From Lenin to Putin: One Hundred and Seven Years of Malfeasance

Since the Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917, Lenin and his comrades have been working out the principles of relations with the outside world: destabilizing the international order through propaganda and disinformation; penetrating the institutions of capitalist countries in order to weaken them from within; exploiting the rapacity of capitalists so that they give the Bolshevik state the means for their own destruction, etc. Perpetuated by all Soviet leaders, this policy of nuisance is still active under Putin, trained on KGB software.

“The Bolshevik government’s intransigence imposed itself on its opponents. The latter always gave in, without demanding correlative advantages. In so doing, they strengthened the regime which, deep down, they wanted to bring down. They have served it no less by their lack of insight.”

Joseph Noulens¹

Antoine Vitkine’s remarkable documentary L’opération Trump, which describes the patient, persevering way in which the Kremlin has cultivated Trump for decades, brings home the astonishing continuity of Russian subterranean politics, beneath the surface turbulence: the fall of communism, the storms of nascent democracy, clan rivalries. If there is such a thing as a deep state, it is in this case. A deep state that is a machine of subversion constantly at work, so well programmed for over a century that it continues to function when the operator leaves the controls for a while. The machine’s software was installed during the Lenin years; Lenin’s successors simply adapted the old methods to the new circumstances and means.

What would the world have been like without Bolshevism? A complete inventory of the “contributions” of this regime has never been made. The time has come to reflect on this, when so many experts fear that the disappearance of the Russian autocracy will sow chaos, without asking whether the global atmosphere would not be considerably healthier if it were purged of the torrent of venom poured daily from Moscow, cleansed of the seeds of discord planted and cultivated by the Kremlin.

The initial software

The originality of Bolshevik foreign policy lies in the fact that it is guided by Leninist ideology, which is both deterministic, since it is based on a pseudo-science (Marxism), and millenarian, since it announces the inevitable destruction of the existing world and the advent of a new one. Its fundamental postulates applied to foreign relations are as follows: the world is divided into two camps, the imperialist camp of the bourgeoisie condemned by history, and the camp of the proletariat embodied by the USSR. There can be no lasting coexistence between the two camps. The Bolshevik Party, the vanguard of the proletariat, can accelerate the course of history by hastening the defeat of the bourgeoisie. In imperialist states, it is necessary to concentrate blows on the weakest link; it is also necessary to identify the main adversary, the leader of the enemy camp (until 1946, this was Great Britain; from 1947, it has been the United States). The Bolshevik sees himself as always at war with the non-communist world. For him, national interest merges with that of the world revolution. All means, legal and illegal, are good in this confrontation, as long as they favor revolution. Trotsky wrote after the assassination of the imperial family²: “We must put an end once and for all to the spiel of the priests and Quakers about the sacred value of human life.” Thus, all foreign policy initiatives since the October Revolution have been aimed at 1) strengthening the Soviet state as an instrument of world revolution 2) destroying non-Communist states.

The modus operandi has not changed since 1917. It consists of exploiting conflicts and antagonisms among imperialists and stirring them up; combining domestic subversion with the use of force. In 1920, Lenin published “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, in which he formulated the doctrine of entryism into bourgeois institutions and organizations, i.e., the technique of rotting democracies from within. This text offers  us a glimpse on the essence of Leninism. Any existing organization in democratic countries can, Lenin explained, be infiltrated and used to disintegrate the existing regime from within, either by discrediting these institutions or organizations in the eyes of the people, or by taking control of them. Communists should “go where the organized masses are”; neither unions nor parliaments should be boycotted: they should be infiltrated. “As long as you don’t have the strength to dissolve the bourgeois parliament or any other reactionary institution, you are obliged to work [i.e., engage in subversion] in these institutions… even in the most reactionary ones.” It is better to infiltrate an existing structure than to create a new one, Lenin added. Nicolai Bukharin dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s at the Second Congress of the Comintern [Communist International] in July 1920: “One can only speak of using bourgeois state institutions with a view to their own destruction… Every Communist deputy in parliament should be penetrated by the idea that he is in no way a legislator seeking a compromise with other legislators, but a party agitator sent into the enemy camp to apply the party’s decisions there.”

