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Michael Doherty is the PRO of the Mica Action Group.
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I was talking to Billy Kelleher in the last podcast about Ukraine, and the west’s reaction, and in particular the attitude of MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace.
Naomi O’Leary started and epic Twitter discussion over Easter about the contrasting attitude of Wallace and Daly to authoritarian regimes and to the west. My attitude to this is pretty simple, it’s that two separate things can be true at the same time. It can be true that the west is responsible for gross human rights abuses, resource extraction, environmental destruction in other parts of the world, it can be possible to condemn that, while still acknowledging that there are totalitarian regimes in different parts of the world that are worthy of being condemned, and that are, in fact, much, much worse. Saying that they are worse doesn’t undermine condemnations of actions by western governments that are bad, just not on the whole as bad. And condemning the abuses by western governments doesn’t undermine criticism of authoritarian governments elsewhere.
Any attempt to calculate a hierarchy of inhumanity leads straight to nonsense.
But what I’m concerned about today, and what cropped up on many of the negative replies to Naomi O’Leary’s article on Twitter was a cohort of people who seem to think that they had some special insight into Vladimir Putin’s inner thoughts, that they were in some way his councillor or therapist, that they could peer into his psyche, and know what really was going on in his poor, troubled soul.
And with this special insight that they magically have, they can tell us what Ukraine could have done that would have avoided the war, or what the west could do now that would end the conflict. If only the west would dot dot dot; if only Ukraine had dot dot dot … a striking number of these comments came from Twitter accounts that had a fake, or no profile picture, no discernible name in the bio or Twitter handle, and a vast amount of Twitter activity for a very new account. These are fairly obviously coming from bot farms, located who-knows-where, and have very recently switched their obsession from sending dozens of tweets per day pushing a hard-line antivax, anti-mask positions to being instant experts on foreign policy, and the motivations of Vladimir Putin in particular.
But this line also comes from what seem to be genuine accounts and genuine people. These are people who, for whatever reason, believe that however bad Putin is, the best way to prevent him from doing harm is to give him what he wants. There is a whole argument about whether that is true – are we in a Chamberlin letting Hitler dismember Czechoslovakia in a vain hope of avoiding war situation, or are we in a Cuba missile crisis situation, where statecraft can avoid a war that is possible but not certain. I’m not going to get into it here.
I’m more interested in what Putin actually wants. Daly and Wallace, just days before the invasion in February said that the massive build-up of Russian troops and military hardware on the border with Ukraine was ‘clearly defensive’. I’m not sure what qualifications they had to make that call, or what evidence they were using beyond wishful thinking, but that claim sure didn’t age well.
Along with this, Wallace and Daly have made a whole series of claims about how innocent and peaceful Putin’s desires are, all he wants is security guarantees, he feels threatened about the expansion of NATO, and so on. It is striking how close these claims are to Russian propaganda aimed at the west.
But are they right?
One thing that I’ve been doing is following the media inside Russia. What is Putin telling Russians? And what is the Russian ruling elite around Putin telling itself?
The first thing to understand is that almost all media consumed within Russia is utterly controlled by the Kremlin. Putin’s Russia was never a great place for freedom of the press, but since he returned to the presidency in 2012, there was a huge change in the level of press freedom. All media that were not already state-owned were acquired by Putin-friendly oligarchs, through a pretty standard procedure. The independent newspaper, TV station or whatever would get an unsolicited buyout offer from a Putin crony, for a ridiculous sum, maybe a tenth of its value. Some owners knew the score and sold up.
Those who didn’t immediately got a huge tax bill, the owners would be arrested for tax fraud, and would either agree to sell to the crony for an even smaller fraction of the value, or go to jail on trumped-up charges and have their companies expropriated and handed over to the crony for free.
The new owners were unfailingly loyal to the Kremlin. Some minor websites held out, and danced around the law, operating increasingly from offices outside Russia, even one TV station, Dozhd, meaning Rain, which was ordered off the air by Putin shortly after he invaded Ukraine. But even before then, their reach was insignificant. It’s not comparing Nuacht TG4 to RTÉ 1 news. It’s comparing some eejit who makes a niche podcast to BBC1 news.
