the Kremlin was his nickname)
How Putin Is Reinventing Warfare
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing-warfare/
The Kremlin, according to Barack Obama, is stuck in the “old ways,” trapped in Cold War or even 19th century mindsets. But look closer at the Kremlin’s actions during the crisis in Ukraine and you begin to see a very 21st century mentality, manipulating transnational financial interconnections, spinning global media, and reconfiguring geo-political alliances. Could it be that the West is the one caught up in the “old ways,” while the Kremlin is the geopolitical avant-garde, informed by a dark, subversive reading of globalization?
The Kremlin’s approach might be called “non-linear war,” a term used in a short story written by one of Putin’s closest political advisors, Vladislav Surkov, which was published under his pseudonym, Nathan Dubovitsky, just a few days before the annexation of Crimea. Surkov is credited with inventing the system of “managed democracy” that has dominated Russia in the 21st century, and his new portfolio focuses on foreign policy. This time, he sets his new story in a dystopian future, after the “fifth world war.”
Surkov writes: “It was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries, two blocks of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. All against all.”
This is a world where the old geo-political paradigms no longer hold. As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally “Western” companies, such as BP, Exxon, Mercedes, and BASF. Meanwhile, many Western countries welcome corrupt financial flows from the post-Soviet space; it is part of their economic models, and not one many want disturbed. So far, the Kremlin’s gamble seems to be paying off, with financial considerations helping to curb sanctions. Part of the rationale for fast-tracking Russia’s inclusion into the global economy was that interconnection would be a check on aggression. But the Kremlin has figured out that this can be flipped: Interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression.
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Non-Linear Warfare and Reflexive Control - NATO Defense College
http://www.ndc.nato.int/download/downloads.php?icode=467
Redefining Hybrid Warfare: Russia’s Nonlinear War against the West
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1538&context=jss
What is Hybrid Warfare?
https://globalsecurityreview.com/hybrid-and-non-linear-warfare-systematically-erases-the-divide-between-war-peace/
Conventional Western concepts of war are incompatible and fundamentally misaligned with the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century. The emergence of a unipolar post-Cold War world order has resulted in a significant paradigm shift.
This change now requires the U.S. and its allies to adopt a new legal, psychological, and strategic understanding of warfare and use of force, particularly by state actors. The term “hybrid war” (military institutions use the term “hybrid threat”) connotes the use of conventional military force supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics. In practical application, the Russian concept of “nonlinear conflict” exemplifies hybrid warfare strategy.
Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing sides, whereas nonlinear conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complementary military and non-military warfare tactics. A nonlinear war is fought when a state employs conventional and irregular military forces in conjunction with psychological, economic, political, and cyber assaults. Confusion and disorder ensue when weaponized information exacerbates the perception of insecurity in the populace as political, social, and cultural identities are pitted against one another.
This “blurring” divides influential interest groups and powerful political organizations by exploiting identity politics and allegiances. Additionally, nonlinear warfare tactics act as a deterrent towards a more powerful ally of the besieged state.
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The Hidden Author of Putinism
How Vladislav Surkov invented the new Russia
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/
“I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Vladislav Surkov told us by way of introduction. On this spring day in 2013, he was wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar. “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and ...”—here he pauses and smiles—“modern art.” He offers to not make a speech, instead welcoming the Ph.D. students, professors, journalists, and politicians gathered in an auditorium at the London School of Economics to pose questions and have an open discussion. After the first question, he talks for almost 45 minutes, leaving hardly any time for questions after all.
It’s his political system in miniature: democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.
As the former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the president on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential pro-democracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. Russia’s Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating, though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind.
They repeat the great mantras of the era: The president is the president of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the president is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the president as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: No one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.
One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting anti-state actors (anarchists in the 19th century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR. Their first clients were actually Russian modernizers: In 1996 the political technologists, coordinated by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and the man who first understood the power of television in Russia, managed to win then-President Boris Yeltsin a seemingly lost election by persuading the nation that he was the only man who could save it from a return to revanchist Communism and new fascism. They produced TV scare-stories of looming pogroms and conjured fake Far Right parties, insinuating that the other candidate was a Stalinist (he was actually more a socialist democrat), to help create the mirage of a looming “red-brown” menace.
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The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/22/the-literary-intrigues-of-putins-puppet-master/
In the summer of 2009, a slender novel caused
a literary sensation in Moscow. Centering on a poetry-loving gangster-cum-book publisher wracked by Hamletian perplexities over a possible snuff film, it unloaded a darkly absurdist, but caustically knowing, satire on the corruptions and machinations of post-Soviet Russia, with a whirligig of literary remixes and references.
What really triggered the sensation, though, over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero (subtitled gangsta fiction, in English, in the Russian edition), was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip from the novel’s publisher to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov, who was then the Russian presidential deputy chief of staff. At the time, this Kremlin ideologue was, arguably, the second- or third-most powerful man in the country. It was Surkov, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging. Almost Zero is now available to English readers in a limited edition from an adventurous small publisher in Brooklyn, Inpatient Press. Inpatient takes the leap and credits Surkov as the author. (And, in the spirit of Almost Zero itself, it is publishing the novel without authorization.)
Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” For supplying an early model, if you will, for Donald Trump’s media-savvy tactics of chaos and confusion. And what a perversely fascinating, complex figure emerges from the details of Surkov’s biography: an arch-propagandist of power and an arty outsider, an authoritarian’s right hand and a bohemian aesthete whose education included studying theater at the Moscow Institute of Culture in the 1980s (he was expelled for fighting). As the USSR was collapsing, Surkov became the public-relations mastermind for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s pioneering business, Menatep Bank, which was where Surkov met his wife, Natalya; soon, he was heading up Russia’s fledging association of ad men. Denied a partnership in business after Khodorkovsky’s ill-fated acquisition of the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s—Khodorkovsky ended up in prison during Putin’s taming of the oligarchs—Surkov left for a position with Alfa Bank (of Trump dossier notoriety, for alleged aid in Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the owners are suing for defamation). He then ran a major TV network, before devoting his image-making and lobbying talents, first, to then President Boris Yeltsin, and, subsequently, to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
Even in government, Surkov found time to write essays praising Bollywood movies and Joan Miró in the pages of Russian Pioneer, a glitzy intellectual magazine—which went on to publish Almost Zero in a special edition. He composed lyrics for the Russian rock band Agata Kristi (whose lead singer later
sued a critic for calling him “a trained poodle for Surkov”). Famously an admirer of Tupac Shakur, Surkov
can also quote Allen Ginsberg’s poetry by heart, albeit in heavily-accented English (there’s a cringe-making recording online of him reciting Ginsberg’s “Supermarket Sutra” in full). In
his spacious Kremlin office, photos of Putin and Medvedev hung beside the likenesses of Jorge Luis Borges and John Lennon, Che Guevara and a young Joseph Brodsky, together with Tupac in a hoodie, Obama looking pensive, and Bismarck looking “Iron Cross.”
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm going to take my time go over this.
