When Putin met Harper at the G-20 this week, it is said that the Russian leader insisted to the Canadian Prime Minister that there were no Russian troops in the Ukraine. Last week also saw a Moscow television station insisting they had dramatic footage proving that the MH-17 flight downed over the Ukraine last July was actually shot down by a Ukrainian fighter plane; and not by a drunken Cossack in command of a Russian SAM battery.
Ah, Russia… some things just never change.
Russia is where the term ‘Potemkin Village’ came from, when one of the ministers of the Empress Catherine the Great supposedly assembled ‘show’ villages for her procession to Crimea in 1787 that showed a happy land of prosperous peasants. Some historians believe no such thing ever occurred, but it speaks to the nature of deception and misdirection in Russia that it was (and remains) widely believed this occurred.
Back in 1903 the Czar’s secret police needed to divert popular unrest away from the regime, they cobbled together that immortal classic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and got some of the hoi polloi to engage in a ruthless series of pogroms against the Jewish community. Unfortunately, there are still people today who believe the book is true (some people actually do allow themselves to be fooled all the time – such is the nature of cognitive dissonance and old fashioned bigotry).
In the 1920s and ‘30s as Stalin cemented himself in place as Lenin’s heir, photographs got changed with dizzying speed. The most classic photo was that of Lenin’s speech of 5 May 1920, where Trotsky and Kamenev had to be serially removed from the rostrum Lenin was using as they fell from favour later on. The Soviets were still at it years later in their space program, editing a disgraced cosmonaut named Aleksey Leonov out of the record when he fell from grace.
Soviet foreign policy objectives were partly attained by the 1957 faked Eisenhower-Rockefeller letter in a German newspaper, a bogus American field manual released in Turkey in 1975, and an invented Jean Kirkpatrick speech in 1983. As the Soviets tried to ruin the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games (still being red-faced over the international boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games), they put out a faked KKK leaflet that threatened the safety of non-White athletes to discourage attendance by African and Asian athletes.
The Russians are still at it: A photo recently surfaced of the young Father Ratzinger (later to be Pope Benedict XVI) that was cut to turn his gesture of benediction into a Nazi salute.
The Russian history of forgeries and falsehoods goes back a long way; and just about every technique in provocation and deception practiced by Soviet security organizations was first trialed by Czarist secret police.
Seventy-five years ago, after Stalin and Hitler drew up their line between their spheres of interest in Central Europe, there was quite a bit of deception going on. In November 1939, the Soviets prepared their war of aggression against Finland, they even shelled one of their own villages – Mainila – on the Finnish frontier. The ‘evidence’ of the attack by a nation of 3.6 million people on one of 180 million was loudly trumpeted around the world.
In 1940, some of the Baltic Republics that were engulfed by the USSR ran ‘plebiscites’ on whether the population approved of the Soviet takeover. Amazingly, some 99.something or other approved! Who knew?
In Post-Soviet Russia, there is still some suspicion about a series of apartment bombings in late 1999 which were used to justify the renewal of Russian military action against the Chechens. Of course, the problem is proving these suspicions is about as useful as disproving them… the innate murkiness of using deception, misdirection and forgeries always makes it more difficult to establish the truth or get people to believe it. The art of propaganda is to always hang the cloak of lies on a coat-hook of truth; the art of misdirection makes it impossible for some people to ever accept the truth.
Putin’s protestation that the takeover of the Crimea and the on-going violence in the eastern marches of the Ukraine is nothing but the action of merely patriotic local residents rings hollow; but the nature of a regime that is heir to a tradition of misdirection and deception compels him to make these statements. There will be an international audience as well as a domestic one that will believe him – but not among the G-20 leaders, and certainly not in the office of the Prime Minister of Canada.