The early experiences of 1918-19 proved to the Bolsheviks that subversion was not enough, and that no attempt at communist insurrection abroad could succeed without the presence of the Red Army on the spot. “The bayonet is an indispensable means for the spread of communism”, observed Bolshevik Karl Radek³. Any war is a good war, including civil war, because it leads to the liquidation of the bourgeois constitutional state, Lenin wrote in a letter to Bolshevik Georgy Pyatakov⁴: “Civil war is also a war, therefore it should also erect violence in place of law”. In May 1918, Lenin ordered⁵ to “devote the bulk of our efforts to military preparation.”

Right from the start, the Red Army was a decisive instrument of Sovietization. Without the occupation by the Red Army, no Transcaucasian state would have become Bolshevik. During the years 1918-1921, Bolshevik forces behaved as they had in “liberated” Europe in 1945, pillaging, raping, and spreading terror. Moscow considered this terror indispensable to the initial phase of Sovietization. The rampages of ragtag soldiers constituted a kind of pedagogy for the new society (now the “Russian world”).

In July 1920, optimism reigned in the Bolshevik ranks as the Red Army approached Warsaw after repelling the Polish offensive in April. Moscow had already prepared a Polish Bolshevik government. Stalin advised Lenin to activate the policy of subversion in Europe, in order to capitalize on anticipated success in Poland: “We are now in open warfare against the Entente, there is no point in stalling any longer, we need to adopt an offensive policy if we are to keep the initiative we have recently seized. That is why the Comintern should be given the task of organizing revolutions in Italy, and in the states that are still weak, such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia (as for Romania, we’ll have to beat it⁶).” Zinoviev exclaimed at the Second Congress of the Comintern, which opened on July 19: “The Third Congress of the Comintern will be held in Berlin, then in Paris and London”.

Destabilizing the international order

The priority of Soviet foreign policy after the World War I was to challenge the European order established by the peace treaties. Moscow sought to weaken the League of Nations, the guardian of inter-imperialist peace, “that center of intrigue and machinations against the Soviet Union⁷.” At the same time, Moscow supported the revisionist countries of Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Hungary against France, a supporter of the Versailles order. As early as their expedition against Poland in 1920, the Bolsheviks began to flirt with German nationalists. In 1923, at the time of the occupation of the Ruhr by Franco-Belgian forces, Radek proposed a common front in Germany between communists and revolutionary nationalists. The memory of Lieutenant Schlageter, a German officer who had carried out numerous attacks and had been shot by the French, was celebrated by both communists and nationalists (including the Nazis). They fraternized in their hatred of social democracy, “objectively the moderate wing of fascism“, as Stalin put it (September 20, 1924). Communists and Nazis discussed the aims of the German revolution. In the spring of 1931, both parties began campaigning for a referendum to overthrow the Prussian government, where Socialists were still dominant, leading to the dissolution of the Reich parliament in July 1932; in November 1932, the German Communists joined the Berlin transport strike organized by the Nazis. Stalin realized early on that Hitler could be the gravedigger of the European order. In his speech to the 17^th Congress on January 26, 1934, he revealed his ulterior motives: “Things are moving toward a new imperialist war… It will undoubtedly trigger revolution and jeopardize the very existence of capitalism in a series of countries.” Stalin never forgot the role of military defeats in the advance of communism: the experience of Kerensky’s setbacks in the summer of 1917 was compounded by that of Armenia, where the rout by the Turks in October 1920 weakened the Dashnak national government and facilitated the Bolshevik putsch. In the summer of 1940, Stalin hoped that an identical scenario would unfold in France and trigger the revolution; in 1944, he counted on the Wehrmacht’s debacle to spread communism throughout Germany.

Down with the West

The destabilization of the international order also involves the struggle of colonized peoples against the “imperialists.” Hatred of the West is one of the most enduring legacies of Bolshevik propaganda, and one of the most damaging influences on the peoples who fell under its sway. As early as November 20, 1917, Pravda wrote: “The army of the Russian revolution possesses inexhaustible reserves. The oppressed nations of Asia (China, India, Persia) await the downfall of the capitalist regime as impatiently as the proletarian masses throughout Europe. It will be the historic task of Russian workers and peasants to fuse these forces and draw them into a world revolution against the imperialist bourgeoisie.”

