NOTE-070: Fridman, the Russian perspective on information warfare

Contribution

The article splits Russian writing on information warfare into two strands (p. 62). One is a neutral, “dual-use” technical literature: information-war methods are “neutral, just like nuclear energy”, in Tsyganov and Bukharin’s phrase (p. 62, n. 1). The other is an ideological strand in which information warfare is a Western technique aimed at Russia. The article traces that ideological strand to three named theorists, sets out each one’s concept from primary Russian sources, and follows the narrative into official rhetoric, doctrinal documents, legislation and public opinion. Its distinctive claim is about causation. The politicisation is “a complicated and synergetic process” among government, scholars and public, not a Kremlin-directed plot “as it is frequently presented in the West” (pp. 63, 81).

Key insight

The “Western information war against Russia” is best read as a narrative that several actors in Russia share for their own reasons. Academics want to promote their ideas, politicians want to consolidate power, and the public wants its lost national pride explained (p. 81). Following Tulchinsky, Fridman treats the discourse about information war as itself a form of information war. Because it is conducted in Russian, its principal target is the Russian domestic audience (p. 77).

Assumptions

Premises and authorities the argument rests on:

• The corpus is representative. Fridman says the “vast scope” of Russian literature divides into two groups and that three theories dominate the ideological one “since the mid-1990s” (pp. 62–63). He calls the study an “in-depth empirical analysis” (p. 63) but states no selection method or counts. The evidence is the footnoted citation of many works that build on each theorist (nn. 2–3, 35, 51, 63–64), many of them from the journal Informatsionnye voyny.
• Textual parallel indicates adoption. That the “very same language can be easily found” in the 2015 National Security Strategy and the draft Information Security Doctrine is taken as evidence that the government adopted the narrative (p. 78).
• Polls measure absorption. Levada Center figures are taken to show that the public “truly believe[s]” the narrative (p. 79).
• Chronology bears on causation. The theorists began promoting their ideas in the 1990s, before Putin, so the Kremlin cannot simply be using them (p. 80).
• Language implies audience. Because the discourse is in Russian, its main target is domestic (p. 77).
• Translation choices. Myatezhevoyna is rendered “subversion-war” and not “mutiny-war” or “insurgency-war”, and the choice is argued in n. 6 (p. 63). Every quotation is the author’s translation from Russian.
• Time frame. The article appeared in spring 2017. Its latest evidence is Levada polling of 2016, the 2015 National Security Strategy and the draft Information Security Doctrine; the article cites a draft, not the final text.

Key results

What the article reports and argues (attributed to Fridman, reporting Russian authors where stated):

