The French were told by Kownacki that Poles had taught them how to use forks. British intelligence concluded that Poland was not a reliable partner.

Macierewicz had maintained some American connections, but these too led back to Russia. In 2010, when Macierewicz sought counsel on how to react to the Smolensk tragedy, he traveled to the United States. His contact in the American House of Representatives was Dana Rohrabacher, an American legislator who distinguished himself with his support of Vladimir Putin and Russian foreign policy. In 2012, the FBI warned Rohrabacher that he was regarded by Russian spies as a source. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican majority leader of the House of Representatives, later named Rohrabacher (along with Donald Trump) as the Republican politician most likely to be in the pay of Russia. In 2015, after Macierewicz became minister of defense, Rohrabacher traveled to Warsaw to meet him. In 2016, Rohrabacher went to Moscow to collect documents that Moscow believed would help the Trump campaign. Interestingly, Macierewicz took the trouble to defend Donald Trump from the charge that his campaign was connected to Russia.

Macierewicz did not deny the facts that connected him to Moscow. Instead he treated factuality as the enemy. When a journalist published a book detailing his Russian links in 2017, Macierewicz did not dispute its claims, nor sue the journalist in a civil court where he would have had to produce evidence. Instead, he claimed that investigative journalism constituted a physical attack on a government minister, and initiated proceedings to try the journalist for terrorism before a military tribunal. He was replaced as minister of defense in January 2018. By that time, the European Union (specifically, its executive body, the European Commission) was proposing to sanction Poland for violating basic principles of the rule of law.

—

There is nothing inherently Russian about political fiction. Ilyin and Surkov arrived at their conclusion because of their experiences in, and aspirations for, Russia. Other societies can yield to the same form of politics, after a shock and a scandal, as in Poland, or as a result of inequality and Russian intervention, as in Great Britain and the United States. In his study of Russian media and society, published in 2014, Peter Pomerantsev concluded with the reflection that “here is going to be there,” the West is going to be like Russia. It was Russian policy to accelerate this process.

If leaders were unable to reform Russia, reform had to seem impossible. If Russians believed that all leaders and all media lied, then they would learn to dismiss Western models for themselves. If the citizens of Europe and the United States joined in the general distrust of one another and their institutions, then Europe and America could be expected to disintegrate. Journalists cannot function amidst total skepticism; civil societies wane when citizens cannot count on one another; the rule of law depends upon the beliefs that people will follow law without its being enforced and that enforcement when it comes will be impartial. The very idea of impartiality assumes that there are truths that can be understood regardless of perspective.

Russian propaganda was transmitted by protégés on the European far Right who shared Russia’s interest in the demolition of European institutions. The idea, for example, that the Russian war on Sodom (and the associated Russian invasion of Ukraine) was a “new cold war,” or a “Cold War 2.0,” was formulated by the Izborsk Club. It was a helpful notion in Russia, since it stylized gay bashing (and then the invasion of a helpless neighbor while gay bashing) as a grand confrontation with a global superpower over the shape of civilization. This trope of “a new cold war” was spread by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, who used it on RT beginning in 2011 and during her July 2013 visit to Moscow. The leading American white supremacist, Richard Spencer, used the same term at the same time when interviewed by RT.

The European and American far Right also spread the official Russian claim that Ukrainian protests on the Maidan were the work of the West. The Polish fascist Mateusz Piskorski claimed that Ukrainian protests were the work of “the US embassy.” Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s Freiheitliche party, blamed western security services. Márton Gyöngyös of the Hungarian Jobbik party, whom the Russian press itself had classified as an antisemite and a neo-Nazi in the years before antisemites and neo-Nazis became RT commentators, said that the Maidan protests were arranged by American diplomats. Manuel Ochsenreiter, a German neo-Nazi, spoke of the Ukrainian revolution as “imposed by the West.” None of these people produced evidence.

Russian conspiratorial ideas, spread by the European far Right, found traction in some corners of the American Right. The pronouncements of former Republican congressman Ron Paul, who ran for president in 2008 and 2012, were particularly interesting. Paul, who described himself as a libertarian, had mounted powerful critiques of American wars abroad. Now he defended a Russian war abroad. Paul cited Sergei Glazyev with approval—although Glazyev’s fascist politics and neocommunist economics contradicted Paul’s libertarianism, and Glazyev’s warmongering contradicted Paul’s isolationism. Paul endorsed the Eurasia project, which was again unexpected, given that its philosophical sources were fascist and its economics involved state planning. Paul, echoing a host of European fascists, claimed that “the U.S. government pulled off a coup” in Ukraine. Like them, he provided no evidence. Instead he cited propaganda from RT.

It was less surprising that Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of an American crypto-Nazi organization, followed Glazyev’s line. LaRouche and Glazyev had been in collaboration for two decades around the idea of an international (Jewish) oligarchy, a genocide of Russians by (Jewish) liberals, and the desirability of Eurasia. In LaRouche’s view, Ukraine was an artificial construction created by Jews to block Eurasia. Like Glazyev and other Russian fascists, LaRouche deployed familiar symbols of the Holocaust to define Jews as the perpetrators and others as the victims. On June 27, 2014, LaRouche published an article by Glazyev, claiming that the Ukrainian government was a Nazi junta installed by the United States.