After their unexpected defeat outside Warsaw in August 1920, and the repeated fiascoes of communist putsch attempts in Germany, the Bolsheviks turned their attention to the East. As Trotsky wrote⁸, “in the Asian space of world politics, the Red Army is an infinitely more significant force than in the European space”. The Islamo-Bolshevik idyll reached its peak at the Baku Congress in September 1920, when before an enthusiastic audience Zinoviev called for a “jihad” against French and English capitalists, and Radek invited in the name of Allah the workers of the East to seize the fraternal hand of Russian proletarians in order to shake off the yoke of capitalism⁹. The Bolsheviks were divided, however, between those who wished primarily to foment revolution in Europe and those who wished to stir up the colonized countries against the “imperialists.” Nariman Narimanov, the patriarch of Azerbaijani Bolshevism, wrote¹⁰ to the Central Committee in the summer of 1923: “By concentrating our attention on the West, we are distancing ourselves from the East and losing what we gained through our proclamations in the early days of our revolution… It may be that if we had handled our Eastern policy better, we would now be in a position to dictate our conditions to Europe. […] I say that we must begin with the East and in this way deprive European capitalism of juicy resources, which will generate unemployment, and aggravate the industrial and commercial crisis in Europe…”

The same ideological grid determined Soviet policy in the Middle East. Israel was seen as an instrument of Western imperialism, used to destabilize “progressive” Arab regimes moving toward the USSR, Nasser’s Egypt and Syria. Moscow was quick to realize that Marxism had little appeal in the region, and consequently staked on Arab nationalism, in the hope — always disappointed — of unifying the Arab world into an anti-Western bloc cemented by hatred of Israel. Such were the ulterior motives behind the Soviets’ disinformation of their Arab clients in the spring of 1967, when they warned of an Israeli troop concentration on the Syrian border and urged them to take military action against the threat. The Kremlin’s leaders were convinced that, in the event of war, Israel would be soundly defeated, prompting other Arab states to turn away from Western patronage and join the “progressive” camp. As Yevgeny Pyrlin, an Egypt specialist at the USSR Foreign Ministry, later wrote¹¹, “it was possible to hope and count on the fact that, thanks to this war, the distribution of political forces in the Middle East would be considerably altered and that, as after 1956, chain revolutions would sweep through the Arab world, replacing pro-Western regimes with nationalist ones… […] We thought that Israel would be in trouble and that the United States would be drawn into a war against the entire Muslim world. We thought that for America it would be worse than Vietnam“. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War did not deter the Kremlin. Its aim would remain to torpedo American efforts to pacify the region by supporting the most extremist Arab groups. In 1974, Andropov recommended assisting the PFLP, which was planning a series of attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and Hong Kong. The Politburo agreed¹². The PLO opened an office in Moscow. Confrontation with Reagan culminated in the Middle East. Andropov massively armed Syria, supplying it with an air defense system completed in January 1983.

The imprint left by Moscow’s propaganda in the region is evidenced by Mahmoud Abbas’s recent words to Margarita Simonian: “Please understand that we have nothing against the Jews. They’ve been our neighbors for a long time. The problem is America. America is responsible for everything. And who spread Zionism in our country? The colonial powers.” Margarita Simonian reports: “He kept repeating that America was to blame, that if America stopped interfering, the Palestinians would find a modus vivendi with the Jews,” applauding this statement by the Palestinian leader: “Our duty is to be with Russia”.

The Leninist ideology implanted by Moscow in Third World countries left deep scars and had deplorable consequences for these countries. It often led them to choose the “socialist” path after independence, drawing inspiration from the Soviet model. The Marxist orientation caused economic collapse in these countries, which Kremlin propaganda was quick to explain away as the result of “neo-colonial” maneuvers by Western countries. This demagoguery forms the basis of the “global South” that Putin is trying to rally against the West, by cultivating the resentment fanned for a century by Kremlin propaganda.

The rope to hang them: “Exploiting the rapacity of capitalists”

If the Bolsheviks were spreading the scourge of discord in the outside world, their domestic policy was even more devastating, encountering no obstacles. By the spring of 1918, there was no longer a bourgeoisie to plunder, food shortages had set in and the Bolsheviks began the great spoliation of the peasantry that would be completed under Stalin. The grandiose plans for the communization of the whole of Europe, and the fight against the enemy within, required the creation of a gigantic army. As a result, the rear had to be organized to feed and equip these armed masses. This was the origin of the wartime communism set up in the spring of 1918. From 1918 to 1920, starving city dwellers fled cities. Petrograd lost nearly three-quarters of its inhabitants.

