Reform of the Kremlin Narrative

An example of this negative hyperbole was evident during a recently televised roundtable meeting on one of Russia's most popular news sites, when Russian military and security experts examined the likely consequences of a US attack on Syria. Their conclusions ranged from the catastrophic to the apocalyptic. One expert asserted that a US attack on Syria would amount to an attack against Russia. According to this speaker's logic, by attacking Syria the US was planning to spread instability throughout the region, to include the volatile North Caucasus region in Russia. An American strategic objective of overall hegemony over Russia was stated as the underlying reason.[2]

While such alarmist sentiments are rarely as explicit in the commentary of Russian officials, this anti-American narrative is, nonetheless, influential with the general population, once savvy to interpret Kremlin pronouncements with critical, independent thought.[3] Despite the plethora both traditional and on-line news sources, anti-Americanism has emerged as the not-so-subtle background narrative to a host of Kremlin-sponsored media. This brief essay will examine the key components of this narrative and some possible implications stemming from portraying the US in a negative light.

America as Source of Russia's Problems

Whether defending the truth of religious or economic doctrine, there has long been a sense of antipathy among some Russians toward the West. The Russian Orthodox had to defend their faith against the predations of the pope. Centuries later, devoted communists fought to keep the Western capitalists at bay. The current generation, however, has been most heavily influenced by the traumatic events, and their retelling, of the past 25 years. In this tale the US increasingly plays the role of chief villain.

While some of the specifics are still open to debate, the current Kremlin story line revolves around an aggressive America that wants to weaken and ultimately subdue Russia. In this story, when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed (thanks to the perfidy of the US and some of their quislings in the USSR), Russia retracted to its pre-imperial borders in the naïve hope that the US would fully accept it as an equal partner. Russia had been battered by its seventy-plus-year experiment with Communism and would need US help to rebuild its political, economic and social institutions. While there was no shortage of promises from Washington to assist Russia in its painful transition, the rhetoric rarely matched the reality. Instead of genuine assistance, the narrative explains that the sole superpower took advantage of Russia's weakness, maneuvering craftily to strengthen its influence along Russia's borders and within its traditional sphere of influence. NATO was enlarged to Russia's very borders and Moscow leaders were marginalized in global politics. The story also describes how the US infiltrated Russia itself via business, government ties, and nongovernmental organizations to thwart Russia's recovery and to appropriate a large share of the country's abundant natural resources.[4]

In this Russian portrayal, the US is depicted as militarily powerful, yet morally weak and addicted to luxury and consumption. Leaders in Washington, described as hypocritical, will use their impressive information and ideological arsenal to claim that they are concerned with spreading democracy and human rights, when, in reality, they merely want to increase the country's dominance and share of the global market. Those countries that do not submit to the American ideological diktat soon find themselves as victims of American military force.[5]

This contemporary narrative is spiced with many painful grievances over the past twenty-five years, all designed to paint US policies and actions in an adverse light. US support for Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their faux-democracy was merely a pretext to weaken Russia. The "traitor" Gorbachev had caved in to demands from the US to disarm and withdraw Soviet forces from Eastern Europe. Glasnost and perestroika were Western tools to dismantle the USSR. Some conservative Russian commentators have even suggested that Gorbachev was acting on orders from the CIA.[6] Aggressive US policies during the Cold War, such as America's support for protests in the Baltics, helped to bring about the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century."[7]

In this account, former President Yeltsin is guilty of even greater collusion with the "enemy." The US was responsible for developing Russia's economic shock therapy and the unfair distribution of Soviet wealth through the fraudulent voucher privatization program. Washington's "concern" for true democracy was fully apparent when US leaders applauded Yeltsin when he used tanks on the streets of Moscow to crush Russia's democratically-elected parliamentarians. Indeed, some prominent Russian leaders have put forward the theory that the US may have instigated this violence.[8] Similarly, America's "understanding" of Chechnya's fight for independence in the 1990s was interpreted as the first step toward greater Russian dismemberment.