• The common core (p. 63). All three theories describe “the same phenomenon”: undermining a legitimate government by manipulating the information domain to influence elites and instil dissent, separatism and social strife.
• Messner (pp. 63–70). Messner (1891–1974) was a White Army General Staff colonel, later an émigré in Belgrade and Buenos Aires. After 1945, he held, the world was in a state of “neither war nor peace”. Future war would be fought by “a military and its people” against the enemy’s military and people, for “the conquest of the souls in the enemy state” (p. 66). Subversion-war is “a psychological war” (p. 66), and the enemy society’s soul is “the most important strategic objective” in a fourth, psychological dimension (p. 67). He distinguished propaganda by word from propaganda by deed, and offensive from defensive propaganda, the latter to be neither “apologetic” nor “justifying” (pp. 67–68). He ranked five goals, with “dissolution of the spirit of the enemy public” first (p. 69). After 1991 he was republished and “reconceptualised”: his anti-communist account of Soviet subversion was inverted into an account of the West’s Cold War method (“the Messner formula got it right, but in the exact opposite way”, p. 70).
• Dugin (pp. 70–73). Russia is a distinct Eurasian civilisation, and the US is “the incarnation of the West”. Dugin’s Geopolitika Postmoderna (2007) recast US network-centric warfare as “net-centric war” across physical, informational, cognitive and social areas, aimed at “full and absolute control” (p. 72). The US network inside Russia is said to include pro-American experts, foundations, elites with Western savings and Western-patterned media (p. 72). His prescription is a symmetric “Eurasian network” of officials, special-service cadres, intellectuals and “patriotically-oriented journalists” (p. 73). His concept has been applied since 2007 to events in the post-Soviet space (p. 73, n. 51).
• Panarin (pp. 73–76). Political activity is “an informational struggle over the control of the minds of the elites and [other] social groups” (p. 74). Informational confrontation uses political, economic, diplomatic and military methods, which for Panarin means manipulating their informational images (p. 74). He describes three stages: strategic political analysis, informational influence and informational defence (p. 74). The sea powers mastered information war; 1991 was “a defeat in the informational war, which lasted for 48 years”. Yet Panarin blames Soviet failure more than US skill (p. 75). His remedy is a new “passionate” political elite (p. 75).
• Four shared tenets of Dugin and Panarin (p. 76). (1) The West has continuously sought to undermine the Russian establishment. (2) Its main method is information warfare. (3) It seeks a “fifth column” inside Russia. (4) Russia must cultivate a patriotic new elite in response.
• Politicisation (pp. 76–80).
  • Labels: the narrative circulates under the labels “Hybrid Warfare, Controlled Chaos, Colour Revolutions” (p. 76, n. 64, citing Tsygankov and Korybko).
  • Official rhetoric: Putin (30 June 2016) on “a growing barrage of information attacks”; Lavrov (April 2015): “We are faced with a large-scale information war” (pp. 77–78).
  • Doctrine: the 2015 National Security Strategy on the “manipulation of public consciousness and the falsification of history”; the draft Information Security Doctrine on foreign “information-psychological influences” aimed especially at young people (p. 78).
  • Laws: 121-FZ (2012, NGOs with foreign funding), 398-FZ (2013, blocking extremist sites), 97-FZ (2014, supervision of popular websites and blogs), 374-FZ (2016, described as requiring data on Russian clients to be stored in Russia) and 305-FZ (2014, limits on foreign investment in media) (pp. 78–79).
  • Public opinion: the Levada figures listed under corrections (p. 79).
• Conclusion (pp. 80–81). Actors and targets cannot be separated. The Kremlin-uses-scholars reading “seems to be flawed”. A demand-side reading, in which the public wants the defeat explained, is offered. Neither is “completely right or entirely wrong”.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Russian writing on information warfare divides into a neutral-technical strand and an ideological, West-as-aggressor strand	moderate	many footnoted examples of each (nn. 1–4); no systematic survey or counts
C2	Messner, Dugin and Panarin supply the main conceptual narratives of the ideological strand, and have dominated it since the mid-1990s	moderate	primary texts quoted at length; lists of derivative works (nn. 35, 51, 63); dominance asserted, not measured
C3	Post-1991 Russian authors inverted Messner’s anti-communist theory to describe Western subversion	moderate	quoted Russian commentators (Savinkin; Morozov, p. 70, nn. 32–33); list of applications (n. 35)
C4	The narrative is expressed in Kremlin rhetoric and doctrinal documents	strong (for presence)	direct quotations from Putin, Lavrov, the 2015 National Security Strategy and the draft Information Security Doctrine (pp. 77–78)
C5	Laws restricting NGOs, websites and foreign media ownership were passed “as an outcome of these changes in doctrinal documents”	weak	the laws are listed, but four of the five (2012–2014) predate the 2015 Strategy and the 2016 draft Doctrine cited; the causal link is asserted
C6	The Russian public has largely absorbed the narrative	moderate	Levada polls (2014–2016); the same polls show majority belief in TV censorship and falling trust in TV, which the article does not reconcile with absorption
C7	Academics played “an equal if not more powerful role” than the political elite in politicising the idea for the public	weak	inferred from the polling on censorship and trust in TV (p. 79); no direct measure of academic influence
C8	The politicisation was not led by the Kremlin, because the theorists predate Putin	weak–moderate	chronology holds for Messner’s revival and Panarin (1990s onward), but by the article’s own account Dugin’s net-centric concept dates from 2007 (pp. 71, 73)
C9	The narrative’s success results from many actors pursuing different interests, not from a planned Kremlin plot	informal argument	synthesis of C4–C8 plus Tulchinsky’s conceptualisation; explicitly hedged (“somewhere in the middle”, p. 81)

