A talk with Dima Vorobiev on propaganda

As relations between ordinary Europeans and Russians have come to a virtual standstill since 2022, we take the opportunity to talk to one of the few Russians who keep access open to a Western audience and who can tell us about the political weather in Russia in particular and the Russian mindset in general: Dima Vorobiev, a former propagandist in the service of the USSR. By Florian Zoller

No one can escape manipulation. Either you admit to being a victim of manipulation or you deny it. But isn’t the fine art of manipulation precisely to make people believe that they are not victims of manipulation and thereby deceive them?

Where we talk about manipulation, political propaganda is not far away. One person who should know about this subject is Dima Vorobiev. Born in Moscow in 1959, he worked for several years in Scandinavia as a propagandist for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, was even an elected member of the Moscow City Council from 1980-82 and helped prepare Mikhail Gorbachev’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize as a diplomatic assistant in 1990.

The end of the Cold War also made him a ‘loser of history’, and he now uses his experience and knowledge to enlighten a primarily Western readership about the Russian soul via the Q&A website Quora. In doing so, he captivates with a great deal of irony and manages -like an old master of propaganda- the difficult balancing act of expressing subtle criticism of Russia’s policies while at the same time conveying their motives and how they work.

A conversation about the Russian mindset, the war in Ukraine and the nature of propaganda.

JetztZeit: Dear Dima, you have been a propagandist for the Soviet cause abroad for decades. If anyone knows what propaganda is, it’s you. How would you define propaganda?

Dima Vorobiev: Propaganda is any act of human communication intended to consistently influence the behavior of the target to serve the source’s objective.

Could it be argued that not only every profession involved in PR (journalism, marketing, etc.), but also every person who publishes any political commentary on the web is ultimately engaging in propaganda?

That’s right. During my time working in propaganda, it was widely believed that propaganda only flows in a top-down direction. Shadowy governments, cults, political parties, all those plotting nefarious things behind closed doors.

The Internet and social media turned the game upside down. The new tools of mass communication made each of us capable of what earlier only big players could do. Nowadays, the musings of celebrities on Facebook and Twitter often carry more weight than the words of presidents, prime ministers, and the Pope.

What distinguishes good and successful propaganda from bad and non-successful propaganda?

Ripples.

Much like the propagation of memes. A meme, you see, is a visual or textual tidbit that many people find so entertaining that they can’t resist spreading it among friends and colleagues for a bit of a laugh. Political jokes and cartoons spread like this.

Now, here’s the kicker. Some people have propaganda as their job. They flog messages to the rest of humanity. They get paid for that. They are the stone that disturbs the surface.

And then there are true believers and fanboys. They do the work totally free, because something about the message resonates with them. They almost never share the same motivation as the masters of the propaganda machine, but they find their own peculiar reasons to adore it. They not only translate the propaganda. They enhance and amplify it with their own words and boundless passion.

They are the ripples.

How does the current propaganda in Russia work? What are typical narratives of Russian propaganda in the Ukraine war? And more importantly, are people in Russia receptive to it?

The tentpole of our civilization is our mighty State. In keeping with it, it’s the Presidential Administration that defines the primary vector of our propaganda. The three most important persons that shape it now are Anton Vaino, Alexey Gromov, and Sergey Kiriyenko. There are others, too, but the voice of these weighs most when the Kremlin sends out its „témniki“ (темники, lists of prioritized topics) and „stop-lists“ (names of newsmakers banned from access to the national media or even mentioned in the news).

These are the two axes that serve as coordinates for a plethora of propagandists on government funding and private propaganda entrepreneurs. They are free to generate any agenda, news coverage, and debate that serve the State’s objective. The Presidential Administration follows the „spaghetti approach“: it watches the players throw all kinds of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Apart from the meritocratic selection of the goats from the sheep, this helps create a wall of white noise that drowns opposition voices and passivizes the public. „It’s impossible to make sense of any of it, the government must figure out what to do with all this in the end.“

What are the biggest misconceptions that people from ‘the West’ have about Russia?

Ah, the ‚collective West‘ and its charmingly misguided attempts to understand Russian politics!

In Russia, it’s generally not so much a case of ‚liberals‘ versus ‚conservatives.‘ It’s more about groups of elites in high-level multitasking. They fight each other for power with one hand and cooperate in keeping a lid on a simmering pot of discontented masses with the other. The opacity this requires and the mess it often creates is what made Churchill think of our politics as ‚a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.‘

In order to control the mass of commoners, the elites keep them on alert against external enemies. Foreigners are blamed for all evil that happens to Russia.

Most of the time, this works superbly. Hence, our famous cohesion and support for the ruler, but which it is actually not. It’s much more compliance that lasts until he who holds the Kremlin drops the ball or dies.

