What's Down on The Kremlin Troll Farm These Days

The Flying Monkeys were the foot soldiers of the Wicked Witch of the East in Wizard of Oz

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I've been thinking in a conceptual way about how the Moscow influence operations worked in the 1960s-1980s, and how they work today -- similar, of course, but with many new affordances from the invention of social media and also the reformation and deformation of Russia itself.

Skip down to the list at the end of this post if you like and think about it more directly and quickly -- or read the back story as you wish.

We've been under attack lately by the usual low-grade trolls, more sophisticated operatives, opportunistic actors, and so on. It's not that "it's getting harder to tell them apart" -- and they encourage brand confusion -- but that maybe it doesn't matter, that function and not form should be followed. In any event, food for thought, but remember when it was more like this?

• Moscow Center - the actual employee of the KGB or GRU or state media, such as Vladimir Posner
• Agent of Influence - the emigre figure or Western journalist or UN officials they had coopted -- Victor Louis was a character like that; 
• Active Measure - the operation that Moscow Agent performed in tandem with AoI to influence media or harass you as a journalist or human rights worker
• Fellow Traveler - the socialist parties, the leftist academics who followed the Moscow line, sometimes slavishly, sometimes less so but mainly travelling along -- the word in Russian is "sputnik" as in the satellite and news agency by that name.
• Pragmatic Industrialist - this would be Armand Hammer or somebody who would sell wheat or oil or Coca Cola to the Soviets in the belief this would bring world peace dynamically on its own
• Double Agent - the person working for both sides
• Defector - a KGB agent or ballet star who defected to the U.S. or another country from the Soviet Union
• Emigre - first wave (tsarists, Whites), second wave (DPs, World War II), third wave (Jews, Baptists, Volga Germans, etc.)
• Peaceniks -- these might be already Fellow Travelers or already turned to Agents of Influence but they also included many sincere marchers for peace in Birkenstock sandals who drank green tea and sang John Lennon songs
• Exchange Students -- this was an inapt name for people like me, who studied at LGU in 1978-179 because we had no "counterparts" -- there was no "exchange" of students allowed to study as we were -- there were only officials and operatives, people like Georgy Arbatov.
• Soviet Friendship Society, Soviet Peace Committee - fake state agencies staffed by real KGB to interact with foreigners
• Kremlinologists - this was a high caste of people with visas valid to the Soviet Union who did not criticize the Soviet Union or they would ose their visas
• NGOs - human rights groups, ethnic groups like Ukrainian Self-Help groups, veterans' groups etc that might or might not take a critical role regarding the USSR - not to be confused with GONGOs, which are "government organized" entities like the Soviet Friendship Society

In other words, the roles were pretty clearly defined. There weren't some roles that were so capacious that almost anything could be meant by them. In part this is caused by the institutions themselves in Russia and even the West breaking down; in part it is due to the Internet; maybe it was the drive of inertia but there it is, it's just not so defined. That is, when was the last time you heard of a defector? It would be good if there were still defectors who would say "I have defected from this evil regime, here is my story" and people would either help with literary jobs or put them in federal protection programs or what have you. 

Today, you have these phenomen:

 

• Fourth wave -- which includes Google engineers who come to live for years on H1 visas but are still allied with Moscow and are fine with the VPK (military-industrial complex) that maybe just didn't pay them enough but might some day; students who can now  study abroad and return; relatives of people who can live abroad and return after 3 or 6 months; even businessmen who don't have to have big-picture pragmatism and money to waste on Soviet reality, but who might merely sell toner refill cartridges or something
• Rossotrudnichestvo -- the state's "cooperation" agency which is little more than the Soviet Peace Committee under Arbatov, really, but now has a way bigger budget and the ability to form or cooperate with think-tanks, committees, projects, trips, conferences, etc. Endless.
• Faux Friends -- these are people who have an institute that sounds like a Western one, like "Comparative Agricultures" or "Policy Studies" or even have a name like "Carnegie" or "an IBM sponsorship" in their set-up -- but are NOT the same as a free, independent, untrammeled institution in the West.
• Russianology or area studies or thematic studies (health) with a regional component -- now more actual research can be done in-country; now more of a range of views and theories are tolerated, but still, this field is visa-dependent and also constantly ducks to avoid being called "neo-con" or some other political career killer that might affect their university's government grants or even private grants
• Social media -- and here where the field is enormous, on steroids, a fire hose, and really, only to be controlled by Moscow Center, which has the will and the manpower and the grudges -- Westerners just don't have those things in enough amounts at any level.
• Kremlin Troll Farm -- semi-state operations by shadowy figures in Russia that do influence partly as a business, partly as a political favor that helps them in their more lucrative businesses (like Prigozhin's Defense Ministry contracts for catering, etc.)

