"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
Winston Churchill, October 1939
GRU
March 4, 2021. Three years ago today two members of Unit 29155 of Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie or GRU, the Chief Intelligence Office of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation allegedly tried to assassinate Russian defector and British citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in Salisbury, England. Subsequently, another British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, was killed and a police officer, Nick Bailey, was left fighting for his life. Why would a European state with such an extremely rich culture and tradition undertake such a reckless attack on the soil of a leading NATO nuclear power?
To answer that question one has to understand the nature and exercise of power in contemporary Russia. Russian policy is controlled by a group with their roots deep in the Soviet/Russian security state with a world view shaped by the Cheka/NKVD/KGB and FSB that believes the Motherland is subject to constant attack by ‘anti-Russian’ elements within and foreign enemies without. It is reinforced by a profound belief that the chaos of the 1990s was fuelled by the West. The so-called Siloviki (‘people of force’) also believe the state must be all-powerful domestically in order to offset its many relative vulnerabilities externally. The resultant foreign and security policy is thus driven by a paranoid ‘zero sum’ belief that the Russia of which they are the very embodiment can only survive by keeping the states around them permanently off-balance by all possible means. The maintenance of dialogue with Russia is essential, but so is the maintenance of sufficient strength (in all its many forms) to convince President Putin and the Siloviki that the threshold for success of Russian coercion will be always be high, as will the risk of conducting both statecraft and tradecraft.
Statecraft and tradecraft
Russian statecraft met KGB (or rather the GRU) tradecraft in sleepy Salisbury in March 2018. The attempt by Russian agents to murder Sergei and Julia Skripal with the nerve agent Novichok, and the subsequent killing of Dawn Sturgess, was not just about the extermination of someone the Putin regime regarded as a traitor. By undertaking such an attack in Britain, and doing very little to hide its tracks, Moscow also sent a signal to the US and other Western powers about the reckless lengths Russia is prepared to go to defend its interests and punish its enemies. The attack also revealed the peculiar and historic pre-occupation much of the Russian intelligence establishment has with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Russia is engaged in a permanent form of warfare with the West precisely because it derives its culture of engagement from the Russian intelligence establishment, which in turn justifies its grip on power on a false ‘threat’ from the West. Consequently, Russia is once again a security service with a state at its disposal that is prepared to spend a huge amount of its relatively limited resources keeping European states (in particular) permanently off-balance through the constant application of 5D warfare – deception, disinformation, disruption, destabilisation and coercion through implied or actual destruction (China applies 6D warfare by adding debt as a coercive tool). There is a clear continuum of complex strategic coercion between the Internet Research Agency and the Russian armed forces.
For Putin and the Siloviki to use force externally as they did in Crimea in 2014 four criteria must be fulfilled: the regime believes that the level of threat it faces domestically is sufficient to warrant such action; the regime feels Russia is sufficiently (and relatively) empowered to act; the risk of any foreign military adventurism is relatively limited; and all or any adversaries are sufficiently distracted and/or divided to be unable to mount a robust response.
Consequently, grey zone or hybrid warfare conducted just below what Moscow assesses as the NATO Article 5 threshold is the primary method of complex strategic coercion and the ‘strategic maskirovka’ that underpins it and the strategic judgement required not to miscalculate. However, whilst extreme ‘active measures’ would only be considered in certain carefully circumscribed circumstances the drumbeat of the strategy itself is constant and unyielding.
Putin, power and the past
Putin’s strategy is straight out of KGB tradecraft which can be thus summarised: destroy all internal dissent and suppress free media; chase down, harass and if needs be murder Russian dissidents at home and abroad; and use all possible means to weaken the internal cohesion of ostensibly richer Western powers to undermine their ability to act cohesively against Russia. One of their greatest weapons is the naivety of many Western politicians and peoples and the retreat from patriotism in my liberal democracies, aided and abetted by the systematic exploitation of social media.