Truth to say, Putin or Yeltsin, or Stalin, or whoever holds the Kremlin, they ride a big bear. The bear often gets angry, and no one knows when this happens nor what the beast is going to do next. The elites know that. They agree to support the ruler no matter what as long as he keeps the beast in reins.

This has two important consequences for the West.

First, any alliance or confrontation between us and them is temporary. It lasts only as long as it helps the elites maintain control over the populace. Second, the West has precious few—if any—levers to influence our behavior.

You may try what the Chinese call ‚wolf diplomacy‘ and the Americans ’negotiations from a position of strength’—but it rarely worked. And the German ‚Wandel durch Handel‘ was obviously one epic exercise in futility.

For all the talks of “the aggressive West”, our long international game isn’t reactive. It’s fully driven by the logic of our internal politics.

In your posts on Quora, terms like „Держава“ (Derzhava) or „авось“ (Avós) keep coming up, which you describe as characteristic of the Russian mentality. What do you mean by that?

Derzhava means „the mighty State.“ The word is never used about other countries, only ours. Originally, this referred to the orb and the cross—much like a European emperor’s accessory from yesteryear. It came from the Pantheon of the Roman Empire. The god, holding a plain spherical globe, symbolized dominion over the ancient universe. Later, Christian emperors added a cross to it.

Our Derzhava now carries at least some of the two millennia of imperial glory with it. No wonder our national anthem proudly begins with the words, „Russia, our great Derzhava,“ only later deigning to mention, „our beloved country.“ Clearly, the mighty State takes precedence over the mere country.

This is significant. Russian civilization has the State as its tentpole. Without it, everything collapses. We’ve seen this tragic play twice in the last century, in 1917 and 1991. Much misery and poverty followed. Much blood was spilled.

Never, never more!

Hence, anything that undermines our State’s powerful will and great glory is, quite simply, anti-Russian and unpatriotic. True patriots, therefore, reject dissent, doubt, and any hint of disrespect towards the government.

Now, to the delightful concept of „avós“. Pronounced with a labial “s” like in the English word „see,“ this essential word encapsulates the role of luck and misfortune in our lives. It’s akin to the Muslim „Inshallah,“ meaning „God willing,“ but decidedly secular. We sprinkle it into our conversations with a vague expectation of good luck.

In the Soviet era, everyone walked around with a netted sack called avóska. It was small enough to be kept in the pocket. Yet fully deployed, avóska could hold the volume of half a fridge and the weight of 80 kg (if not more).

Back then, the shelves in our shops were usually empty. Occasionally, someone inexplicably restocked them. In that sweet spot, it would have been foolish not to grab as much as you could for lack of bag space. A highly indispensable hunter-and-gatherer item in the daily struggle of foraging Soviets, this netted sack epitomized that expectation of a lucky break that forms the core of avós.

You often wrote that Putin was the best statesman in Russia’s history to date. In fact, Putin had some success, especially in his first two terms. He led Russia out of the very difficult and painful 1990s. Relations between Russia and the ‘West’ were also better than probably ever before in history. Here you often write in your blog about the terms „Project Londongrad“ and „Schröderization“. What do you mean by this?

That’s right. Let’s look at the political logic in what happened.

The oligarchs picked Vladimir Putin as President Yeltsin’s crown prince in the late 1990s. One of his main tasks was to establish Russian oligarchs as equal players in the global political and economic game.

Enter „Project Londongrad.“ This was a term coined by one of Putin’s early spin masters. Meaning „the city of London,“ it referred to the burgeoning community of London-based Russian expats. They followed the torrent of money from oil proceeds being stashed in Western offshores. The new rich from the former Soviet Union joined the Persians, Indians, Pakistanis, and Arabs (Londonistán). They wanted to call the shots there. That’s what the super-rich do everywhere, right?

The Londongrad men wanted Russia-owned transnational corporations. Also, they needed a safe haven for oligarchical assets. The main scare for the Russian elites at the time was some future left-leaning government in Moscow renationalizing the oligarchical “loot” from the 1990s.

Putin’s mission was to become a guarantor of Russian business interests in the West. This is why he—in spite of his increasingly anti-Western vitriol—kept calling them “our Western partners” all the way until the Ukraine war.

Putin, as a former secret service operative, developed a talent for forging close personal relationships with strangers he needed as assets. Why not turn some Western leaders into assets now? With our new riches from petroleum exports, he could certainly afford it. Add to that the great potential of Russia’s foreign intelligence network.

Throughout the 2000s, Putin achieved great success in this. A Russo-French-German alliance started to take shape in opposition to the American neoconservative agenda. Getting the former German leader Gerhard Schröder as his errand boy was probably our President’s greatest feather in the cap (therefore, „Schröderization“).

And yet, the feeling of not being treated on par with the Americans frustrated these men more and more. The label of “robber barons” and “Putin’s rich friends” hurt. President Putin needed to address this frustration. He made it plain that it wasn’t his fault. The story of eternal Russophobia permeating the West, and us valiantly fighting back, became the signature of our foreign policy in the 2010s. This ultimately culminated in the Crimea annexation and the Ukraine war.

