30 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
our society, the architects of Operation
Denver expended an extraordinary
amount of effort—funding radio pro-
grams, courting journalists, distribut-
ing would-be scientific studies—in
order “to make the elaborate lie look
real.” Today, the tactics of disinforma-
tion require considerably less heavy lift-
ing: bogus claims by Russian state
media, Pomerantsev says, “are just
thrown online or spewed out on TV
shows, more to confuse than to con-
vince, or to buttress the phobias of au-
diences predisposed to seeing US plots
all around them.”
A sizable number of American media
outlets have adopted much the same
approach, not because Russia taught
them how but simply because such nar-
rative techniques are effective, speak-
ing to the sense of anxiety and disori-
entation found among many news
consumers. Pomerantsev dissects a Han-
nity monologue from 2017 that attacked
the notion of journalistic objectivity.
Did the media investigate Barack
Obama’s ties to a former domestic ter-
rorist? What about his affinity for sup-
posedly anti-American Black-libera-
tion theology? And where was the press
when Hillary Clinton lied about the
deaths of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi?
How about all the laws she violated in
maintaining a private e-mail server?
“The effect of such a long list, where
some of the charges are serious, others
spurious, many debatable, and none ex-
plored, is to leave the mind
exhausted and confused,”
Pomerantsev writes.
Although many aspects
of the tradecraft of disinfor-
mation remain the same—
forged documents, planted
leaks, fake experts—there
are crucial differences be-
tween Cold War-era disin-
formation and its modern-
day equivalent. A contin-
uity of tactics does not necessarily
equal a continuity of strategy. Putin-
ism, to the extent that it exists as a co-
herent system, is largely a defensive
one. It sees Russia as continually mis-
treated and conspired against by West-
ern powers, and wants to keep these
enemies at bay, not remake them in its
image. (Weiner misses this key differ-
ence when he declares Putin the “true
heir” of Stalin.) Disinformation is meant
to enervate and disorient an opponent,
creating generalized distraction and
noise, freeing the Russian state to act
unencumbered. One could say some-
thing similar about Trumpism, an-
other incoherent political phenome-
non, which, above all, wishes to escape
the irksome constraints of values and
norms and institutions.
Perhaps the most important shift
has been in the role and the availabil-
ity of information itself. In a 2017 ar-
ticle titled “Is the First Amendment
Obsolete?,” the Columbia law profes-
sor Tim Wu wrote that “it is no lon-
ger speech itself that is scarce, but the
attention of listeners.” In the twenti-
eth century, the main threat to free
speech was suppressive states. This
model “presupposes an information-
poor world,” Wu wrote. But now a plen-
itude of online outlets for expression
have led to an abundance of speech.
And this “cheap speech,” as Wu put it,
“may be used to attack, harass, and si-
lence as much as it is used to illumi-
nate or debate.” The notion of more
and better speech conquering ill-in-
formed or malevolent speech looks out-
moded. In fact, it seems that the op-
posite is true: the distinction between
“good” and “bad” speech is lost amid
the information deluge.
The Kremlin, then, doesn’t really
have to hack anything; it merely needs
to gently stir the informational pot.
Or to let others think that
it has. Pomerantsev writes,
“The Kremlin’s rulers are
particularly adept at gam-
ing elements of this new
age, or at the very least are
good at getting everyone
to talk about how good
they are, which could be
the most important trick
of all.” Rid puts it plainly:
“Saying where an opera-
tion ended, and whether it failed or
succeeded, requires more than facts;
it requires a judgment call, which in
practice means a political decision,
often a collective decision.” In this
sense, the Kremlin’s efforts to meddle
in the 2016 U.S. election were indeed
a success, no matter how many votes
were affected by active measures of
Russian origin. If the goal is disrup-tion and confusion, then being seen
to affect outcomes is as good as actu-
ally affecting outcomes.C
oncern over Russian “active mea-
sures” has given rise to government
initiatives, think tanks, and online re-
searchers, all hunting for troll accounts
in the recesses of the Internet. Janko-
wicz, in her book, visits a number of such
think tanks in Central and Eastern Eu-
rope—places that have encountered Rus-
sian interference of all types earlier and
with more intensity than elsewhere, in-
cluding the United States. She finds that
these initiatives produce mixed results,
but one constant emerges: the Kremlin’s
success in injecting pernicious, false, or
manipulated information into the pub-
lic discourse is of secondary importance
to the mood and political cultures of the
countries themselves.
In Poland, the right-wing Law and
Justice Party, known as PiS, took power
in 2015, at a time of deep-seated mis-
trust. In 2010, a plane crash had killed
ninety-six people, including the Presi-
dent, Lech Kaczyński. He had founded
the Party with his twin brother, Jarosław,
who remained at the helm and propa-
gated the conspiracy theory that the
crash was not an accident. Although
the theory may have been given a help-
ful nudge by Russia, it was a home-
grown toxin, spread and kept alive by
PiS. A number of organizations have
arisen in Poland to fight disinforma-
tion, but, as Jankowicz notes, they are
wary of wading into domestic issues;
instead, they focus on external threats,
even if they are of less significance. As
an opposition journalist remarks of the
PiS leadership, “Why would they be
serious in countering disinformation
when they do it themselves?”
When institutions are captured by
a self-serving ruling party, disinforma-
tion begins to look as much like a symp-
tom of democratic decline as its cause.
Having solidified its rule, PiS packed
Poland’s constitutional court with loy-
alists and took over the country’s main
public broadcaster. Ultimately, a domes-
tic authoritarian figure can inflict far
greater damage on a democratic system
than a remote perpetrator can. Even
Weiner, who is generally alarmist about
the danger posed by the Kremlin’s co-
vert meddling, notes that Trump, by the