Mick Hartley

The miasma of lies and disinformation that characterises Russian media output is nothing new. Christopher Booth at the Spectator recalls his time in Grozny:

We were having a few drinks in a rented flat in the centre of Grozny in late 1994. A bunch of foreign reporters, including myself, who were usually based in Moscow, had been sent to check out the strange conflict flickering in Chechnya. It was late at night….

At the time, the background noise from the Kremlin was that if Chechen rebels didn’t stand down, there would be unspecified but terrible consequences. But nobody truly believed the Russian general staff meant it. We scoffed, and had big evenings not far from a market where you could buy grenades, AK-47s and God knows what else for cash.

It had to be a bluff, a pose – none of it made sense. The men in Moscow weren’t that crazy. The president, maybe. But he was surrounded by grown-ups. Right? (Which might sound familiar.)

To date, it had been a semi-phoney conflict: an insurrectionist government in Chechnya was being harried and periodically attacked by ‘local’ troops directed by the GRU – Russian military intelligence – who used as their figureheads ‘local’ leaders from ‘breakaway’ areas of the republic. (Probably also rings a bell.)

The then Russian defence minister, the famously corrupt Pavel Grachev, had boasted that he could take Grozny in two hours with one airborne regiment. It would be a walk in the park. So don’t tempt us. (A final comparison.)

Suddenly, amid our by now somewhat debauched soirée, a correspondent from Sky News shouted: 'Bloody hell! They’re actually doing it!'

The drunken strumming of a local hack came to a stop, drowned out by massive explosions, very close by, and the sound of jet planes returning for another run. All of us sobered up, piled into the nearest vehicles, the competitive journalist instinct overriding inebriation and also good sense.

Just up the road, an apartment building was smouldering. Walls that should have been protecting those dreaming in their beds were there no longer. I could see someone on an upper floor wandering around her bathroom.

A few days later, I returned to our bureau in Moscow. There was admin to do and there were faxes to look through. One was from a government information service. It quoted Oleg Soskovets, a now forgotten official, then deputy prime minister with the portfolio for security matters:

'The bandit groupings in Chechnya have taken to blowing up their own apartment blocks in order to simulate the effects of air raids.'

I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

A press release that followed accepted that there may have been air raids after all, but said they were by ‘unidentified aircraft’.

Planes from Lichtenstein, I wondered? Is that what you’re saying? Maybe devilishly clever pilots from outer space with missions we can only guess at? Given what I had seen in Grozny, I was astonished by the insane scale of the lies.

I kept the fax, because it seemed so utterly egregious. A bad version of Nazi propaganda. Goebbels on an off day. It had to be the exception rather than the rule. I got the print-out framed and hung it in my toilet, the better to examine it at my leisure with a mix of wonderment and horror.

Only now do I recall that at no point at the time did the Kremlin call what was happening ‘a war’. It was referred to as an ‘operation to restore constitutional order’. Much as what is taking place almost thirty years later in Ukraine is also not a war, but a ‘special military operation’.

Among the many compliments paid to Vladimir Putin’s version of tyranny is a supposed special and novel gift for devious information warfare. As though he were some kind of post-modern genius: Foucault with novichok and tanks.

The truth is that he is merely an inheritor of the ingrained governing DNA. Pathological lying to foreigners and one’s own citizens is standard operating procedure….

A great many Russian journalists have been killed under Putin. And, in recent days, those who remain have been given the choice of silence or exile, including very brave friends from the BBC Russian service. It is, in effect, against the law to tell the truth. Now more than ever, you cannot dishonour a principle taken for granted by many in the country: 'menshe znaesh, luchshe spish’ – the less you know, the better you sleep.

So to think that Putin and his acolytes at outlets like Russia Today have some special talent for mendacity is both to ignore the past and pay such dismal characters an undeserved compliment. Falsehood has a serious pedigree here.

What's particularly depressing is how many people claim to believe the Russian lies. In Russia of course they may have no choice – though that doesn't stop a few brave souls from speaking out. But in places like China, Syria, Pakistan, Iran – places with an anti-western mindset – the old lies are trotted out and the West condemned as the aggressor. It's almost like a new axis of evil.