History of Government Provocations in Russia
By Antero Leitzinger
Global Politician
3/10/2005
The use of provocations as casus belli or as legitimisation of
violence, pogroms and propaganda against ethnic and religious groups,
and disinformation in order to lead the media astray both at home
and abroad are not new phenomena in the political arena. They have a
long tradition especially in Russia, from the anti-Semitic propaganda
that once spread all over Europe to the present-day disinformation
concerning the Chechens. The extraordinarily strong position of the
secret police in Russian political culture can partly explain this
gloomy side of Moscow’s policies. This article enlightens the use of
these methods against Jews and Muslims throughout history.
Western political scholarship has been credulous of ostensibly
democratising societies, such as Russia. In reality, a political
culture does not change in a moment, and cannot easily be released
from old habits and customs. Russia is still governed by the secret
police, although its leader now uses the more democratic titles of
prime minister and, since the New Year, acting president. Also among
the other presidential candidates former KGB officials are strongly
represented. Does this signal a return to totalitarianism?
Russia has governed her people through provocations, pogroms against
minorities, and interventions against neighbours. All these methods
have been used to gain hegemony over the Chechens since the 1860s, when
the conquest of Caucasia was “completed”. The strategy has been based
on the “divide and conquer” method, used already by the ancient Romans,
but every now and then the method has been completed with direct
military aggressions (1939-40, 1994-96, 1999-) and with genocide.
History of Provocations in Russia
The goal of provocations is to infiltrate political oppositions, to
reconstruct their image as criminals, and to agitate common hysteria.
As early as 200 years ago, Joseph Fouché, the police chief of the
French Emperor Napoleon I, had become acquainted with the practical
skills of politics: “A real police chief must always have at least
two or three conspiracies in his suitcase.” The use of provocations
spread in the 1820s to other parts of Europe, too, as an effective
weapon against revolutionary movements. The Prussian espionage chief
Wilhelm Stieber imported this ‘knowledge’ also to Russia, where a
strong attraction to conspiracy theories has prevailed ever since.
(Deacon 1972, 67-68.)
“In May 1862 a series of devastating fires broke out in St.
Petersburg. Their origin remains obscure, but they were widely
attributed to Nihilist students. The Nihilists for their part blamed
the fires on police ‘provocation’ – a word which becomes increasingly
common from now onwards to describe acts undertaken or instigated
by the police in order to discredit and trap revolutionaries. That
the fires were started by the police was maintained on the pages of
Herzen’s Bell. Whoever did or did not ignite the tinder, the result
was a wave of revulsion against the Nihilists, which made it easier
for the government to impose repressive measures… against freedom
of speech.” (Hingley 1990, 51-52)
The provocations reached their climax in the late czarist period,
when the Bolsheviks were especially subject to the plots of the
secret police, Ohrana – yet the Bolsheviks also took the lesson of
the use of provocations. “Chekists very quickly learned to keep one
step ahead of their quarry by resorting to the tactic of provocation,
which indeed became standard Cheka practice, and a most effective
one… In this, as in other techniques, the Vecheka modelled itself
on the Okhrana, which had penetrated some of the main revolutionary
parties – and especially the Bolsheviks – so competently through its
agents provocateurs.” (Leggett 1981, 302)
Also in Finland, the Investigating Central Criminal Police (“Etsivä
Keskusrikospoliisi”, EK) was in trouble in the 1920s, when the Cheka
infiltrated agents across the border among refugees, pretending to
be supporters of czarist rule. In 1921-1927 a feigned conspiracy
called the “Trust” managed to damage the reputation of the emigrants
permanently. (Leggett, 1981, 297.) The later president of Finland
Urho Kekkonen, who was in the service of the EK at the time, planned
to make the use of provocateurs the subject of his doctorate thesis.
(Simola & Salovaara 1994, 55.)
