By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova, Echo of Siberia Blog, 3/8/23

The one-year anniversary is behind us and the “fog of war” has maxed out. People can’t even agree who the combatants are. Is this a war between Ukraine and Russia, Russia vs. the US/”collective West”, Russia vs. NATO, the old “rules based international order” vs. multipolar world, economic hegemony vs. globalized economy, good vs. evil, proxy war, “unprovoked” aggression by an imperial madman, regime change operation…?

Things are quiet, considering the enormity of events, how much the world has changed since a year ago. In the Siberian communities where I live (an Altai Village and scientific suburb of Novosibirsk), the war remains a part of everyone’s life, every day.

Instead of sanctions, news exchange involves battlefield stories from family or friends serving as career military, volunteers, mobilized, or prisoners offered early release for 6 months of service. The reports describing near death experiences and the camaraderie are similar to what you hear from all sides in all wars.

· Some people left the country to protect a son from the draft, others to avoid mobilization or protest against the politics in Russia. Some have returned.

· Some anti-war people who stayed express their anguish on social networks. Some who left post vacation like pictures in their new locales.

· There are still occasional Z’s and V’s on cars, t-shirts, and buildings. Billboards honoring lost soldiers have appeared along the highway and murals have been painted on an apartment building and school. There is talk of honoring some by renaming streets in Novosibirsk.

· People share videos on our Village chat and social networks. A recent one featured the Governor bringing donated goods to the men serving in the Donbass. Another portrayed life for the Altai troops on the frontlines with throat singing in the background.

· Not once have I been harassed or challenged in any way because I am American.

On the American front, I am estranged from a couple of people, I have been accused of being the equivalent of a diarist in Dresden 1942, and told that it was for the best that my high school would not accept the Sputnik vaccine at my reunion because America would not be a comfortable environment for me now. I am not complaining, I offer these examples as a statement of fact and wonder.

The majority of my friends in the US have learned how to navigate the complexities of maintaining a relationship with someone who lives in a place they have been told is uniquely evil. Lifelong seekers they follow the news and some of them check in to see if I am OK and ask questions. In the beginning it was, “tell me what I don’t know”, now the questions are more specific. Most recently, wanting to know if it is true college kids are being conscripted (it isn’t), about the economy because “Lots of people in the US think the economy is in chaos, people starving, etc. “ (not starving, no chaos), and confirmation that more Ukrainian refugees fled to Russia than any other country, “this…confounds the conventional wisdom” (Yes, 1,300,000 more than second place Poland). Most notes begin or end with “thinking if you” and that means a lot.

Meanwhile, the State Department issued a travel advisory upgrade, “U.S. citizens residing or traveling in Russia should depart immediately.” I contacted an American friend in Moscow to ask if something changed there, “no”. For 30 years I have experienced the dissonance between life in Russia and how it is portrayed in the US. In the 90’s, the gap was filtered through the rose-colored glasses of a love affair.

Then, never has a country gone from “in” to “out” faster than Russia did on September 11, 2001. Overnight, Russia “experts” in the form of pundits, talking heads, journalists, and academics became irrelevant, vanishing from the airwaves and front pages of newspapers in pre-social media America. The largest country on earth no longer mattered. Russian language disappeared from University course catalogues along with scholarships and travel funding for students interested in studying Russia.

The media, academia, and US government were always Moscow-centric. But, since the beginning of the century the lens has progressively narrowed as the voices of human rights and opposition activists and liberal media were increasingly amplified in America. At the 2006 Civil Society leaders meeting with President Bush, 13 of the 15 participants were Moscow human rights organizations. Still, efforts were made to get a first hand understanding of what was happening at a grassroots level in the regions. My community and NGO development Foundation organized regular visits to Siberia for Moscow USAID staff and US Ambassadors who attended events and met with government, business, and NGO representatives. I was occasionally invited to Moscow to debrief USAID on the status of civil society in Siberia.

The 2009 “Reset” ended almost all of that regional outreach and input and the American perception of civil society in Russia became increasingly grim. Words like “crushed” appeared in contrast to what we were experiencing which was more and more people becoming active and sources of indigenous funding for NGOs continuing to grow. When community development activist Obama spoke at the US sponsored Civil Society leader’s summit there were only 5 community development representatives and 31 human rights and liberal media participants. 79 of the 91 Russian participants were from Moscow where 7% of the population live.