Stephen Cohen borrowed Russian media terms of abuse at the same time, on June 30, 2014. Like LaRouche, Cohen endorsed the Russian propaganda claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified by Ukrainian genocide. The notion that Ukraine was perpetrating genocide was translated into English by RT, and then spread by certain people on the American far Right and the American far Left. This propaganda effort exploited images associated with the Holocaust. These could be used by LaRouche to present Russians to American antisemites as the victims of Jews, or by Cohen to suggest to the American Left and American Jews that Russian victimhood in 2014 was like Jewish victimhood in 1941. Either way, the result was not only to falsify events in Ukraine but also to trivialize the Holocaust.

Writing in The Nation, Cohen claimed that the Ukrainian prime minister had spoken of adversaries as “subhuman,” which he proposed as evidence of the Nazi convictions and behavior of the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian prime minister had in fact written a statement of condolence to the Ukrainian families of soldiers killed in action, in which he used the word “inhuman” (neliudy) to describe the attackers. Russian media then mistranslated the Ukrainian word into Russian as “subhuman” (nedocheloveki), and RT used the word “subhuman” in English-language broadcasts. Cohen served as the final link in the chain, bringing the slander into American media. In one RT account, the mistranslation had been broadcast along with a series of other untruths and accompanied by graphic images of mass murder in Rwanda. The RT segment violated broadcasting standards in the United Kingdom, and was pulled from the internet. Readers looking for the false “subhuman” claim could still turn to The Nation.

When Russia shot down MH17 in July 2014, Cohen said: “We’ve had these shootdowns. We had them in the cold war.” The killing of civilians was dismissed by a vague reference to the past. A Russian weapon with a Russian crew during a Russian invasion of Ukraine shot down a civilian airliner and killed 298 people. A state transferred soldiers and weapons; an officer gave an order to fire; pilots were killed in a cockpit as shrapnel ripped through their bodies; a plane was ripped apart ten kilometers above the earth; children, women, and men died in sudden terror, their body parts scattered over the countryside. On July 18, 2014, the day that Cohen said this, Russian television was broadcasting its multiple versions of the event. Rather than explaining to Americans what reporters knew—that multiple Ukrainian aircraft had been shot down by Russian weapons in the same place in prior weeks, and that the Russian GRU officer Igor Girkin had claimed credit for shooting down the aircraft that turned out to be MH17—Cohen changed the subject to the “cold war.”

This idea that Russia’s anti-gay policies and its invasion of Ukraine were a “new cold war” was a meme spread within Russia by the fascists of the Izborsk Club and then by right-wing politicians on RT: Marine Le Pen, beginning in 2011, and Richard Spencer, beginning in 2013. The term became a mainstay in the pages of The Nation in 2014, thanks to articles by Cohen and the journal’s publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel.

On July 24, 2014, vanden Heuvel claimed on television that Moscow was “calling for a cease fire” in a “civil war.” In speaking in this way, she was separating Russia from a conflict in which it was the aggressor. At that moment, the prime ministers of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Lugansk People’s Republic” were not Ukrainians but Russian citizens brought in by Russian forces, political technologists with no connection to Ukraine. In their public relations capacity, they were promoting the very “civil war” concept that vanden Heuvel was helping to spread. At the time of her television appearance, the Russian citizen in charge of security was Vladimir Antyufeyev, who characterized the conflict as a war against the international Masonic conspiracy and foretold the destruction of the United States.

Vanden Heuvel was speaking one week after MH17 had been shot down by a Russian weapons system, during a summer in which Russian transfers of weapons across the border were widely reported. She was speaking of a “civil war” during a massive Russian artillery barrage from Russian territory. A Russian journalist at the launch site had reported that “Russia is shelling Ukraine from its own territory” and wrote of “the military aggression of Russia against Ukraine.” As vanden Heuvel was speaking, thousands of Russian soldiers from units based all over the Russian Federation were massing at the Russian-Ukrainian border. These elementary realities of the Russian war on Ukraine, known at the time thanks to the work of Russian and Ukrainian reporters, were submerged by The Nation in propaganda tropes.

Important writers of the British Left repeated the same Russian talking points. In The Guardian, John Pilger wrote in May 2014 that Putin “was the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism.” This was an unwise conclusion to draw from current events. Just a few days earlier, neo-Nazis had marched on the streets of Moscow without meeting condemnation from their president. A few weeks earlier, on Russian state television, a Russian anchor had claimed that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves; and her interlocutor, Alexander Prokhanov, had agreed. Putin’s government paid the anchorwoman, and Putin himself made media appearances with Prokhanov (who also took a joyride in a Russian bomber, a rather clear expression of official support). These people were not condemned. Russia at the time was assembling the European far Right—as electoral “observers,” as soldiers in the field, and as propagators of its messages. Moscow had organized meetings of European fascists and was subsidizing France’s far Right party, the Front National.

