The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace 2019006351, 9781626167339, 9781626167346, 9781626167353, 2019981204

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Soviet Understanding of War
Soviet Military Science
The Cause of War
The Nature of War
War as an Instrument of Politics
Evgeny Messner
Conclusion
2 The Russian Understanding of War after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The 1990s: Continuity
The 2000s: Confusion
The 2010s: Change
Conclusion
3 Information Warfare
The Information Security Doctrines
Information-Technical Warfare
Information-Psychological Warfare
Conclusion
4 Color Revolutions
The Political View
The Military View
Conclusion
Conclusion
Policy Implications
References
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
About the Author

Citation preview

The Russian Understanding of War

Other Titles of Interest from Georgetown University Press Hacking the Bomb: Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons Andrew Futter Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars Jessica Trisko Darden, Alexis Henshaw, and Ora Szekely NATO’s Return to Europe: Engaging Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond Rebecca R. Moore and Damon Coletta, Editors Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond Anna Ohanyan, Editor Russia, BRICS, and the Disruption of Global Order Rachel S. Salzman Strategic Challenges in the Baltic Sea Region: Russia, Deterrence, and Reassurance Ann-Sofie Dahl, Editor Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence Kenneth Payne Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli

The Russian Understanding of War Blurring the Lines between War and Peace Oscar Jonsson

Georgetown University Press / Washington, DC

© 2019 Oscar Jonsson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for third-party websites or their content. URL links were active at time of publication. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jonsson, Oscar, author. Title: The Russian Understanding of War : Blurring the Lines between War and Peace / Oscar Jonsson. Description: Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019006351 (print) | ISBN 9781626167339 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781626167346 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781626167353 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Russia (Federation)--Military policy. | Soviet Union--Military policy. | War. | Information warfare. Classification: LCC UA770 .J635 2019 (print) | LCC UA770 (ebook) | DDC 355.020947--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006351 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981204 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. 20 19     9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing Printed in the United States of America. Cover design by Jeremy Parker. Cover images courtesy of Vexels (Moscow skyline) and pixabay.

To my mother, Ing-Marie

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Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xi

Introduction

1

1 The Soviet Understanding of War 22   Soviet Military Science 23  The Cause of War 25  The Nature of War 29   War as an Instrument of Politics 34   Evgeny Messner 38   Conclusion 40 2 The Russian Understanding of War after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union 43  The 1990s: Continuity 45  The 2000s: Confusion 53  The 2010s: Change 67   Conclusion 90 3 Information Warfare 94  The Information Security Doctrines 96   Information-Technical Warfare 105   Information-Psychological Warfare 110   Conclusion 121 4 Color Revolutions  The Political View  The Military View  Conclusion

124 125 136 149

Conclusion 152   Policy Implications 157 References 161 Index 183 About the Author 187

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Acknowledgments The journey of attaining a PhD, of which this book is a result, is a peculiar one. On the one hand, it is a barren journey, during which you spend years all alone with the torments of your research. On the other hand, there is an encouragement in all the people you meet along the way, be it in the form of ideas, discussions, or simply good company. They are consequential, and this book would not have been what it is without them. Many good ideas have come into play with others, while all the faults and flaws are mine alone. For this particular journey, Dr. Ruth Deyermond has been merciless, tireless, and supportive in equal parts, which have made her the ideal supervisor. Professor Jan Ångström has contributed with a critical eye, time, and an unending optimism. I am grateful to Professor David Betz, Professor Bertil Nygren, and Dr. Kersti Larsdotter, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for commenting on the full manuscript, and Dr. Frank Hoffman, Fredrik Westerlund, Keir Giles, Chuck Bartles, and Lincoln Pigman for giving their thoughts on parts of the manuscript. I also would like to thank Dr. Bettina Renz and Professor Pavel Baev for conscientious and constructive feedback in my viva. A special thanks goes to Maria Kuchma, who throughout the years helped me navigate all the nuances of the Russian language. At the Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters, I thoroughly enjoyed my time, largely thanks to excellent leadership from Vice Adm. Jonas Haggren, Lt. Gen. Michael Claesson, and Col. Hans Alm but also due to all other colleagues. Outside the armed forces, I am also indebted to Annika Nordgren Christensen, Carl Bergqvist, and Patrik Oksanen for their moral support and companionship over the years. I also would like to express my gratitude to the Gålö Foundation for its generous financial support and to the Ax:on Johnson Foundation for financing my fieldwork in Moscow. Furthermore, I am very grateful to Dr. Carole Sargent for her inspiration and expertise in publishing, as well as to Donald Jacobs and all the team at Georgetown University Press for accepting and steering this project. The last expression of gratitude goes to all my friends and my family, for everything.

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Abbreviations C4ISR command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance CIA Central Intelligence Agency CIS Commonwealth of Independent States EU European Union FSB Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service) GRU Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye (Main Intelligence Agency [Russian military intelligence service]) ICT information and communications technology KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) MCIS Moscow Conference on International Security MTR Military-Technical Revolution NCW network-centric warfare NGO nongovernmental organization NGW new-generation warfare NVO Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye (Independent Military Review, a weekly Russian newspaper) RISS Russian Institute for Strategic Studies RMA Revolution in Military Affairs VPK Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kuryer (Military-Industrial Courier, a Russian weekly newspaper focusing on defense and industry)

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Introduction

Today, it is obvious that the line between peace and war is blurring. . . . Nonmilitary forms and means of struggle have received an unprecedented technological development and acquired a dangerous and sometimes violent nature.  —Gen. Valery Gerasimov (2017a)

R

ussia caused shock and surprise among the states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) by its audacious and effective use of military and nonmilitary force. The annexation of Crimea in 2014, the creation and command of insurgencies in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Eastern Ukraine, and the information warfare and subversion to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election are the best-known examples. However, beyond that, Russia has pursued a wide range of provocative military actions and nonmilitary and subversive measures against European states and states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union in order to forward its national interests. Consequently, the 2018 US National Defense Strategy reelevated the threat from Russia and identified long-term strategic competition with Russia and China as the central challenges to US security (US Department of Defense 2018). Similarly, the UK Defence Committee concluded in its report after the illegal annexation of Crimea that the Russian use of asymmetrical warfare “represents the most immediate threat to its NATO neighbours and other NATO Member States” (UK Defence Committee 2014). In the Western debate about Russian warfare, analysts have discussed concepts such as “hybrid warfare,” “new-generation warfare,” and the “Gerasimov doctrine” to describe Russia’s pursuit of its political goals using the full spectrum of military and nonmilitary forms of conflict. The main novelty for Western analysts has been the effective combination of nonmilitary means with, or instead of, overt military force. However, Russian military thought has for the past three decades been understudied and misunderstood in the West. During the Soviet Union, scarcity of sources, ontological differences, and