 

There's probably more I could add to the complexities of the forces and entities at play here  -- "metasticizing Russian mafia inside the health benefits system of America" is the kind of thing I mean -- that is partly about fourth wave, which doesn't really leave Mother Russia even if it does physically by bringing its worst features and embedding them in Western life; "Londongrad" is another one of these entities of criminality. So I won't get into all that now but let me just sketch out the list of "roles" that I see played out mainly on Twitter or Facebook which make the whole Moscow Center game now so much more effective (for them) and tiring and frenetic (for us).

In the old days, a KGB agent, perhaps with the help of an Agent of Influence, could infiltrate an emigre group, get them fighting with each other, pressure somebody facing a divorce or who was an alcoholic and turn them, smear people in the newspapers with their AoI journos, and mission accomplished. They could recruit spies or pen a podval (the so-called "basement" on the bottom of the page of Pravda or Izvestiya which either denounced a certain figure or institution in the West, or carried their recantation with titles like "How My Eyes Were Opened") -- so that if you saw a name in the podval you'd know they'd be arrested or expelled or fired -- or worse. What the KGB could not do was get into your Kiwanis Club or bowling nights on Tuesdays. Now it can.

Basically, in the old model, Moscow Center couldn't really leverage the concept that there were supposed non-agents that could be decent and have those pro-Moscow views on their own -- because they didn't exist, or there were far less.

That is, either somebody was an out-and-out agent, or they were bought, like some UN official or businessman, with bribes or merely drinks or girls or whatever, blackmailed perhaps, or actually put on the payroll, or the "influence" agents were in short supply -- even if you were a peacenik or a socialist, you wouldn't want to go ride on a Volga Boat Trip in the Soviet era unless...well, wait, Bernie Sanders did that, AND actually spent his honeymoon going up the Volga with such a Ship of Fools...

But what I mean is...people didn't have the ability or capacity or couldn't get the visas (the Soviets didn't grant them) such as to go backpacking around Buryatia and get roped into a mafia/intelligence scheme by stupidity or ominously, wind up dead in the taiga -- the opportunity wasn't there. There wouldn't be someone who worked in a Citibank or a Pizza Hut in Moscow the way they would in Vienna or Tokyo who might become a witting or unwitting agent -- they didn't exist as positions. There wasn't that vast field of activity of ordinariness possible -- and there wasn't that vast ability to get into the interstices like bed bugs and stay forever and wreck havoc.

If you ran the Moscow line in the 1980s, you were an actual agent, or paid in cash or kind, or in a very lonely place in your sectarian magazine that no one found credible -- if you were honest, and few believed you were. And here I'll say there were always arguments (like about Alger Hiss) and I personally found I.F. Stone (in the 1980s before his death) to be honest and decent; I worked with him in fact-checking a number of articles, we would speak on the phone now and then, and didn't believe him ever to have been a committed Moscow agent, although the arguments that rang in Alcove 1 and Alcove 2 in the old days about this still ring in the virtual equivalents of those Alcoves today.

That is re: Stone, I'd say even if you present proof that he worked for Moscow in 1936-1938 (and you might be able to do that -- and that's terrible!) he would have atoned for his sins in the 1980s by exposing the decided incompleteness of Gorbachev's glasnost in the 1980s and by really getting it about Moscow in general.