We in the ‘West’ have the feeling that a considerable part of the Russian population not only supports the invasion of Ukraine, but even thinks Putin is too lax? Is this observation true, and if so, is this enthusiasm for war related to Russian nation-building, as you keep describing in your posts? Or, to put it another way, is the Russian Federation more of an imperial state than a nation-state?

We don’t really know how many ordinary Russians support or oppose the war. Considering the heavy prison terms and other reprisals against the dissenters, few people dare to speak their minds in public.

But in a larger scope of national politics, this doesn’t matter much. What matters is the support the Ukraine war gets from our political class. Yes, for many among them, it may be plain conformism. Yet, Putin gets their cooperation, and this is important to him.

Why does he have their support and acquiescence? It’s because our political class consists almost all of the people on the government’s pay or living off government contracts. Putin has made it clear it’s his war. It’s an all-in game for him. If he falls, the cushy positions and great wealth of many influential Russians in Moscow and provinces will be in grave danger.

Better the devil you know than the angels you don’t. And to that the mutual mistrust that hangs over Moscow these days, the modern tech that is able to detect disloyalty and dissent almost everywhere 24/7/365, and the fear of Putin’s wrath. You get the scene of unique national cohesion only Kim’s North Korea and China of Chairman Xi can possibly match.

Also, remember that we’re a young nation born only thanks to the collapse of Soviet rule. Before that we Russians, along with Ukrainians, Belorussians and others, were just powerless, voiceless subjects of Tsars and the Communists. We need to define ourselves in terms of shared values and common destiny.

Germany went through this over several decades after the Bismarck-led unification in the 19th century. In the 20th century, Norway, Finland, and many nations of Eastern and Southern Europe had to do the same. We’re late arrivals to this, we need to get this job done, one way or another.

From history, we know that nation-building often turns rather ugly. The German one brought us two world wars. Under Putin, we chose to identify ourselves with our imperial past. Hence Putin’s concept of Russia being “the largest divided nation” and the “Russian world”. These led to the Ukraine war, his most ambitious project so far.

Imperial past sits deep. Great Britain had Ireland and India, France the war in Algeria, and Portugal had to fight in Mozambique and Angola. Now, it’s our turn.

The “Russian Reconquista” we see in Ukraine is part and parcel of our nation-building. No matter how it ends, its consequences will stay with us for decades ahead.

How does Putin’s political or even biological life depend on the outcome of this invasion? What is to be feared from a post-Putin Russia?

President Putin, like the most of our nation, was very proud of the lightning annexation of Crimea. The Ukraine war was meant to be an upscaled version of it. Hence the dogged insistence of Putin on calling it a Special Military Operation. People get fined and indicted for calling it voiná (война, “war”) in Russia.

However, right from the outset, it whole project turned out to be our President’s struggle for political survival. He can’t lose it. So far, he believes he’ll overcome it.

Anyway, no matter how it all ends, he’s going to declare it a victory. This is why the narrative shifted from “demilitarization” and “de-Nazification” of Ukraine to “defending Russia from NATO’s aggression.” It builds up the story of our final victory somewhere down the road, irrespective of the result: “We’ve defended our independence, Moscow stands, and Putin is our President—this means we won the war!”

There’s no way to know what happens after the war, nor what Putin’s death would mean for world peace. This can happen tomorrow, or twenty years from now. The outcome will depend on the general situation around Russia. It can change dramatically overnight, and we have no idea which way.

You dedicated your career to the socialist-Soviet dream, and one day this dream came to an end in one fell swoop. How do you personally deal with this so that you can also resist the temptation of nostalgia and revanchism?

Time heals, especially when your life takes a completely different direction.

When I was ousted from the propaganda profession by Yeltsin’s men, I ventured into sales. In less than a decade, I rose to a well-paid executive position in a telecom corporation. My kids grew up, got a good education, and now have good jobs. The demise of Soviet rule opened up whole new horizons for me, with much wider perspectives.

I feel I’m a better, wiser person now than I was back then. Also, almost everyone I know from the Soviet era now lives more comfortable and fulfilling lives. This makes me one of the older Russians who may feel nostalgic about their youth, their friends, and the loved ones lost to time and circumstances—but not about Soviet rule.

Again, back to propaganda: if it is prevalent everywhere and we are always victims of our own biases, how can I as an individual best protect myself from it (if at all possible)?

My personal conviction is that you can’t insulate yourself from other people’s attempts to impact your behavior—not on your own.

We are designed to be social. We think and act as pack animals. No matter how hard you resist, our nature kicks in, in many unexpected ways, big and small.

The only way to navigate in the jungle of propaganda is to be aware of who you are, what your values and interests are. Find your tribe based on that. Stick to your tribe through thick and thin.

„United we stand, divided we fall!“