  1

2 

 Introduction

lack of cultural knowledge were limiting factors. The available material was considered more likely to be propaganda than genuine beliefs. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, the amount of accessible material increased, but attention decreased as the Red Army and the threat of a third world war withered. Western attention revived anew in the 2010s as Russia again became a central concern for international security, by which time Russia’s political and military realities and military thought had changed notably. While the NATO and EU states see a new threat from a resurgent and aggressive Russia, Russian leaders, from military strategists up to President Vladimir Putin himself, believe that their regime’s survival is threatened by Western subversion. From their perspective, prodemocracy movements such as the 2013–14 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine have been engineered by the West’s use of nonmilitary means of conflict, and Russia sees itself as responding to the threat of “controlled ‘color’ revolution” (Putin 2014a). Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, stated that “during the past decade, a wave of these ‘color revolutions’ has been instigated by the U.S. in the post-Soviet space, North Africa and the Middle East” (Gerasimov 2014a, 15). Furthermore, the sanctions that the United States and the EU imposed on Russia beginning in 2014 were understood by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, as an attempt to create “regime change” in Russia (Reuters 2014) and by the head of Russia’s second-largest bank as amounting to “economic war” (TASS 2015). Likewise, Putin claimed that the fall of oil prices in 2014 was created by the United States and Saudi Arabia to sink the Russian economy (TASS 2014). If the Russian government believes itself to be in a war with the West, albeit one conducted via nonmilitary means, this explains why a high degree of risktaking with military and nonmilitary means is warranted. Furthermore, when Western states are taking actions that they perceive as being short of war— sanctions, democracy promotion, and information operations—but that are understood by Russia as amounting to war, there is a risk of unconscious and/ or unintentional escalation. As the cost of such can be vast, grasping Russia’s understanding of war is thus crucial for international and regional security and is something this book seeks to provide.

Purpose of the Book Has the Russian understanding of the nature of war changed? Answering this question is the primary goal of this book. Other studies have analyzed the

Introduction 

3

Russian military thought but not directly engaged in whether or not the nature of war is changing. In answering this question, I will map the development of Russian military thought from the creation of the Soviet Union until today. This book relies on a distinction between the nature of war and the character of war. This was a distinction originally proposed by the general and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz in On War, but it was brought into Soviet military theory by Vladimir Lenin (see chapter 1) and has persisted since then in Russian military thought (see chapter 2). The distinction of character versus nature of war is critical because a change in character is constant as technology and societies change, whereas Clausewitz and others have seen that the nature of war is unchanging. As explained by the Russian theorist Pavel Kazarin, the nature of war refers to the properties or traits that war has, and the character refers to the content (Kazarin 2002, 18). Thus, a change in the nature of war would represent a break from past understandings of what war is, impacting the full knowledge system surrounding war. In a study of the nature of war in the Soviet Union, the Polish scholar Julian Lider saw that “the nature or essence of war encompasses those general features which distinguish war as a political act and armed struggle from other socio-political and socio-historical phenomena” (Lider 1977, 245). This captures very well how Lenin defined war as the continuation of politics with violent means (Lenin 1915, 219). The key characteristic of the nature of war was thus armed violence applied to a political purpose. Lider continued: “If used without qualification the term nature of war in Soviet studies is to be understood in this sense” (Lider 1977, 245). This is the sense in which this book understands the nature of war. He saw that among Soviet military theorists’ definitions of war, “the specificity of armed struggle . . . distinguishes it from other social phenomena, and in particular from the peace time [sic] political struggle” (Lider 1977, 182). Seeing the nature of war as defined by armed violence has been the baseline in the Soviet, and later Russian, debate. Marksizm-Leninism o voine i armii (Marxism-Leninism on war and army), the authoritative book on military affairs during the Soviet Union, stated that “the essence of war is the continuation of politics by means of armed force. This is the main characteristic of war. Therefore, this definition of the essence of war does not include many of the important ways that are used to secure victory” (Byely et al. 1972, 10). Likewise, Lider summarized this thought as follows: “Soviet scholars have traditionally laid down that war is in all epochs a continuation of politics by military means and that its essential nature does not change” (Lider 1977, 245).

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 Introduction

That is not, of course, to argue that there are no changes in war. Rather, what did change in every war was the particular policy governing war, how military violence was applied, and the instrumentality of war (Lider 1977, 247). Russian military theorists Sergei Chekinov and Sergei Bogdanov argued that the criterion of the presence or absence of war is the place and role of military and nonmilitary measures in political confrontation. If armed struggle and other actions by the armed forces predominate the business of achieving political objectives, while all other nonmilitary methods of violence work to ensure maximum effect from using armed forces, this is none other than war. Acting on this premise, political confrontation is not war if the focus is on nonmilitary means of violence, while the effect of the troops is due merely to their presence or some actions that do not involve fire and attacks, but is confined to demonstrations, threats, etc. (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2017, 78)

The premise that the nature of war is defined by armed violence has traditionally been the baseline for Russian theorists.1 That is to say, those who argue for an expansion in the understanding of the nature of war still accept the premise that the nature of war has, in the past, been defined by armed violence. This underlines the need for a study in the Western debate that focuses on the nature of war in the Russian understanding. The question is thus: Has the Russian understanding of the nature of war changed, and if so, how? In order to answer this question, this book will investigate how the nature of war has developed in the views of Russian military theorists, political elites, and public security doctrines. Furthermore, this book will analyze the most notable nonmilitary means—information warfare and the creation of color revolutions—affecting the Russian understanding of war.

Argument Questioning whether or not the nature of war was changing began anew in Russia in the mid-2000s. This was driven by two sets of revolutions: the revolution in information and communications technology (ICT) and the color revolutions. Color revolutions are seen by Russian theorists and elites as shorthand for Western-created uprisings through information warfare, ideological influence, prodemocracy movements, and nonviolent protest techniques combined with Western financial and diplomatic support. The military-theoretical discussions placed more emphasis on the increasing utility of nonmilitary means in relation to military means. Nonmilitary means refer to a mix of information,

Introduction 

5

ideological, economic, subversive, and diplomatic means. However, while military theorists increasingly acknowledged the effectiveness of nonmilitary means, the view that such means might change the nature of war itself was not widespread among theorists and security doctrines at the time. Rather, the most notable shift in the Russian understanding of war came in the period 2012–14. Thereafter, the most central political elites and military theorists expressed the view that war was going through a fundamental transformation because nonmilitary means were so effective that they should be considered violent, the boundary of war and peace was blurring, nonmilitary means were becoming four times as important as military means, representing their own form of warfare, and the effectiveness of nonmilitary means constituted a cardinal change in the concept of war and its knowledge system (Putin 2012a; Gerasimov 2013; Gareyev 2013b; Gerasimov 2014a; Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016). Albeit less explicitly, the shifting understanding of war was also reflected in the main security doctrines, which emphasized the role of information warfare in both war and peacetime that could reach strategic goals by itself, as well as ideological confrontations related to color revolutions. The views that nonmilitary and nonviolent means are so effective that they should be considered violent, blurring the boundary between war and peace, and an ongoing form of warfare are hardly compatible with the traditional understanding of war as defined by armed violence. Rather, the understanding of nature of war among current Russian theorists and elites has broadened and cannot anymore be seen as solely defined by armed force. This understanding has gone from being voiced by a few theorists to the mainstream of Russian thought, as reflected by security doctrines and key officials. While central theorists and elites have implied a change in the nature of war, there has not been an unequivocal authoritative statement that war is no longer defined solely by armed violence or the threat thereof. However, this should not be expected, and such a declaration would have significant consequences. First, the concept of armed attack and armed violence is the basis of international law as well as the Russian federal law On Defense, which regulates the use of the armed forces. Such recognition would, given the Russian leadership’s perception of these means as ongoing, mean that Russia now would be in a state of war. This argument has direct implications for handling the conflict with Russia—something the West often struggles with. One example is how the US and EU sanctions on Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine were seen in the West as a way to avoid escalation, whereas the Russian leadership claimed they were a form of warfare to provoke regime change (Reuters 2014). This

