I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. “The stability,” he said without hesitation. “You can feel the stability.”
That was a different world; the late 1990s. I don’t remember the year, but I remember knowing what my friend was talking about because I had felt the same culture shock in reverse when first visiting Russia.
It was the decade of degenerate democracy under Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union had collapsed. It was not obvious where the unravelling would stop. Criminal violence was endemic. The drunk president was propped up by a lawless oligarchy, pillaging state assets and calling it privatisation. No one who witnessed Russia’s trauma in that period was surprised that it engendered nostalgia for the pre-democratic era. Soviet power was unaccountable but at least predictable.
Vladimir Putin is as crooked as everyone else who rose to the top in Yeltsin’s entourage. But he restored order and national self-esteem, which mattered more to most Russians than the slow suffocation of political freedom.
It is not a familiar dilemma to British voters because democracy and stability have not seemed mutually exclusive. Our multiparty system allows peaceful rivalry between different political and economic interests. The opposition can become the government without bloodshed. The defeated regime yields without fear of retribution. Under conditions of rules-based competition, democracies can accommodate dissent before it turns to revolution. That makes them innovative and resilient. It is how free societies outperformed tyrannies and won the 20th century. Vengeful dictatorship wants a rematch. Putin thinks he can turn the west’s strength into its greatest vulnerability.
An authoritarian megalomaniac sees merit in a political system if it raises no obstacle to the leader’s will. He therefore sees liberal democracy as stupid and weak. It submits its rulers to the contradictory caprices of dumb voters. It follows that the way to accelerate democracy’s failure is to amplify those contradictions, nurture division, accelerate polarisation, shrink the available space for compromise so that representative government grinds to a halt.
The theory originates in Soviet-era tactics, but the old KGB was constrained by the unwieldy analogue logistics of recruiting agents and meddling in politics abroad. The digital age makes it cheaper and scalable.
Traditional methods of subversion are still practised. Reform UK’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, is now in jail after pleading guilty to bribery charges dating from his time as a Ukip and Brexit party MEP. He accepted tens of thousands of pounds in bribes to boost pro-Russian interests in the European parliament. He offered to recruit colleagues to do the same, but there is no suggestion that he did so.
The case has prompted the government to set up an inquiry into foreign influence in UK politics. The terms of reference cover the post-Brexit landscape, not because Kremlin meddling is a recent phenomenon but because excavation of more historic interference – perhaps contaminating the democratic credentials of the Brexit campaign – is deemed too socially and politically fissile.
Back in 2016, the Kremlin obviously had a preference for Britain to harm itself and the EU by burning their mutually beneficial alliance, just as Putin had a clear interest in Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton in that year’s US presidential election.
But the method isn’t confined to specific geopolitical goals. All divergence of opinion is ripe for radicalisation via the enraging algorithms of social media. A 2018 US senate committee investigation found that Russian troll accounts were posting messages in support of Black Lives Matter and cheering Confederate flags in different digital silos.
Anything to inflame the connective social tissue that holds multicultural societies together counts as a successful attack on the democratic immune system. And that was before AI entered the scene as an info-weapon of mass destruction, flooding the arena with synthetic news slop and terrifyingly plausible deepfakery.
This is one of the challenges identified by Blaise Metreweli, the new director of MI6, in a speech earlier this week. She characterised the current national security environment as a “space between peace and war”. Russia was not the only antagonist to be named, but in the eyes of Britain’s spy chief, Putin is the pre-eminent menace. His method is “the export of chaos”.
That could involve needling incursions over Nato borders with drones, ships and submarines. It features cyber-attacks on infrastructure, arson and sabotage. Such provocations are alarming but counterproductive if they alert public opinion in the target country to a threat that would otherwise be largely invisible.
The more insidious threat is pollution of democratic discourse. It blurs the distinction between knowing service to a hostile government and unwitting collaboration; between active treason and gullible dogmatism. Gill was greedy, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t believe arguments he was paid to make. There are pockets of opinion on the radical right and left of British politics, among the Trump acolytes and the “anti-imperialist” Nato-quitters, where the Kremlin gets its talking points boosted free of charge.
Ideology is not the prime vector for sabotage of western democracies. Political commitment and activism can be less useful than their opposites – apathy and disengagement. The most toxic substance spewing from turbines of digital disinformation is cynicism. It is the view that politicians are as bad as each other and that none is trading in the truth. That is the path of despair down which democracy itself starts to be dismissed as a sham.
And that is where Putin’s strategic calculation merges with his need to avenge Russia’s humiliation in the 1990s. The lesson he observed in the chaotic Yeltsin years was that democracy was easily manipulated by elites to legitimise plunder. The liberal script was different from the one parroted by Communist party elites. The hypocrisy was the same.
If that was true of democracy in the former Soviet Union, it was surely true everywhere. The appeal in that analysis is that no Russians need be held responsible for their country’s failure to thrive. They were tricked by their enemy and the great lie of political freedom. According to the same grudge, there was no need to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine because its independence was an extension of the original con. Nato’s defence of Kyiv’s right to self-determination can be dismissed as rhetorical patina on the long-running conspiracy to diminish Russia.
This is the deep well of resentment that fuels Putin’s export of chaos. Sowing discord and shredding consensus is meant to rob western societies of the stability that was once their superpower. Then, in Putin’s ultimate vindication, the moral lesson of the cold war will be inverted. Instead of authoritarian regimes crumbling because their captive subjects craved freedom, it will be demoralised citizens of failing liberal societies turning to strong leaders for order.
The realisation of that dark fantasy can seem grimly plausible, especially given the spectacle of Trump’s misrule in the US. That has to be our spur to vigilance in Europe. In the end, dictators always underestimate the resilience of societies governed by law and institutions because they cannot believe in a system that is stronger than the rule of one man. They cannot cope with the most powerful truth of democracy – that it outlives every tyrant who tries to prove it is a lie.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
