Russia’s new master in Beijing
On June 10, the New York Times published a front-page article detailing how the Russian security and intelligence elite are getting extremely uneasy about President Putin’s growing “no-limits” partnership with China.
The full-page Times article, which is based on a leaked document from the top Russian counterintelligence agency, the FSB, goes into great detail about how China has created a widespread spying network in Russia and is extensively recruiting Russian scientists to report back to their Chinese handlers. The FSB, Russia’s “spooks,” refers to China as “the enemy.”
Russia has a centuries-long historical memory of menace from the East. For over two centuries, the Mongols and Tatars ruled Russia. This degrading historic memory of invasion, defeat, and occupation lingers in the Russian mind and was commemorated in a scene from the classic Russian film, “Alexander Nevsky” by Sergei Eisenstein.
Is Russia a European or an Asian society?
The Russians are much more “Western” than they often like to admit.
The Russian Orthodox religion emerged from Byzantine Christianity. Its founding saints, Cyril and Methodius, were Greek. Their Slavic language is Western, not Asian. Their science, literature, music, art, architecture, and dance are firmly in the Western mode. Peter the Great modernized Russia by looking to the West, not to the East. Russia’s contemporary elites prefer to shop and vacation in the West. The Russian establishment doesn’t send its children to schools in China. They much prefer the United States and Europe. Russia’s major cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, are over 3,600 miles from Beijing, but only 800 miles from Warsaw. Moscow is only one time zone away from Berlin, but five time zones from Beijing.
In short, Russia and China are not a good fit, historically, geographically, culturally, or spiritually. This is not a marriage, much less a warm partnership, which is destined to last.
What can the West do?
But what should the United States and our EU/NATO partners do to undercut the Moscow/Beijing Axis? How can our legislative and executive leaders pry these two despotic powers apart and significantly weaken their ill-conceived liaison?
A critical Western goal to undermine Putin’s brutal dictatorship must be to chip away at its legitimacy at home. Emphasizing Moscow’s almost servile relationship with China, the United States, and the EU should play on the fear of both average Russians and the Russian elites.
We should strive to instill a sense of fear that Russia, the junior partner, is slowly being absorbed into a distant and foreign civilization and economy: China.
We should relentlessly accuse the Putin-led kleptocracy of selling out Russia’s culture and heritage, its soul, to its eventual Chinese masters.
Action
Starting immediately, the United States and our EU/NATO allies should launch a broadly based propaganda war against Putin and his Russian cronies.
We’ve done it before
The United States has a decades-long propaganda experience in planting ideas and materials in Eastern Europe and Russia to undercut the old Soviet establishment. Now the target is the corrupt Putin establishment. America needs to screen volumes of internal Russian military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents that demonstrate the risks of closer ties to Beijing. We also must comb through popular and social media to find messages that will delegitimate the Moscow-Beijing alliance. Then we must plant these subversive ideas in the Russian heartland.
The Instruments
We need a creative and believable amalgam of stories, ideas, factoids, quotes, pictures, observations, puns, doggerel, shanties, statistics, jokes, satire, graphs, cartoons, photos, caricatures, limericks, rhymes, and anagrams that all play on the same theme. Russia is being consumed by China. The American/EU propaganda effort should enlist the help of Russia’s Slavic neighbors, like Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Poland, who know it well and can provide insights into Russian thinking and anxieties. We should sponsor contests where creative types suggest new and imaginative ways to portray China as the apex predator and Russia as prey.
The new propaganda campaign against Russia must also use the latest advances in AI to overwhelm Russian countermeasures. Placing subversive jokes and comments into the mouths of lookalike Russian celebrities, journalists, musicians, athletes, and politicians would enhance the value of misinformation. It would also create a viral word-of-mouth onslaught on Putin’s misadventure.
Who can do the job today?
For decades, during the Cold War, America operated a sophisticated propaganda war against expansionist Soviet Communism. We supported an alphabet soup of agencies that worked to undermine Soviet legitimacy at home and in the captured nations of Eastern Europe. We won the Cold War, and we can repeat this success story.
However, it’s unclear whether the United States government still has the proper tools to undertake a new, decades-long mission to convince Russian elites and the general public that Russia’s future lies with its Western neighbors. The United States Information Agency (USIA) might have taken on this role in years past. However, the USIA has been rolled up into the stifling bureaucracy known as the Department of State and is now its largely ineffective appendage.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might be an appropriate home for a new propaganda agency with a focus on Russia. The CIA still has many experts who are familiar with Russian history and the thinking of current Russian elites. The CIA could create open-source and anonymous multimedia materials that would be consumed by the general Russian population as well as Russian elites. An alternative to the CIA might be a new, highly specialized agency under the control of the Director of National Intelligence or a new private company specializing in deceptive marketing.
The time to start is now.
James S. Fay is a California attorney, political scientist, and semi-retired college administrator. His articles have appeared in social science and law journals, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and RealClearDefense. He served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Germany.