Russia is also an oligarchy led by a very rich Kremlin elite most of whom are drawn from the Siloviki who believe they are indispensable to Russia and for whom their own survival is thus the central pillar of state policy. Much of the ‘prestige’ of the state is deliberately linked to the security services and the armed forces who are appropriately funded to ensure loyalty. This is not a new power phenomenon in Russia as it was much the same under the Tsars and the Soviets (Red Tsars). Putin thus views himself and the state as one and the same and his own indispensability as its core strength. A narrative that is reinforced by the ‘Wild East’ chaos of the 1990s, the West’s ‘humiliation’ of Russia and the threat posed by Islamists in the form of Chechen separatists. When Putin became President of the Russian Federation in early 2000 he immediately set about re-establishing the supremacy of the Kremlin over the Russian state through the primacy of the KGB/FSB and by strangling a putative and fragile civic society.
Putin’s rise to power is indicative of how the Siloviki gain and view power. As an aide to St Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak Putin made himself useful to power. When Boris Yeltsin saw that St Petersburg was better off than the rest of Russia he was told by Sobchak that it was due to the ruthless efficiency of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his old KGB cronies. In 1998 Boris Beresovsky, then part of a failing Yeltsin’s corrupt oligarch inner circle, recommended Putin be made head of FSB. He was then rapidly promoted to become prime minister. Putin rose to power because he solved two problems for Yeltsin. First, he promised Yeltsin and his family they would be left to retire in peace. Putin’s successor, the search for whom is now under way, will offer Putin the same deal. Second, Putin helped ‘block’ parliamentary attempts to pass laws that would have prevented KGB officers again serving in the security services and another law that would have ended political corruption and thus embarrassed Yeltsin and his cronies.
There are also significant (and carefully crafted) historical parallels between Putin and Stalin. Putin has yet to use ‘Terrors’ (Lenin’s Red Terror and Stalin’s Great Terror) as a means of suppression and oppression, but the use of extra-judicial killing of dissidents (Litvinenko, November 2006) is a form of it. Putin is a cynical opportunist who uses events, either real of staged, to justify crackdowns designed in turn to perpetuate power to undertake adventures abroad. He uses the security state and Siloviki to preserve and extend his power base across all political, social and economic life of the state. All opposition is crushed, even amongst the oligarchs (Khodorkovsky, Nemtsov and Navalny). Routine appeals are made to patriotism and nationalism by Putin to keep a sufficiency of the masses onside whilst blaming all of Russia’s many problems on spies, agitators and foreign powers. Where Putin is different is that he is prepared to appeal to Russians through Tsarist history (Alexandr Nevsky) as much as Soviet history (Great Patriotic War) with a narrative in which Russians are both heroes and victims.
The Lubyanka complex
Contemporary Russia is not a police state, it is a Cheka/NKVD/KGB/FSB state with the Lubyanka the emblematic continuum of paranoia that has underpinned power in Russia and not only since 1917 and the Russian Revolution but before. The Lubyanka was built on the site of the old headquarters of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, and whilst no longer ‘Moscow Centre’ it continues to house at least one directorate of the FSB. Much of the statecraft and tradecraft of today thus has its roots deep in the Tsarist era. Therefore, to understand Putin’s Russia one must also understand the culture of the security services built up first under the Tsars (Okhrana) and then under Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. To them Russia has always been a relatively weak power governing an enormous territory surrounded by hostile powers and peoples that are both richer and more advanced, the very existence of which is a threat. And yet, the Siloviki regard Western Europeans in particular as soft and decadent and prone to panic in a crisis, a belief the European response to COVID-19 has done little to dispel. Proof of threat is that efforts by Russia to become part of the wider Europe ever since the days of Peter the Great have been constantly rebuffed and often at an immense cost to Russia and its peoples, whilst the price Russia has routinely demanded to join the rest of Europe are quietly ignored. Whilst suffused by ideology the Soviet era was little different to the Tsarist era in this regard.
Therefore, the only significant difference between the KGB and the FSR is that whilst the former claimed to uphold the Revolution against class enemies, the latter is the ultimate guardian of Mother Russia against a whole host of ‘enemies’ real and imagined. Moreover, there is little difference in world-view between the FSR and the Okhrana. Indeed, the very mission of the Lubyanka was to provide a concrete (and stone) continuum of power from the early days of the Cheka under Felix Dzerzinski, the NKVD (Genrikh Yagoda, Nokolai Yezhov, Laverentiy Beria), the KGB (inter alia Alexandra Shelepin, Vladimir Semichastny, Yuri Andropov, Vladimir Kryuchov) and the post-Soviet FSB (Nikolai Patrushev, Alexandr Bortnikov).
