Indeed, passportization is no simple consular matter. While most countries focus their consular activities on tourism, cultural and educational exchanges, and migration of workers, Russia has made consular activities a means to its security and territorial ambitions. Moscow’s policies of protecting its citizens and compatriots abroad have rightfully made most post-Soviet countries suspicious of Russian consular activities.72 According to anthropologist Florian Mühlfried, passportization is a clear case of “a new form of imperialism by civic means.”73 Its origins have been said to date back to the Cold War, when the notion of socialist international solidarity was used as grounds for intervention throughout the world. In the Putin era it has been replaced by a paternalistic ideology of providing help to fellow citizens and compatriots in need—an ideology formulated in the modern language of human rights.74
The main actors in the passportization process, in addition to Russian consulates, have been public organizations, field forces or special door-to-door brigades, and at times even individuals. In Georgia, when the 2002 new Russian Citizenship Law simplified procedures, the Russian government created passport application centers in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.75 At the same time a public organization, the Congress of Russian Communities, spearheaded the passportization process in Abkhazia and field forces traveled to remote mountain villages to hand out passports.76 In Crimea, the Russian consulate in Simferopol had been aggressively issuing Russian passports for years leading up to the 2014 conflict.77 The passportization policies achieved some success. According to the Russian Federal Migration Service, from 2000 to 2009 almost 3 million people living on the territory of the former Soviet Union beyond the Russian Federation had received Russian citizenship.78 Many among these were dual citizens, especially in countries like Moldova and Ukraine.
Russia has generally not forced its citizenship on its diaspora or other nationals. Russian citizenship has had some appeal for the Russian minority and other nationalities, as seen in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, Estonia, Latvia, and Armenia. First, any citizenship may hold appeal for people without passports as in Estonia and Latvia. Second, there are also economic motives for acquiring Russian citizenship, which makes it easier and less expensive to travel to Russia as it eliminates the need for visas—an attraction, for example, in Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia. Russians may seek frequent travel to Russia to visit their relatives while all nationalities may benefit from visa-free travel if they work in Russia or reside near the border with the Russian Federation and conduct business or trade across the border. Third, Russian citizenship entitles passport holders additional benefits such as education in Russia, child support payments, free health care, support for large families, worker and military pensions, and the right to vote in Russian presidential and Duma elections.79 Some of these benefits, though, are selectively administered and favor separatist territories. For instance, in 2008 Russian citizens residing in Moldova’s Transnistria received supplementary pension payments, while Russian citizens residing elsewhere in Moldova did not receive such payments.80 Lastly, the appeal of Russian citizenship may reflect the success Russia has achieved in its soft power efforts to maintain the loyalty of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers abroad and attract other nationalities.
STAGE 5: INFORMATION WARFARE
The previous four stages of the neo-imperialist trajectory all pave the way for the blitz of information warfare and mark a pivot point preceding more open aggression from Moscow. Information warfare is the aggressive use of propaganda to destabilize, demoralize, or manipulate the target audience and achieve an advantage over an opponent including by seeking to deny, degrade, corrupt, or destroy the opponent’s sources of information. Some use of propaganda, loosely defined as information of a biased or misleading nature used to promote a political cause or point of view, is common among states even during times of peace and is often perceived to be part of soft power efforts. However, a turn to information warfare signals an escalation of tensions and sometimes also a turn to military engagement. In the Russian National Security Concept of 2000, the term “information warfare” was introduced to describe the threats Russia was facing, and rather ambiguously, also as the “improvement and protection of the domestic information infrastructure and integration of Russia into the world information domain.”81 Russian analysts, when referring to the internal and external information warfare threats that the country faces, argue that such warfare also “presumes ‘nontraditional occupation,’ namely the possibility of controlling territory and making use of its resources without the victor’s physical presence on the territory of the vanquished.”82 In my proposed seven-stage trajectory, information warfare is a crucial turning point when an “urgent” need for the “protection” of Russian compatriots and citizens is conceptualized. However, information warfare campaigns are preceded by decades of softer propaganda tactics, spread of pro-Russia historical narratives, and efforts by Russian state-run media companies to capture the audience of post-Soviet states.
The targets of Russian information propaganda are legion: the Russian diaspora, the broader audience of the countries within Russia’s sphere of influence, Russian domestic audiences, and the international community. While Russian media sometimes target these different audiences at different stages and in different ways, at times they do so simultaneously. Most generally, the initial target audience tends to be the compatriots residing in any particular former Soviet republic, who are presented with a Moscow-biased version of current events and history. Then, the idea is introduced that the compatriots are at risk from hostile forces in Europe, America, the titular nationality—the dominant eponymous ethnic group in the country—and/or the country’s nationalist and “fascist” groups. The surprisingly high degree to which Russian information warfare and propaganda are accepted both domestically and in the former Soviet republics is closely related to the fact that Russian state-controlled media tend to dominate the information space of the entire post-Soviet region. Local media do not have sufficient resources or are simply not sufficiently established to compete with Russian state-funded media. Likewise, due to the prevalence of the Russian language, the vast majority of the audience consistently opts for Russian over English or other foreign-language media. In November 2014, the Russian state-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya announced the launch of a new international media project, Sputnik, that will broadcast in forty-five languages and have offices in all post-Soviet states with the exception of Turkmenistan.83 The Russian government also intended to beef up the spending in 2015 for the Russia Today international TV network and for Rossiya Segodnya, which also incorporates the Voice of Russia radio station and the international news agency RIA Novosti, by 40 percent and 200 percent respectively.84 However, given the enormous fluctuations of the ruble in the foreign exchange market, which in early 2015 lost nearly 50 percent of its value vis-à-vis the dollar, the combined funding for Russia Today and Rossiya Segodnya actually decreased from $695 million in 2014 to $335 million in 2015.85