This was frustrating but I didn’t consider it dangerous until 2011 when Putin threw his newly smooth face into the Presidential election ring and street protests mobilized in Moscow. Russia was BACK only this time like Jack Nicholson in the Shining. One of the “Reset” leaders wrote an op-ed saying that Putin had never done anything positive for civil society. I contacted him to ask why he didn’t think Law #131 “On Local Self-Governance”, that mandated citizen input on issues of local significance, was not a step forward. He had never heard of it. The narrative was set, Russia, the disappointing problem child. Who lost Russia became the refrain, as if it was ever America’s to lose. And in 2012, USAID lost it’s authority to operate in Russia.

Levada Center’s March 2012 survey registered 68% support for Putin. That number did not impress Moscow based journalist Masha Gessen. During an interview with Charlie Rose, she described the most likely and best case scenario for Russia as, “the protest movement continues, there’s a large scale protest, Putin orders the use of force, decisive use of force, not what has been done the last couple of days and the interior troops do not obey the order. At this point he feels that he has no recourse, he has to negotiate for an exit, he has to negotiate for immunity from prosecution. That is when we get a transitional government that would essentially be technocratic for a year or two, rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed under Putin and hold new elections.” Rose follows up with, “How long will it take for Putin to be out?” Her response, “I think it is a matter of months, maybe a year or two.”

This type of anti-Putin frenzy was quaint compared to what happened when Trump arrived and Russiagate was launched. Escalating propaganda and sheer madness (both meanings of the word) characterized the post-Trump election media environment. During a 2017 visit to America, MSNBC blared from enormous flat screened TVs in homes of friends where I never noticed a TV before.

This situation left people who actually knew something about Russia unable to respond adequately when given the rare chance. Commenting on a Time Magazine cover with the blood red of St. Basil’s Cathedral drenching the White House “Carrie” style, real experts were reduced to, “and they are calling them domes when they are, of course, minarets”, anything to elevate the dialogue. Only in this case, the whole concept was stolen from Mad Magazine and the genuine merging of American satire, foreign policy, and news had occurred.

In 2018 things grew even more ominous when my Russian husband and I went to dinner at a friend’s fiancé’s family in Maine. An American, he was our neighbor for years in Altai before returning to the US. The next morning, he told us the liberal matriarch said we were not welcomed back. He apologized saying, “ she gets her new from Rachel Maddow”. My teenage daughter asked me, “why are the Russians in American TV shows and movies always bad people?”

Distorting the reality in Russia to make it seem worse than it is has brought blowback to the very forces it was meant to support. It also set a precedent where the more complex truth became irrelevant and/or a victim in order to achieve an “end” that was often disconnected from the quality of life issues the majority of people consider a priority.

Flash forward to today and regardless of who you believe is fighting or for what noble cause, it is bringing us to the brink of WW III. I assumed there was a uniqueness to this insanity until I came across a letter from my Cousin Rennie who was a Marine in the early days of Vietnam (1966). He was responding to a question a former Soviet soldier who served in Vietnam asked me on a train to Krasnoyarsk in December 1999, what was it like from the American perspective? Rennie’s reply, “Marines hate doing combat landings next to sailors getting suntans. What kind of a war was this anyhow? …Nobody knew…. Then I realized what kind of a war it was. Nobody knew what kind of a war it was — that was the kind of war it was. There were no turning points., everything was a turning point. Who could tell?”.

Almost 50 years later and it’s deja vous all over again right down to the M113 armed personnel carriers and rumblings of a domino theory. I fear my life has its bookends.

RT.com, 4/4/23

The main suspect in the murder of prominent Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, Darya Trepova, has confessed to investigators details of her involvement in the incident, according to the news outlet Fontanka.

Tatarsky was killed in an explosion on Sunday at a cafe in St. Petersburg, after Trepova handed him a gift, a statuette, that contained an improvised explosive device (IED). The bombing, which also wounded 40 people, has been classified as a terrorist attack.