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 Introduction

emphasizes the difficulties that the West has with handling escalation with Russia. Measures such as sanctions are meant to signal that Russian actions are unacceptable, but the West also tends to think that they avoid escalation. However, they are often contrarily seen by the Russian leadership as escalation, although by nonmilitary means. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, “Russia believes itself to be in a war with the West, albeit, for now, a non-military one” (Jonsson 2017a). The inability to grasp the Russian leadership’s understanding gives Western states a disadvantage both in negotiating potential solutions with Russia and deterring Russia, which is now the focus of NATO and the United States and is channeled through the European Reassurance Initiative and the European Deterrence Initiative with their budget of over $10 billion. Gauging the Russian understanding of war is thus crucial for handling the conflict with Russia, both in terms of how Russia will fight and how it will react to Western actions. The most notable means accounting for this change in the Russian understanding of war is information warfare, particularly information-psychological warfare, and the creation of color revolutions. Both of these are understood as nonviolent but are seen as so effective that they could amount to violence and blur the boundary between war and peace. Nonviolent color revolutions, largely depending on information warfare, are seen as the West’s main approach to the use of force. In the view of Russian elites, the threat perception includes the content of information, which makes the understanding of information warfare very broad. This has led several key members of the elite, such as President Putin and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov, to declare that Russia is in an information war perpetrated by the West. Information warfare is intrinsically linked to the Russian perception of color revolutions. Color revolutions refer to the nonviolent revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in the mid-2000s but have in the Russian mind expanded to include the Arab Spring uprisings as well. Color revolutions are seen to consist of the destabilization of a targeted society with the spread of values and brainwashing of the population so that it will ultimately take to the streets and revolt against its leadership. Color revolutions have grown from being seen as mostly spontaneous uprisings (albeit with foreign support) to a form of warfare orchestrated by the West. After 2014, color revolutions were understood as the West’s main geopolitical tool to achieve its political objectives and as a form of warfare (Gerasimov 2014a). There is agreement among elites and military theorists that the color revolutions were nonviolent events, even though some of the latter events that came to be included in the concept, such as the Arab Spring and the Euromaidan revolt, have included violence. Nonetheless,

Introduction 

7

some Russian theorists objected to the description of the color revolutions as nonviolent because they saw that they were ultimately backed up by violence or the threat thereof. The Western military interventions in Libya and Syria are seen as conceptually separate from the nonviolent color revolutions that were in those cases pretexts for armed interventions. This book shows that the threat of color revolutions increased notably on the political agenda in the period 2004–6, but it took until 2012–14 for them to become mainstream among Russian military theorists. The broadening of the Russian understanding of war has been a long-term evolutionary process. This is to be seen in contrast to reoccurring calls for a revolution in Russian military thought and practice, often heard after the invasion of Ukraine or the interference in the US election. Rather than expounding novel ideas, it is the Western lack of attention to Russian military thought that makes them seem novel. In fact, many of the most publicized notions— the blurring of war and peace, that Russia is in an information war, that information can be a weapon, that nonmilitary means can be as effective as nuclear weapons—have been a part of the Russian military-theoretical debate long before the invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, the attention that was paid to Russian military thought had to a large degree focused on the modernization of conventional capabilities and less on the unconventional ones.

The Western Debate With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Western interest in Russian military thought was on a steady decline until the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia and the concomitant reform of the Russian Armed Forces. Thereafter, the questions got more attention, but they were still far from mainstream. In general, the extent of Western analytical engagement with Russian military thought, both in terms of number of analysts and frequency of publications, has been linked to perceptions of Russian military capabilities and their use. The analysis in the late 2000s and early 2010s mostly confirmed how difficult it would be for Russia to reform, and the debate centered on Russia’s military means (see, e.g., Vendil Pallin 2009; Bukkvoll 2009; Baev 2010; Renz 2010; Bartles 2011; McDermott 2011a; McDermott, Nygren, and Vendil Pallin 2012; Renz and Thornton 2012; Klein 2012; Giles 2012a). An important exception was those Western theorists already analyzing Russian information warfare since 1996 (see Thomas 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2009, 2014; Blank 1999, 2008a, 2013; Heickerö 2010; Giles 2012b, 2014; Giles and Hagestad 2013). When Putin was reelected and returned to the presidency in 2012, relations

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 Introduction

with the West turned worse, and interest in Russia increased again. After the war in Ukraine began, a more focused debate on Russian warfare and the Russian understanding of modern war came to fruition (see, e.g., Allison 2014; Wilson 2014; Tsygankov 2015; Charap and Colton 2016; Westerlund and Norberg 2016; Kofman et al. 2017; Bowen 2017). However, the long-term lack of attention to Russian military thought made hybrid warfare and the Gerasimov doctrine the bedrock for debates on understanding Russia (Monaghan 2016b, 66). The key theme in all concepts was that they were introduced to capture the successful Russian conduct in Ukraine with a combination of military and nonmilitary means and especially the use of information warfare (NATO 2014; EEAS 2015; Lasconjarias and Larsen 2015; IISS 2015; Rácz 2015; Hunter and Pernik 2015; Chivvis 2017). The initial outburst of analysis gave way in turn to a second wave, which to a large degree focused on explaining why these concepts were wrong (Galeotti 2016a; Giles 2016a; Renz 2016a; Charap 2015; Thomas 2016a; Bartles 2016a; Galeotti 2018b; Freedman 2014; Kofman and Rojansky 2015). How war is changing is a perennial topic in military theory. However, few Western studies have engaged in depth with how the Russian understanding is changing. Rather, it seems that the debate on how war is changing assumes that war in general is changing and that it is the same (and perceived as the same) for all states. A key insight from the field of strategic culture points out that communities with different cultures and values can look at the same thing but interpret it very differently. As put by Colin Gray, “Culture yields us the truths, small and large, that we know should guide our decisions and actions” (Gray 2007, 8). Likewise, “strategists and their institutions cannot be acultural and hence will continuously perceive and interpret the material realm culturally” (Poore 2003, 282). Culture should be seen as a context from which an understanding cannot be isolated. This has been put particularly in the case of Russia as the Russian paradigm is “idiosyncratic, reflect[s] a strong cultural imprint, and need[s] to be analysed in the context of [its] strategic culture” (Adamsky 2018, 35). Hybrid Warfare The concept of hybrid warfare became the center of the Western debate for understanding Russian warfare after the onset of the war in Ukraine. The concept has a longer history, but the use of the term before the invasion of Ukraine was not aimed at understanding Russian warfare and will therefore not be analyzed in depth here.2 In 2014, international organizations such as NATO and the EU,

