Subversion by Andreas Krieg;

Author:Andreas Krieg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2023-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

with powerful information technologies at its disposal, the aggressor will make an effort to involve all public institutions in the country it intends to attack, primarily the mass media and religious organizations, cultural institutions, non-governmental organizations, public movements financed from abroad, and scholars engaged in research on foreign grants. All these institutions and individuals may be involved in a distributed attack and strike damaging point blows at the country’s social system with the purported aims of promoting democracy and respect for human rights.27

Like other Russian strategic thinkers, Chekinov and Bogdanov conceptualize war in the twenty-first century not from an offensive point of view but primarily from a defensive one, linking Russia’s perceived insecurity to the threat of Western information operations. Nonetheless, it is this realization that a vulnerability in the information environment exists at all that allows Russian strategists to turn this vulnerability into an offensive capability to be used against Western adversaries.

The experience of the Arab Spring in the aftermath of the “Color Revolutions” in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence—in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan—as well as protests in Russia during the elections of 2011 and 2012 fostered the securitization of sociopolitical dissent and civil-societal discourse in Russia. Information was viewed not just as the main driving force for mass mobilization in the Arab world but also, more importantly, as the driving force behind regime change in Libya. And for Russia, both the Arab Spring and the Color Revolutions were products of Western subversion campaigns compounding local grievances into revolutionary movements.28

It is against this backdrop that Russian chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov gave a speech in 2013 at the Academy of Military Science, which to Western observers was a watershed moment in Russian strategic thinking. Gerasimov’s speech touched on the blurring of war and peace, and information operations being a constant part of a new generation of warfare, in which Arab Spring–type revolts could become the typical version of twenty-first-century confrontation.29 The fact that the most senior Russian military officer openly prioritized nonmilitary means in twenty-first-century confrontations over the use of kinetic force led Western commentators to quickly speak of the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” which is not so much a doctrine as a grand strategic vision and was based not on Gerasimov’s thinking but on almost two decades of Russian strategic discourse on new-generation warfare.30 The events in Ukraine that unfolded in 2014 seemed to confirm Gerasimov’s remarks a year earlier: Russia had used a blend of military and nonmilitary means to mobilize networks in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea amid a widespread information offensive that Russian irregular troops exploited to make territorial gains. For Russia, the attempt to break the kill chain as far away from “pulling the trigger” as possible seemed to have paid off by taking the West by surprise.31 Gerasimov’s maxim to achieve political and strategic ends by nonmilitary means meant that subversive operations below the threshold of war would avoid the high risks and certain penalties arising from overt methods of war while still securing political objectives.

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