By 1920-1, ruin and famine were such that Bolshevik power was threatened. Lenin decided to appeal to foreign capital, offering concessions to “bourgeois” entrepreneurs. He no longer feared the Western powers after their failed intervention in Russia: “The forces of the international bourgeoisie are incapable of withstanding the slightest test, of sacrificing themselves¹³.” Western countries “are afflicted with the disease of the will¹⁴.” If the bourgeoisie failed to unite at a decisive moment for it, all the more reason will its divisions worsen in the future¹⁵. It will be easy to co-opt the bourgeoisie and encourage it to come to the aid of Bolshevik Russia. “We’ll back down now, but only to prepare ourselves for a better attack later¹⁶,” Lenin explained to those close to him.

It was thanks to the purchase of a thousand locomotives from Sweden in the spring of 1920 that the Bolsheviks were able to prevail in the civil war, overcoming the paralysis of transport that handicapped the advance of the Red Army. As early as 1918, Lenin and his cronies developed a whole line of argument aimed at persuading the “imperialists” that it was in their interest to keep the Bolshevik regime in power. They played on the national rivalries among European powers: “In spite of the disappointments Russia has given us, we should not abandon our position, for it would be taken definitively by others, without our ever being able to hope to recover the billions we have exposed,” said the French ambassador Joseph Noulens, who had no illusions about Bolshevism¹⁷ (April 3, 1918). For his part, in the summer of 1918, Karl Radek advised exploiting the Germans’ fear of Russian anarchy: “The Germans have understood that attacking Russia is like throwing 25 divisions into a swamp without making the slightest profit. Whenever we are in trouble, they tremble at the thought that we might fall, and prepare to occupy parts of Russia; when we recover, they breathe a sigh of relief¹⁸“.

The Bolsheviks saw economic exchanges above all as an additional instrument for destabilizing states, to be combined with intimidation: “On the one hand threats, on the other the oil we deliver: this is how we are going to acquire influence over bourgeois Georgia,” Chicherin¹⁹, the commissar for Foreign affairs, stated in 1920, when Bolshevik Russia was putting all its efforts into overthrowing the Menshevik government of independent Georgia.

It was also Chicherin who best formulated the Bolsheviks’ conception of their parasitic relationship with the West: “The unprecedented originality of our policy lies in the fact that the proletariat is the master of political power, and it offers itself the services of capital without allowing it to become the ruling class.” (November 22, 1921²⁰). In other words, the men in the Kremlin understood that they could tap into the capital and technologies of the “bourgeois” countries without having to pay the slightest price in terms of political concessions. Better still, Western economic superiority could be turned against the Western camp and used to divide it, as trade with the USSR created a Kremlinophile lobby within the ruling class in every country.

What is more, the West was ready to sell the USSR military technologies that could be used against them! From 1929 to 1932, at the start of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, there was an unprecedented infusion of foreign technology. The USSR massively imported skilled labor, technical data, and equipment. The transfers that took place during this brief period enabled production to increase in most Soviet industrial sectors, particularly in heavy industry and armaments. This foreign assistance convinced Stalin that he had no need to spare his own population: hence the destruction of the peasantry and the appalling famine of 1932-3, followed by the Great Purges. The Kremlin learned that it could go very far with impunity in the physical, moral, and intellectual annihilation of its subjects, since it could always count on the complacency of foreigners to maintain and develop the instruments of its power, the only thing that mattered to it. Significantly, when Germany offered the USSR a loan at the end of 1935, the Soviets made German consent to USSR military orders a condition for discussing the proposal. An identical request was made to France at the same time. As the diplomat Potemkin wrote to his minister Litvinov on January 11, 1937, for the Soviets, military orders “were a kind of test to see whether the French were ready to contribute to the strengthening of our military power²¹.” One of the reasons why Stalin opted for entente with Hitler in 1939 was German acquiescence in sharing military technology with the USSR. In 1940, the Soviets were able to go on a shopping spree in Germany, procuring fighter aircraft, artillery systems, anti-aircraft guns, light tanks, diesel engine sketches, and documentation for submarine construction. Unique German presses were used in the manufacture of the famous T-34 tanks.