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as well as national governments, adopted hybrid warfare as their concept for understanding Russian contemporary warfare. At the NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, the alliance stated, “We will ensure that NATO is able to effectively address the specific challenges posed by hybrid warfare threats, where a wide range of overt and covert military, paramilitary, and civilian measures are employed in a highly integrated design” (NATO 2014). Since the definition includes all opposing terms, such as military, paramilitary, and civilian, as well as overt and covert, it becomes so vague that it lacks utility. As Michael Kofman argued, “If you torture hybrid warfare long enough it will tell you anything, and torture it we have. The term now covers every type of discernible Russian activity, from propaganda to conventional warfare, and most that exists in between” (Kofman 2016). The term becomes useless for practical purposes, since any Russian activity can be included in it. Rather, it is useful to return to the original concept of hybrid warfare authored by Frank Hoffman and James Mattis in 2005 in support of the US Marine Corps’s threat concept (Mattis and Hoffman 2005). Hoffman defined an enemy who uses hybrid threats as “any adversary that simultaneously employs a tailored mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the same time and battlespace to obtain their political objectives” (Hoffman 2014; see also Hoffman 2007, 2009, 2010). This definition explicitly refers to synchronicity in time and space on the operational level, which makes the definition narrow. Hoffman also pointed out that the definition excludes nonmilitary means, such as economic, information, and subversive political acts, except when they are associated with terrorist and irregular tactics (Hoffman 2014).3 This way of defining hybrid warfare is therefore narrow enough to be analytically useful for the military’s operational analysis, but it does not capture the key elements of what made Russian warfare successful in Ukraine, nor was it meant to. To dispel the definitional confusion, Mark Galeotti usefully argued that the debate deals with two parallel, yet overlapping, phenomena: “One is true ‘hybrid war,’ the other perhaps best considered ‘political war’” (Galeotti 2016a, 7; see also Galeotti 2016b, 2019). In this way, Galeotti saw hybrid war in the sense used by Mattis and Hoffman, which has occurred in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. That hybrid warfare was also coupled with political war, seen as “the pure use of political methods to bring about desired changes in the policy in another state” (Galeotti 2016a, 7). A large part of the conceptual confusion stems from the fact that both of these were run in parallel (Galeotti 2016a, 7). The separation into hybrid war and political war is a helpful conceptual solution, but there are also problems with the term “political war” (setting aside

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 Introduction

those with hybrid war). Political war was famously used by George Kennan at the outset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union when he called for “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives” (Kennan 1948). This emphasizes the problem at the center of the term. As argued by Hoffman, “If all wars are political in their purpose (as the famous Prussian soldier-scholar Carl von Clausewitz insisted),” and if war is defined by violence, then “there is no warfare in these political and economic activities, which is why the term is an oxymoron” (Hoffman 2014). Indeed, in a follow-up book, Galeotti addressed the contradictions in the Russian debate and the criticism of the term “political war.” First, he correctly noted that “time and time again, military writers flirted with the notion of war without open fighting” (Galeotti 2019, 30). Galeotti then argued that Russians “believe that the nature of war is changing, and in ways which mean the use of direct force may not always or initially be a central element to the conflict” (Galeotti 2019, 30). As it comes to the criticism of political war, Galeotti stated that the alternative would be to call it political conflict, but that would open up to the obvious counterargument that all politics are conflictual and that “much political warfare is hardly bloodless: assassinations, stirring up violent mobs, working through thugs and terrorists, and even deploying small-scale military forces are all clearly part of the toolbox” (Galeotti 2019, 52–53). The complications of conceptualizing the Russian understanding indeed stems from inherent contradictions and oxymorons in the Russian debate as well as the flirtation with the idea that war is broader than armed violence. A similar approach to hybrid warfare comes from Ofer Fridman in Russian Hybrid Warfare (see also Fridman 2017). Fridman argued that there are three distinct meanings of hybrid warfare. The first is the original from Mattis and Hoffman, focusing on military problems; the second is how “Russian hybrid warfare” was conceptualized in the West as a mix of military and nonmilitary means; and the third distinct meaning, similar to Kennan, was how gibridnaya voina, the literal translation of “hybrid war” into Russian, was emerging in the Russian discourse as “solely based on non-military means” (Fridman 2018, 44, 155). In this way, he argued that the Russian “idea of gibridnaya voyna represents something entirely different” and that all “these three types of confrontations are completely different” (Fridman 2018, 155–56). While providing an in-depth overview of both Western and Russian military thought and what can be included in the concept of hybrid warfare, Fridman’s argument regarding the use of gibridnaya voina in Russia is overreaching. As he himself pointed out, the concept was not used until it regained popularity

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in the West after 2014. Furthermore, when used in the Russian debate by key figures, it is more a passing reference rather than a central concept or tradition of thought. Fridman overemphasizes the importance of gibridnaya voina as a concept used in Russian military thought and neglects other concepts, such as color revolutions, controlled chaos, and simply nonmilitary means, that have long been (and remain) central in the Russian debate (see chapter 2). As Fridman himself stated, “In Russian political discourse, it is difficult to find direct references to terms such as net-centric wars or subversion wars, gibridnaya voyna or gibridnaya metody” (Fridman 2018, 144). In this sense, it becomes strange to fit the Russian military-theoretical tradition into a mostly unused concept that often refers to Western conduct when used. Fridman’s characterization of gibridnaya voina as solely being about nonmilitary and nonviolent means becomes too narrow a categorization in which to fit Russian military thought. It goes against Gerasimov’s understanding, which can be seen in the article where he first mentioned hybrid methods; he also emphasizes that they relied on the use of military force and also included hidden military measures (Gerasimov 2016a). Gerasimov has furthermore emphasized the importance of military means in almost every speech he has given. It thus becomes problematic to see gibridnaya voina as fully nonviolent when several Russian theorists discussing the phenomenon see violence as a distinguishing factor for what is considered gibridnaya voina.4 It does, furthermore, not capture the broader trends in Russian military thought emphasizing both military and nonmilitary means. The use of hybrid warfare has received pointed criticism for being a Western concept applied to Russian warfare without regard for the particular developments and traditions in Russia. Hybrid warfare (gibridnaya voina) in the Russian debate is a transliteration of the English term and is used when referencing Western thought (Giles 2016a, 9; see also Bērzinš 2015; Giles 2015a; Monaghan 2016b; Thomas 2016a; Adamsky 2018). Keir Giles argued “not only that the hybrid label is unhelpful and misleading but also that it gives an entirely misplaced impression of novelty” (Giles 2016a, 5). Indeed, he pointed out that “the Armed Forces, and the capacity for intensive information warfare or subversion of the adversary, are simply two of the most important longstanding but reinvigorated instruments of [Russian state] power” (Giles 2016a, 12; see also Renz 2018, 161). It was against the backdrop of a tendency to use Western concepts to understand Russian warfare (most notably hybrid warfare but also “ambiguous warfare” in the United Kingdom) that alternative concepts gained currency.

