Peter Pomerantsev on Kremlin Information Warfare

"Putin's message is that he does whatever the hell he wants"

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which won the 2020 Gordon Burn Prize.

Peter Pomerantsev. Credit: Milan Jaros. .

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (RBG): You don't use the word propaganda. How should we talk about today's information warfare in a way that lets the public understand the scope and severity of the assault on truth?

Peter Pomerantsev (PP): I think generally we live in a time where a lot of the words that we thought meant something, like lefts and rights in politics, have sort of lost their meaning. We have to just get back to what precisely is being done and whether we have a problem with it. I don't think these abstract words help very much. Take the word "meddled," as in Russia meddled in the U S elections. Now I know why people use that word, but what does it mean?

RBG: Precision and not being lazy about words we use is important. I've been really struck by the visuals that I see on Russian state news, and how they've been depicting American President Joe Biden as a kind of grotesque monster juxtaposed with a statesmanlike Russian President Vladimir Putin. It's like they are repurposing the Cold War propaganda repertoire. I'm curious how you see the portrayal of America in Russia state media, also in view of the Biden-Putin summit.

PP: Of course, it's an old tradition to see America as evil, and nowadays it's also part of conspiratorial thinking which has replaced ideology in Russia. During the Donald Trump years, it was that Trump would like to make peace with us, but the "deep state" has sort of got him. At the end of the day, though, Russians are westward looking and they do aspire to Europe and America, which doesn't mean that they don't see Americans as enemies politically. But many Russians really like America and like the American lifestyle, music and marquee universities. So it's more complicated than just "America is the great Satan," it's a bit more schizophrenic.

RBG: What do you expect from the summit? Some people don't think it should be happening at all, and of course, Putin made a new provocation to mark the occasion, banning Alexei Navalny's organization.

PP: Well, an interesting way to look at it might be the narrativizing on both sides. I assume that the Americans are going to be very tough and say, here are our red lines, don't cross them. And then Putin will try and do just that. So, I wonder, what's the bigger story that we're trying to tell? China is the main obsession, but Russia is very important in terms of showing whether this [Biden] administration is serious about revitalizing democracy. There's a lot happening right now. Radio Free Europe is being thrown out of Russia, and the U.S. Embassy staff in Moscow has been cut to like 30 people. Russia is kicking anybody it feels like kicking.

And the Russians do see the world in terms of narratives, largely because their economic power is so weak so that they have to be very focused on narratives and information. And Putin's message is that he does whatever the hell he wants, I can invade Ukraine, get my meeting and get my Nord Stream 2 pipeline too. His great argument is that there's no one who can stand up to him. That's his argument at home. That's his narrative. And, you know, I don't really see anything that's questioning his narrative. We'll see how the new anti-corruption weapons are wielded, but we've been talking about corruption a long time, and the Russians are aware that the Americans are going to start using such tools and have likely prepared for that.

RBG: What do you say to readers who have lost family members to disinformation and conspiracy theories?

PP: I get asked that a lot, most recently at the LSE from Indian students whose parents have all become Modi supporters. I think we haven't thought enough about the cost to families and relationships. You have to talk about things you have in common and also take on specific things rather than dismissing the whole. Our research has found that it's often very nuanced. Let's take Soviet nostalgia. People can be very nostalgic about the Soviet Union. So, if you attack it in general, they will say it was great. But if you say specifically, what do you think about the Soviet response to Chernobyl? They're like, oh, it's terrible. Or, what do you think about people getting arrested for reading Solzhenitsyn? Oh, that's awful.

People build themselves identities out of these things -- it's not really about knowledge. And so, if you just start to attack them at the level of identity, I think that's hard. People reject that. But I think just being really specific and building up the evidence about a specific thing, keeping it very concrete. But that might be too exhausting! So maybe we just change the subject and talk about the weather and that's just the easiest thing to do.