The end of America and the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon world: “You have no idea what is being prepared for you”

Since the announcement of the Marshall Plan in 1947, the United States had become Stalin’s main enemy, as the American presence in Europe was seen as the only obstacle to the establishment of Moscow’s hegemony on the continent. In November 1952, Stalin made the following recommendations to the heads of the MGB [Ministry of State Security]: “In intelligence, we must never carry out a frontal attack. Our services must always act indirectly. Otherwise we will suffer serious failure. Frontal attack is a short-sighted tactic. […] We must constantly change our tactics and methods. We must take advantage of the global situation. We have to maneuver sensibly, using what God gives us. […] We must take what is poorly guarded, go to the weak points. Our main enemy is America. But we must focus our efforts elsewhere. We must create clandestine residences in neighboring countries. The first base where we must have people of our own is West Germany²².”

Stalin’s main criticism of the MGB at the time was its refusal to practice terror and sabotage on NATO territory. He instructed his services to prepare attacks on the Pacific coast ports of the USA²³, and groups of illegals were set up to destroy the military bases at Bergen, Cherbourg and Le Havre, as well as the communications of the NATO headquarters at Fontainebleau²⁴. In December 1952, he ordered “the creation of a grandiose intelligence network… We must act decisively against the Americans, first in Europe and the Middle East… It is the multinational structure of its population that makes America vulnerable. We must use every means at our disposal to exploit minorities²⁵.” On April 15, 1973, Andropov, then head of the KGB, sent Brezhnev the above-mentioned document dated November 1952. In the accompanying note, Andropov commented that “all of Stalin’s remarks have lost none of their topicality”.

The coincidence between the date on which this eloquent document was communicated to Brezhnev and the arrival of a man called Dimitri Simes, who emigrated from the USSR to the USA in 1973, reveals the continuity in the workings of the subversive machine represented by the Soviet-Russian deep state. Indeed, Simes was the man who helped weaken the Reaganite current in the Republican Party, steer the American right toward isolationism, and turn it in favor of the Kremlin. According to KGB defector Yuri Shvetz, Simes was sent to the US by Primakov, Shvetz’s superior at the time. Simes enjoyed a dizzying career. He became an advisor to ex-President Nixon, president of the Nixon Center in 1994 and editor-in-chief of The National Interest magazine, before becoming Trump’s foreign policy advisor in 2016. In 2022, Simes, finally burned out in the US, received a Russian passport and became a highly paid propagandist for Putin’s first TV channel²⁶.

After the break-up of the USSR, which Kremlin propagandists unjustly attributed to Washington’s intrigues, the destruction of America became an obsession for Russian leaders. With his talent for expressing the pet subjects of his leaders, Zhirinovsky tirelessly predicted that the United States, “this country of odds and ends“, would soon cease to exist. As far back as the Yeltsin period, he prophesied urbi et orbi: “America too will soon begin to unravel. […] It is on the eve of perestroika and will begin to degenerate. […] States will break away. […] California will ask to be attached to Mexico, and a Negro republic will be proclaimed in Miami²⁷.” In 2009, Zhirinovsky claimed that Obama would be the American Gorbachev, that he would preside over the break-up of the United States. Russian experts were discussing how the American bear would be butchered, and how China and Russia would share the spoils. Undeterred, in 2020 Zhirinovsky predicted that Biden would cause the disintegration of the United States, that there would be no more elections in the United States in 2024, because “there would be no more America.”

The KGB has been fine-tuning the scenario for the end of the USA. In 1998, Igor Panarin, a KGB officer and later dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic academy, presented a map of the disintegrated North American space in 2010. Several new states appeared on the map: the states of California, the Republic of North Central America, the Republic of Texas and Atlantic America. California would become the core of the “Republic of California,” part of, or influenced by, China. Texas would become the base of the “Texas Republic,” a group of states that would be ceded to or influenced by Mexico. Washington and New York would become part of an “Atlantic America” that could join the European Union. Canada would receive a group of northern states — the “Central American Republic of North America”. Alaska would go to Russia and Hawaii to Japan. This disintegration would be accelerated by the division of the elites, between the “globalists” and the “statists” (“gossoudarstvenniki”), the now open confrontation between the American financial elite and the American armed forces, intelligence services and military-industrial complex. Soon, hopes of civil war in the USA were added to hopes of the dismemberment of the country. As Solovyov said in 2022, addressing Americans: “You are putting pressure on us, and you are failing on all fronts, but to this day, you have no idea of the responses we are preparing, no idea of what is being planned for you. You won’t like it at all, dear American comrades.” Solovyov made these remarks following an interview with Tulsi Gabbard, whom Donald Trump has just selected for the position of head of American intelligence. This woman so faithfully repeated the Kremlin’s narrative that one of the participants on the set asked, astonished: “Is she a Putin agent or what?” “Yes,” Solovyov replied.

