The majority of these threats, when looked at rationally, have been completely dreamt up, from the foreign child adopters to ‘the homosexual lobby’. However, it would be naive to suggest that this is simply because of the paranoia of members of the State Duma. The precise mechanism for marking out these threats, amplifying them in the media and drawing up the legal process leads one to suggest that behind this endless flow there is a unified guiding logic. Threats are sought from the outside, but they are formulated within the system. What’s more, threats are a key element of the functioning of the Russian state.
The scientific description of the role and place of threats in the state system was given by the sociologist Simon Kordonsky. For him, the very structure of the state, with its role of providing for survival, security and social stability, creates the conditions for apparent threats. Each department comes up with a particular type of threat – natural, military, social and so on – and accordingly this hierarchy of threats requires its own share of resources. The more dangerous the particular threat (be it real or imagined), the greater the flow of state resources dealt out to the various services and departments responsible for dealing with it. In such circumstances, Kordonsky writes, ‘services become ever more interested in increasing the number of the threats for which they are responsible, as well as making them appear bigger and more dangerous’.[14]
One method for gaining extra resources from the state is to invent new threats on different levels, from the state level down to the municipal level. One example of such an invention was the creation of the myth about the ‘orange threat’ after the revolution in Ukraine in 2004. This led to the formation of new organizational structures (such as the infamous Directorate E of the Interior Ministry, responsible for tackling extremism) and a variety of ‘patriotic’ youth organizations. The state set aside for certain agencies the appropriate resources to fight the ‘orange threat’, which became a particular type of corporation, interested in continuing the funding of its activity and using any means possible to reactivate the ‘orange’ myth.
In 2011 the League for a Safe Internet was launched by Konstantin Malofeyev, to combat the threat of ‘paedophiles and extremism on the Internet’. This organization was given a budget of tens of millions of dollars. It is still managing to cope with ‘its own’ threat, while trying to introduce ever more restrictive laws and receiving ever more administrative and financial resources. Sometimes, combatting a threat can bring direct commercial benefits, as happened with the Russian Sea (Russkoe morye) group of companies, belonging to the oligarch Gennady Timchenko, which benefited from the embargo on the import of Norwegian salmon. After it was announced that there would be Russian sanctions, the purchase price of salmon doubled, and Russian Sea shares rose by 34 per cent.
Exactly the same thing happened when the Russian Security Council discussed the fantasy threat that Russia might be excluded from the worldwide web (as happened to Sudan in 2007). This was a purely commercial idea, dreamt up in order to sell to the state equipment that would duplicate the infrastructure of the Internet in Russia. The threat of Russia being excluded from the worldwide web remains purely hypothetical; but real funds can be allocated to that idea – including technology costing hundreds of millions of dollars. A very peculiar ‘threat market’ is growing in modern Russia, and bets on this are constantly growing. As for the growth in the amount of resources that are redistributed, there is ‘threat inflation’, as new ones are constantly being brought into being. Threats may be genuine or just as easily imagined or carefully designed. The motivation of the players in this market may be purely for their own department, or it may be commercial (frequently these amount to the same thing), but the sale of these threats has massive internal and foreign policy consequences.
The emergence of this market has been dictated by the character of the political elite of Putin’s third term. In place of ‘Politburo 2.0’, which was made up of representatives of the power ministries (siloviki), bureaucrats and oligarchs, the leadership is now totally dominated by the siloviki. As the political commentator Konstantin Gaaze writes, all the key decisions in the past year have been taken by a closed circle of representatives of the FSB. ‘The FSB doesn’t concern itself with development, it just reacts to threats as it sees them. The government and the various departments spend years weighing up the pros and cons of any decision, but now the FSB simply “sells” a threat to the President and he immediately takes the decision reached by the Service.’ In this way, according to Gaaze, the decision was taken about protecting Russians’ personal data (according to which all personal data should be stored on Russian servers); about the embargo on foodstuffs; and also about many questions linked to Ukraine.
The threat-producing machine works on the redistribution of state resources to the advantage of the power corporations and the business structures linked to them. Here you will find means that have been earmarked for the rebuilding of Crimea and the war with Ukraine, the rearmament of the Russian Army and the modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Then there’s the expensive reinvention of the bicycle – that is, the production of Russian versions of global technology: GLONASS instead of GPS; a sovereign Internet on local servers; a national payment system, ‘Mir’, in place of Visa or MasterCard; and a national search engine, ‘Sputnik’, to take the place of Google. Fascinated by imaginary threats, the Kremlin has diverted funds from the market to the siloviki, who follow their own commercial interests exclusively through nonmarket methods. The liberals in the system have been crushed; those that are left carry out rearguard battles in the Central Bank; and market logic no longer works in post-Crimea Russia.
But this is just half the problem. The bitter irony is that the idea is tangible, and these threats, which were dreamt up and sold to the Kremlin, have become reality – only now not as the reasons for Russian policy, but as the results of this policy. The Kremlin is not reacting to threats, but creating them itself. So in the autumn of 2013, for instance, the legend was dreamt up about ‘the loss of Ukraine’ if it were to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. In many ways this Agreement was a mere formality and did not carry with it any obligations. But because of this, the Kremlin started to tie the hands of the then Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, which led to mass demonstrations on Kiev’s Maidan Square and subsequently the whole spiral of confrontation. As a result, Ukraine went ahead and signed the Agreement; and is now lost to Russia forever. Three months later, in February 2014, the annexation of Crimea was undertaken out of fear of an imaginary ‘NATO base in Sevastopol’; and what has happened as a result? Ukraine is rapidly growing closer to the North Atlantic Alliance and NATO is expanding its presence by creating permanent bases in the Baltic States, which are worried by the turn of events. In Russia they started battling with imaginary ‘separatists’ until they were foaming at the mouth, and as a result created the virus of separatism, coming to us from Crimea and Donbass.