Concepts

• Information warfare (informatsionnaya voyna) — in the ideological strand, a non-military means to political ends which the West wields against Russia. In the neutral strand, a dual-use set of influence techniques (p. 62).
• Subversion-war (myatezhevoyna) — Messner’s form of conflict in which “wars have merged with subversions”, fought “not so much [by] the troops themselves, but rather public movements”, and chiefly psychological (pp. 66–67). The translation is argued in n. 6.
• Propaganda by word / by deed — Messner’s distinction between what is said and broadcast and what is done for its psychological effect (p. 68).
• Net-centric war (setetsentricheskaya voyna) — Dugin’s recasting of US network-centric warfare as a strategy of total informational control over participants in war and peace alike (p. 72).
• Informational confrontation — Panarin’s term for the use of political, economic, diplomatic and military methods to influence an opponent’s informational environment while protecting one’s own (p. 74).
• Politicisation — the article’s term for turning the concept into an instrument of domestic and foreign politics through rhetoric, doctrine, law and public opinion.

Connections

• Clark, “Russian Hybrid Warfare” (LIT-023). The two works describe the same Russian belief from different corpora, and reach neighbouring but distinct conclusions about its sincerity and origin.
  • Shared object. Clark reports an “institutional worldview that the US has led the West in an ongoing hybrid war against Russia since the end of the Cold War” (Clark p. 16). Fridman traces the intellectual roots of the “Western information war against Russia” narrative. Fridman notes (p. 76, n. 64) that the narrative also travels under the label “hybrid warfare”, citing Tsygankov’s Gibridnye voyny and Korybko’s Hybrid Wars.
  • Different sources. Clark’s evidence is 2015–2020 military writing (Military Thought, Army Collection) and senior officers (Gerasimov, Dvornikov, Bartosh, Kiselev). Fridman’s is civilian academic and political writing (Messner, Dugin, Panarin; the journal Informatsionnye voyny), plus doctrine, legislation and polling to 2016. A search of Clark’s text finds no citation of Messner, Dugin or Panarin. Fridman cites none of Clark’s military authors. The two therefore corroborate each other only at the level of the shared narrative, not through shared evidence.
  • Sincerity. Clark argues that the view is sincere, or else that “a fake tail … is now wagging the dog” (Clark p. 18). Fridman declines both a pure top-down reading and a pure bottom-up one, and places the truth “somewhere in the middle” (p. 81). Both reject the reading that the narrative is merely cynical Kremlin propaganda, and both suggest that the narrative now drives behaviour whatever its origin.
  • Where Clark cites Fridman. Clark does not cite this 2017 article. He cites Fridman’s later book (Russian Hybrid Warfare: Resurgence and Politicisation, Hurst 2018) three times. In n. 4 it is among “books on the Russian threat [that] highlight the Kremlin’s perception that it is fighting a defensive hybrid war against the West”, which is the subject of this article. In nn. 14–15 it is among Western works that Clark says describe the means of Russian activity without engaging the Russian concept of hybrid war as a type of war. The reading of LIT-023 (reads/26.md, Connections) lists Fridman’s book only among the “means” literature. Clark’s n. 4 also credits it with the perception point, and that reading could be refined accordingly.
• The 3rd EEAS FIMI report (c02, LIT-084). The EEAS names “information confrontation” (информационное противоборство) as central to Russian doctrine (c02 p. 12). Fridman quotes Panarin’s definition of informational confrontation (p. 74) and cites Russian work on informatsionnoe protivoborstvo (n. 2). The EEAS catalogues Russian FIMI practice as seen from the target side. Fridman explains the Russian self-account in which Russia is the target.
• Sources. Western analysts on the other side of Fridman’s argument are Darczewska (OSW, The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare, 2014) and USASOC’s “Little Green Men” primer (n. 78). The conceptual frame for the conclusion comes from Tulchinsky (nn. 65–66, 82).

Bearing on the record

It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and no THEORY document is affected. It is filed as area-studies and intellectual-history reading alongside LIT-023 and LIT-084.