According to Fontanka, Trepova claims that it all started when she made friends with a certain activist online and was offered to move to Kiev to take up an editorial position at an unnamed media channel. Before she could be hired, however, she was told that she had to undergo an internship to “prove that she knows how to deal with Russian propaganda.”

Her first task was to go to the Listva bookstore in St. Petersburg and strike up a friendship with Tatarsky, who was holding an event there. Afterwards, she was reportedly told via Telegram that she had to travel to Moscow. There, a taxi driver, who was likely unaware of what he was doing, gave Trepova a package that contained a golden figurine.

Upon receiving the package, Trepova was instructed to go back to St. Petersburg to meet with Tatarsky at the Street Bar 1 café, where he was holding another event for his followers. She was allegedly told to give the figurine to Tatarsky as a gift, and “come up with something about the heroes of the Wagner PMC,” according to Fontanka.

“Then, we will act,” Trepova was reportedly told by her handlers, who said they had booked her a flight to Uzbekistan, where she would be transported to Kiev. Trepova reported her every move to her contact, sending messages such as “I’m arriving at the cafe,” “I’m about to present the figurine to Tatarsky,” and “I’ve handed it over.”

Trepova reportedly insists that she did not know the figurine contained a bomb and has repeatedly claimed that she was set up. Fontanka says her arguments seem plausible since she did not leave the building after handing over the statuette, and did not hesitate to sit next to it when Tatarsky invited her to join him on stage not long before it detonated.

Fontanka reports that explosives experts are now examining the blast site to confirm that the bomb was activated via SIM card, which would have made it possible to detonate it from anywhere in the world.

By Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 3/12/23

A peer-reviewed paper initially approved and praised by a prestigious academic journal was suddenly rescinded without explanation. Its author, one of the world’s top scholars on Ukraine-related issues, had marshaled overwhelming evidence to conclude Maidan protesters were killed by pro-coup snipers.

The massacre by snipers of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014 was a defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. The death of 70 protesters triggered an avalanche of international outrage that made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. Yet today these killings remain unsolved.

Enter Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa. For years, he marshaled overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the snipers were not affiliated with Yanukovych’s government, but pro-Maidan operatives firing from protester-occupied buildings.

Though Katchanovski’s groundbreaking work has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media, a scrupulous study he presented on the slaughter in September 2015 and August 2021 and published in 2016 and in 2020 has been cited on over 100 occasions by scholars and experts. As a result of this paper and other pieces of research, he was among the world’s most-referenced political scientists specializing in Ukrainian matters…

Read full article here.

Well, it didn’t take that long for the concerns raised in this previous post to become an actual issue. I can also envision the US national security state using this idea to try to discredit any authentic video evidence that an anti-establishment source or outlet might use. – Natylie

By Sam Biddle, The Intercept, 3/6/23

U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND, responsible for some of the country’s most secretive military endeavors, is gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept.

The plans, which also describe hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda, come at a time of intense global debate over technologically sophisticated “disinformation” campaigns, their effectiveness, and the ethics of their use.

While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.

SOCOM’s next generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists capabilities it’s seeking for the near future and soliciting pitches from outside parties that believe they’re able to build them.

“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”

Meserole added, “If deepfakes are going to be leveraged for targeted military and intelligence operations, then their use needs to be subject to review and oversight.”

The pitch document, first published by SOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology in 2020, established a wish list of next-generation toys for the 21st century special forces commando, a litany of gadgets and futuristic tools that will help the country’s most elite soldiers more effectively hunt and kill their targets using lasers, robots, holographs, and other sophisticated hardware.

Last October, SOCOM quietly released an updated version of its wish list with a new section: “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.

The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”

SOCOM typically fights in the shadows, but its public reputation and global footprint loom large. Comprised of the elite units from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, SOCOM leads the most sensitive military operations of the world’s most lethal nation.

While American special forces are widely known for splashy exploits like the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden, their history is one of secret missions, subterfuge, sabotage, and disruption campaigns. SOCOM’s “next generation” disinformation ambitions are only part of a long, vast history of deception efforts on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatuses.

Special Operations Command, which is accepting proposals on these capabilities through 2025, did not respond to a request for comment.

