Part 3. The Splendors and Miseries of Propaganda
The Dugins
On the night of August 20th, the 29-year-old Darya Dugina was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow. To understand the significance of this death, the readers need to understand the significance of her father’s political philosophy for Putin’s regime and Vladimir Putin personally. Known as “Putin’s whisperer”, “Putin’s Rasputin” and even “Putin’s brain”, Alexander Dugin has been seen, for many years and by many analysts, as the author of the ideological foundation behind Putin’s grand plan of Russia’s superpower status revival.
In 2017, CBS’s 60 Minutes interviewed Alexander Dugin, but the interview did not run due to the time constraints. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the program’s producer Shachar Bar-On revived the interview and dedicated a 60 minutes Overtime episode to its analysis. In his commentary Bar-On quoted Dugin’s 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics:
For Russia, to rebuild its power globally, it would need to use disinformation, destabilization, and annexation.
One particular exchange from the 2017 Dugin interview with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl is worth citing. It begins with Stahl listing Dugin’s recommendations for the Kremlin leadership from the same book of his, The Foundations of Geopolitics, that has been quite influential in the Russian military. I am quoting the exchange verbatim, leaving Dugin’s English grammar intact.
LS: - You proposed that Russia annex Ukraine. You said that Russia should encourage Britain to leave the EU – Brexit. You suggested that Russia make Iran an ally. Now, it does sound as if Mr. Putin is following your blueprint. […]
AD: - I agree, there is similarity. More than that. But I have developed my vision, Eurasian vision, that is much more… That is larger than what you have mentioned. That is only the first steps…
LS: - But he followed your first steps. He followed exactly the first steps.
AD: - That takes too long. So he is in a position of absolute power, because we are living in a monarchist society from below. So that is not Putin who imposes on us monarchism or authoritarian rule – we demand from him to be much more authoritarian than he is. So he a little bit disappoints us because it take too long, so…
LS: - But he did the first steps.
AD: - First step in seventeen years. In seventeen years you could change the globe.
LS: - He listens to you, but he’s going too slow?
AD: - Too slow, yes.
There is a lot to unpack in Dugin’s radical views articulated above. One idea, shocking yet plausible in relation to the most militant Rushists, is about demanding from Putin more authoritarianism. Indeed, for a substantial part of Russia, mostly of the older generation, the role model of a ruler is still Joseph Stalin. From the Stalinism vantage point, Putin’s annexation of Ukraine, taking many years and many stages, is apparently too slow and not aggressive enough. The obvious fact that more authoritarianism always means more oppression at home never bothered these hardliners. As Russian writer Alexey Shiropaev pointed out in his 2015 essay “People Like Any Other People”, “Slavery from under the stick is terrible. But slavery without a stick is even worse.”[1]
Unlike Putin’s propaganda soldiers of the media, with their militant rhetoric and typically hysterical tone, the usually soft-spoken, scholarly-looking Dugin presented himself as a philosopher, often emphasizing his affiliation with Moscow State University, where for years he served as professor and the Head of Sociology of International Relations Department. The same emphasis on the academic degree and title was effectively used in the 1930-40s by Doctor Goebbels to dignify his cannibalistic philosophy. And following in the footsteps of the chief Nazi propagandist, Dugin’s real calls for action were far from academic. “Kill, kill, kill!” Dugin said about the Ukrainians involved in the violent clashes with the pro-Russian activists on May 2, 2014, in Odessa, which had claimed 42 lives. Dugin’s murderous plea, often cited by the Russian and Ukrainian sources, was a part of his monologue during the streamed discussion of this tragic event by the online TV channel Anna News. Here is the complete quote:
What we saw on May 2nd goes beyond all boundaries. I think: kill, kill, kill. There should not be any more talking. I think so as a professor.
This echoes countless speeches of Dugin’s “academic” mentor Goebbels encouraging the mass killings of the Jews and other “subhuman” races. And just like Goebbels taught, Dugin has been spreading and probably authoring crude, clear and forcible legends about the horrific bloody crimes committed by the Ukrainians. The most notable of them appeared on his Facebook page on July 9, 2014, on the 4th day after the Ukrainian forces retook the city of Sloviansk (Slavyansk) during the Donbas War. Significantly, Dugin’s post was meant to further substantiate his “kill, kill, kill!” chant as its first sentences clearly shows:
Animals captured Sloviansk. Escalation of genocide. And such creatures are not to be “killed, killed, killed”? Are you sure?
Then Dugin proceeded to cite the “testimonies of eye-witnesses” about the war crimes of the Ukrainian forces – systematic executions of civilians, tortures, kidnappings, the corpses lying around in the streets, apartments and houses. This vivid description sounds disturbingly familiar today – these war crimes were indeed committed, eight years later – in 2022, by the Russian army – in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Izyum and other occupied Ukrainian cities and towns.
The most graphic story from Dugin’s post was about the crucifixion of a six-year-old boy who was nailed to an advertising stand by the Ukrainian soldiers. Apparently inspired by Dugin’s tale, three days later the main Russian state-owned TV Channel One reported a more developed story of the crucified boy whose age was now reduced to three. Halyna Pyshnyak, introduced by Channel One as “a refugee from Sloviansk” described the public execution of the boy at Lenin Square. For millions of Channel One viewers the crude, clear and forcible fiction became reality.
