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Conclusion: Deprogramming a fascist

From Z Generation by Ian Garner

“What does progress toward a brighter future mean?” “It means we live better today than tomorrow.”

“Even Putin,” as Anton jokingly tells me, “has to die some day … probably.” Aging fast, isolated from his country and the world, and enduring a humiliating beating at the hands of the Ukrainian army, Vladimir Putin is approaching the end. Perhaps he’ll soldier on, his reputation tarnished by military impotence, for a few years. Perhaps he’ll be removed in a bloody palace coup tomorrow. Perhaps, as improbable as it feels, the Russian public will become so angry at the failure of the promised fascist utopia to materialize that they’ll march on the Kremlin.

Pundits rifle through the Kremlin tea leaves, trying to picture who might replace Putin. Most likely another authoritarian leader. Maybe Yevgeny Prigozhin and his army of Wagner mercenaries. Perhaps Nikolay Patrushev, Putin’s old friend, or even Patrushev’s son, Dmitry. Or a coalition of nationalists, furious that today’s president won’t pursue an even more violent genocide in Ukraine. A social media idol in the mold of Olga Zanko might even slip under the radar and into the cockpit.

And the war in Ukraine will end. Perhaps it will come to a screeching, sudden halt as Ukraine advances. Perhaps there’ll be a drawn-out, years-long quagmire of “frozen” conflict. Perhaps Russia will yet strike back with a fearsome, obliterative strike on its enemy. Nobody yet knows.

But one thing is for certain. The quasi-religious concoction of nationalism, war, martyrdom, and rebirth being poured down the throats of Russia’s young today will leave its mark. Everything tainted with the influence of the West – democracy, homosexuality, difference, the non-Russian – is suspicious. Everything Russian is praiseworthy, and everything Russian is under threat.

Even when Putin is long gone, this “Frankenstein” identity toolkit will live on. The president is idolized but he is not worshipped, like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were, as a demi-god. “Ukraine” as Russia’s Other in 2022 could just as easily be replaced by Belarus, by Moldova, by the Baltic states, or by a new internal enemy – just as Ukraine replaced Chechnya and Georgia in the 2010s. Without major democratic reform in Russia, an increasingly fascist nation won’t be content with a peaceful status quo. Stasis is the natural enemy of an ideology that seeks to rejuvenate society through destruction. It’s impossible to say where the next war will come. But, internal or external, the war will come. It must, if the fairy tale of the glorious future is to keep being told.

Indeed, despite the flashes of protest that have broken out since February 2022, the country doesn’t seem much interested in moving past Putinism, even if some are falling out of love with Putin himself. When asked, most slavishly agree that the president would be right either to stop the war immediately or to turn up the heat and go on the offensive in Ukraine. They follow the leader. They ignore their moral compass and look to the environment around them to learn that what’s happening is right.

Anyway, the death or deposition of an aging authoritarian doesn’t always produce a stampede toward democracy. The memory of the 1990s means that few Russians are ready to spring for a Western-style democracy: justice for corrupt kleptocrats, liberalization in education, free and fair elections, and freedom of speech. Even if a widespread desire for democracy took hold and was realized, the post-fascist experiences of Germany – where denazification was deeply troubled and perhaps, even, a failure – and Italy – where today’s far-right parties are sweeping to power on fever dreams of the Mussolini era – suggest that the path would be rocky.

Those at the most extreme end of Russia’s political spectrum have constructed an absurd reality. Yet, in the middle, few are embracing liberal democracy or know where to look for alternatives. Instead, queer children grow up suicidal, fighting inner battles of shame and trauma. Potential protestors see the state’s vengeful eye everywhere. They quiet themselves. They drown in the noise of internal debates with the state’s imagined voice.

The marginalized and the masses alike can choose to seek comfort in remaking themselves under the state’s protective umbrella. The imagined mythical past – the past of tsarist and Soviet glory – is warm, welcoming. Putin’s neo-fascism might not be perfect, but beyond the digital curtain that is closing around Russia’s borders lie only moral depravity and fearsome military threats. It’s better to be on the inside, in nasha Russia. In our Russia.

When Putin goes, the Youth Army might cease to exist. Victory Volunteers could collapse tomorrow. Perhaps there’ll be no more mass rallies, and no more child soldier’s uniforms sold online. But the social media reality will persist. The connections between Maksim and his young soldiers, between Zanko and her followers, between Nagornyy and his fans, won’t disappear. The TikTok communities where young Russians out-compete each other with tales of military belonging and self-sacrifice won’t evaporate. The culture might fragment, and perhaps split into fractious internal animosity, but it will perpetuate itself for years to come.