THOUGH SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.

Provocatively, the updated capability document reveals that SOCOM wants to boost these internet deception efforts with the use of “next generation” deepfake videos, an increasingly effective method of generating lifelike digital video forgeries using machine learning. Special forces would use this faked footage to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” the document adds.

While deepfakes have largely remained fodder for entertainment and pornography, the potential for more dire applications is real. At the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a shoddy deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordering troops to surrender began circulating on social media channels. Ethical considerations aside, the legality of militarized deepfakes in a conflict, which remains an open question, is not addressed in the SOCOM document.

As with foreign governmental “disinformation” campaigns, the U.S. has spent the past several years warning against the potent national security threat represented by deepfakes. The use of deepfakes to deliberately deceive, government authorities warn regularly, could have a deeply destabilizing effect on civilian populations exposed to them.

At the federal level, however, the conversation has revolved exclusively around the menace foreign-made deepfakes might pose to the U.S., not the other way around. Previously reported contracting documents show SOCOM has sought technologies to detect deepfake-augmented internet campaigns, a tactic it now wants to unleash on its own.

Perhaps as provocative as the mention of deepfakes is the section that follows, which notes SOCOM wishes to finely tune its offensive propaganda seemingly by spying on the intended audience through their internet-connected devices.

Described as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” the document says that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.” In 2017, WikiLeaks published pilfered CIA files that revealed a roughly similar capability to hijack into household devices.

The technology behind deepfake videos first arrived in 2017, spurred by a combination of cheap, powerful computer hardware and research breakthroughs in machine learning. Deepfake videos are typically made by feeding images of an individual to a computer and using the resultant computerized analysis to essentially paste a highly lifelike simulacrum of that face onto another.

Once the software has been sufficiently trained, its user can crank out realistic fabricated footage of a target saying or doing virtually anything. The technology’s ease of use and increasing accuracy has prompted fears of an era in which the global public can no longer believe what it sees with its own eyes.

Though major social platforms like Facebook have rules against deepfakes, given the inherently fluid and interconnected nature of the internet, Pentagon-disseminated deepfakes might also risk flowing back to the American homeland.

“If it’s a nontraditional media environment, I could imagine the form of manipulation getting pretty far before getting stopped or rebuked by some sort of local authority,” Max Rizzuto, a deepfakes researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept. “The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”

SOCOM’S INTEREST IN deploying deepfake disinformation campaigns follows recent years of international anxiety about forged videos and digital deception from international adversaries. Though there’s scant evidence Russia’s efforts to digitally sway the 2016 election had any meaningful effect, the Pentagon has expressed an interest in redoubling its digital propaganda capabilities, lest it fall behind, with SOCOM taking on a crucial role.

At an April 2018 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Kenneth Tovo of the Army Special Operations Command assured the assembled senators that American special forces were working to close the propaganda gap.

“We have invested fairly heavily in our psy-op operators,” he said, “developing new capabilities, particularly to deal in the digital space, social media analysis and a variety of different tools that have been fielded by SOCOM that allow us to evaluate the social media space, evaluate the cyber domain, see trend analysis, where opinion is moving, and then how to potentially influence that environment with our own products.”

While military propaganda is as old as war itself, deepfakes have frequently been discussed as a sui generis technological danger, the existence of which poses a civilizational threat.

At a 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing discussing the nomination of William Evanina to run the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said of deepfakes, “I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies.” Evanina, in response, reassured Rubio that the U.S. intelligence community was working to counter the threat of deepfakes.

The Pentagon is also reportedly hard at work countering the foreign deepfake threat. According to a 2018 news report, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s tech research division, has spent tens of millions of dollars developing methods to detect deepfaked imagery. Similar efforts are underway throughout the Department of Defense.

In 2019, Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote 11 American internet companies urging them to draft policies to detect and remove deepfake videos. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images,” read the letter, “it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”

Nestled within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was a directive instructing the Pentagon to complete an “intelligence assessment of the threat posed by foreign government and non-state actors creating or using machine-manipulated media (commonly referred to as ‘deep fakes’),” including “how such media has been used or might be used to conduct information warfare.”