It did not matter that there is no Lenin Square in Sloviansk. It did not matter that the investigative journalists from Novaya Gazeta and Dozhd visited Sloviansk and did not find any evidence supporting Dugin and Pyshnyak story, nor any audio or video footage of this public crucifixion. It did not matter that Pyshnyak turned out to be a mentally unstable wife or a Russian separatist. It did not matter that the story was refuted by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and a prominent writer Dmitry Bykov – their combined audience was dozens times smaller than the audience of the Kremlin’s Channel One.
In his essay “What for did Alexander Dugin and Halyna Pyshnyak Crucify a Boy?” that appeared on the 6th day after Channel One featured the story, Dmitry Bykov compared it with the infamous Beilis Trial of 1913 when a Russian Jew Menahem Mendel Beilis was falsely accused of a ritual murder of a Russian boy in Kyiv:
They arrested a Jew by the name Beilis, who had no idea why, who did not even observe Shabbat, and they cooked up a case against him per which all Jews were accused of drinking the blood of Christian babies (and although Beilis was acquitted by the jury by a majority of one vote, the libel was never officially refuted). […] Now we have our own “Beilis case” with the only difference that there is no corpse, no witnesses, no accused, and no any evidence.
In the conclusion of his essay Bykov wrote:
Many already say that in war all means are justified, but this is precisely the horror that we judge all conflicts, including sports, by the standards of the World War II. But then we were opposed by non-humans, by degenerates, and today any enemy is immediately called a fascist. War triggers an attack of sadomasochism in our people – sadism is directed at the neighbors, and masochism – at the leader who can do anything he wants once again.
This was written in July 2014. Throughout Putin’s long reign, Dmitry Bykov has been one of those intellectuals who, using Goebbels formula, refused to yield to the stronger – to the brainwashed militant obyvateli. “Russian Poet Dmitry Bykov Targeted by Navalny Poisoners” was the conclusion of a long investigation by Bellingcat – one of the leading investigative journalism groups of our time. Bellingcat’s Executive Director and chief Russia investigator Christo Grozev proved that some of the same Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who followed Navalny and participated in his assassination attempt in August 2020, had used the same strategy and methods during the attempt on Bykov’s life in April 2019. Luckily, Bykov survived. He left Russia after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As of this writing, Dmitry Bykov is residing in the Unites States and working on a book about Volodymyr Zelensky.
Back in 2014, while rebutting the child cruci-fiction story, Dmitry Bykov was inadvertently keeping the story alive. This was exactly what Putin’s propaganda was trying to achieve. Alexander Dugin’s method behind concocting this graphic image, the specific role of his story in the context of the Russian military strategy in Sloviansk in the summer of 2014, and the story’s long-lasting damage were summed up by historian Timothy Snyder in his essay “The Sadness of Sloviansk”:
By 5 July 2014 the Russians had withdrawn from Sloviansk. Six days later, on 11 July, the Russian army began to shell the Ukrainian army in the Donbas -- from the territory of the Russian Federation. The next day Russian media distracted from both of these events with an outrageous lie. The most important channel on Russian television told an entirely invented story about a non-existent three-year-old Russian boy crucified by Ukrainian soldiers on Lenin Square in Sloviansk.
This tale seems to have been the creation of the Russian fascist intellectual Alexander Dugin, who had published it on social media a few days earlier. Dugin is a believer in what he calls "archetypes," foundational cultural constructs, can be deployed to allocate guilt and innocence. Thus the calculated choice of a defenseless small child as the victim and the crucifixion as the method of killing.
Nothing about the story was true, and it was refuted by independent Russian journalists. There is no Lenin Square in Sloviansk. The image nevertheless quickly became established. Years later I was still asked about it in Europe and the United States.
***
Although not nearly as prominent as her father, Alexander Dugin’s daughter Darya was a soldier of the Russian propaganda front in her own right. A frequent guest on Channel One and other Kremlin’s media outlets, a writer and lecturer, Dugina was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Ukraine and shared her father’s disappointment about Putin’s lack of speed and resolve. She was also her father’s worthy pupil in the indoctrination tactics. Here is an excerpt from her last lecture about the information wars. In a typically devious twist and in accord with her troll farm colleagues, she accuses the Ukrainian media of manufacturing evidence of the Russian army’s war crimes in the town of Bucha:
To convince the Western public in “the bloody crimes of the Russians” a performance is staged with people’s corpses which are presented as “the victims of the Russian aggression”. Linguistic experts pay attention to the sound resemblance between the name Bucha and the English word butcher – slaughterer. For the Ukrainian society the same staged performance is used to prevent a friendly or neutral attitude toward the Russian military. Now the emphasis is different: “that’s what will happen to you if you take the side of the Russian Federation”. In Europe Ukrainian refugees and hired actors stage performances everywhere, imitating, in their turn, the “performance” in Bucha, produced by the Ukrainian forces.