The government in Kyiv has known that Russia won’t back down since 2014, when it began undertaking mammoth preparations for a full-scale war with its belligerent neighbor. Now we must recognize it too. We ignore Russia’s militarized youth at our own peril. Russia’s fascism problem won’t go away on its own.

So what can we do about a problem like the Z Generation, before yet more wars are wrought in and beyond Russia? I’ve spoken to politicians and experts to find out. They all agree. The time to act is now. Neo-fascism is embedding itself deeply in Russia’s young. And its tentacles are reaching into our young people’s smartphones and minds too.

Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations and special envoy to Myanmar when the Rohingya ethnic cleansing crisis unfolded in 2017, says, “This is going to be the battle that will define the world that our children and grandchildren will inherit.” This is a battle worth fighting.

Lock them up?

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the President of Estonia from 2006 to 2016, isn’t a man to mince his words. The West has wasted thirty years, he tells me, trying to be “a psychological counseling service for a bunch of sick fucks. We tried the hand-holding bit. It didn’t work. Instead what we get is the horrors of Bucha. On top of that, people are cheering it on.” Ilves reminds me that Soviet Russia invaded and occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, murdering and deporting thousands. And today, he says, “nothing’s changed. They’re still as brutal and barbaric as they were back then.”

Ilves recalls meeting Russian graduates from leading American business schools at a party after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. They were, he says, “all in” on “Crimea is ours.” He’s fed up of seeing “smart Russians, who go study in Western universities, go home, and see how great the gap is between their society and the West.” Driven by jealousy, explains Ilves, “the result is a turn to fundamentalism and a radical rejection of the West.” He notes that Islamic extremists took the same path before 9/11: study abroad, adopt Western customs, then become radicalized. Promoting links between Russia and the West, he believes, won’t help at all.

Ilves’ solution is simple: “We need to arm ourselves, strengthen NATO, and contain them.” That means massive investment in arms and military equipment and taking a hard line on cultural exchanges. For Ilves, there ought to be no more student and tourist visas for Russians, no more goodwill visits, and certainly no more economic links. He calls this a policy of “benign neglect”: “The envy plus the hatred is something we don’t want to deal with. They can deal with it over there. But don’t come back into our yard, please.”

Ilves isn’t alone. Sweden and Finland have raced to join NATO in response to Moscow’s latest war. Kaja Kallas’ and Sanna Marin’s governments in Estonia and Finland respectively have already introduced visa bans for Russian tourists. Zelenskyy is encouraging more nations to follow their lead. The task is made much easier when radical Russian bloggers travel abroad to provoke and hector their neighbors in the pursuit of social media likes in nationalist online communities. With the Russians locked away in Russia – so the thinking goes – there can’t be another Bucha, even if the country collapses into extreme internal violence.

And the conditions for re-engagement? According to Ilves, simple: reparations for destruction; free, democratic elections; and, above all, “they need to get rid of the death cult known as pobeda victory. It’s insane.” Ilves’ goals are noble. But will an isolationist approach really contain a nuclear power like Russia when many of its people are motivated by an irrational drive to wage destructive war within and around its borders? And when its fascist rallies go on night and day on social media groups and in shared memes and videos? The state could collapse almightily and the parades would just go on, luring in children and teens.

Isolating Russia might secure Europe’s borders. It might, though, also bring us a bigger, more powerful, and even more unpredictable North Korea, full of zealots driven by revanchism against the “traitors” at home and abroad who’ve betrayed them. Wouldn’t it be better to address the root cause of the problem by intervening in the sociopolitical development of the Z Generation?

Ukraine’s social media-savvy info war teams have proven to be adept at countering the threat from their neighbor in cyberspace. They understand how important the long view is when it comes to defending themselves from their neighbor. Oleksandra Tsekhanovska is head of the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. Her team develops policies and solutions to counter global threats, especially from Russia, and works with Western nations to nullify Russia’s influence abroad. Few know the Ukrainian and Russian information security field better.

Will the “containment plan” work? “I love the idea,” says Tsekhanovska, “but I live in the real world.” Tsekhanovska explains that there’s a growing Ukrainian interest in conducting influence operations within Russia: “This is something, regardless of whether we like it or not, we will have to do. Because when the war ends, however it ends, Russia in one form or another will still be there.” She concurs that “we will have to take action … if we don’t want to have another big problem in ten or twenty years.” Today, Ukraine has to focus its limited resources on fighting a hot war. But tomorrow, it’s going to be ready to take action to prevent the next invasion.

Part of that pre-emptive defense preparation must be intervening in Russia to interrupt the training of a generation of fascist youth. That doesn’t mean providing a “counseling service” for Russian teens. It’s a way to head off a serious military threat. And the good news? There are plenty of proactive ways to shape Russian attitudes without risking a repeat of the 1990s, being tarred as Western provocateurs, or – worse – risking a nuclear war. Even better, we don’t have to wait for the Putin regime to end. The work can start now.

Words are our bullets

Speaking to Canadian university students via video-link in June 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy explained that under Russia’s dictatorship, “for us, the internet is a weapon. We can use it to show what’s going on in Ukraine, who conquered us, who are the victims and the casualties. It’s a powerful instrument.”

Zelenskyy is right. He and his predecessor as president, Petro Poroshenko, recognized the risk of Russian escalation years before the rest of the world. What’s more, they knew that conflict doesn’t end on the battlefield. Nor does it begin and end with political declarations of war (or even of “special operations”). In the twenty-first century, the information space is just as important as guns and bullets. “Information,” Zelenskyy told his Canadian audience, “the word – can sometimes strike a greater blow than a weapon. Just like real shells and bullets, we can’t let words run out.” Russian propagandists know it today, just as their Soviet forebears knew it a century ago.

The Kremlin’s digital curtain is made from gossamer-thin scraps, not great iron walls. Russia’s citizens remain open to digital influence. The Kremlin knows it: 2021’s new national-security strategy highlighted the importance of increased cyber defense against “the spread of false information” by external powers. The dyed-in-the-wool Kremlin supporters and the young who’ve never known a world beyond Putinism are not looking to reach out to the West. But we can reach out to them.

Telegram, the country’s most popular social app, is not beholden to the Russian state. Millions are still accessing banned Western social media using VPNs. The state’s attempts to cut off access to Instagram in 2022 have been widely ignored: usage has barely fallen. And, with Western expertise, running undetected influence operations even on Russian networks like VK and Odnoklassniki – “Classmates” – isn’t impossible. From offices in Europe and America, we can interrupt Russia’s glittering bubbles of fascist reality.

Before intervening, we have to be certain that our approaches won’t provoke a backlash. Russians like Alina, Vladislav, and Ivan Kondakov dismiss anybody who disagrees with them as a “traitor.” Any criticism of any part of their identity – their Orthodoxy, their community, their leaders, their Russianness – must be driven by Western lies. Even moderates like Anton and Kostya have a knee-jerk dislike of terms like “liberal democracy.”

Promises of the “American dream” or “Western values” aren’t going to gain much traction when anything tainted with the West means lies, perversion, economic failures, and corruption. The slightest drop of counterevidence causes those deeply entrenched in the fantasy reality of Putin’s Russia to reach for their toolkit of slogans and images, shoring up the damage to their harmonious world by piling it ever higher with fairy tale. Tell them that Russians have committed war crimes in Ukraine and they will wave away reality as a staged “provocation” – a CIA or Ukrainian psychological operation – and send you a stream of videos or posts about heroic Russian soldiers saving children. Fascism simply isn’t a rational force.

What is often termed “counter propaganda” – providing the “real” news through, for example, Russian-language radio broadcasts or websites – isn’t likely to convince those raised on a diet of myth. The snappy social media videos created by Navalny’s team that expose regime leaders’ corruption might rack up millions of views, but they’re probably not winning over many regime supporters. When I ask him about Navalny, Kostya chuckles and waves his hands: “He’s not a serious man.” Telling Russians that they’re brainwashed, that they’ve been abused, or that they’ve been lied to won’t be effective. In fact, such efforts are more likely to be counterproductive.

The dangers of the confrontational approach are made clear in attempts to engage the citizens of a country even more distanced from reality than the Russian Federation: North Korea. Sokeel Park is country director at Liberty in North Korea, an NGO that assists refugees who have left their homeland. For years, Park has been guiding North Koreans as they rethink reality.

When they arrive in South Korea, North Korean refugees often hear stories that expose the corruption and hypocrisy of their leaders or that challenge the military myths underpinning the state’s foundation (North Korea is as attached to tales of the Korean War as Russia is to those of World War II). But, says Park, all too often, even those who’ve chosen to risk their lives by leaving refuse to believe the truth in South Korea. Many even grow angry at challenges to the foundations their realities rest on – a response known as the “backfire effect.” The clash between their mythical world and empirical reality is simply too dissonant to process.

Indeed, forceful “counter propaganda” doesn’t make people “wake up.” It is more likely either to lead to doubling down or – equally dangerously – to the adoption of another illusory mindset. The psychologically fragmented simply choose to seek out another fairy-tale reality. That’s what’s happened to many in the post-Soviet era. Men like Maksim ditched the Soviet illusion in favor of another fairy-tale reality. Fractured and fragmented after the fall of the USSR, they sought out simple versions of reality that seemed to provide a way to rebuild their sense of self. Like all those who experience trauma, they sought wholeness and harmony. If the attack on their new reality is too severe, they will snatch at anything that promises to repudiate renewed trauma.

Thus, former Soviet soldier Maksim, distressed at the loss of authority and identity the Red Army’s slow descent at the end of the Cold War created, leapt at Putin’s promises of military strength and at the chance to create the soldiers of tomorrow in the Youth Army. And howling the truth – that the Youth Army is a dangerous indoctrination program to feed the state with sacrificial bodies – at fourteen-year-old Maria won’t help. She’ll just retreat into the safety of her TikTok world. She’ll resent the West even more than she already does. Perhaps she might be tempted down even more dangerous, revanchist paths offered by new, yet more radical online groups that promise to defend Russia.

The parasitic social media culture of Russia’s fascism makes the task even harder. One of the most effective ways to deradicalize a cult member is to separate the individual from their group. Indeed, research shows that the more personal links Russians have with positive role models and identities abroad, the less likely they are to support Putinism. We’ve already seen that process work for Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov. Once he was able to live in Europe, Ilya recognized his own internal battles and his internalized homophobia. Living abroad gave him a new language to describe his experiences. The Russian state emptied him of language and identity; life on the outside filled him back up. However, the effect is not always the same. Some North Korean refugees, for example, find the experience of living in a world at odds with their state’s imagined propaganda reality deeply psychologically jarring; some even dream of returning to the comfortable psychological reality of the brutal regime. When social media can constantly recycle infinite permutations of nationalist myth, the temptation to return to the “cult” will never go away.

Even when Russians do live or travel abroad, they can still be in contact with the culture of Russian fascism thanks to social media. Brute force – banning one community or Telegram channel – will see a dozen others pop up instead. Russia’s web of fake-news networks, paid influencers, and bloggers living in Europe and North America, meanwhile, continues to spew dangerous pro-Kremlin content. Moscow’s hand is inescapable. The most radicalized can never truly be separated from their networks in the twenty-first century.

If confrontation and isolation won’t have much impact, what can we do instead? “Cults don’t last forever,” explains Rae: “They have to confront reality.” But Rae doesn’t have in mind a clash with reality, volleys of facts fired into worlds of myth. He suggests we target “deeper human emotions and aspirations. The notion of people wanting to live a decent life and get along with their neighbors, to provide for their children, to want to respect each other, and to live a dignified life? I don’t think those are Western ideas.”

Rae is right. Even the most radicalized individuals I have spoken to – Maksim, Kondakov, Vladislav – care deeply for their families and communities. They are convinced that they are motivated by human goodness. The moderate patriots, like Kostya and Anton, are drawn more to visions of family and home than to fantasies of butchering Ukrainians. And the youngest, like Maria and Alina, seem to seek belonging in familiar narratives and online communities. They are drawn to the fantasies of youthful rejuvenation the state has produced over the past twenty-two years, they revel in the always-available media rally: the movie scenes of joyous dancing and dreams come true; the downtown youth parades; the speeches, the fanfare, the triumph; the peers who profess that they belong to some or other group.

The task, then, is to use our access to Russia’s social media world to recreate the atmosphere of those spaces – but shorn of the state’s militaristic, destructive content. In its place, we must provide alternative language, images, and models of behavior. Tomorrow’s young Alyoshas should be able to fill themselves up from a range of positive examples, not find themselves being turned into model young martyrs. Young Russians should be able to find a path from the present and toward the values of respect and dignity they share with their neighbors in Russia, in Ukraine, and beyond. As it happens, this is the same tonic Vasily Grossman suggests for his characters, who have been fragmented by totalitarianism, in Life and Fate. Embracing small acts of human kindness – like nursing an enemy soldier or altruistically helping a neighbor – rebuilds individual identities and communal bonds.

Staging the real world

Arnold Schwarzenegger sits at a desk in a well-appointed study. He addresses the camera as scenes from his youthful body-building career and shots of the Soviet past scroll by. Schwarzenegger remembers meeting Soviet weightlifting idol Yury Vlasov, a hero to bodybuilders everywhere, as a teen.

He speaks in English, but Russian subtitles explain Schwarzenegger’s words: “He reached out to shake my hand. He had this powerful hand that swallowed mine. But he was kind, and he smiled at me.” Schwarzenegger explains how much he admires his fans in Russia, where bodybuilding and powerlifting remain popular hobbies. Those young Russian fans watching Schwarzenegger speak could imagine, perhaps, looking up to this Austrian-American role model – even though the West is meant to be the enemy – and wanting, too, to reach out to the other side. To admire the other side.

An almost perfect counter-narrative. Until Schwarzenegger ends his personal story and attacks the Russian state’s lies. “I know that your government has told you this is a war to denazify Ukraine. Denazify Ukraine? This is not true.” Russia, explained Schwarzenegger, was the real villain. Russia, not Ukraine, was killing innocents. The knee-jerk reaction on Russian-language social media groups was all too predictable. Days after Schwarzenegger’s video appeared, twenty-two-year-old Russian powerlifter Maryana Naumova released a response. The mise-en-scene and narrative arc of the clip imitate Arnie’s: Naumova too speaks directly to the camera to address the “enemy” audience, relating a story of positivity then attacking American hypocrisy. Naumova recalls meeting her “kind” and “good” hero, Schwarzenegger, as a teen, just as he had met Vlasov decades earlier. Naumova claimed she had given Schwarzenegger letters detailing the plight of children in Donbas in 2015, and that he had broken a promise to help with the situation: “ Your message,” she explains, “is based on some kind of an invented reality.” We know. We understand. You do not. You cannot. The familiar breath of conspiratorial unlogic.

The clip, which saw this young, photogenic athlete tip Schwarzenegger’s message on its head, went viral on Russian-language Telegram and VK groups. It could have been delivered by any one of the Kremlin’s army of young social media-friendly sports heroes: by Veronika Stepanova, by Nikita Nagornyy, or by one of the Averina twins. Arnie’s message of alternative masculinity sunk without trace. Instead, social media users tore into Schwarzenegger for shilling for America, attacking him with the same litany of homophobic and nationalist insults that have become all too familiar. They didn’t accept his message. They bonded around rejecting it.

Dr Bruce White, director of the Organization for Identity and Cultural Development, highlights the clip as a nearly ideal example of the kind of material that might influence young Russians. But the direct attack on the state’s reality from outside shrank its chances of changing minds. Whenever material like this appears, says White, “the powers that be can simply turn it around and say, ‘But America’s done all these terrible things!’”

White and his team have developed a smarter, data-driven approach to intervening in conflict scenarios around the globe. White’s team sidesteps the idea of creating “counter narratives” at all. Instead, they crunch vast data sets from publicly available materials to see how entities like the Russian state have manipulated identity. Then, White explains, they “break down the components of identity into their constituent parts so that you can see the manipulation visualized.”

He and his team then map out visual pathways showing, for example, how a Russian might associate being “Russian” with being Orthodox, with messianism, and then move further into violent beliefs: war, violence, and anti-Ukrainian hatred. White’s team is, in effect, using big data to map the counterpoints of Russia’s fascist myth: the alternating modes of destruction and regeneration that the state and its allies have cultivated since Putin’s ascent to power.

Analyzing thousands of examples, they can ascertain how alternate pathways might lead not from Orthodoxy to messianism and violence but to – hypothetically – the construction of churches and Christian community work. Using this approach, they can pinpoint where identity construction leads from positive or neutral beliefs to dangerous ends and vice versa. Then, they can design interventions that offer alternatives: videos, social media campaigns, texts, classroom materials, and so on. The approach has already been tested in several post-conflict settings.

Following this method, Russians don’t need to stop being “Russian” to be deradicalized. “We need to find a way,” explains White,

to celebrate the things that people want to celebrate to fulfill their needs. We need to ask, “How does my alternative narrative check the same boxes as the existing pathway?” If the current propaganda allows young men to feel valued, then we need to ensure that the alternate pathway checks the same boxes.

The chances of “backfire effect” are minimized; the appeal of alternative forms of nationalism reduced.

The approach doesn’t rely on ramming a uniform, or even a Western, way of life down young Russians’ throats. It’s about methodically constructing different architectures of reality on the few positive foundations that Russian extremism has left behind. Then, it’s up to individuals to take small steps towards inhabiting one of myriad different, non-violent realities. The evidence suggests that many will follow the same paths of extremism. But others, when faced with a branch in the road, will elect to move towards peace – even if they do so unknowingly.

The situation in Russia may seem hopeless, the extremists’ heads buried too deep in the sand. Even amateur efforts to make an impact, though, have met with some success. When the war broke out in February 2022, Paulius Senuta knew he wanted to do something to help. From his home in Riga, Latvia, he and a group of others founded Call Russia. Consulting with psychologists and policy experts, Senuta and his team developed an approach that resembles Bruce White’s and that anybody could learn in a few minutes.

The group recruits volunteers to make calls to randomly generated Russian numbers using internet phone technology. Russians who pick up the phone are invited to speak about themselves and their views on the war. For the first five to seven minutes of the call, volunteers are instructed just to listen. Then, they are permitted to share their own views, to simply provide a flip side of the Russian’s story. The aim is not to decimate Russians’ beliefs with facts, but to provide alternate readings of the world, and to do so in a friendly way.

The results of the more than half a million calls that Senuta’s volunteers made in the first six months of the war were striking. More than half of the phone calls lead to lengthy conversations. Senuta says that he can often be lost in an hour-long conversation; sometimes his interlocutor even invites him to call back again. Of the hundreds of phone calls he’s personally made, only two have led to furious responses or threats. Russians, when they’re not angrily confronted, are ready to listen to other human beings.

Indeed, Sokeel Park notes that the most powerful messages North Koreans encounter are films and videos “showing Americans and South Koreans being friendly. Some of the simplest messages can erode threat narratives.” Elaborate psychological warfare, outlandish promises of wealth, and mountains of lies aren’t needed to win people over. Rae’s simple truths of shared humanity will prove effective if delivered at scale. The scale, though, has to be vast.

Call Russia is an amateur effort. With the aid of state money, much more ambitious projects could be born. The Russian state and its allies have been staging a fake reality for their citizens for years. Using social media and approaches based on data like White’s, we can show them an alternative, more positive reality. As the state’s dazzling imperial edifices lure Russians in, we can shine our own beams of light into their fairy tales.

Imagine Alina logging onto VK. She comes across a new group with an appropriately military title: “RuZZia Proud.” A few hundred others have already joined. The moderator has shared daily posts. A few quotes from Putin and neo-fascist thinkers. Images of fireworks in Moscow. A painting of Orthodox saint Aleksandr Nevsky riding into battle against European invaders. Photos of troops in Ukraine. An image of a dying “Russian” child in Donbas. Alina joins. She likes and shares the content. Slowly, the group’s feed begins to be interrupted by more positive stories. Mere drops in the ocean of nationalist material. A story about a Ukrainian soldier who helped a Russian prisoner of war. A photograph of a modern-day priest helping Ukrainians. Alina likes and shares some of these posts. A hundred other Alinas see the same material.

Maria opens TikTok. Up pops a new account. A teen girl has joined the Youth Army. She posts all about her life in the Army. The usual bedroom selfies. Parade-ground snapshots. #RealMeWishList. A few weeks in, she issues a gentle complaint. An aging veteran who spoke at that day’s meeting is going hungry. She decides to volunteer in the community. Over time, Youth Army content gradually recedes from view. She records videos describing how she’s helping her community. She even starts attending church services. She quotes from the Bible: “Love thy neighbor.” Maria decides she’ll spend less time in the Youth Army. She’d like to be a part of a humanitarian volunteer group instead.

With a little coordination, it could all be staged from Europe or America with Russian-speaking actors and internet users, the content guided by research on identity pathways. The moments of belonging, the moments of shared enterprise, of shared values feel just as real as those staged by the Putin regime. Their reach and audience boosted by tech experts, the posts could find themselves influencing real Russians.

Perhaps the wisest starting point for identity reconstruction could be to turn to Putin’s Valdai speech from the fall of 2013. How could “Russian language, Russian culture, the Russian Orthodox Church” be recast as positive starting points for identity? Can subtle social media campaigns seemingly delivered by other Russians convince the young that the Russian language belongs to its speakers, not the Russian state? That Russian culture does not exist independent of a mix of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, the Russian ballet’s French roots, Tolstoy’s pacifism, and the contributions of countless ethnic-minority writers, poets, and musicians?

Young users could begin to build their own world around this reality of life outside of militarism. They will not have been lied to. They will never realize they have been confronted, nor do they have to actively choose to leave the herd. They will have simply been provided with alternate models of living. Not all, but some, will choose them over extremism.

Within this web, it may only take a small pin prick to deeply affect an individual. Seohyun Lee, one of very few North Koreans able to study abroad in China, had an awakening in her early twenties in a taxicab. When the taxi driver asked her why North Korea’s leaders left their people to starve, she says, “I couldn’t reply to him.” She was wordless – just like the many Russians who cannot explain the nature of reality beyond their fairy-tale lives. That moment of realization, explains Lee, “burst my bubble.” Later, when her roommate was arrested, she realized that “we are all disposable, expendable … the hope that I had for the future under the Kim regime vanished.” The Chinese taxi driver’s question opened Lee to the possibility of an “alternate pathway,” priming her to reject the regime totally and, eventually, flee abroad.

In new images, new groups, and new hashtags – just as patriotic and appealing as the state’s – identities can be rebuilt. Totalitarianism, the renowned thinker Hannah Arendt wrote, feeds on bodies. It needs war. It demands sacrifice. Human materiel must be pushed through its mangle to keep the cogs of conflict turning. Starve Russia of bodies – the young conscripts who wage genocidal wars, the violent young thugs who attack the state’s latest enemy on the streets – and its fascism will grow weaker. Young Russians need to rediscover that they can be patriotic without being violent. That they can refuse to take part in the state’s wars at home and abroad.

Repluralizing identity, giving Russians the tools and language that they need so that they can identify as both proudly Russian and non-violent, is going to be hard work. Success won’t come overnight. But a thousand pin pricks, delivered in online communities through carefully constructed interventions, might just have an effect.

We have already seen how such small moments can play out in Russia. Anna Veduta read a blog and discovered a vibrant, youthful language distinct from the state’s; Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov recognized a queerness shared with a music star; Lera met peers who invited her into the world of Navalny and the opposition. Seemingly insignificant moments, embedded in popular and youth culture, open up individuals to change. But all too often, we have seen the inverse: Ivan Kondakov, Vladislav, and Alina all deepened their patriotism due to the state’s memes and spectacles. As the Kremlin slams the door on pluralism for good, it’s up to us to provide counterbalancing material.

We must set aside polarized political discussion in the West and agree that acting to stave off the threat of an increasingly radical generation of young Russians is a vital, long-term project. That does not mean launching a war or imposing our will on the Russian population. Nor are these “information warfare” approaches that need to be associated with or overseen by a country’s military or intelligence agencies. All we need to do is add pluralism back into the Russian mix.

Between them, the United States, the UK, and Germany have already spent over 60 billion euros on the war in Ukraine in just eight months. One HIMARS rocket launcher alone costs over $3 million. These vast expenditures do not count the global economic damage of the war. Leaving aside the human and economic cost of the war to Ukraine itself, even the most hard-nosed accountant would agree that influence operations are a bargain.

While Russia remains connected to global internet networks and social media, flooding its online space with positive examples of identity creation is a cinch – and far cheaper and less risky than preparing for or conducting hot wars for the next few decades. So play the Russians at their own game: give their young a social media reality of belonging and harmony that leads them away from their state’s messages of violence and sacrifice. We can show Russians a reality in which Russia’s “greatness” lies in human kindness, not imaginary worlds of lost imperial grandeur.

Born to be killed

“What do you make of groups like the Youth Army? And the new school classes? Will you sign your kids up?” I ask.

“Finally” – Ivan Kondakov looks me in the eye, pausing for effect – the state’s education programs, both in and out of schools, are going to shake degeneracy out of the next generation. They will train children to, he says, overcome “the Western desire to eat, drink, and fuck.” Children will at last, he says, have “examples of mass heroism” in the form of today’s soldiers, the soldiers of the past, and neo-fascist messianic internet warriors (like Kondakov himself). Kondakov hopes that his children will have the “will” to transform themselves, to rise above the “base instincts” of the West, and to acquire enough “willpower” to resist the onslaught of American psychological warfare. Kondakov speaks fluently in the language of a fascism that subjugates the individual will to the national spirit.

Like and comment, watch and share, consume and reproduce. Bathe in the glamour of the rally. Become whole. Purify yourself. Purify the nation. Purify the world. Destroy to save. Frightened of the shadowy West, some of Russia’s young are already being drawn by these promises of a better, purer future.

Russia’s apocalyptic messianism is inescapable, but it is built on fragile myths. A shoddy, incompetent government struggles to sell its war in Ukraine to millennials. People are dying. The economy is drying up. Soldiers are mutinying, fleeing, and refusing to serve. Living standards are falling. The hallowed reality of the war in Ukraine, spread by state propagandists on TV and thousands of memes, is a sham. People aren’t reaping the benefits of the promised utopia.

Things might come tumbling down quickly. In the 1980s, plenty of Soviets blindly engaged in the daily rituals of communist life – joining the Communist Youth League, attending parades, “volunteering” for community work – even though they could see the state falling apart before their very eyes. Perhaps, then, Russia in 2022 is closer to the USSR of 1989 than the Germany of 1939.

Indeed, as Bob Rae tells me, fascism cannot withstand contact with reality forever: “If you live in a society of war of all against all, life becomes brutish and nasty and short. It can’t last very long.” He’s right. Fascist regimes can’t last forever. But extinguishing a fascist mindset that spreads and exists beyond the bounds of state and party institutions is a new challenge.

Across the world, political movements are becoming detached from reality as their adherents succumb to the same tactics of online division and attack that Putin’s regime has piloted. Extremists in America, Britain, and the European Union sell tales of imaginary threats and fairy-tale solutions, attack education, and use social media to build harmonious communities for their supporters.

They’re not as violent as Russian fascists. Nor are they as warmongering. But our worlds are built online. Many are losing their grip on what is real and what is not. And that leaves everybody vulnerable to being pushed towards a desire to cleanse their society of “enemies.” Russia is already reaching into our spaces to ease that transition, flooding our political landscape with bots, trolls, diversions, and paid influencers. I am vulnerable. So are you.

For all the brave talk of unity against Russian expansionism and violence in 2022, little is being done to build up our defenses. “The corruptibility of Western societies may do us in,” says Toomas Hendrik Ilves, giving Russia “the ultimate victory.” He laments the pervasiveness of Russian money in Western politics, especially in Britain and the United States; the timidity of European politicians; and our continued attempts to strike compromises with a government that will never be willing to make peace. Fascism can’t and won’t be beaten at the negotiating table, and Putin’s money and social media armies are still on the march. Unless they’re stopped, we’re all at risk of succumbing to Russia’s fascism.

If we cannot resolve the divisions and rage bubbling away within our own society, we may not be able to convince a generation of Russians that views us with total suspicion that we mean it when we say we do care about humanity and humans. “We have,” says Rae, “to be prepared to fight for our views, for our concept of what it means to be a decent human being in a decent, humane society.”

“We’re at an existential moment,” says Rae. “We’re going through a period of great violence. How can we fight in the most intelligent and consequential way that will have the least damaging effect on our own society?” Rae is right. We must use all the tools at our disposal to go on the offensive; to reframe our thinking around Russia; and to realize that, as Zelenskyy knows, we are already fighting an information war. If we do not, there is nothing to stop Western democracies following in Russia’s fascist path.

“Whither, then, are you speeding, o Russia of mine?” asked the author Nikolay Gogol at the end of his nineteenth-century Russian-language epic Dead Souls. Gogol’s Russia is a whirl of arabesque sentences that wanders aimlessly through a corrupt, empty country; his novel’s protagonist meanders around the landscape buying up dead serfs as a tax scam. Russia in the 2020s is speeding nowhere. The Russian world is a place of monolithic expression and stock language, of militarized performance and regimented life, and of perpetual violence. Russia is spiraling, collapsing in on itself, repeating its performances of grandeur and militarism in ever smaller concentric circles as it promises itself – and its youngest generation – a utopian future. But the promise, like the promise of the dead serf in Gogol, is empty.

I try to check in with Alina in Nizhny Tagil. She doesn’t return my messages. She has, however, kept up her hectic VK posting schedule.

Alina’s latest post is a photograph of a nuclear explosion. The caption is simple: “Your children were born to be killed by Russians. And nothing more.”

Linked from 17/6/2023 Journal