After all, Wikipedia is accurate about the critical position he took on the Moscow purges, for example, although I think he was wrong about the Korean War. I.F. Stone's Weekly was the first blog, and a good thing for the country, in my view. The problem is that the many, many sources on what Stone really did in the 1930s when he met with Soviet press attaches and ran front groups against the Nazis aren't clear - like this accusatory one  or this exculpatory one. That is, I just never see anybody going frame by frame what the activities and positions were -- how Moscow's agenda was advanced, if they didn't pay for lunch.

To me, to have lunch with the Soviets in the 1930s, especially if you condemned the Moscow trials, was just bad judgment and maybe arrogance that you could remain above it all and unstained by this. The stricter categories for these roles are gone now -- the case for or against Izzy hinges on a defector being able to say he was a paid agent or an unpaid agent -- and that's it. It's like Alger Hiss. That is you can draw in all kinds of other evidence like "what was his position on the Moscow trials or Korea" -- but the bottom line is, it's about a former Moscow agent's word against you, take it or leave it. Today, there are no defectors whose ruling on an American figure can paralyze entire intelligence agencies for year.

Instead, there's Twitter.

The arguments about what Izzy was or wasn't will never be solved. 

But here's the thing: now everybody -- EVERYBODY -- is Izzy Stone at lunch with the Soviet press attache because EVERYBODY could accidentally retweet a Russian bot, or be influenced by a Russian operative, or get themselves tangled up in knots with some smear or Twit fight and end up with dozens of "new friends" they will never shake. 

(BTW, the thrashing given to Altman here is spot on, and exactly the problem with these apologists for the KGB, and exactly the problem we still see today in dramaticizing the role of foundations or think-tanks or grants and the unwillingness to allow civil society to be -- with freedom of association and freedom of speech. That is, I can think generally Stone's legacy can stand without calling his life's work "a KGB operation" -- ridiculous -- but I can sure condemn Altman for his smear of the people who merely tried to find facts as well they should about the vast lying machinations of the Soviets.)

SO at any event, you have to think in a more sophisticated fashion about what the job is here -- if the job in the 1960s and 1980s might be plausibly to show "who takes Moscow gold" (the Communist Party, that front socialist group) or "who was really an agent of influence" (they lunched with the Soviet press attache even if they picked up their own tab) or "who is an objective agent of Moscow" (remember that whole "objective" debate that really Lenin started), today, your job is to bypass the argumentations of that quagmire of people trying to goad you into calling them "agents of Moscow" -- when they readily can show they take no pay, have no institutional affiliation, and "came by their views honestly".

Your job is always and everywhere to show that their views are aligned with Moscow's, and Moscow's views are wrong, cruel, brutal, etc. -- let's say on the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, and so on.

Your job is to keep saying that if they were honest, independent, socially-conscious and right-thinking their views would not align with Moscow by definition.

Your job is to keep saying, "but if you are that independent thing, why are your views aligned with Moscow's? Because they are. Why would you support bombing Syrian villages where there's no ISIS?" "Why do you think Right Sector and NATO is fighting in Ukraine when it's the regular Ukrainian army fighting Russia's GRU battalions plus "volunteers" who are really contractors in the army at best and at worst operatives of ultraright groups" and so on. 

Some people think they establish their credibility by saying "yes, those are my views, but I oppose Putin's position on gays or women". Or they say, "Yes, Russia bears the brunt of blame for Syria but the US is wrong and we should work on our own government's policies -- MISTIA is right around the corner here."

Well, your job is to show them that you don't  have credibility when you can weep for Chechen gays but not weep for Boris Nemtsov killed by Chechen soldiers run by the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. They are all part of the same phenomenon. 

So I don't pretend this is easy, or that I have even found a good working method to try to address the moral equivalency squad, especially among the Cypsters but I think the first thing is just study the types and characters and realize the complexities of the situation. And to keep saying things like this -- that if you tendentiously supported Chelsea Manning in the process of feigning to report on her "objectively", you are working for WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is an agent of influence of Moscow. So why are you defending WikiLeaks? 