In fact, Dozhd wasn’t ever even on the air, it was a webcast run from a private apartment, so you would have to go to their website with your phone or computer to see it, which is not how most people watch TV. Similarly, there are still some VPNs that allow people to get through to now-banned western social media like Facebook and Twitter.
So it’s true to say that until recently there were some media that didn’t toe the Kremlin line, and that even now it’s just about possible to get alternative non-state controlled news in Russia; it’s just that it’s so niche, so non-mainstream, so technically awkward that it only reaches the tiny minority who are powerfully motivated to seek it out, in other words the people who are set in their views against Putin anyway.
What I’m talking about here are the behemoths of Russian media. In Russia, that means the main half-dozen TV stations that are in every home in every city and every village. The Kremlin doesn’t just censor them, the Kremlin directs every political line that they take. It’s not a case that their news and current affairs are presented by journalists grumpily omitting the news that Putin doesn’t want broadcast.
What is happening is that the editors and presenters are hard-line Putin loyalists; not a few of them are in the elite of a couple of hundred billionaires who Putin has surrounded himself with, and whose wealth is believed to be, in fact, beneficially owned by Putin, despite being in their names, they get a cut in return for helping him launder the many billions that he has stolen.
So at least the most senior of these commentators are not so much censored by Putin as a window into his thinking, or at least the portion of his thinking that he wants promoted to the wider Russian population. So what is he thinking?
Listener, it is terrifying.
Most of his ideas come from a man Aleksander Dugin. Dugin has written a number of books, but by far the most influential was written in the mid 1990s, it’s called Foundations of Geopolitics. In the 1990s Boris Yeltsin was the drunken post-communist president of a Russia was humiliated by the loss of the cold war, economic collapse, and a total failure to compete with the west in culture, politics, technology and soft power.
At that time, Dugin was a member of a fringe neo-fascist group called Pamyat, which roughly translates as Memory. The name is significant; it harks back to a past, somewhat imaginary, when the greatness of Russia was not in question. Like any large, inward-looking culture, Russia has an inflated sense of its own importance in world affairs, both political and cultural.
I cannot overstate the influence of this book. When people say ‘required reading’ that is usually a metaphor meaning that it is important, but in this case this book is literally required reading in the academies that every officer in the Russian military goes through. That includes all the people in the FSB, the successor of the KGB, everyone in the GRU, Russian military intelligence, including the spies caught on CCTV in Salisbury poisoning the Skripals, it includes every one of those enthusiastic TV commentators seen by millions every evening, and of course everyone else who matters in Putin’s elite.
And that means that not only have they read it, they would have been required to write essays on it, give presentations on the importance of this or that chapter of the book, and pass exams proving they understood the text. This book is to the Russian elite what some sort of mixture of Peig Sayers, the 1916 Proclamation, and the rosary was to generations of Irish schoolchildren.
And what does it say? Basically, it is a roadmap to Russian domination of what it calls Eurasia – that is the combined continent of Europe and Asia. It regards what it calls Atlanticism – the close relationship between Western Europe and North America – as the source of all evil, and sets out how to defeat it.
Some of this book, along with Dugin’s other works, are laughable nonsense. It supposedly charts a route of how Russia would defeat China in geopolitical terms – bear in mind that China has about 10 times the population of Russia, and a rapidly growing, technically advancing economy. The Russian economy is stagnant, and hugely overdependent on resource extraction with little or no added value.
But in the plans for Western Europe, you get more engagement with reality. It doesn’t mention Ireland, by the way; it actually doesn’t even mention Britain by name, just contemptuously refers to it as an American aircraft carrier parked off the coast of Europe. Remember that this book was written quarter of a century ago – and its prescription for Britain is that it should be separated from the EU – and you begin to see its relevance.
As to the current conflict, its analysis of Ukraine is savage, here’s a portion translated for Wikipedia. “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represent an enormous danger for all of Eurasia.” The book goes on to make clear that the most urgent project is quote “resolving the Ukrainian problem”.