History of Pogroms in Russia
Besides political parties, whole groups of people were branded
by using provocations. In the 1800s, the most opportune ones for
such branding were the Jews. People were commonly led to imagine
that the Jews were planning a world revolution, and to prove this
claim, the Ohrana falsified a document called “Protocols of the
Elders of Zion”. This provocation is still inspiring anti-Semitic
organisations around the world. (It must be remembered that in the
1800s the propaganda against the Jews, albeit it would sound absurd
today, was taken seriously by large share of the population, in the
same way that the anti-Muslim propaganda has spread today.) “A more
serious by-product… was the outbreak, in spring 1881, of anti-Jewish
pogroms, largely in the Ukraine. For these the Imperial authorities,
including local police organisations, were partly to blame – if not
for directly instigating such outrages, at least for conniving at
them. … Pogroms recurred over several years, but the nation as
a whole seemed… relapsing into political apathy…” (Hingley,
1990, 70.)
In Odessa, in October 1905, hundreds of Jews were massacred in a pogrom
provoked by the Ohrana. This incident has been studied thoroughly by
Robert Weinbert (Weinbert 1902, 248-289). In February of the same
year, the same methods were used in Baku, in order to provoke the
Muslims and the Armenians against each other. (Deutscher 1967, 68.)
After the World War II, mainly the Americans have ensured that
anti-Semitism does not reach the stage of fomenting pogroms. Russian
economic dependency on United States support has effected a shift in
the Jews’ position as favourite target of hate-agitating allowing them
to be replaced by the Caucasians, whom the Russians contemptuously call
“the Blacks”, and whom they accuse of all kinds of criminality.
Mysterious Bomb Explosions
According to Russian research, the ‘mafia’ reputation of the Caucasians
is heavily exaggerated. In August 1995, the Caucasians were responsible
for only 4,4 per cent of Moscow’s total crime – in which number the
share of the Chechens was only 0,18 per cent. (Moskovskiy Komsomolets,
13th August 1996.) It may tell something about the situation, that
one year earlier the Caucasian share of persons formally accused of
crimes in Moscow was, however, as high as 20,6 per cent. (Argumenty
i fakty, 10th August 1995.) At the same time, investigation, solving,
bringing the guilty to court, and conviction for crimes committed by
ethnic Russians is relatively rare.
The Russian literature has constructed an image of savage and cruel
Chechens already since the 1800s. The image was reinforced when Stalin
deported the whole nation from its homeland, falsely claiming them
to be loyal to the Germans, although the war had not even reached
as far as Chechnya. A new slander campaign began after the fall
of the Soviet Union. The targets were two prominent Chechens, yet
politically totally opposed to each other, who had both in their own
ways developed a hatred of Boris Yeltsin’s regime: Dzohar Dudayev,
who had declared his country independent in autumn 1991, and Ruslan
Hasbulatov, who led a rebellion in Moscow one year later. Both their
reputations could be damaged by fomenting fear and hatred against
the Chechens both in Russia and abroad. The bloody invasion and
humiliation of the Russian army, as the Chechen guerrillas liberated
their capital in August 1996 – soon after Yeltsin’s inauguration –
left a desire for revenge to smoulder.
Last September, bombs exploded in a shopping centre and in apartment
blocks in Moscow. The culprits were never found, but it was not long
before everyone “knew” that they were Chechens. The militia arrested
tens of thousands of people, judged on the grounds of being “dark”
by looks, and when the arrested proved to be largely Caucasians,
the arrests were used as further “evidence” of the “natural” criminal
tendencies of Chechens.
As early as in the summer of 1998, the Muscovian researcher Andrei
Piontkovsky had been able to predict, that the next Chechen war would
follow a number of explosions in Moscow. (Suomen Kuvalehti 48/ 3rd
December 1999, p. 12.) In July 1999, Moskovskaya Pravda published
a secret plan (operation ‘Storm in Moscow’), which predicted bombs
preceding the Duma election. (Novaya Gazeta, 20th November 1999.)
Besides their prophetic function, the Moscow bombs seemed to have
imitators. In the city of Ryazan, on 23rd September, three sugar
sacks containing hidden explosives and a timer were discovered in
an apartment block. At first the FSB (Russian secret service, former
KGB) announced that the incident was undoubtedly connected with the
earlier bomb blasts. (Fakty i kommentarii 24th September 1999.) Then
it was discovered that the bomb had been installed by agents of the
FSB! At the same time it was remarked that in the sacks there was
too much sugar for the bombs to have exploded in full intensity.
