Signs of information and psychological warfare in Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The main goal of information and psychological warfare is to break the enemy's ability to resist.

Before unleashing hostilities in the information-psychological direction, the enemy studies for a long time what you are weak and where you are strong. And only after that he begins to strike - both at the “points of weakness” and at the “points of strength”.

Striking a blow to the "point of weakness", the enemy can count on a quick result. Striking a blow to the "point of power", he cannot count on such a result. But the enemy understands that if the “points of power” are not suppressed with the help of long and painstaking work, then there will be no victory.

During the Great Patriotic War, the enemy failed to suppress our "points of power." By the way, he hit our "points of weakness" well: he used the fifth column, fueled the moods of opponents of Soviet power, introduced emigration into the game, and so on. The enemy also used our traditional weaknesses: lack of organization, slowness, inability to quickly inflame with hatred of the enemy. But by underestimating the "points of power" and not being able to deliver powerful long-term blows to these "points of power", the enemy suffered a fiasco.

The psychological portrait of Russians compiled by the Germans before the start of the Great Patriotic War was erroneous. During the war, German generals and field marshals noted with growing concern that the Russians were "the first serious enemy." Displaying "fabulous stubbornness" and "unheard-of stubbornness", they resisted "strenuously and desperately" … The disruption of the blitzkrieg demanded that the Germans try to understand what the root of the factor they had not taken into account was the unparalleled heroism of the Russians.

In the mid-nineties, two documents were first published in Russia containing very important information - secret reports of 1942 and 1943, prepared by the Imperial Security Service of Nazi Germany for the highest leadership. These reports are devoted to the ideas of the German population about the Soviet people. More precisely, the transformation of ideas formed by German propaganda after real contact with the enemy. The 1942 report indicated that the propaganda explanation, according to which the "persistence of the Russians in battle" was caused only by "the fear of the commissar's and political instructor's pistol", no longer seems convincing to the Germans. “Again and again the suspicion arises that naked violence is not enough to provoke actions reaching the level of neglect of life in battle … BOLSHEVISM (here and hereinafter emphasized by me - A. K.) instilled in a large part of the Russian population an unyielding stubbornness … Such an organized manifestation of stubbornness never met in the First World War … Behind the enemy's combat power … there are such qualities as a kind of LOVE FOR THE FATHERLAND, a kind of courage and COMMONWEALTH … ".

General Blumentritt, the German chief of staff of the 4th Army, admits after the war: “The Red Army of 1941-1945. was a much stronger adversary than the tsarist army, for it selflessly fought for an IDEA."

Thus, the enemy recognized the tense communist idea, love for the Motherland and collectivism (what is called “comradeship” in the above quote) as the main “points of power” of the Russians.

In the post-war period, the enemy took into account the mistakes and realized that it was necessary to deliver concentrated strikes at various "points" of our strength. I am specifically citing here only those "points of power" that are named in the German secret report.

“Point of Power” # 1 is an idea.

"Point of Power" No. 2 - love for the Fatherland.

"Point of Power" No. 3 - partnership.

Alas, it is all too obvious that the enemy has succeeded in a prolonged and monotonous attack on our "points of power". He acted on the principle of "a drop wears away a stone."The enemy used a new situation: an ideological thaw, a much greater openness of the country, the presence of a powerful dissident stratum in the country, the presence of new informational opportunities and new contradictions generated by provocative de-Stalinization and "goulash-communization", the greed of the nomenklatura elites, the desire of these elites to make friends with the West, conflict various elite groups … And so on.

The enemy has worked tirelessly with our power points for over forty years. Then he went over to a decisive perestroika offensive. During this offensive, the enemy crushed the idea ("point of power" No. 1) and the image of the Motherland-Mother ("point of power" No. 2) - these topics we discussed in previous articles. In this article we will focus on the information-psychological war, which allowed crushing the partnership ("point of power" No. 3). That is, to radically change the attitude of Soviet people to collectivism.

The Russian sociocultural code for centuries, including the Soviet period, included the idea of the priority of the collective over the individual, the interests of the whole over the interests of the parts. The apologists of individualism, who insist that collectivism turned people into “cogs of the system,” are disingenuous. The Soviet people who grew up in a tense atmosphere of collectivism - who participated in the pre-war construction of industrial giants, who fought in the Great Patriotic War, who raised the country from the post-war devastation - were not cogs.

It is characteristic that when in 1989, in the era of glasnost, the famous Soviet director I. Kheifits (before that was the favorite of our liberal intelligentsia) stated this in an interview, the interview was simply not published anywhere. Kheifits said: “When the life of a huge country has passed before your eyes, you involuntarily feel like a kind of Gulliver in the land of giants. And now I feel myself in the land of the midgets. There was a great national idea. Now she's gone. The giants died out, the Lilliputians remained …”(the interview was published in 2005, when the director was no longer alive).