Champagne at the Kremlin in 2016: Brexit and Trump’s election

In 2016, the Kremlin was strutting its stuff. It could boast two successes: Brexit and the election of Trump. In the eyes of Russian leaders, Brexit is the first act in the dismemberment of the EU, while Trump represents a decisive step toward civil war in the United States. These two events have more in common than chronological coincidence. On both sides of the Atlantic, the same men are at the helm. Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who helped finance the Trump campaign, is a long-time friend of Nigel Farage, Britain’s Brexit champion. Mercer founded the company Cambridge Analytica, which collects data from internet users to offer personalized advertising and boasts of using cutting-edge technology to build intimate profiles of voters to find and target their emotional levers. Mercer introduced the company to Nigel Farage and commissioned it to provide expert advice to the pro-Brexit Leave.eu campaign, targeting influential voters via Facebook. Leave.eu founder Arron Banks said Cambridge Analytica had “world-class” artificial intelligence, and had helped pro-Brexit achieve “unprecedented levels of engagement”. “AI won for Leave,” he declared. According to Andy Wigmore, a friend of Banks, this was free help, as “Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign were one family”.

In addition to the Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica has been accused of influencing numerous elections, including the US presidential campaign. Trump’s team paid the company over $6 million to target influential voters. We will not go over the multiple threads linking the Trump campaign to the Kremlin. On the British side, much attention has been paid to Arron Banks, married to a Russian woman, who has never hidden his admiration for Putin, even going so far as to approve of the annexation of Crimea. Questioned at the High Court in London, he said he had forgotten how much he had paid into the Leave campaign. The court is convinced that his contribution to the Conservative party amounts to at least £8-9 million. According to the British media, this donation is the largest in the country’s history, and much of it has been allocated to Leave. During the Brexit campaign, Banks had frequent contact with the Russian embassy. He was interested in the Russian gold market, and Russian oligarchs dangled fabulous contracts in front of him.

In both cases, we are struck by the paralysis of the institutions that should be defending the country against hostile interference. During the Cold War, a hint of Sovietophilia was enough to block the career of a civil servant or an artist. Today, as Russia threatens the United States infinitely more openly, pro-Russians are unabashedly outspoken, and candidate Trump praised Moscow’s role in his rival Hillary Clinton’s disgrace, just as he has invited the Kremlin to punish NATO’s deadbeats. The establishment has been so radically turned inside out by years of irradiation by Kremlin propaganda that the American state has become severely immunosuppressed. The same is true of Great Britain. When the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee took a serious look at whether Russia had influenced the Brexit vote, it found that the British government did not want to know, and was putting the brakes on the publication of the “Russia Report” (2020), devoted to Russia’s malign interference in British politics. Produced by an independent committee of nine MPs from several political parties, including the ruling Conservatives, the report is damning when it comes to the infiltration of the British elite by oligarchs and large-scale corruption by Russian money, particularly that of the Conservative party. Regarding the 2016 Brexit referendum, the report leaves open the possibility that Moscow-based information operations, notably via social networks and Russian state-funded TV channels such as Sputnik and RT — and backed by targeted support for influential voices within British politics — may well have been a significant factor.

Tenfold destructive action

The progress made since the years of the Comintern, and the spectacular breakthroughs in disinformation, psychological warfare and Russian expansion in recent times, can be explained by a series of causes.