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 Introduction

New-Generation Warfare An early and oft-cited article that attempted to launch the concept of Russian “new-generation warfare” (NGW) in the Western debate came from Janis Bērzinš. He took the concept from an article in 2013 by Chekinov and Bogdanov, whose name recognition in the West surged after the start of the war in Ukraine. Bērzinš argued that “the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, newgeneration wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare” (Bērzinš 2014, 7). For Bērzinš, this represented the seventh generation of warfare, whereas the sixth generation was cyberwarfare (Bērzinš 2014, 9). However, this misses that the arguments and framework for Chekinov and Bogdanov, which explicitly came from Vladimir Slipchenko’s notion that sixthgeneration warfare was coming into being. Chekinov and Bogdanov wrote that “the Gulf War may be called the first war of a new age—the age of high technologies” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 15). This echoed Slipchenko’s original contribution, which is the most common framework in Russia for generations of warfare and which saw the Gulf War as the prototype of a sixth-generation war. Indeed, as Timothy Thomas correctly pointed out, “Slipchenko’s work may be considered as a (or the!) most important source behind much of the newgeneration warfare thinking and postulating of Bogdanov and Chekinov” (Thomas 2016a, 555, italics in original). Moreover, the ideas that Chekinov and Bogdanov have developed also have a strong focus on conventional armed force and are very close to Slipchenko’s (see chapter 2), except that they put more weight on the information-psychological aspect of war. Thomas saw that Western discourse was becoming saturated with the use of new-generation warfare. He noted that it stemmed from Chekinov and Bogdanov but had not been used thereafter (Thomas 2016a, 554). Rather, the Russian debate had shifted into using the interchangeable concept of “new-type warfare,” as labeled by Gen. Andrey Kartapolov, chief of Russia’s Main Operational Directorate at the General Staff, and later by Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov (Thomas 2016a, 554–55; see also Thomas 2016b). Rod Thornton drew upon the label “NGW” and the work of Chekinov and Bogdanov and of Bērzinš. He correctly argued that Russian analysts perceived that the West had learned how to incite regime change through color revolutions (Thornton 2015, 41). He argued that “the Maidan events in Ukraine in 2014 furthered Moscow’s perception that it was at war” (Thornton 2015, 42). Thornton also stated that “Russia’s information campaigns are thus supposed

Introduction 

13

to remove, as far as possible, displays of ‘hard military power’ from modern warfare, with ‘war’ becoming something fought ‘at arm’s length’ without the need to engage with an adversary’s forces” (Thornton 2015, 42). Thornton is unfortunately not fully capturing the tradition of Russian thought and the role of informatization among the theorists he is discussing. The quote regarding fighting at arm’s length is from Chekinov and Bogdanov, but they were summarizing a speech of Gerasimov’s (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 12–14). Chekinov and Bogdanov (and Gerasimov) were discussing how informatization and automatization affected the disposition of conventional armed forces, distance between troops, how to command and control them, and the increasing use of high-precision weapons. Another analyst who relied on the concepts of the Gerasimov doctrine and NGW is Dima Adamsky, although he proposed his own term, “cross-domain coercion.” Adamsky helpfully put the development of the understanding of war into a longer perspective, arguing that while Russian warfare might be a unique invention, “it appears to be more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary one since Gerasimov’s doctrine reflects more continuity than change” (Adamsky 2015, 41). Adamsky continued: “Leading up to the 2014 doctrine, Russian understanding of the changing character of war matured into a corpus of ideas under the rubric ‘NGW’ . . . or [the] ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’” (Adamsky 2015, 22). Like Thornton, Adamsky placed information warfare at the center. He argued that “since, according to NGW, the main battlefield is consciousness, perception, and strategic calculus of the adversary, the main operational tool is information struggle, aimed at imposing one’s strategic will on the other side. Perception, consequently, becomes a strategic center of gravity in the campaign” (Adamsky 2015, 26). He further argued that “this unique role of informational struggle is a fundamental difference between the Russian approach and the Western [hybrid warfare] model” (Adamsky 2015, 30).5 Adamsky saw that the Russian understanding and key focus of the information struggle had developed from three distinct bodies of knowledge, which rendered it unique. These were the Military-Technical Revolution (MTR) / Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) (digital-technological), the active-measures tradition (cognitive-psychological), and the cybernetic tradition (Adamsky 2015, 27–28; see also Adamsky 2018). Last, Adamsky argued that “it is difficult to overemphasize the role that Russian official doctrine attributes to the defensive and offensive aspects of informational struggle in modern conflicts” (Adamsky 2015, 26). Nonetheless, Adamsky may have ended up overemphasizing the information struggle in his reading of Chekinov of Bogdanov, as he saw it as the main operational tool.

14 

 Introduction

Gerasimov and Chekinov and Bogdanov focused on both military and nonmilitary means. Nonetheless, Adamsky’s study is an important contribution to the debate, as he was one of few who analyzed a larger number of Russian theorists. Given the notable popularity of the concept of NGW in the Western debate on Russian warfare, it is worth quoting Thomas’s examination of the concept. He found that “a recent search on open-source data indicated that NGW has almost completely disappeared from Russian military literature. There were zero hits on the topic over the past 1500 days” (Thomas 2017, 143). Therefore, it seems that the concept of NGW gathered momentum for being an accessible and interesting concept that described the Russian modus operandi in Ukraine rather than for its role of influencing Russian military thought. Gerasimov Doctrine As the concept of hybrid warfare started to fall out of favor, the Gerasimov doctrine gained popularity. This refers to the thoughts Valery Gerasimov expressed in a 2013 speech, but the term was first used by Galeotti—something he came to regret. In an undated update to his article, he added “I was just going for a snappy title. I really didn’t expect (or want) it to become a more generally used term” (Galeotti 2014; see also Galeotti 2018b). He continued to argue that if it was anyone’s doctrine, it was Nikolai Makarov’s but that the article should rather be seen as an observation about war in the twenty-first century rather than a Russian doctrine (Galeotti 2014). Nonetheless, the concept had already acquired a life of its own among US and European practitioners and theorists (e.g., see Lalu 2016). One of the most effective criticisms of the terms “hybrid warfare” and “the Gerasimov doctrine” comes from Charles Bartles in his article “Getting Gerasimov Right” (Bartles 2016a; see also McDermott 2016). Bartles argued that “Gerasimov is simply explaining his view of the operational environment and the nature of future war, and not proposing a Russian way of warfare” (Bartles 2016a, 31). In the Russian understanding of war, Bartles continued, instead of a “traditional” military invasion, the United States would first install a political opposition (supported by media, social media, and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]), induce separatism and social strife to weaken the domestic government, and apply special or private force to provoke an overreaction, which creates a pretext for sanctions until the government collapses (Bartles 2016a, 32–33). Thus, Bartles concluded that “the leveraging of all means of national power to achieve the state’s ends is nothing new for Russia,