Consequently, ‘Russia’s’ world-view is that of the Lubyanka: a zero sum contest in which only dominance can assure security with foreign policy an extension of a Siloviki-led domestic agenda. Where Putin cannot dominate adversaries beyond Russia’s border he will ruthlessly destabilise them by exploiting their many vulnerabilities. Russia has no allies, not even China, because mistrust is the very essence of strategy and any ‘compromise’ a tactical manoeuvre to be used only for advantage. Russian statecraft is thus a form of grand strategic KGB/FSB tradecraft in which four levers of coercion are applied constantly to strategic advantage using what the KGB called MICE: money, ideology, ‘compromat’ and ego. There is little room for confidence-building. The EU and US world-view is founded on a belief in the permanency and possibility of progress, partly because of a belief in progressiveness and the advance of technology. Russia is the counter-progressive state based on a FSB/SVR/GRU world-view that is eternally and essentially a cynical and enduring belief that human nature is inherently corrupt and eternally corruptible.
Apart from a partial retreat under Nikita Khrushchev between 1953 and 1964, and a significant loss of influence under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin between 1985 and 1998, it is not the Kremlin which has been the beating and constant heart of Russian power, but the Lubyanka. Why? The simple answer is that the Siloviki can only justify power as a consequence of threat against Russia - real and imagined – and the constant appeal to Russian patriotism/nationalism such a world-view evinces. Their essential weakness is precisely because they offer little prospect of progress with no formal mechanism for peaceful succession or transfer of power. As such power and instability are hard-wired into the Russian state. It was pretty much ever thus and is thus equally unlikely to change soon.
Active measures need counter-measures
As Churchill suggested the focus for Western policy should be a clear understanding of Russian interests and the establishment in the Russian elite mind of red lines Moscow must not cross for fear of sanction or worse. Where interests align then co-operation should be sought across the spectrum from economic partnership to arms control. Indeed, where Russia does have legitimate interests they should be acknowledged. However, where it does not they must be firmly resisted and all defections from agreements and treaties must elicit a response. Therefore, in dealing with Russia the first objective must be to adopt (as much as possible) common positions and approaches that whilst designed to promote constant engagement and dialogue with Moscow are underpinned by demonstrably strong security and defence across the hybrid, cyber hyperwar mosaic of contemporary deterrence. Disagreements between allies and partners will be ruthlessly exploited.
It is a profound mistake to believe that Russia can be influenced by legalism or trade alone (Wandel durch Handel). The Siloviki detest ‘soft’ power as no power because it cannot be applied decisively. Therefore, the most important transatlantic policy objective must be the constant, consistent and coherent demonstration of solidarity between Europeans and North Americans. Indeed, it is the first line of defence. Moscow must also be repeatedly reminded that coercion and force that undermines the institutional architecture of Europe’s security and defence will not work and lead inevitably to unacceptable costs being imposed on Russia.
Perhaps the biggest mistake is to believe that THIS Russia is likely to change soon and become a friend or trusted ally. Moscow can indeed be a temporary partner and a fellow traveller for a time when interests align, but not a friend. The land of authors such Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Pushkin, Nabokov, Tolstoy or composers such as Borodin, Khachaturian, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky et al could quite possibly want to be just such a friend because their work is so uniquely and hauntingly Russia as well as so quintessentially European. However, it is the Siloviki who run Russia and friendship is simply not in their DNA.
At the start of this Analysis I
posed the question why. The answer is
because such strategy works and because they can. Russia is successfully destabilising Europe and
its open, vulnerable societies whilst keeping Europe’s leaders permanently
off-balance. The objective? To erode the political cohesion of both the
EU and NATO. Sceptical? Take a look at
last month’s the humiliation of EU High Representative Josep Borrell by Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Power
crushing weakness.
Julian Lindley-French