1. Russia no longer offers the “socialist model”. The Kremlin’s propaganda is free of ideological ballast. In the past, it was easy to counter lies about the “socialist paradise.” All it took was a short visit to the USSR. Today, propaganda is no longer handicapped by the obligatory claim of a utopian project, and can devote itself entirely to its work of denigration and universal suspicion, spreading the black tide of hatred and suspicion over mankind. The International it is building around itself is one of resentment and delinquency. It has found reliable allies in two countries which, like it, are macerating in hatred and a thirst for destruction: North Korea, which dreams of annihilating South Korea, and the mullahs’ Iran, whose obsession is the destruction of Israel. But the cement of obsessive hatred is infinitely more solid than that of a utopian ideological construct. The other category of Russia’s allies is the nebula of manipulative billionaires like Elon Musk, whose mentality is similar to that of the Russian oligarchs. These men consider themselves above the law, despising the people whose strings they think they can pull thanks to the technologies mentioned above. These self-important supermen have the nerve of secreting an “anti-elite” ideology, which they inject into the population under the guise of a discourse denouncing the “mainstream”: all this to weaken the states which, despite everything, remain the guarantors of legality; and to replace political sovereignty with techniques of control and manipulation which will give them free rein. The Kremlin’s alliance with these egomaniac billionaires, who pursue the same objectives as it does – undermining Western democracies – is understandable.
2. The Kremlin’s propaganda has acquired a gigantic resonance chamber thanks to social networks and now artificial intelligence.
3. It also benefits from widespread ignorance in democratic countries, due to the shortcomings of public education. Westerners have lost touch with the bedrock of their democracy. They have forgotten that, as Montesquieu wrote, virtue is the principle of the republic, the disposition that enables it to preserve itself: “When this virtue ceases, ambition enters the hearts that can receive it, and avarice enters all. The republic is a corpse; and its strength is no more than the power of a few citizens and the licentiousness of all²⁸.” A democratic regime can only function if citizens and their elected representatives give priority to the public good; if they have respect for the law; if they are aware of the ravages that passions and partisanship can bring; if they are accessible to reason and master their affects; if they accept the effort of differentiating between truth and falsehood. Montesquieu remarked that “it is in republican government that the full power of education is needed”. Training in the humanities gave us the ability to prioritize events and put them into perspective. It is this ability that most of our contemporaries, including our politicians, lack. We wade into the trivial, and can no longer discern the developments that threaten us directly. How much attention have we paid to Russia’s importation of North Koreans and their dispatch to the battlefield? To the transformation of the Russian economy into a war economy, to the detriment of the asphyxiated civilian economy?

“We need to be victorious everywhere” 

Yet Europeans have every reason to be alarmed by these recent developments. For the Russian economy cannot withstand this shift toward a war economy for long on its own. China assists it only insofar as it exploits it. As always, on the brink of collapse, Russia will turn to Europe to maintain its war machine and provide supplies. But in line with the Bolshevik software we have just described, it will want to control Europe militarily, to avoid depending on it. And this is where the presence of thousands of North Koreans will be of great help to the Kremlin. It will enable Moscow to resume its traditional imperial policy, providing slaves for its military-industrial complex and, why not, occupation forces.

For years, Russian television had been announcing the destruction of the Ukrainian nation in February 2022. We paid no attention to their belches. Quite wrongly. We would be making the same mistake if we ignored the Kremlin’s plans, which are openly expressed in its propaganda. Not content with sowing the seeds of war in Europe, Putin is planning to extend them to Asia. General Gurulyov explained on Channel 1: “What does victory mean for us military men? […] It means achieving the objectives defined by our president in December 2021. But how do we get there? We absolutely must go as far as Ukraine’s western border. We need to add a gray zone. NATO must withdraw. But what if it refuses to do so? It will be up to us to force them to do so. Remember the map of the USSR? From our border to the Arctic Circle? What about today? This is the second problem we face. We need to restore our borders. We are told that there will be provocations in the Baltic States. I’m telling you that there will also be provocations in the Kuril Islands, in Sakhalin. We must be victorious everywhere.” “We have enough weapons to destroy Germany to the point where there will be nothing left of it,” Gurugliov insisted. North Koreans can be useful in Russia, but that’s not the point: “Our main objective is to prepare the North Korean army for modern warfare […] All crises in the world are resolved by military force, not by negotiation.” TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov added: “One day we’ll be holding maneuvers in Potsdam, Berlin, Paris, Strasbourg, Barcelona, Lisbon, and the Atlantic. The Europeans must be put in their place”. As Solovyov put it to a Ukrainian guest on the set: “We’ll exterminate every last one of you. Negotiations are out of the question.” Serguei Karaganov, an expert close to the Kremlin, recommends using “the deterrent of nuclear weapons” against “our European neighbors who cross the line.” We must “stop Europe, which is the source of all mankind’s ills… Europe is the worst thing that mankind has produced in the last 500 years at least. I’m thinking of neo-colonialism, racism, numerous genocides, Nazism and so on. They must be eliminated… Historic Europe must be thrown into the dustbin of history so that it no longer spoils the life of humanity.”