Introduction 

15

but now the Russian military is seeing war as being something much more than military conflict” (Bartles 2016a, 34). Indeed, Bartles saw that “while the West considers these nonmilitary measures as ways of avoiding war, Russia considers these measures as war” (Bartles 2016a, 34). Bartles thus argues, although not explicitly, that these nonmilitary means are changing the Russian military’s understanding of war away from something strictly defined by armed violence. For all its merits, Bartles’s study is only eight pages long and does not delve into the questions of how theorists other than Gerasimov discussed the issue, how and when the understanding of nonmilitary means has changed, and why these means came to be seen as useful. Bartles argued in a subsequent article that the 2014 Military Doctrine and Gerasimov’s 2013 article showed an acceptance of the view that color revolutions and Arab Spring–type events were the largest threats to the Russian government, as opposed to military invasions (Bartles 2016b, 9). These were understood among Russian military theorists as the mastery of new forms and methods of warfare by the West (Bartles 2016b, 4). This led to the fact that “the primacy of effort has now shifted from military to nonmilitary methods, by a factor of 4:1. This is indeed a new development in Russian military thinking” (Bartles 2016b, 4). This reasoning emphasized the notion that beyond nonmilitary means always being important, they are now placed at the center of the military’s understanding of, and priorities in, contemporary war. Out of these, Bartles identified information means and NGOs (Bartles 2016b, 4). Similarly, Jakob Hedenskog, Gudrun Persson, and Carolina Vendil Pallin saw three distinct drivers of Russian threat perception: color revolutions, the “besieged fortress” perception, and the struggle over values (Hedenskog, Persson, and Vendil Pallin 2016, 97). The fear of popular uprisings was “central for the understanding of the Russian view of modern conflicts” (Hedenskog, Persson, and Vendil Pallin 2016, 110). They concluded that the Russian leadership sees color revolutions as a form of aggression from the West against Russia and that “non-military means are given a fundamental role in contemporary and future conflict,” among which the information sphere was particularly important (Hedenskog, Persson, and Vendil Pallin 2016, 114–15, 121–22). There was indeed agreement on the centrality of information warfare, although in different aspects. Giles argued that Western decision-makers “cannot afford to underestimate the extent to which Russian concepts and approaches in information activities differ from what they may take for granted”: This includes the specific question of when, or whether, hostile action in information space or cyberspace constitutes an act or state of war. As noted

16 

 Introduction

above, an overt state of conflict with Russia need not necessarily exist in order for Russian capabilities to be deployed. But this also means that in information space, as elsewhere, activities by NATO nations which appear to them to be entirely innocent and unprovocative can be assessed from Moscow as immediately hostile, and provoke a reaction which once again takes NATO by surprise. (Giles 2016b, 76)

In this way, Giles suggested, the Russian understanding of war is not strictly defined by armed violence, and information warfare has expanded the understanding. This relates to the information-psychological sphere (given that states could conduct it while thinking they are innocent, as opposed to, for instance, cyberattacks). Furthermore, Giles contended, if one measures Russian actions against what Russian information theory suggests permissible in times of peace and in times of war, “recent Russian activities in the information domain would indicate that Russia already considers itself to be in a state of war” (Giles 2016b, 11). Gray Zone One way to handle the mismatch between the Western and Russian understanding of war has been to introduce the concept of the gray zone, which aims to capture the zone between war and peace (Mazarr 2015; Fitton 2016). Gen. Joseph L. Votel, at the time head of the US Special Forces Command, and colleagues said that “the gray zone is characterized by intense political, economic, informational, and military competition more fervent in nature than normal steady-state diplomacy, yet short of conventional war” (Votel et al. 2016, 102). Another way to describe the gray zone was that “the space between war and peace is not an empty one—but a landscape churning with political, economic, and security competitions that require constant attention” (Schadlow 2014). Nonetheless, it is too optimistic to solve a difference in strategic culture by semantic construct. Rather, as pointedly argued by Hoffman, “the real gray zone is ‘between our ears,’ in our faulty models and education about what conflict entails. Enshrining our intellectual fault line as an opponent’s method is not enlightening” (Hoffman 2018, 36). Likewise, Antulio Echevarria II emphasized that “the so-called hybrid and gray zone wars of the present are not new, but they have highlighted important failings in the West’s conception of armed conflict” (Echevarria 2016, xiv). Thomas also concluded “there is continuity in Russian thought that the US may be neglecting with its fixation on hybrid and gray area concepts” (Thomas 2017, 144).

Introduction 

17

Material and Definitions To ascertain authority in the understanding of war, this study relies on a focus on Russian public security doctrines, political elites, and military theorists. This focus helps us approximate an understanding of the Russian view of war. The selection of elites’ and theorists’ views will be based on their positions as well as on the relevance of the content. The primary sources consist of official statements, academic articles, books, news articles, and reports. The security doctrines are not exhaustive but represent the accepted official view, and it is likely that the majority of stakeholders involved in the drafting process accept their content. The doctrines hold formal status as the basis for national security planning. Moreover, following Soviet tradition, these doctrines are useful to analyze because they go far beyond Western ones in terms of what questions they answer and their military-theoretical depth and detail. The military doctrines not only direct the armed forces but the whole of the state’s organization for war (voyennoye organisatsiya gosudarstvo). The statements of the political elites are important as they reveal perceptions of war among those in power. A drawback of analyzing the political elites’ statements is that they are less likely to venture into depth on military issues or have a military-theoretical foundation. Among the political elites, particular weight is given to the president, the minister of defense, and the head of the Security Council. The military theorists are crucial as they have the militarytheoretical expertise to analyze how war is changing. Among military theorists, the views of the chief of the General Staff—the highest-ranking officer, the deputy defense minister, and the person with the utmost responsibility in leading the military-theoretical development—are of particular importance. This book will also focus on theorists involved in drafting the public security doctrines and with influential positions in the military-theoretical debates and the General Staff. To be clear, there is no such thing as a single understanding of war, either in Russia or elsewhere. It is an aggregate of different views that can be more or less conforming. Nonetheless, analyzing the understandings of war in these three different areas allows for the approximation of an understanding of war and how it has developed. The key rationale for adopting such an approach is that other major studies in the field (most notably Bukkvoll 2011; Thomas 2016b; Fridman 2018) mostly track the thoughts of individual theorists without a weighted assessment of how representative their thoughts might be of the general consensus. Given the difficulty of establishing a single understanding of war, the argument for an aggregate view will largely be based on argument

18 

 Introduction

and interpretation. The aim of this book very much echoes the way Gray approached writing on Soviet nuclear strategy. He wrote that it would be a major error to approach Soviet nuclear strategy as if it were an extant mosaic to be uncovered by the prodigious scholarly efforts of Western archeologist-strategists. . . . One should approach the subject expecting a quality of evidence more suitable for the securing, by analogy, of conviction in a civil, than a criminal, case. There is, and is going to be, no “smoking gun,” in the form of Soviet public explanation and defense of the equivalent of a NSDM242, or a PD-59. (Gray 1992, 29)

When it comes to asserting authority in military theory, this study draws upon Tor Bukkvoll’s classification of three major arenas for Russian militarytheoretical debates: the General Staff, the Russian Academy of Military Science, and “others,” which included the weekly military newspapers Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye (NVO, Independent Military Review), VoyennoPromyshlennyy Kuryer (VPK, Military-Industrial Courier), and Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) (Bukkvoll 2011, 648–87). The General Staff has the leading role of developing military thought; it is the “brain” of the army. A particularly important role for developing military theory in the General Staff is given to the Center for Military-Strategic Studies. The center is a kind of in-house think tank that was created in 1985 by, among others, Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, probably the most influential theorist and the author of the military sections in the 2010 Military Doctrine. The General Staff, its academy, and other academies have the responsibility to “institutionalize [the] culture of strategic thought in the officer corps” (Covington 2016, 3). The General Staff is also in charge of the journal Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought), which has been running since the late nineteenth century (Voyennaya Mysl n.d.). It is the main outlet for military-theoretical works for both the General Staff and the Academy of Military Science. The journal publishes many of its works translated into English (although the volume and issue numbers sometimes differ). Definitions The nature of war is understood as what war is, which has, as discussed above, traditionally been defined in Russia as armed violence for a political purpose. This book does not define other key terms a priori. Rather, it analyzes the way in which Russian political elites and military theorists use them, since the objective is to see how the Russian understanding has changed. Nonetheless, this

