Conspiracy theories have always been a fundamental element of popular culture and political thinking in America, prompting some scholars to define the country as an ‘empire of conspiracy’ (Melley, 2000). In this respect, despite their socio-economic and political differences, the USA and Russia have much in common. Russian history over the last few centuries has been filled with fears of conspiracy: Jews, Freemasons and Catholics have been considered major enemies (Davis, 1971; Bagdasarian, 1999). Furthermore, as in the USA, the messianic idea of the ‘City upon the Hill’ (Goldberg, 2001) and Moscow as the Third Rome (Duncan, 2005) provided fertile soil for suspicion and fear of others who wanted to prevent it from fulfilling its global mission. Yet, there is one major difference between these two cases. In the USA, conspiracy theories normally emerge from grassroots movements and are kept at the margins of official political discourse. In post-Soviet Russia the political and intellectual elites are major producers and disseminators of conspiracy theories. The top-down spread of these theories in Russia is reminiscent of countries in the Middle East, where the state is a ‘conspiracist narrator’ (Gray, 2010). As Gray shows, these theories provide the legitimization of political regimes and social cohesion in the face of mounting social and political challenges and the declining popularity of political leaders. What is special about the Russian case is that these ideas were initially employed to increase the popularity of the country’s leaders at a time of economic growth.
Years before the annexation of Crimea, and Russian accusations that the USA was out to destroy the Russian economy by means of economic sanctions, Mikhail Iur’ev, a businessman and member of parliament, published an article entitled ‘Fortress Russia: The Concept for the President’ (Iur’ev, 2004). He praised Russia’s radical economic and cultural isolation from the rest of the world, particularly the West; indeed, he called for complete severance of all ties with the West. He also argued that openness to the world would result in the destruction of the nation. This publication became iconic: from 2004, anti-Western conspiracy theories calling for isolation from the West began to infiltrate Russia’s public domain, and by 2017 had become an integral part of public debates, television programmes and state legislation. A careful analysis of the ideas proposed by Iur’ev in the book-length study (Leont’ev et al., 2005), reveals that this isolationist ideology contains elements both of traditional anti-Westernism in Imperial Russia, and Soviet Cold War narratives that criticized the Russias’ major rival, the USA. The crux of these ideas is the notion that ordinary Russians must unite with the authorities to deal with conspiracies on the part of the West, and that this unity will eventually turn Russia into a great world power. The Kremlin is not ready to cut all ties with the West at present. On the contrary, many Russian businessmen who keep loyalty to the Kremlin, prefer to keep their savings and invest money in assets in Europe and the USA (Maxwell, 2015; Cowdock, 2017). However, when fear of losing power begins to increase, political elites unhesitatingly attempt to turn Russia into a bastion of anti-Westernism.
Just as in the United States, conspiracy theories have long been a feature of Russian political discourse. This book will demonstrate that by the mid 2010s, the Russian political authorities, with the help of the media and public intellectuals (writers, journalists, media personalities, political scientists, spin doctors and those pseudoacademics who produce and disseminate conspiracy theories), had found a way of transforming these theories into an essential element of official political discourse that strengthened their legitimacy and helped keep society under control. In recent years we have learnt from Vladimir Putin that the Internet is an invention of the CIA and therefore part of the anti-Russian conspiracy (MacAskill, 2014); from Putin’s economic adviser, Sergei Glaz’ev, that the Russian government has been infiltrated by foreign agents that undermine its economic stability in the face of sanctions (Adrianova, 2016); and from first deputy prime minister, Arkadii Dvorkovich, that the price of oil is in decline because foreign plotters are trying to destroy oil-rich Russia (Kuvakin, 2015).
In simple terms, this study investigates the reasons why Russian politicians are so keen on conspiracy theories and explores how these ideas help Russian leaders to exercise power through anti-Western conspiratorial rhetoric. As this rhetoric is aimed primarily at the domestic audience, the book will explore how conspiracy theories become the means of achieving popular mobilization, nation-building and community cohesion.[1] What role do public intellectuals play in developing and disseminating anti-Western conspiracy theories? What are the key events in Soviet and post-Soviet history that have generated the notion of anti-Western conspiracy? How do the political and intellectual elites of post-Soviet Russia use concepts which emerged in the Imperial and Soviet periods to produce and disseminate conspiracy theories? How do conspiracy theories enable political elites to reinforce their power? What is the impact of conspiracy theories on electoral campaigns? What role did anti-Western conspiracy theories play in framing the Ukraine crisis of 2014–16, and how were they used to help shape the unfolding crisis? These are some of the questions that this book tries to answer.
Because of the growing impact of conspiracy theories on Russian society today, I will focus on the post-Soviet period. The emergence of democratic and market institutions in Russia after the collapse of the USSR transformed society and opened the way for democratization. However, the rise of authoritarian trends has gradually undermined existing democratic institutions in the country, and this has led to doubts about how successful the Russian state’s transition from state socialism to democracy has been. Russia does still demonstrate many elements of a democratic state, but these have acquired a specific form, leading to a ‘hybrid regime’. Conspiracy theories play a crucial role in Russia’s turn to authoritarianism and have served as a trigger for numerous public campaigns to justify repressive legislation. Yet these ideas are also often marginalized and perceived as eccentric and paranoid and therefore their study lacks academic depth and rigour. This book aims to demarginalize conspiracy theories and approach them as an integral part of the political process. To do so, it will examine the extent to which models for studying conspiracy theories developed in Western democracies can be applied to a non-Western transitional regime.
Conceptual Framework
The topic of conspiracy theories is gradually gaining popularity in the field of Russian, East European and Eurasian studies. Academics have analysed the role of conspiracy theories in fiction and memoirs (Livers, 2010; Fedor, 2011; Amirian, 2013; Borenstein, 2017), popular films and documentaries (Razuvalova, 2015), and as a form of modern folklore (Panchenko, 2015; Astapova, 2015). Conspiracy theories as a form of national and social cohesion across post-Soviet states are also getting more attention (Golunov, 2012; Laruelle, 2012; Ortmann and Heathershaw, 2012; Yablokov, 2014; Radnitz, 2016).
Among the works that have studied specifically Russian conspiracy theories is Vardan Bagdasarian’s (1999) analysis of conspiratorial literature. The author documents a large set of theories which appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and concentrates on the concept of conspiracy in the intellectual thought of Imperial and Soviet Russia, only briefly describing its evolution in post-Soviet Russia. According to Bagdasarian, conspiracy theories emerged in Russian society in the mid nineteenth century, because of the Russian defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–6, and of the liberal reforms carried out by Aleksandr II in the 1860s to 1870s. They were then disseminated by various conservative groups in Russian society such as the Slavophiles and radical nationalists, who resisted these reforms. Although he offered a thorough exploration of the conspiracy concepts Bagdasarian failed to develop a clear and systematic methodology of how to approach conspiracy theories in the specifically Russian context.
1
Although in the 2010s Russian foreign policy strategy also includes the application of anti-US and anti-EU conspiracy theories (Yablokov, 2015), this would require a separate book-length study.