The scale of the sacrifices imposed by Putin on Russians should give us cause for alarm, for history shows that the deeper this country sinks into destitution and subjugation, the more its ambitions for conquest become exacerbated. Russia’s close neighbors know this, and its more distant neighbors are likely to learn it the hard way if they do not come out of their navel-gazing cocoon and realize that the absolute priority must be to defend European territory, starting with Ukraine, and our freedoms.

Françoise Thom

She has a degree in classical literature and spent 4 years in the USSR from 1973 to 1978. She is an agrégée in Russian and teaches Soviet history and international relations at Paris Sorbonne.

1. Quoted in: Joseph Noulens, Mon ambassade en Russie soviétique, Plon 1933, t.1, p. IV
2. Quoted in: Orlando Figes, The Russian Revolution, Denoël 2007, p. 789
3. Quoted in: L.A. Kogan, “Voenny kommunizm: utopia i realnost”, Voprosy istorii, 2, 1998, p. 128
4. Lenin, Works, op. cit. t. 23, p.25, in Stéphane Courtois, Communisme et totalitarisme, op. cit. p. 31
5. Quoted in: Edward Hallett Carr, The bolshevik revolution, vol . 3, Penguin Books, 1984, p. 80
6. A.V. Kvašonkin, Bolševiskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska 1912-1927, Rosspen, Moscow, 1996, p. 148
7. O.N. Ken, A.I. Rupasov, Politburo Ck VKP(b) i otnosenia SSSR s zapadnymi sosednimi gosudarstvami, SPb, 2000, p. 126
8. Trotsky’s letter of August 5, 1919. Quoted in: Rakhman Mustafa-zade, Dve respubliki, Moskva 2006, p. 68
9. Richard Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, University of California Press, vol. IV, 1996, pp. 170-1
10. RGASPI, f.85, op. 2c, d.3, pp. 2-3
11. Quoted in: Isabella Ginor, “The Cold War’s Longest Cover-up: How and Why the USSR Instigated the 1967 War,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 3 (September 2003), pp. 43-44
12. L. Mlechin, Osobaja Papka, Moskva 2003, pp. 152-3
13. Speech to the unions and factory committees, May 5, 1920 p. 113
14. Speech to the Metalworkers’ Congress, March 6, 1922
15. Speech to the unions and factory committees, May 5, 1920 p. 113
16. F. Čuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, M. Terra 1991, p. 200
17. Quoted in: Joseph Noulens, op. cit. t.2, p. 59
18. Quoted in: Ju. Vatlin, Meždunarodnaja strategia bolševizma na iskhode pervoj mirovoj vojny, Voprosy Istorii, n°3, 2008, p. 73
19. Quoted in: Rakhman Mustafa-zade, op.cit., p. 304
20. A.V. Kvašonkin, (ed.), Bolševistkoe rukovodstvo, perepiska 1912-1927, Moscow, Rosspen, 1996, p. 224
21. Sabine Dullin, Des hommes d’influences, Payot, 2001, p. 155-6
22. The document setting out these excellent principles was revealed byIstočnik, no. 5, 2001, pp. 130-1
23. A. A. Danilov, A. V. Pyžikov, Roždenie sverkhderžavy, Moscow, Rosspen, 2001, p. 69.
24. A. Sudoplatov, Tajnaja žizn generala Sudoplatova, Moscow, Olma Press, 1998, pp. 229, 233.
25. P. & A. Sudoplatov,Missions spéciales, Seuil, 1994, p. 411
26. On the role of Dmitri Simes, see the article by Laurence Saint-Gilles, « Le Lobby russe aux États-Unis »
27. Françoise Thom, Poutine ou l’obsession de la puissance, Litos 2022, p. 172
28. Esprit des Lois, III, 3