August 16, 2019

“Fake news” part of Moscow’s modus operandi since 1923

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Vladimir Putin’s regime is often presented as a pioneer in the production and use of “fake news,” but, in fact, historical writer Nikolay Syromyatnikov says, “fake news” under various names has been part of Moscow’s modus operandi since January 1923 – a tactic that Soviet leaders from beginning to end viewed as critical to their success.

On January 11, 1923, 13 days after the formation of the USSR, Iosif Unslikh, the deputy head of the NKVD, asked the Politburo to authorize the creation of a bureau of disinformation in the State Political Administration of his commissariat. The Politburo agreed and that agency was set up (russian7.ru/post/feyk-novosti-v-sssr-zachem-nkvd-sozda/).

Mr. Syromyatnikov draws heavily on two sources, Yevgeny Zhirnov’s detailed history, “80 Let Sovietskoy Sluzhbe Dezinfor­matsiyi” (80 Years of the Soviet Disinfor­mation Service, Kommersant, January 13, 2003, available at kommersant.ru/doc/358500) and Leonid Shebarshin’s memoirs, “The Last Battle of the KGB” (in Russian, Moscow, 2013.”

In its decision, the Politburo directed the new institution not only to collect information that might interest foreign intelligence services and clarify the extent to which those services were informed about Soviet secrets, but also to disseminate plausible but fake information to mislead them and their governments.

Such misleading stories were to be distributed about the domestic situation in Russia, the state of its military, as well as the work of the government and its various commissariats. In the case of especially important disinformation materials, the Politburo decree specified, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was to make decisions.

Many of the first such efforts were directed at discrediting the Russian emigration and its leadership, including Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich who aspired to be recognized as tsar, and Vasily Shulgin, an important nationalist leader whose reputation was destroyed after he was led by the nose through Soviet Russia and wrote about it, only to be exposed.

The Soviet Union’s “fake news” efforts continued in the 1930s with publications of books by Western journalists like Henri Barbusse, who celebrated the USSR, and during World War II with an active radio program directed against German forces. In the early 1950s, Moscow spread fake stories about a supposed American “bacteriological war” in Korea.

According to Mr. Syromyatnikov, “Western left-wing media willingly swallowed and distributed this ‘fake news.’ Soviet ‘colleagues’ simply sent the needed Western scholars the stories and sufficient money, and the latter didn’t reject anything.”

Former KGB officer Leonid Shebarshin in his memoirs says that “in the late Soviet period, it wasn’t all that hard to find in the West a print journalist who would for money agree to write a pro-Soviet article.” And once one did, others would pick up on it, not recognizing the source of the original story.

Indeed, according to Mr. Shebarshin, “the Gorby phenomenon” (a reference to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev) was created in the West largely thanks to this method. The problem with all such claims, of course, is to know whether they are factual or whether they too are part of the fake news that Moscow has used with such success.

 

Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).

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