Conservative Russians like to point to the former Yugoslavia and how Washington helped to hasten its dissolution by labeling Serbia, Russia's traditional ally, as the chief aggressor. Ditto for 1999, when the US and NATO bypassed the UN and took unilateral action to force Serbs out of their traditional homeland in Kosovo. The one silver lining to this depiction of blatant Western aggression was the brief seizure of the airport in Pristina by Russian airborne forces. Long forgotten in the US, this incident "proved" that the US only understands the language of force, and though weakened, Russia still maintained the ability to standup to the US.[9]

According to select Russian commentators and the Russian president, the US is a self-described "indispensable nation" that feels free to flex its military muscle whenever and wherever it deems fit.[10] Armed with the flimsiest of evidence and without global community approval, the US had few qualms about invading sovereign Iraq in 2003. America has not only been the driving force behind NATO's continued enlargement, but continues to use the NATO alliance as a fig leaf for its aggressive actions. Libya is used as an example of this. This narrative claims that in its quest for global domination, the US abrogated the ABM treaty and continues to press forward with ballistic missile defense and other global weapon systems.

The US is also blamed for a series of economic disasters. Besides not helping Russia in the early 1990s, Washington is viewed as the chief culprit in the collapse of the Russian banking system in the summer of 1998. US banks were deemed complicit in Russian money-laundering schemes, transferring wealth out of Russia into the US. A decade later it was again greedy American bankers who were responsible for the global economic crisis. In the Kremlin calculus American profligate spending is one of the chief causes of international insecurity.[11]

To buttress their anti-American arguments, these Russian experts will often cherry-pick quotes from American or Western sources, even when quite dated or obscure. One of their favorite authors is British geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, who wrote in 1904 that "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."[12] The Russian experts now ascribe this theory to Washington's foreign policy, where the US has every intention of controlling the crucial pivot area of "East Europe," which includes Russia.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is another favorite source of these authors for "proving" that US leaders are determined to weaken Russia and force the country to follow a Western path of development.[13] Using the global-chessboard analogy, they tell their audience that it was Brzezinski who was behind the plan to arm the Mujahidin during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. They go on to explain that Brzezinski's claims regarding the universality of Western and US values which underpinned the "color revolutions," were nothing more than US-inspired plots to infiltrate Russia's traditional sphere of influence.

When necessary, these Russian experts have not been averse to simply making up anti-American quotes to strengthen their arguments. One of their oft-quoted favorites was purportedly made by former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who allegedly claimed that Siberia was just too big and rich for just one country to own, and it should therefore be chopped up by the major powers.[14] Secretary Albright, of course, made no such comment.[15]

With their semi-control over Russia's major media, the Kremlin leadership reiterates this anti-US message in a wide variety of traditional formats, such as TV news, movies, documentaries, newspapers, magazines etc.[16] They have enlisted a number of media pundits whose primary mission is to interpret select American-related news stories in a negative light.[17] Some of these bellicose journalists have a long quasi-communist pedigree, stretching back to the collapse of the USSR and the "betrayals" of Gorbachev. Yet while these strident anti-Western critics were once numbered among the fringe in the Gorbachev, Yeltsin, early-Putin era, many have now become mainstream media figures.

The anti-US vitriol is reinforced on the Internet, where an ever-increasing number of Russians are turning for their information. Here one can find the most incredible conspiracies and allegations, all centered upon the belief that the US is determined to fatally weaken Russia.[18] It is unclear which sites are affiliated with the Russian authorities, however.

With regard to current international affairs, the US is often depicted as the dark power behind any political instability. Just as America helped to fatally weaken socialist Eastern Europe and the USSR with deliberately empty talk of democracy and human rights, so today, it is spreading its "freedom-chaos" to stable regimes throughout the Middle East and Africa. According to some of these Russian experts, terrorist groups like al Qaeda are really inventions of the CIA and serve as a mere pretext for American involvement in foreign countries.[19]

Alongside the media, various Russian clerics have labored to enhance US fear-mongering.[20] It is not just American armaments that threaten Russia's sovereignty and traditions, but also the materialistic, humanistic and secular values expounded by the US. Gay rights, gender equality as well as other liberal social values are portrayed as US issues and the modern equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah. These clerics preach that America's insidious control over the global information sphere allows the US to infect Russian minds with these false values.

Implications

This persistent and increasingly shrill America-bashing has resulted in an increased number of Russians who now see the US as Russia's primary threat.[21] While the resurrection of the US bogeyman may be an appealing and even useful domestic tool for the Kremlin, it inadvertently increases the strategic communication risk for Russia as it faces outside threats that may be ultimately common to both Russia and the US. Awareness of this negative narrative trend should also be understood by Americans as they design engagement with Russians or react when prevented by Russia from engagement.

By Ray Finch, Foreign Military Studies Office