So here's a chart of the roles of yesteryear, during the Cold War:

 

• Moscow Center  - this is the same old thing, Same As It Ever Was, it didn't change -- the KGB is the FSB and SVR; the GRU, it doesn't matter, it's the secret police
• Vanya or Masha at IRA - these people aren't exactly KGB agents (or FSB agents) today but something different -- they are cadres for the semi-state entities like the Internet Research Agency. They might be enthusiastic VPK types; they might be moonlighting grad students; they might be single moms with toddlers who need a job -- it's a range. Some of them defect like the old KGB defectors, but only defect to the Internet and then they get either a similar job or they fade into obscurity - there's lots more of these people than there used to be. Some of them work like an American English major might work reluctantly at an ad agency -- just wanting a job, a resume builder, hoping to get out of that creepy business; others work at the IRA with zealous, ideological enthusiasm as if they were not only a VP in an ad agency but a political campaign director.
• Active Measures- the thing they do is still the same -- lie, spread disinformation that is 90% true, distract, disrupt, denigrate, sabotage etc.
• Flying Monkeys - this is my collective term for all of them but the first wave sent out in a big operation to distract, discredit, paralyze, disrupt
• Flunkies -- these are people who work in state institutions, or even private business who feel they have to support the Kremlin for survival reasons or authentic reasons who will not fight for any space of freedom for others -- the people in this video, for example -- that is, there may be some very nice nurses or decent school teachers or skilled plumbers among the flunkies -- which is only their job by day, as by night, they may be "sobels" -- but from the perspective of the social project of how you oppose the malice and murder of the Kremlin, they are "part of the problem, not part of the solution". Still, normal relations with them building on thematic or single-interest or human commonality ties work to a point to mitigate the more awful aspects of the regime. 
• Scribes -- These are people who work for the state press, or fake independent press (an oligarch who has a license because he is Putin's crony).  Rule 1: never sit on a panel with them and never go on their media entities believing you are "helping to get the word out" about freedom or facts or anything outside their world. The only way to avoid losing the game with Scribes is never to play.
• Bots -- these are scripted entities that either tie to spam kings who just do political jobs like they would do a bank robbery or a credit card theft, or ideologically-driven types who make or buy or sell bots to perform operations to serve their own interest group -- for example, a group of Afghan veterans who support the People's Republic in Donbass and maybe work as policemen -- they're not Moscow Center at the FSB, they're just a force aligned with it that may be even more malevolent and capable of greater damage to targets precisely because they have no institutional constraints -- like Anti-Maidan. Keep in mind that you can't always tell a bot from a real person, and they play on that. So your work here is not to identify "bots" but to oppose their malevolent ideas, whether authentic or real.
• AoI - this is the Agent of Influence who is now 2.0 -- an Internet commodity, perhaps available for rent by groups even with opposite agendas, a "work for hire" type - these people are more flexible now, and have entire web sites and think tanks which I call Open Source Active Measures -- available to be used by just about anybody (like Registan or Storify) but which become suborned quickly by those with means and mind for mayhem, like RT.com journalists or Uzbek security goons.
• Cypsters - this is my contraction for Cynical Hipster especially because they "sip" a lot of alcohol in bars -- and are willing to drink with Alexander Boroday of the DNR and MH17 infamy, for example, and tweet nasties about Navalny. These are generally young men in their 20s or 30s with their first grad school or media or business or travel in Russia -- but they can occasionally be young women who work in a Soros AIDS project and then sometimes they stay five years and write for obscure lefty magazines and do fixing for real journalists for a lot of money and then maybe marry a Russian woman or man. The Cypsters believe they are Above it All and Russia and America are morally equivalent, and they have just the fact-filled nuanced 140-character version of why this true, with a meme photo ready at the hand -- that maybe actually Konstantin Rykov gave them or sent them, and from which they may not even wipe off the electronic identifiers. In their middle age, Cypsters may upgrade at best to AoIs or perhaps be revealed finally as Scribes. There is no redemption here.
• Contrarian Authoritarians - these people are more skilled, established, invested in careers but their entire world, which started with Opposing the Man, is now about providing the Critical (Marxist otherwise) stance about [fill in topic] -- always being contrarian to what they few as the stampede, the pack journalism, the benighted people who think their own country, America is superior to Russia because despite the Trump horrors it is still under the rule of law -- and that matters.. Steve Cohen is a good example of this type of character. I say "Authoritarian" about some of them because their recipe is usually to shut down free speech, accuse others of having called them "agents of Moscow" or even write their bosses and tell them they should fire people for what they said on Twitter.