Limitations

• There is no stated method for selecting texts. “In-depth empirical analysis” (p. 63) describes an interpretive reading of chosen authors, and dominance of the three theories is asserted.
• The chronological argument against Kremlin direction (p. 80) holds for Messner’s revival and Panarin. By the article’s own dating, however, Dugin introduced net-centric war in 2007 (pp. 71, 73), during Putin’s tenure, although Dugin had been publishing since the late 1980s (p. 70).
• The causal ordering from doctrine to law is reversed for most of the laws. The 2012–2014 laws predate the 2015 Strategy and the draft Doctrine that the article says they are “an outcome of” (pp. 78–79).
• One legal citation looks mismatched. The article describes 374-FZ (6 July 2016, footnoted as amendments “On Combating Terrorism”) as the law requiring websites to store Russian users’ data in Russia, but supports it with a BBC item of 5 July 2014 on a data-storage law (n. 74). The 2014 data-localisation law is usually identified as 242-FZ. This reading has not verified that against the Russian texts.
• The public-opinion evidence is mixed and not fully reconciled. High shares see Western hostility, but “42% of them” (p. 79) is ambiguous between all respondents and those who saw hostility. Majorities also believed TV was censored, and trust in TV fell sharply.
• All quotations are the author’s translations and cannot be checked from the article. The Information Security Doctrine is cited in draft.
• The article covers the period to 2016 and does not address later developments.

Open questions

• Would a systematic, dated corpus of Russian information-war publications confirm that the ideological strand predates, rather than follows, official adoption? A bibliometric study of Informatsionnye voyny and related outlets from 1995 to 2016 would settle the chronology.
• How do the civilian theorists here relate to the military hybrid-war writers in LIT-023? A citation study of Military Thought and Army Collection for Messner, Dugin and Panarin would show whether the two discourses are one or parallel.
• Did the public receptivity reported in 2014–2016 persist after 2022, and does the demand-side explanation survive it?

Corrections to the seeded skim

• The skim treats the held Russian Hybrid Warfare as “Fridman’s own book” and asks a deeper reading to check overlap with it. In this record, Russian Hybrid Warfare (LIT-023) is Mason Clark’s ISW report (September 2020), not Fridman’s book. Fridman’s book, Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’: Resurgence and Politicisation (Hurst, 2018; OUP edition 2018), is not held. It appears only as a citation inside Clark (nn. 4, 14, 15). The overlap question the skim raised is therefore about an unheld book; the relation that matters for filing is to Clark, set out in Connections.
• The skim says Messner’s ideas “went unknown in the USSR”. The article is more precise: his books reached the USSR, and the Russian State Library holds them in original editions, but access was “definitely restricted to a small number of high level officials and professionals” (p. 69). He remained “generally unknown” to the wider public because of his anti-communism and his wartime alliance with Nazi Germany (p. 70). The skim also omits that Messner served in Wehrmacht propaganda and supported the Vlasov army (p. 64). The article presents this as part of why he was suppressed.
• The skim summarises Panarin as holding that the sea powers “used [information warfare] to bring down the Russian Empire (1917) and the USSR (1991)”. It omits a qualification the article reports: Panarin gives “the systematic failure of the Soviet political and military establishments, rather than the skilful exploitation of the information domain by the US” as the main reason for the Soviet defeat (p. 75). Panarin’s figure is a Cold War information war “which lasted for 48 years” (p. 75, n. 58).
• The skim gives only the December 2014 Levada figures. The article also reports October 2015 (82% hostile; 44% information war). It gives sanctions attitudes: 71% in September 2014 and 69% in October 2015 said the aim was “to weaken and humiliate Russia”, against 4% and 6% saying it was “to stop the war”. Most respondents believed the main TV channels were censored (69% in Feb 2014, 58% in May 2016), and trust in TV as the main news source fell from 79% in Aug 2009 to 41% in Nov 2015 (p. 79). The article uses these figures to argue that academics played “an equal if not more powerful role” than officials in politicising the idea (p. 79).
• The skim’s conclusion paraphrase is accurate, but it misses that the conclusion moves in three steps. First, the article rejects the assumption that the Kremlin uses these scholars as “flawed”, because their ideas predate Putin (p. 80). Second, it offers an alternative: the Kremlin “simply follows [the public’s] hearts and minds” after the loss of the Cold War (pp. 80–81). Third, it concludes that “none of these explanations is completely right or entirely wrong” (p. 81).