Just a couple years later, American special forces seem to be gearing up to conduct the very same.

“It’s a dangerous technology,” said Rizzuto, the Atlantic Council researcher.

“You can’t moderate this tech the way we approach other sorts of content on the internet,” he said. “Deepfakes as a technology have more in common with conversations around nuclear nonproliferation.”

By Pietro Shakarian, ACURA, 3/21/23

The ongoing war in Ukraine has been framed in multiple ways by multiple commentators of international affairs.  Depending on one’s point of view, it could be characterized as a war between Russia and Ukraine, a proxy war between Russia and NATO, or a proxy war between Russia and a US-backed West.  The latter two perspectives anchor the war in the larger context of the gradual deterioration of US-Russia relations since the high point at the end of the Cold War.  In this framework, most scholars who adhere to this position perceive the expansion of NATO as a key reason for the deterioration and eventual break-down of ties between Moscow and Washington.

Although this position is amply supported by a substantial body of evidence, there are those who question it on the basis of excluding the agency of Ukraine.  By framing the war and its origins entirely within the larger context of US-Russia relations, these individuals contend, “does it not erase or mitigate the independent agency of Ukraine?”  Similarly, those who adhere to this argument contend that Ukraine should be able to join NATO if it so freely chooses.  The argument is applicable beyond Ukraine and, in different contexts, has been applied to various other former Soviet republics – Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc.

The response given to such arguments is usually that, yes, Ukraine (for example) has independent agency, but NATO membership is not, as the historian Stephen F. Cohen used to say, a fraternity or sorority, let alone the American Association of Retired People.  Not anyone can join.  The membership of the country must enhance the security of the other member states, not imperil it.  A similar response, employed by John Mearsheimer, contends that while these countries do have agency, their interests have to take a back seat to the larger aim of averting a cataclysmic nuclear clash between the superpowers.  Such was the case with Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it had to relinquish the Soviet missiles from its island as a necessary part of defusing of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While such arguments are fully valid, an equally compelling response to the agency question, and one that speaks much more directly to the people of the post-Soviet space, is the fact that former Soviet republics like Ukraine are usually compelled into such a difficult geopolitical position by external forces that do not have the interests of the people at heart.  Again, this argument applies beyond Ukraine and, in different contexts, extends variously to Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and other ex-Soviet states.

The external forces in these cases are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based out of numerous Western countries, especially the United States.  This is not to say that all Western-based NGOs exert some sort of nefarious influence in the region.  However, certain NGOs have clearly used (or abused) the goodwill of several post-Soviet governments in order to advance larger geopolitical aims.  These include the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Open Society Foundation, the Eurasia Foundation, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and the International Republic Institute (IRI), among many others.  In the 30-year period since the dissolution of the USSR, such organizations have taken full advantage of the acute socioeconomic conditions that emerged in these countries, with little or no regard for their independent agency, their national histories, or the longstanding economic, cultural, and personal ties that bind them together.

As a result of the loss of jobs, inter-republican economic ties, and the significant disruptions that occurred from haphazard market “reforms,” many citizens of these societies have gravitated toward these NGOs as sources of economic opportunity.  Still others have fallen under the sway of the messaging of these organizations, which have a clear geopolitical imperative – to diminish Russia’s political and cultural presence in the post-Soviet space, with the objective of preventing any sort of restoration of economic, political, or person-to-person connections.  Another, much more sinister aim, made all too painfully evident by the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, is the effort on the part of these NGOs, in collusion with the Washington war party, to use these republics as geopolitical bludgeons against Russia, at the terrible expense of their own citizens.

Equipped with substantial budgets and a savvy understanding of soft power and social media, these same NGOs also know the value of marketing.  If large majorities of Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, and others might have opposed taking an overtly anti-Russian, pro-NATO stance in 1992 or 1998, then these NGOs work constantly to change public opinion, manipulating attitudes and manufacturing consent until the desired results are achieved.  These newfound “desires” for NATO are then represented as being just as natural as the Caucasus mountains or the wheat fields of the Ukrainian steppe.  To deny NATO, the NGOniks declare, would be to deny the long-awaited wish of the narod of the post-Soviet space to join the Western military alliance and purchase expensive military weaponry.