The giants proceeded from the fact that true collectivism is possible only if general and personal goals are harmonized. In particular, A. Makarenko wrote about this: “The harmony of general and personal goals is the character of Soviet society. For me, common goals are not only the main, dominant, but also related to my personal goals. Collectiveness presupposed a single goal-setting. The goal had to be matched with the meaning bestowed on all the individual elements of the collectivity. A member of the team received the opportunity for individual ascent through participation in the collective solution of problems of great importance.

The fierce resistance of the USSR to fascism led to an unprecedented increase in the authority of our country in the world and to the fact that the ideas of socialism and communism gained more and more new supporters. In order to stop the spread of these ideas, it was necessary to create a theoretical basis, providing a basis for the assertion that collectivism - and socialism as its manifestation - is the greatest evil.

Friedrich von Hayek is considered to be a pioneer in breaking our third point of strength - camaraderie. In 1944, von Hayek published in Great Britain the book "The Road to Slavery", in which socialism and fascism were practically equated. Because both socialism and fascism profess a terrible evil - collectivism.

Moreover, von Hayek insisted that socialism is more terrible than fascism, since the terrible essence of fascism has already fully manifested itself, and it is no longer possible for fascism to pass itself off as something good. But socialism, which has seduced the world's intelligentsia with assurances that its goal is to build a free and just society, is like a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Why is socialism so terrible for von Hayek and his followers? It is precisely collectivism!

Grossly distorting the essence of the matter, von Hayek argued that Bolshevism introduced the virus of collectivism to Germany and was therefore responsible for fascism. According to von Hayek, it turns out that fascist collectivism is less poisonous and durable than communist, since there remains a private sphere that hinders the development of collectivism. And therefore communism is much worse than fascism.

Once again: the degree of evil for von Hayek is collectivism, camaraderie. The same one that Gogol sang in Taras Bulba. We all learned this by heart in the Soviet years: “There are no bonds holier than comradeship! The father loves his child, the mother loves her child, the child loves the father and mother. But that's not it, brothers: the beast loves its child too. But only one person can become related by kinship by soul, and not by blood. There were comrades in other lands, but there were no such comrades as in the Russian land."

So, the "doctor" von Hayek approaches a patient called "society" with a thermometer to measure the temperature - the level of collectivism. In other words, the level of attraction for society of everything that is associated with the bonds of partnership, praised by Taras Bulba. And also all of our great writers and poets. As well as communist and non-communist thinkers. Your idea of camaraderie can be as humanistic as you like, including such terms as compassion, solidarity, tolerance … For von Hayek, this is not important. He sees a high temperature on the thermometer and writes: "The communist patient is terrible."

Then he puts the same thermometer on the fascist patient, not giving a damn about the fact that the fascist understanding of collectivism includes completely different - brutal, anti-humanistic - terms. And he writes in the temperature sheet: "The fascist patient is also terrible, but the temperature of collectivism is lower, and therefore he is not as terrible as the communist patient."

If anyone thinks this is a sarcastic distortion of von Hayek's idea, let him check out his book. And he will be convinced that if we subtract from the text of von Hayek and others (the same K. Popper, for example) the obvious anti-communist, anti-Soviet propaganda, then the meaning will literally be as stated here.

Evil is any collectivism. The higher the degree of collectivism, the more vigorous the evil.

Having completed the criticism of our collectivist "monstrosity" (by the way, clearly connected not only with socialism and communism, but also with a thousand-year cultural tradition), von Hayek proceeds to glorify his ideal - individualism. Here is what he writes: “From the most complex rituals and countless taboos that bound and limited the everyday behavior of primitive man, from the impossibility of the very thought that something can be done differently from your relatives, we have come to a morality within which an individual can to act as he pleases … The recognition of an individual by the supreme judge of his own intentions and beliefs constitutes a being

individualistic position. This position does not exclude, of course, the recognition of the existence of social goals, or rather the presence of such coincidences in the needs of the individual, which make them join forces to achieve one goal … What we call a "social goal" is simply the common goal of many individuals … the achievement of which satisfies their private needs."

The idea of destroying any collectivity, transforming society into a set of atoms connected only by such a goal, the achievement of which satisfies the particular needs of most atoms, received support and development.

In 1947, von Hayek organized the Mont Pelerin Society, which included liberal intellectuals (including Popper). The spearhead of society's intellectual attack was directed primarily at collectivism. Any belittling of an individual in the name of a common goal was considered unacceptable by the Mont-Pelerin society. Any theoretical scheme, suggesting the possibility of a single social goal-setting, was considered hostile. Society saw its mission in the destruction of the semantic, value foundations of collectivist societies.

But it was not the Mont Pelerin society that destroyed our collectivism, but the anomie generated by perestroika. "Mont Pelerin" and others "just" told our intellectuals and politicians exactly how to launch the virus of individualism into society. And how to emphasize the real defects of collectivism, invent its imaginary defects and evade consideration of everything positive that is connected with it.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, witches, conjuring, squeal: "Evil is good, good is evil!" Perestroika witches - they are noble "teachers of life" - did just that. They called collectivism evil, which we have admired for centuries and millennia. They called individualism good, which we have despised throughout our history.

How this was done specifically - in the next article.