How were opinion leaders of the Left seduced by Vladimir Putin, the global leader of the extreme Right? Russia generated tropes targeted at what cyberwar professionals call “susceptibilities”: what people seem likely to believe given their utterances and behavior. It was possible to claim that Ukraine was a Jewish construction (for one audience) and also that Ukraine was a fascist construction (for another audience). People on the Left were drawn in by stimuli on social media that spoke to their own commitments. Pilger wrote his article under the influence of a text he found on the internet, purportedly written by a physician, detailing supposed Ukrainian atrocities in Odessa—but the doctor did not exist and the event did not take place. The Guardian’s correction noted only that Pilger’s source, a fake social media page, had “subsequently been removed”: far gentler, that, than to say that the most-read article about Ukraine in that newspaper in 2014 was a translation of Russian political fiction into English.

Guardian associate editor Seumas Milne opined in January 2014 that “far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests” in Ukraine. This corresponded not to The Guardian’s reporting from Ukraine but to the Russian propaganda line. Milne dismissed from the record the labors of about a million Ukrainian citizens to turn the rule of law against oligarchy: an odd turn for a newspaper with a left-wing tradition. Even after Putin had admitted that Russian forces were in Ukraine, Milne was claiming that “the little green men” were mostly Ukrainian. At Putin’s presidential summit on foreign policy at Valdai in 2013, the Russian president had claimed that Russia and Ukraine were “one people.” Milne chaired a session of the 2014 summit, at Putin’s invitation.

None of these people—Milne, Pilger, Cohen, vanden Heuvel, LaRouche, Paul—provided a single interpretation that was not available on RT. In some cases, as with Paul and LaRouche, the debt to Russian propaganda was acknowledged. Even those whose work was published adjacent to actual reporting, in The Nation or in The Guardian, ignored the investigations of actual Russian and Ukrainian reporters. None of these influential American and British writers visited Ukraine, which would have been the normal journalistic practice. Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality; in so doing, they submerged their own countries and themselves.

Enormous amounts of time were wasted in Britain, the United States, and Europe in 2014 and 2015 on discussions about whether Ukraine existed and whether Russia had invaded it. That triumph of informational warfare was instructive for Russian leaders. In the invasion of Ukraine, the main Russian victories were in the minds of Europeans and Americans, not on the battlefields. Far-Right politicians spread Russia’s messages, and left-wing journalists helped to bring them to the center. One of the left-wing journalists then entered the corridors of power. In October 2015, Seumas Milne, having chaired Putin’s Valdai summit, became chief of communications for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. With Milne as his chief press officer, Corbyn proved a poor advocate for EU membership. British voters chose to leave, and Moscow celebrated.

In July 2016, not long after the Brexit referendum, Donald Trump said, “Putin is not going into Ukraine, you can mark it down.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun more than two years before, in February 2014, right after snipers murdered Ukrainians on the Maidan. It was thanks to that very set of events that Trump had a campaign manager. Yanukovych fled to Russia, but his advisor Paul Manafort kept working for a pro-Russian party in Ukraine through the end of 2015. Manafort’s new employer, the Opposition Bloc, was precisely the part of the Ukrainian political system that wanted to do business with Russia while Russia was invading Ukraine. This was the perfect transition to Manafort’s next job. In 2016, he moved to New York and took over the management of Trump’s campaign. In 2014, Trump had known that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Under Manafort’s tutelage, Trump proclaimed Russian innocence.

Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul were taking the same line at the time: Russia had done nothing wrong, and Europeans and Americans were to blame for the Russian invasion, which perhaps had happened and perhaps had not. Writing in The Nation in the summer and autumn of 2016, Cohen defended Trump and Manafort, and dreamed that Trump and Putin would one day come together and remake the world order. The mendacity and the fascism of the Russian assault upon the European Union and the United States, of which the Trump campaign was a part, was a natural story for the Left. However, few on the Left took Trump and his own political fiction seriously in 2016. Perhaps this was because writers they trusted were not analysts of, but rather participants in, the Russian campaign to undermine factuality. In any event, Ukraine was the warning that went unheeded.

When a presidential candidate from a fictional world appeared in the United States, Ukrainians and Russians noted the familiar patterns, but few on the American Right or the American Left listened. When Moscow brought to bear in the United States the same techniques used in Ukraine, few on the American Right or the American Left noticed. And so the United States was defeated, Trump was elected, the Republican Party was blinded, and the Democratic Party was shocked. Russians supplied the political fiction, but Americans were asking for it.

^* The older idea of plausible deniability, constructed by Americans in the 1980s, was to make claims in an imprecise way that allowed an escape from accusations of racism. This strategy was memorably formulated by the strategist Lee Atwater: “You start out at 1954, by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘Nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” If someone who spoke like this was accused of racism, he could plausibly say that he was not speaking about blacks.