(Kommersant, 24th September 1999.) Finally the FSB admitted that
it had installed the bomb for practice purposes, in order to test
the alertness of the inhabitants. The local authorities, however,
wondered why there was a bomb at all in the sack, and why nobody had
been informed of any such so-called ‘practice’. (Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
25th September and 12th October 1999.)
The whole thing remained an enigma, whether the wave of terror in
September ended with the embarrassing “bomb simulation” of Ryazan,
or with the war in Chechnya, which Russia was suddenly perfectly
prepared to start and maintain. The Russian press gave in to the
power of war fanaticism, and it was mainly foreigners who wondered
who and what the actual motives of the terrorists were. The only
one benefiting from the bomb incidents was the chief of the FSB,
the newly appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose popularity
as Yeltsin’s successor was established from scratch. Through Putin,
also the new party that had been founded to back the regime (‘Unity
Block’, or Medved, ‘the Bear’), benefited, and won the Duma election.
The traces of the bomb explosions in Moscow were patched up so quickly
that any more serious investigating could not take place.
But even conspiracy theories are not necessary to explain the
mysterious bomb blasts of autumn 1999. Since 1995, there have been
over 40 bomb blasts in apartment blocks in Russia, none of which has
been followed by a successful investigation. (Der Spiegel 37/1999, p.
197.) If the apparent ‘series’ of bomb blasts is just a coincidence,
the FSB has practised rather disinformation than provocation.
Disinformation in Russia
Disinformation is a form of propaganda, which the KGB had mastered par
excellence. It involves the spreading of false information, and leading
the media astray. At its most accomplished level, the disinformation
is indirect and aims at diverting the discussion in an unnoticed way
rather than crude lying. For example, the information centre founded
by Russia (RosInformTsentr) began its tour in Helsinki on 21st October
by spreading various papers, whose purpose was offering journalists
suitable subjects to write about. One such paper was a list of bomb
blasts that had taken place in Moscow underground stations. Yet there
was not a single attempt at establishing some sort of connection
with Chechens. The first incident dates back to the 1970s, when,
among others, an Armenian dissident Stepan Zatikyan was executed on
terrorist grounds, although he had an alibi and lacked a motive. At
the time, both Andrei Sakharov and Amnesty International appealed
for Zatikyan. When the KGB was formally abolished, the case proved
an excellent means of demonstrating the arbitrariness of KGB terror,
and got publicity. According to the present FSB, however, the KGB
never acted incorrectly, and the innocent victims of that judicial
murder were proved guilty, “dangerous recidivists”.
Another paper consisted of a vague and chaotic overview of Islamic
extremist movements, but the paper aimed at exposing their heinous
plans for the destruction of not only Russia, but also Europe.
According to this disinformation, the Islamist goals include, among
others, a) “to make Islam the second state church in France”, and b)
“to lobby laws favouring Moslems in the West German parliament”.
These are quite lofty goals, concerning the absence of any state
church in France, and a West German parliament has ceased to exist
ten years ago!
A third paper constituted a document of the Russian “Ministry
for the Federation and Nationalities of the Russian Federation”,
which, in its history of Chechnya, totally ignored the last war, and
skipped the years between 1991 and 1997. Meanwhile, the population of
Chechnya, it seemed had collapsed “due to the prevailing criminality
and emigration”. The majority of Chechens is said to have “absolutely
supported the war that will promote the social and spiritual revival
of the Chechen people”.
Finally, a fourth paper attempted to connect Islamism, terrorism, and
Chechnya with one another. Naturally it referred to Osama bin Laden,
who is claimed to have been sighted, alone during the past year,
everywhere on the globe from Kosovo all the way to Cambodia. It seems
the goal is to make the Western public believe that bin Laden travels
freely from Afghanistan to any spot around the world he chooses in
order to plant bombs for the destruction of the French state church
and West Germany, and that the Russian army is undertaking a crusade
for the European civilisation in Chechnya!