Introduction 

19

can at times create difficulties in that theorists can be using different terms to refer to the same thing or the same terms to refer to different things. This is further complicated by varying degrees of precision in the use of terms; some terms are very clearly defined and used with precision, while others are not. For instance, a key distinction for this book is between the nature and character of war. In the Russian language, however, the nature of war is often translated kharakter voiny, which literally translates to the character of war, which it can also mean. There is no simple way around this except to look closely at the context and use the original Russian phrase when the meaning is unclear. Moreover, the nature of war can also be described as sushchnost (essence) and priroda (nature). Another potential source of confusion is the use of terms such as nevoyennoye (nonmilitary), nenasilstvennyye (nonviolent), and netraditsionnyye (nontraditional/unconventional). These terms are often used to refer to means that are both nonviolent and nonmilitary, even if the precise connotation is different. Similarly, uses varies between vooruzhennyy konflikt (armed conflict), vooruzhennaya borba (armed struggle), and vooruzhennoye protivostoyaniye (armed confrontation). This book will use the perhaps suboptimal division between a Western debate and a Russian debate. Even though they are interacting, the key difference is the audience that they are addressing. For this reason, Russian theorists writing in the Western debate will be discussed there. This book will use all the terms “the West,” the “Arab Spring,” and the “color revolutions.” There are good reasons to doubt the suitability of all these terms, but since they are the most common terms used by Russian theorists and elites, they will be used in this book. The West generally refers to the United States and EU states together but can also simply mean the United States. This book will use the BGN/PCGN standard for Russian transliteration, although with a few exceptions. Names and words that are more commonly transliterated in other ways will be kept. Names such as “Vitaliy” and “Evgeniy” will be written as “Vitaly” and “Evgeny.” Moreover, war will be transliterated as voina rather than voyna, as it is the most common way of transliteration. Soft signs for ь and ъ will be omitted. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations taken from the non-Englishlanguage sources in the reference list are my own translations.

Structure The first two chapters of this book are organized chronologically to show how the Russian understanding of war has developed. Thereafter, it focuses

20 

 Introduction

thematically on information warfare and color revolutions as the two major factors affecting the Russian understanding of war. Thus, the first chapter analyzes how the understanding of war changed from the creation of the Soviet Union until its dissolution. It scrutinizes the early writings of Lenin, which became key tenets for how war was understood in the Soviet Union and later Russia. The creation of the Soviet Union is a natural starting point for this book, as it laid the theoretical and methodological foundation that in many aspects persist in contemporary Russian military theory (De Haas 2010, 5; Thomas 2016b, 37; Giles 2016a). Chapter 2 surveys the development of post-Soviet understanding of war through the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. This chapter considers each decade, and the discussion of each time period is divided into the views of theorists and the statements in security doctrines. This chapter demonstrates how the increasing importance of nonmilitary means and their potential to affect the nature of war has been a long-standing discussion in Russia. Chapter 3 investigates the Russian understanding of information warfare, both in terms of key events and the views of elites and theorists. The discussion follows the customary Russian division of information-technical warfare and information-psychological warfare. The importance of information-technical warfare increased after the Gulf War, when Iraqi troops relying on Soviet matériel and doctrines were defeated by a technologically superior, but numerically inferior, US military. The importance of the information-psychological sphere increased during the Chechen wars. The perceived threat from color revolutions is analyzed in chapter 4. The color revolutions contained a degree of Western nonmilitary support, which mainly consisted of the work of NGOs, political and diplomatic support, and financial support for democracy and human rights. As opposition groups in the color revolution states rallied under the banner of democracy and human rights and were supported by Western countries (mainly the United States), the color revolutions became seen by Russian political and military elites as an instrument for engineering regime change. This view was cemented with the Arab Spring, whose protests carried over to the Russian elections of 2011– 12 and the Euromaidan revolt, after which Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. Last, the book will end with a conclusion and policy recommendations for those who are handling the conflict with Russia.

Introduction 

21

Notes 1. For those arguing for a change, see, inter alia, Kalistratov 2004; Kvachkov 2004; Bruntalsky 2007; Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009; Kirshin 2013; and Burenok 2014. For those arguing for the nature of war to remain, see Gareyev 1998, 2003a, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2012, 2013a; Serebryannikov 2004; Slipchenko 2005; Malyshev 2007; Brezkun 2007; and Mikryukov 2010. 2. For an overview of the origins of hybrid warfare, see Fridman 2018. 3. The concept of hybrid warfare was also used by a wide variety of senior US political and military leaders, including Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Undersecretary of State Joseph Nye Jr., Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy. See the summary in Hoffman 2018, 37. 4. For instance, Aleksandr Bartosh, whom Fridman quotes, saw violence as the factor distinguishing hybrid warfare (violent) from color revolutions (nonviolent) (Bartosh 2015). 5. This might not be fully accurate, though, as leading Western theorists have also given strong emphasis to information warfare. Two examples include Mattis and Hoffman’s argument of the four-block war, where the fourth is psychological and information operations (Mattis and Hoffman 2005), and Freedman’s (2006) argument on the importance of strategic communications in the transformation of strategic affairs.

chapter 1

The Soviet Understanding of War

An analysis of Soviet military publications indicates an exceptionally sophisticated level of professional understanding by the Warsaw Pact officers of Western military-technological innovations. What is even more striking is that the Soviets were able to place these innovations in a much deeper and broader context, reflecting a far more profound grasp of these developments’ implications than the West itself possessed.  —Dima Adamsky (2010, 32)

M

any of the particular features of Russian military thought today have roots in Soviet military thought. This is probably unsurprising since the majority of the elites in today’s Russia were educated and had their early careers under the Soviet system. The influence, however, goes further. Some of the key debates in contemporary Russia regarding what war is—including the US military’s MTR/RMA, which later became network-centric warfare (NCW)—originated in Soviet times. Furthermore, many of the characteristics that set Russian military thought apart from its Western equivalent, such as the reliance on holism and dialectical materialism, were also introduced during the Soviet period. Soviet military theorists and political elites had a different way of approaching military thought, and arguably it was deeper and broader than Western approaches, as the quote above emphasizes. The body of military theory and authoritative views was exceptionally stable throughout the history of the Soviet Union. This was partly because the essence of war was indeed seen as static and partly because all military theory and military science had to reflect the established views and ideology of the Communist Party, from which military doctrine and military strategy was derived—that is, all authoritative ideas on matters of war and military policy derived from party policy (Scott and Scott 1982, 13). Military doctrine was divided into a political part and a military part. The political part was the superordinate, and it changed little (Light 1988, 13). The military part was also quite

22

The Soviet Understanding of War 

23

stable, with much of the foundation of Soviet military theory developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the key concepts—deep operations, echeloned formation in the attack, the primacy of the offensive, and the importance of engagement—persisted in various forms (Scott and Scott 1982, 18). This chapter analyzes the development of the Soviet understanding of war from Lenin’s early writings until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. While not entering into a comparative study, it discusses the particularities of this “broader and deeper” Soviet understanding. It begins by discussing the particular features of Soviet military science. Thereafter, it analyzes the nature of war in the Soviet understanding in terms of the definition, the root cause of war, and the view of war as an instrument of politics.