It’s worth noting here the parallels with an article that appeared on the website of RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency at the start of April. This article explicitly calls for the erasure of the Ukrainian nation. It says that the majority of Ukrainians are nazis, it uses the terms de-Ukrainianisation and de-nazification interchangeably, and says that the elite of Ukrainian society and all members of its military must be liquidated – that is, murdered. It says that the entire Ukrainian cultural heritage must be erased, and that the general population of Ukraine deserve the most severe horrors of war because they allowed a nazi government into power, and those that survive must be subjected to decades of forced re-education.
To be clear, that’s not Dugin, that is an article published on Russian government website this month, and is still there online as of the time of recording.
Dugin, in his book, explicitly says that Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, and his justification for that is essentially the denial not only of the legitimacy of Ukraine as country or a nation, but what he clearly regards as the inferior, sub-human status of Ukrainians in general. It is also notable that statements by both Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov since the invasion have echoed these sentiments almost word-for-word.
In an interview in 2014 around the time Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, Dugin gave an interview, saying of Ukrainians “…what we see is beyond any limits. Kill them, kill them, kill them. There should not be any more conversations.”
I’ll say a bit more about Dugin’s belief system in a moment, but briefly, his book sets out a vision of Europe and Asia where some countries are wiped out like Ukraine, and others are allowed to remain as client-states. Finland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Latvia and Lithuania in the west are all to be taken over by Russia, as are the former central Asian soviet republics of Kazakhstan Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, along with Mongolia.
After that, there’s a lot of ‘giving’ one country to another. Estonia – for some bizarre logic based on ethnic prejudice – is to be given to Germany, which would also get France, and by implication the remaining Mediterranean countries, Iran would be given Azerbaijan, as some sort of gift to make Iran into an ally of Moscow, and Turkey would not be conquered, but kept weak by fuelling ethnic conflicts.
Similarly, Dugin doesn’t seek to conquer the United States, just weaken it by “introducing geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”. Again, the wiki translation there.
And how is this to be done? Dugin sees hot war as a last resort. His primary tool is subversion, destabilisation, and spreading disinformation in the target countries. He advocates the establishment of dedicated special services to run these operations in the West. This book was published 25 years ago remember, and he writes explicitly that the Russian government, at the time on its knees in the post-Soviet chaos, should dedicate huge resources to supporting groups that it has nothing in common with, just to undermine society, to spread disinformation and do everything else it can to destabilise western democracies.
And what sort of government does Dugin envisage? Helpfully, he’s written a book about that too, called The Fourth Political Theory. The first three political theories that refers to are democracy, communism and fascism. To understand why he call his ideology the fourth theory, it helps to understand the enormous cultural and psychological role that fascism, the fight against it, the Second World War, what they still call the Great Patriotic War have in Russia. Think of how big the World War II is in American culture, the role that Hitler and fascism play today as a bogeyman in political discourse, how nazi Germany is used as a shorthand for almost anything negative. Then consider that the US lost about half a million men in combat in World War II. Then consider that the Soviet Union lost 26 million men in combat in World War II, along with uncountable civilians.
However bad the label fascism is in Anglo-American culture, it’s literally 50 times worse in Russian culture. That’s why preposterously labelling the Jewish president of Ukraine, most of whose family were murdered in the holocaust, as a nazi is so important in Russian propaganda, regardless of the cost to their credibility.
Dugin’s ideology advocates intensely chauvinistic and racist policies, it is contemptuous of democracy, of international law regarding the sovereignty of nations, and of any notion of human rights.
He doesn’t have any really coherent economic policy, other than having a strongman leader of Russia, and allowing that strongman to dole out the economic goodies as he sees fit, he is OK with private enterprise but not with free markets, everything must be under the control of the strong leader.
There is only one reason why Dugin distinguishes his ideas from fascism, and that is the taboo nature of fascism in post-war Russian culture. It’s an overused term, but Dugin’s ideas are as fascist as the nazis. Applied to Russia, all of his ideas are fundamentally identical, to Hitler’s, as they applied to Germany.
But Dugin is no rabble-rousing demagogue, he’s a university professor in Moscow. He supplies the ideas, the ideology. The demagoguery is outsourced to his student, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