Naturally the disinformation campaign of Russia actively neglects all
questions about the relationship of the KGB with the terrorism in the
1970s, and the radical Islamism of 1980s. It mentions nothing about
the support that the representatives of Iraq and Iran declare for
the Russian war campaign in Chechnya, nor about the warm relations
between Russia/Turkmenistan and the Taliban. It does not tell,
why Osama bin Laden is known for his attacks against American, not
Russian, targets. For the support of their disinformation campaign,
the Russians have presented violence videos, which are claimed to
present the cruelty of Chechen kidnappers against their hostages. It
remains totally unclear, where and when the videos have been recorded,
by whom, and for what possible purpose. Why would Chechens have wanted
to frighten representatives of international help organisations and
foreign reporters out of their territory after the last war? Why
was the city of Urus-Martan, where the inhabitants are known to have
been relatively loyal to Russia, the base of the groups running the
hostage taking business? Why did Yeltsin release the Urus-Martanian
politician Bislan Gantamirov from a prison in November: Gantamirov,
who was convicted in Moscow for embezzlement, but who promised to
serve Russia – after having rebelled against Dudayev more than five
years ago?
It may be that the FSB is only guilty of mere disinformation,
exploiting suitable “evidence” or misunderstandings. However, it is
equally possible that the FSB, like its predecessor the KGB, has also
created “evidence” wherever necessary. The activity, then, is better
understood as provocation, where some human lives are sacrificed
for advocating some ‘greater purpose’ – isolation of the Chechens,
and Russian victory. Would that be too shocking to be credible?
At any rate, the September bomb blasts of Moscow, and the video tapes
on so-called Chechen cruelties that have been produced during these
few years, fulfilled their purpose as a most successful provocation.
Nobody asks how safe life in loyal Dagestan or elsewhere in the
Caucasus is, although some released hostages did remark that their
kidnappers were not at all (only) Chechens.
Truths and Tales on the Chechnya War
According to a Russian general, a body of a Finnish “mercenary”
was also found in the battlefields of Chechnya. When this claim was
investigated, it was rejected. What are we to understand by the almost
legendary “battalion of Baltic female ski snipers” (also known as
‘White Tights’ by the sarcastic journalists who find the same peace of
disinformation popping up again every now and then), who, according
to the same sources, are making their adventures among the foreign
“mercenaries” of the Caucasian side? However, the soldiers of the
Russian army cannot be thought of as mercenaries, as they are not
paid any salary?
The bad tangle of lies has yet again achieved such a scale that the
Western public has difficulty believing what it sees and what it hears
where Russian representatives’ claims are concerned. The army is not
going to attack Chechnya, we are told – but it attacks. The army is not
going to seize Dzoxar-Kala (former Grozny), we are told – and yet it
rushes directly into ambuscade. Hundreds of corpses lie on the ground,
but ‘nobody is killed’. There are no refugees – there are just people
displaced from one place in Russia to another. Chechnya is a part
of Russia, and the Chechens are ‘equal’ citizens of Russia, but they
can still be enclosed in “filtration camps”, and they can be bombed.
Somehow Western reporters, researchers, and politicians still find
it difficult to believe the “conspiracy theories”, when the theories
hint that the FSB is capable of what its predecessor, the KGB, by
the very same officials, was certainly capable of. In spite of that,
Russia seems to believe that it is the rest of the world that is in
a conspiracy against Russia, and that the international news agencies
are working for this Jewish-bourgeois-Islamist conspiracy, when they
find official Russian information suspicious.
Unfortunately history teaches that in Russia, things are often
precisely as bad as they are feared to be. This is not only due
to Russians, and due to the lack of democratic traditions, but due
to problems of the same nature as those that are encounterable in
Western attitudes at Germany in the 1930s. The outside world did not
‘believe’ – and neither did the Germans themselves at the time –
before it was too late for millions of people.
“Protocols of the Elders of Zion”
A lesson on disinformation is offered by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung
issue of 17th December 1999 in an article that recounts the history
of the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. The sensation of
last century shift, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories inspired by the
“Protocols”, has many similar features with the anti-Muslim images
and myths challenging objectivity in the present media.