The historical periods of Khrushchev’s Thaw and Gorbachev’s glasnost underscore the indisputable historical fact that the countries of the former Soviet Union have a rich history of endogenous democratization efforts.  Yet, the post-Soviet NGO class represents democratization as only being possible through the “enlightened” influence of the United States and other Western societies.  To allow these countries to find their way to democracy independently is considered an anathema, a rejection of “European values,” and indicative of “democratic backsliding,” to use a very demeaning term all too common in the neocolonial lexicon of post-Soviet NGO-speak.  This line of thinking is horribly Hobbesian, assuming that without the “civilizing influence” of Washington, these “poor people” would revert to a “natural state” of “barbarism” and “Cyrillic autocracy” (as if use of the Latin alphabet indicates “civilization” and “democracy”).

With the discreet charm of used car salesmen, the representatives of these NGOs also extol markets and hyper-individualistic neoliberal values, while ignoring genuine social concerns like poverty and joblessness.  In terms of the historical memory of the Soviet experience, those affiliated with NGOs in former Soviet republics often emphasize the “totalitarian model,” asserting that there were virtually no differences between the various Soviet leaders and their contexts (e.g., that there was “no difference” between Lenin and Stalin, or even Stalin and Gorbachev).

Likewise, the NGO emissaries often represent the October Revolution of 1917 not as a genuine revolution (which it was, as the research of Alexander Rabinowitch and others highlight), but as a “Bolshevik coup.”  In this context, they also often downplay the major Soviet-era achievements of these republics, be they artistic, scientific, or economic. Furthermore, these NGOs emphasize the (incorrect) narrative (adopted as truth by the US foreign policy establishment) that the Washington “won” the Cold War and single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union, the dissolution of which they framed as “inevitable.”  Yet, as former US ambassador Jack Matlock regularly reminds us, this was simply not the case.  However, if one questions these narratives, they are attacked for peddling “Russian disinformation.”

Rather than reflecting the desires of the societies of the post-Soviet space, these Western-based NGOs usually subordinate wishes for genuine independence to the geopolitical objectives of Washington’s war class.  In this respect, they only succeed in acting as disruptors, upsetting the ability of countries like Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia from developing genuinely democratic societies and truly independent agency on the international stage.  The recent controversy in Georgia over the “foreign agent” bill is vividly illustrative of the roles of these NGOs as “disruptors” preventing these countries from achieving actual independence and democracy.  Rather than indicating a “roll-back of democracy” or a “contradiction of European aspirations,” the aim of Tbilisi was to move toward a genuinely independent and transparent democratic society.  After all, there is a reason why the “foreign agent” bill was based on the example of FARA in the United States.

Above all, by forcing the post-Soviet states to make a hard geopolitical “civilizational choice” between Russia and the West, these NGOs are being incredibly unfair to the peoples of these societies.  In this regard, they deny them the true agency and independence that they genuinely desire, barring them from the right to imbibe in the fruits of both sides as independent actors.  Moreover, the professed NGO aspiration of “democratization” has resulted in the opposite intended effect.  Across the former Soviet space today, from Russia to Ukraine, one encounters far more illiberal governments than liberal, democratic ones.  Indeed, the interference of external organizations into the endogenous political development of these states has led to a greater de-democratization throughout the region.

Perhaps most ironically and tragically, the professed zeal for “democratic enlightenment” has also led to a de-democratization of the United States itself.  In the drive to “contain Russia,” the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower once eloquently warned against has now joined forces with corporate interests and a pervasive political culture of righteous conformity to erode the basic liberties upon which the country was founded.  The results bode poorly for America’s image abroad and only succeed in setting a bad example for the rest of the world, including the post-Soviet space.  Even more alarmingly, they also have the potential to bring humanity perilously close to nuclear catastrophe.  If the deafening silence on the journalism of Sy Hersh is any indication of the state of American democracy, then it becomes clear that the chief priority of Washington lawmakers should be fixing democracy at home rather than searching for monsters abroad.

Dr. Pietro A. Shakarian is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research, National Research University–Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. He previously worked as a lecturer in history at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan.