Russia is blaming the United States for the coronavirus outbreak for the same reasons the Soviet Union blamed the U.S. for the HIV/AIDS epidemic: to undermine the U.S. government’s domestic and foreign credibility.
As the Guardian reported, thousands of social media accounts have been pushing a shared narrative of American culpability for the coronavirus outbreak. The evidence for their claims is nonexistent, and the coordination is striking. But Vladimir Putin doesn’t care about the shallow credibility of his lies. He wants an America that is weakened, divided, and unable to influence global events in Western favor. Under Putin, as under the Soviet Union, the U.S. is still regarded as the glavnyi protivnik, or “main enemy” — a target to be undermined at every available avenue.
That makes the coronavirus a useful opportunity for the type of disinformation the Russians refer to as active measures.
Russia’s particular advantage with the coronavirus is how it speaks to the common concern of a global pandemic. Here, the Russians can hope their scaremongering lies will earn attention from a wide array of individuals, including individuals otherwise largely disinterested in news reporting. That’s valuable because these individuals are likely to have less awareness of what is and what is not fake news and, as such, are more susceptible to Putin’s propaganda.
But as I said, there’s nothing new in Russia’s use of a global health concern to serve its anti-American agenda. Former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew testify to as much in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. They document some successful Soviet active measure efforts from the 1980s.
For one example, look to how the KGB successfully promoted the idea that HIV/AIDS had been created at the U.S. Army’s bioagent defense facility at Fort Detrick. “Fortified by spurious scientific jargon, the AIDS fabrication not merely swept through the Third World, but took in some of the Western Media as well. In October 1986, the conservative British Sunday Express made it its main front-page story. During the first six months of 1987 alone, the story received major news coverage in over forty Third World countries.”
Another of the “most successful” efforts involved “the ‘baby parts’ story, alleging that rich Americans were butchering Third World children in order to use their bodies for organ transplants in the United States.” The authors continue, “In September 1988 a motion in the European Parliament condemning the alleged trafficking in ‘baby parts,’ proposed by a French Communist MEP, passed on a show of hands in a poorly attended session.”
It’s too easy to laugh at these stories for their absurdity.
Even if the Russians are able to persuade just a few individuals of their veracity, they’ve scored a win. Moreover, other Russian active measure efforts are hugely successful.
Just consider Russia’s heavily funded covert effort to portray fracking-based energy extraction as damaging to the environment and human health. This is a fiction that Putin sometimes offers personally, and the narrative has seeped into the energy platform of every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. If it makes its way into national policy, the fracking ban would be a huge boon to Russia’s long-term energy strategy, ensuring European dependence on its energy exports.
That should concern you, even if the coronavirus fictions do not.
