WAR BOOKS: RUSSIA’S INFORMATION WARFARE
T.S. Allen | 10.27.23
War Books: Russia’s Information Warfare
Editor’s note: Welcome to another installment of our weekly War Books series! The premise is simple and straightforward. We invite a participant to recommend five books and tell us what sets each one apart. War Books is a resource for MWI readers who want to learn more about important subjects related to modern war and are looking for books to add to their reading lists.
This week’s installment comes from the War Books archives. It features a set of books to help readers better understand a topic that has only grown in importance since we first published this list: Russian information warfare.
In 2011, a Russian Ministry of Defense white paper defined information warfare “as the ability to . . . undermine political, economic, and social systems; carry out mass psychological campaigns against the population of a state in order to destabilize society and the government; and force a state to make decisions in the interest of their opponents.” Russian information warfare is the subject of extensive debate among policymakers, soldiers, and scholars—as well as a tremendous amount of hype, confusion, and international finger-pointing. This is because, as I have discussed elsewhere, Russia’s own definition of the term is a neat summary of Kremlin paranoia over how a foreign power could subvert the government with a “color revolution,” as well as a description of what many Westerners fear Russia is doing to undermine democracies around the world.
The following books have helped me understand why information warfare has a unique place in Russian strategic culture.
Generation П, by Victor Pelevin (translated into English by Andrew Bromfield as Homo Zapiens)
To understand the role of information in Russian statecraft, you must understand Russian attitudes toward the role of information in politics and decision making. In this hilarious 1999 novel, Pelevin addresses “fake news,” “deep fakes,” post–Cold War US-Russia tensions, and even international conflict over information technology. While the plot runs parallel to ancient Mesopotamian prophecy (one of its many similarities to Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Snow Crash), it touches on themes that are intensely relevant today. In Pelevin’s Russia, all politics is merely the techno-manipulation of populations by governments. “By his very nature,” a shadowy advertising executive explains at one point, “every politician is just a television broadcast.” This novel shows why Russian strategists think democracies can be manipulated—or, put another way, why they suspect all democracy is manipulation.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/war-books-russias-information-warfare/