Unsurprisingly, some of the first social media reactions to Darya Dugina’s assassination evoked the Dugins family style – from the claims that her death had been staged and Darya is alive and well, to the sardonic suggestions that Dugin never had a daughter and Darya’s very existence was nothing but a media invention. Yet Darya Dugina was indeed killed on August 20th, 2022, by a bomb, while driving a car that belonged to her father. The vast media coverage of her death, the statements from political and spiritual leaders, including Pope Francis, and multiple whodunit theories indicate that this murder is widely perceived as significant and consequential.
While reiterating his call for peace during his general audience talk at the Vatican on August 24, Pope Francis spoke of “that poor girl flown into the air because of a bomb under her car seat in Moscow. The innocent pay for war. The innocent.”
With thousands of the Ukrainian civilian casualties, including children and infants, the choice of Darya Dugina for an innocent victim of the war is problematic to say the least. Can a spiritual leader of the world afford to be so misinformed at such a moment? Was the Pope a victim of the Russian propaganda or political influence?
There are three main theories about the party responsible for Dugina’s death:
· It was an operation of the Ukrainian military intelligence.
Predictably, this was the conclusion of the FSB investigation, completed with the unprecedented speed in 2 days. The firm denial of the Ukrainian government was articulated by President Zelensky’s adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak: "I confirm that Ukraine, of course, had nothing to do with this because we are not a criminal state, like the Russian Federation, and moreover we are not a terrorist state". Indeed, even if the Ukrainian intelligence had the impressive ability to execute such operations right outside Moscow, Darya Dugina would be a bizarre target. Some speculated that her better-known father, who was expected to be travelling in the same car but switched vehicles at the last moment, was the real target. Still, it is hard to understand how the assassination of Dugin, whose ideological influence which, by all accounts, has been diminishing in the last decade, would have benefited Ukraine in this war.
· It was an operation of the FSB.
This is the most plausible theory, supported by the majority of independent analysts. Four possible motives were named, and a combination of any number of them could have made it happen:
1. Turning Dugina into a symbolic martyr, picturing Ukraine as a terrorist state murdering young “innocent” women, and thus stimulating the militant fanaticism of the Russian population that was getting weary by the stalling war.
2. Sending a warning to the ultra-right wing of the Rushists that Dugin represents – to all those who believe that the “special military operation” is not fast and brutal enough. The criticism of Putin from this group became much more public and vocal as the war reached its stalling phase.
3. Using Dugina’s murder to unleash a stronger wave of domestic repressions against the war opponents. This strategy was employed by Stalin who had the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov killed in 1934, and then used this assassination to escalate the political repressions.
4. Using Dugina’s murder for relocating influence and funds within the FSB.
· It was an operation by a domestic Russian group fighting against Putin’s regime.
This version was made public by the former State Duma member and opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev who has been living in Ukraine for several years. He claimed that he has been in touch with the organization called The National Republican Army (NRA) which took responsibility for Dugina’s murder. No one has ever heard about this organization before. Other reasons for skepticism are the sophistication of the operation (a remotely detonated car bomb), and once again – the bizarre choice of a victim. Claiming responsibility for the murder of a 29-year-old C-list female propagandist is not an impressive launch for a resistance group.
Regardless of who killed Darya Dugina, the Kremlin propaganda instantly turned her into a mobilizing martyr of the war. Her memorial service, held at the main television center in Moscow and attended by hundreds, was broadcast live. Putin sent his personal condolences and posthumously awarded her a medal for valor, a military award normally given for the acts of exceptional courage. He also ordered his military to recruit 137,000 new troops – on the 5th day after Dugina’s murder. One of his key propagandists, the RT network editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan demanded the retaliatory strikes on the “decision-making centers” in Kyiv. Photos of the Russian military vehicles and artillery shells with the words “For Dasha Dugina!” inscribed on them appeared on pro-Putin Telegram channels. Pope Francis’s statement quoted above showed that the propagandistic benefits of Darya Dugina’s death for Putin’s regime went far beyond Russia’s borders.
In his essay “Putin’s New Martyr for the Russian Cause”, Meduza investigative editor Alexey Kovalev pointed out a specific historic parallel, evoking the ghost of Dugin’s “academic” mentor – Dr. Goebbels:
It is not the first time a “sacred sacrifice” has been used for this kind of propaganda. In 1930, a communist carpenter killed a small-time Nazi thug, Horst Wessel, in Berlin. The latter was immediately stylized into a martyr for the Nazi cause by Joseph Goebbels, who would later become the Third Reich’s propaganda minister. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Wessel was made into a national hero. Towns and streets bore his name, concentration camp inmates had to bow their heads when he was mentioned, and the “Horst Wessel Song” became part of the German national anthem. The Kremlin may or may not give Dugina the full Wessel treatment. But the propaganda benefits of her martyrdom status for a cruel and sadistic regime is already apparent.
Two other things were made apparent by Darya Dugina’s death. The war that Putin’s Russia started has come to Russia itself. And the propagandists enticing, justifying and inspiring it will sooner or later pay the price.
(…to be continued…)
[1] All Russian texts are offered in my translation.
Good essay.