• Listless Liberals -- this should be self-explanatory, and why these other characters succeed -- not enough spine, too much fear, wary of losing a visa to Moscow or being called a "neo-con" etc.
• Adjuncts -- these are people who have those low-level jobs in academe that they think should be paid more -- except then people like the semi-drug addicted unemployable, the failed businessman with a drinking problem who can at least teach business writing to feed his family, the former gentry family scion rich fallen on hard times, the new immigrant -- they have no place they can get jobs, and they should. Bloomberg is harsh on these people and tells then to get a real job. Sarah Kendzior who matches the description of a number of roles here is a big champion of adjunct rights past the point of sanity. This job exists and is low paid so that those who should be low paid can at least get that -- and really, the solution isn't "publish or perish" or "get tenure" -- which can be hard now for all kinds of reasons -- but to be willing to be a paralegal, and then either becoming a lawyer, run for office, or become a business executive or even a New York City school teacher. The need is greater there. In the Kremlin Troll battle context, the adjuncts are horrible because they are underemployed, feel no pressure to write real articles when they can tweet all day, have all the time in the world to sit at conferences and junket around at least with couch-surfing and so they never really work for a living even as they whine that they are underpaid -- they won't even paint houses. Moscow doesn't have to pay them -- New School for Social Research does.
• Granolas - these are like Peaceniks, but with better health and while they home-school or sell Amway, they might be on Twitter all day with a vengeance and they may decide the Russian bot line du jour -- hate Musk, release the memos, cheer the underdog Russian Olympians are all viable Apple Pie positions. Don't misjudge them.
• MISTIA "More In Sorrow Than in Anger" -- people who share your views, but they begin to think you are Counterproductive if you are Too Harsh in your criticism; they call for nuanced discourse; they urge dialogue; they say maybe there's another way to look at this, they view themselves as ABOVE like the Cypsters, but they may drink less, and actually be more grown-up in their fields of employment or the ability to Affect Change. The MISTIAS can include just weepy girls who think Russian cats are cute but really, it's about established professionals who think really, it's going too far to say things like "Putin should go to the Hague" and we Need to Be More Temperate In Our Language.
• Clueless Gits - these are people who wander into Twitter wars about facts and realities with no idea of where Russia is on a map, or even the next state over from the one they live in, in America. They have all kinds of totally random ideas -- did they see that thing about Russia on the Discovery Channel? No, they saw "The Americans" or somebody had a video on Facebook. They can go stampeding after the actual agents, and you can't count on them to know American civics or world history well enough to have some natural checks and balances, as you could in the 1960s. 
• Pugilists - these are people who actually fight Russian trolls or try to oppose the mayhem, from amateur civic positions, from professional positions in NGOs or institutes, from whatever,  but they become so wrapped up on it that it is easy for Moscow Center to play on their egos, vanities, insecurities, and narcissisms and just "play" them by ensuring they themselves do the splitting of groups; they themselves undermine solidarity with stubborn suspicions and so on
• PlayCops -- these are people who maybe actually worked in law-enforcement or intelligence but don't anymore. Now they play on Twitter. Or they wish to be cops someday, and play one on Twitter. At one level, Preet Bharara is a very, very good and skillful version of PlayCop that is actually a very needed thing in civil society -- a former federal prosecutor fired by Trump who takes outstanding civic positions and tries to be helpful and knowledge -- but since Obama could have fired him just as well (they are all fired when a new president comes in) it has to be seen in context. Try to grasp that this isn't an insult -- I'd vote Bharara for mayor of New York City. Yes, PlayCops when they really have a robust cop history and really know their field (Schindler) are generally vital to the Twitter discourse. The problem is that they are NOT the real thing -- and the real thing does not function. You also can't tell, if you just have a bunch of kids at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, or Moscow agents pretending to be intelligence, or prison guards in Columbus, OH when you have some nit saying he is in "law-enforcement" and begins to talk with that gabble of long, official words and colloquialisms that make up the average cop patoir. 

 

Well, I've sketched it out. Lots more to think about...