The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was based on an 1864 text by a
Frenchman named Maurice Joly, attacked the Emperor Napoleon III. In
the Russian version “Napoleon” has been replaced with “the Jews”. Who
had a Russian version made of the book, and why? Can it be proved
that Joly did not, on the contrary, modify some genuine, common,
original source? A St. Petersburg researcher Mikhail Lepekhin has
investigated the issue in the Russian archives, and published the
results in November 1999:
In 1899 the ultra-reactionary Ivan Goremykin, who had been fired from
the post of minister of internal affairs, decided together with the
co-ordinator of foreign espionage, Pyotr Rachkovsky, to convince Czar
Nicholas II of their view by writing a “document” that would show that
industrialisation of the country, privatisation of state monopolies,
use of foreign capital loan, relaxation of censorship, and education
of the people, was a “conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons”. Rachkovsky
gave the task to his agent Matvei Golovinsky, stationed in Paris,
as the latter had some experience on literary falsifications.
This was how the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” came to existence
– at first as a copy, which the confessor priest of the Czar was
meant to bring to the Czar’s attention personally. The Czar family
was well-known for its prejudice, suspiciousness, and fondness of
mysticism. The plan, however, failed, as suddenly a wrong man was
appointed to the confessor priest, and not the theologist publisher
Sergei Nilus (Goremykin and Rachkovsky’s man). Now it became necessary
for the conspirators to spread the idea to a larger publicity, and so
Nilus published the “Protocols” as an appendix to his own book’s second
edition in 1905. The book itself did not attract much attention, but
its appendix became a bestseller that found its way to the library
of the Czar family, too. The “Protocols” outlived both Nilus, who
died in 1912, and the Czar family, whose members died in 1918.
After the revolution Golovinsky became a passionate communist, but he
died as early as in 1920. Alfred Rosenberg had the text translated into
German, and the car industrialist Henry Ford into English. Thereafter,
the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” served the aims of the German
national socialists and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
A Hidden Hand of Provocation
The British newspaper ‘The Independent’ recently published an article,
which claimed that it was the Russian military intelligence, the GRU,
together with the FSB, that organised the September bomb blasts. This
claim is not a new one, and it has yet to be backed by some evidence
(this, of course, applies equally to all claims). According to
the author, in the video recorded by a Turkish reporter, other GRU
officers are also mentioned by name, but it seems the newspaper
did not wish to publish them at the time. The incapability of the
Russian authorities to prove any of their own accusation has fomented
suspicions of the possibility of a provocation. Among others the
Duma Representative Konstantin Borovoi believes in the possibility
of provocation. Borovoi stated that he had got similar information
from GRU inside sources. (Monitor, 11th January 2000.)
The credibility of the Russian authorities hardly improved when
Colonel Yakov Firsov objected: “The Russian military is protecting
the people. It is impossible that they would attack against their
own people.” (The Independent, 6th January 2000.) At the same time
Russia rejected the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov’s offer for
a cease-fire, during which foreign experts could have investigated,
who had used chemical weapons.
The last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted
in an interview, that clarity of the matter of the responsibility for
the bombings had not been achieved. For him, however, it suffices
that some Chechens invaded Dagestan in August. (Der Spiegel 2/
10th Jan. 2000.) In fact also this too has been questioned lately
and has been a subject of debate since. Helen Womack, reporter of
the British newspaper, speaks of a meeting of Putin’s election team,
where Grigory Amnouel boasted that it was Moscow’s disinformation that
had deceitfully convinced Shamil Basayev of invading Dagestan: “They
were made to think that it would be easy, but it was a trap.” (The
Independent, 9th Jan. 2000.)
SOURCES
Deacon, 1972: Richard Deacon: “A History of the Russian Secret
Service”, London 1972.
Deutscher, 1967: Isaac Deutscher: “Stalin”, London 1967.
Hingley, 1990: Ronald Hingley: “The Russian Secret Police”, New
York 1990.
Leggett, 1981: George Leggett: “The Cheka – Lenin’s Political Police”,
Oxford 1981.
Simola & Salovaara, 1994: Matti Simola & Jukka Salovaara:
“Turvallisuuspoliisi 75 vuotta 1919-1994”, Helsinki 1994.
Weinbert, 1902: Robert Weinbert: “Pogroms – Anti-Jewish Violence in
Modern Russian History”, Cambridge 1902.
Antero Leitzinger is a political historian and a researcher for the
Finnish Directorate of Immigration. He wrote several books on Turkey,
the Middle East and the Caucasus.
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