Finally, all the Russian special operations to support forces that are against the system in Western countries – from right-wing populist and proto-fascist parties, like the National Front in France and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (‘Alternative for Germany’), to the former hope of the Kremlin, the populist Donald Trump – have collapsed. The established parties proved to be more stable than the Kremlin thought, and Trump became a headache for the whole world, including Russia. So the Kremlin has ended up with a huge number of toxic assets on its hands: compromised Olympic medals; Crimea and the Donbass, not recognized by international law; Assad’s cannibalistic regime in Syria; radicals, separatists and quasi-fascists in Europe; accusations of staging a chemical weapons attack in Salisbury; and now even the unpredictable, poisonous Trump. These are all the fruits of special operations and hybrid wars in which Russia, as they say, has shot itself in the foot.
Here we have the second problem of the policy of special operations: they are highly toxic. Even in places where Russian interference went unnoticed and was merely symbolic, its policies and representatives are marked: the West is now looking for the Kremlin’s traces even in places where they may not exist. A very good example is Russia’s interference in the American elections. It appears that it was not so widespread as decisively to affect the outcome (some $50,000 was spent on creating fake accounts on Facebook, which is a mere drop in the ocean when you consider that around $2.5 billion was spent on the election campaign); but the mere fact of interference by an outside power in the holy of holies of American politics, the elections, so enraged the American establishment that a witch hunt has been opened the like of which has not been seen since the days of McCarthyism, and the heads of the Internet giants, from Google to Twitter, have been lining up to take part in hearings in Congress so as to demonstrate their loyalty and uncover the traces of Russian agents. And, to be honest, the influence of the Kremlin’s propaganda mouthpiece, the Russia Today (RT) television channel, was not so significant in America as to limit its activity there and, in so doing, place under threat of reprisals Western media in Russia. But the channel certainly deserves to be caught up in the storm that it has done so much to create. The toxicity of Russian influence is so great that the tiniest presence needs to be cleaned up. Any hint of even the most innocent contacts with Russians leads to scandal, and the ‘Russian infection’ could ultimately destroy Donald Trump, already weakened and embittered as he is.
All Russian sportsmen and women are also feeling this toxicity now, even those who were not named in the McLaren Report and who have nothing to do with the Sochi doping scam. Every Russian athlete is now, a priori, under suspicion; all Russian sportsmen and women are presumed to have taken drugs, and it is up to each one of them to prove their innocence. This is unfair and hurtful, but it’s the result of that same radioactive special operation, that Chekist polonium, which has infected everyone’s clothes. Russian holdings, capital, investments, businessmen, projects, real estate – all of these are now under suspicion, as the list of sanctions published by Washington in February 2018 illustrated. The world is now paranoid about Russian hackers, dopers, trolls or agents of influence. They are searching for Russians under the bed; and we will take with us this stigma, this radioactive background, wherever we go for many years hence, even after Putin is no longer in power.
Typically, the failure of various special operations all occurred simultaneously: in the same months in which ‘Russiagate’ broke in Washington, the Russian doping scandal happened in WADA and the IOC, as did the judgement on the shooting-down of MH17, which revealed even more evidence about Russia’s participation. It may be that Russia’s exclusion from the Winter Olympics is just the first alarm bell, and there may yet be the collapse of the whole system of Russian hybrid gains, from Crimea to Trump, from the Donbass to Assad.
And here we have the third fundamental weakness of the special operations: they are irrelevant in the modern world. Yes, it is complicated, mutually dependent and vulnerable; it is a ‘risk society’ over which it is easy to place the hybrid ‘fog of war’. But it is also a society of radical transparency, a world of networks, video recordings and anonymous activists from Wikileaks to Bellingcat, where every step is tracked, every telephone call, every bank transfer; where you can no longer hide your account offshore, or your test-tubes, or your ‘BUK’ missiles, which, it is assumed, shot down MH17; where the special services are just as vulnerable, transparent and old-fashioned as the state they serve. Our Chekists operate as in days gone by: planning, operational development, recruitment, intimidation, disinformation – but in a global society of social networks and citizen control, they can be instantly found out by traces of polonium, urine samples and IP addresses, by tracking phone calls and selfies posted by soldiers on social media. And various observers rigorously point the finger of blame at their patron: the Russian state.
In exactly the same way, because of the interference of the special services, half a century ago, at the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union lost its place in the developing information revolution. At that time, under Brezhnev, the fatal decision was taken to pass responsibility for the Soviet computing sector from the scientists to the siloviki. At that time, Soviet computer technology was at least on a par with the USA, perhaps even ahead: we had progressive programming languages such as ‘Algol’ and machines such as the BESM-1, which was a worthy competitor. But the siloviki, trying to minimize the risk to a strategic industry, turned this into a special operation, involving the theft of technology from the West, the reverse engineering of American examples (principally IBM) and their production in Soviet enterprises. But what had been done successfully with missile technology and nuclear weapons ‘borrowed’ from the West didn’t work with computers, which were significantly more complicated and needed not secret constructors’ bureaux but an open code, independent development, testing in production and on the market. The well-known sociologist and also historian of the Soviet computing sector, Manuel Castells, gives a humorous example: because the sizes of transistors and the width of the wires in the microsystems in the USA were given in Imperial measures (i.e., inches), while in the USSR they were metric, the siloviki decided to round up the American sizes to a convenient number – as a result of which the stolen chips didn’t fit the Soviet connectors! Castells acknowledges that, because of this special operation, which lasted for several decades, the Soviet computer sector was about twenty years behind the USA by the time the USSR collapsed.
Today the special operations of the hybrid war are again throwing us decades back in our relations with the outside world, just as they did at the beginning of the 1980s and at the start of the 1950s. Once again, the world is afraid of Russia and is isolating it, but we can’t capitalize on this fear and the consequences of it hurt us, like with our athletes and our sports fans. The lesson to be learnt from everything that’s happened is simple and banaclass="underline" everyone should mind their own business. Athletes should be coached by trainers, and not officers of the special services; relations with neighbouring countries should be worked out by diplomats and business people and not by Russian spetsnaz soldiers with no markings on their uniforms, as happened in Crimea; Russia’s ‘soft power’ should be conveyed by artists and tourists, and not hackers, trolls and propagandists. And representatives of the special forces should carry out their own direct tasks, such as catching terrorists, and should not be substituting special operations for all the existing institutions and procedures. But in a country that chose, for the fourth time, to have as its President a Chekist, this all remains a utopian dream.