Soviet Military Science Before venturing into the Soviet understanding of war, a few words are merited on Soviet military science. The starting point for investigating the nature of war was the established views and ideology of the Communist Party. It was from the precepts therein that Soviet military science drew when forming its system of knowledge. This included the character of war, the laws of war, the preparation of the armed forces for war, and the methods of waging war (Scott and Scott 1982, 5). The authoritative framework was set out at the creation of the Soviet Union by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, commissar of war from 1918 to 1925 and the founder of the Red Army. They in turn relied heavily on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Marxism in what later became known as Marxism-Leninism. The first point that rendered Soviet military science particular is its insistence on holism, the belief that everything is connected in a single synthetic system. All issues are analyzed with the function of the system in mind. This, Adamsky argued, is to be seen in contrast with the Western analytical-logical tradition that starts from the microlevel processes and then goes on to aggregate them (Adamsky 2010, 40). This was also the interpretation of the military historian David Glantz, who argued that “this tendency to treat war as a totality of military, economic, political, and social measures differentiated Bolshevik strategy from that of its opponents” (Glantz 1992, 16). Holism— starting from the whole and then analyzing how the different components fit into it—is something the veteran Soviet military analysts Harriet and William Scott say persisted throughout the Soviet era (Scott and Scott 1988, 288). The second point, which ties in with the first, is that Soviet military science was scientific because of the strict reliance on formal philosophy in the form of

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chapter 1

dialectical materialism as a guide to action and development (Fedotoff-White 1936, 321). Western analysts were often led astray when analyzing Soviet military thought because they gave too little attention to the philosophy that Soviet military science relied on (Scott and Scott 1982, 28). Materialism started with Hegelian dialectics but was modified by Marx and Engels, who discarded Georg Hegel’s idealistic metaphysics (Somerville 1945, 24). The three basic laws of dialectical materialism can be summarized as follows: “The law of strife and unity of opposites (that is, things are in a continuous process of change because they are made up of opposing forces or elements); the law of transformation of quantity to quality . . . and the law of negation of negation (each qualitative stage becomes negated by a further development)” (Somerville 1945, 24). N. Ya. Sushko and Stefan Tiuskhevich described dialectical materialism and military thought, saying that “the appearance of new means of struggle always brings into being corresponding counter-means, which in the end also lead to changes of military operations. The ‘struggle’ of tanks and antitank means, submarines and antisubmarine means, aircraft and antiaircraft defense . . . this is the axis around which revolves the development of military affairs, including the development of methods and forms of armed conflict” (Sushko and Tiuskhevich 1965, 128). Dialectical materialism and holism were the foundation for the scientific drive in Soviet military science. In 1917, Lenin decided that all science of war and society needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism (Thomas 2011, 77). Against the backdrop of Lenin’s disappointment when the older strategists did not rely on Marxist-Leninist methodology, Adamsky says that “the Bolsheviks were determined to produce unique, proletarian military science. They assumed that armed with the laws of dialectical materialism, the Red Army would possess a master key to military reality” (Adamsky 2010, 47). Adamsky goes on to state that the major theorists—Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Boris Shaposhnikov, Mikhail Frunze, Aleksandr Svechin, and Trotsky—shared a conviction that “scientifically” developed military thought was a basic necessity (Adamsky 2010, 47). However, a closer look reveals a contradiction here. Both Svechin and Trotsky held the view that military knowledge was more of an art than a science. Trotsky argued that “there is not and cannot be a science of war, in the precise meaning of that word. There is an art of war” (Trotsky 1922). Trotsky also contended that historical materialism was not a universal method but rather a method for “a strictly delimited group of phenomena, a method of investigating the development of historical man” (Trotsky 1922, emphasis in original). Nonetheless, the strict scientific approach to military affairs remained. The scientific dialectics were taken further by Josef Stalin, who coined five

The Soviet Understanding of War 

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permanently operating factors that would ensure victory in war (discussed below). As explained by Gen. Vladimir Kurasov, commandant of the Academy of the General Staff, one of the top positions in the Soviet Armed Forces, in an article on Stalin’s military art, “the most important and characteristic feature of Stalinist strategy, finally, is the profoundly scientific foresight” (Kurasov 1950, 85, italics added). He explained that “Comrade Stalin determined these decisive factors of war on the basis of brilliantly applying the method of Marxist dialectical materialism to the phenomena of war. Therefore Stalinist strategy is deeply scientific, permitting the correct disclosure of the perspective for the development of a war” (Kurasov 1950, 85). Likewise, Vasily Sokolovsky stated confidently that war was “an extremely complex social phenomenon, whose essential meaning can be revealed solely by using the only scientific method: Marxist-Leninist dialectics” (Sokolovsky 1963, 270). In sum, working in the philosophical tradition of dialectical materialism was seen as the key element of what made Soviet military science scientific. Marxist philosophy and dialectics had their roots in Hegelian dialectics, even if the Marxist tradition developed in opposition to it, especially with regard to the central role of the state for Hegel (Gat 1992, 372). This philosophical kinship, which included the common focus on historicism, was a key reason why communist military theorists found such affinity with Clausewitz, who was also drawing heavily on Hegel (Gat 1992, 364). Lenin appreciatively noted Clausewitz’s use of dialectics. A third component that made Soviet military science scientific was its focus on history. Historical analysis was a constituent part of Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism and seen as critical in the development of Soviet, and later Russian, military theory. As the seminal theorist Svechin put it, “All of strategy is basically a contemplation of military history,” and “the study of strategy is of little use without military historical knowledge” (Svechin 1927, 77). Or, as similarly put by Ivan Vorobyov and Valery Kiselyov, military history was an “organically indissoluble constituent” of military knowledge and the “nucleus of military science” (Vorobyov and Kiselyov 2013, 43; see also Vorobyov and Kiselyov 2011). Indeed, Russian theorists insisted that their military science is distinct, partly because of its focus on history (see Adamsky 2010, 33; Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 17; Vorobyov and Kiselyov 2013, 43).

The Cause of War In Marxist thought, the root cause of war was the existence of class societies. War was seen as a logical, almost automatic consequence of political systems

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with class divisions. The exploiting ruling class would continually use war to further its economic interests, and in this light the cause of war was economic (Light 1988, 212). B. Byely et al. (1972, 32) concluded that all the wars in history “were caused by private ownership relations and the resultant social and class antagonisms in exploiter formations.” Likewise, the chief of the Red Army in 1923, Ioakim Vatsetis (1923, 33), opined, emblematic of the view that persisted throughout the Soviet Union, that “a future war will in a sense be a class war, evoked by rivalry on purely economic grounds.” Indeed, economics was of primary importance; “the connection between the military organization of the nation and its entire economic and cultural structure was never as close as the present” (Glantz 1992, 6). This was enabled by Marxist-Leninist theory, which provided a coherent framework that guided politics, economics, and war. Lenin contended in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that “imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system where private property in the means of production exists” (Lenin 1916a, 28). This represented a continuation of the thought of Marx and Engels and became one of the core points of the Soviet understanding of war. Wars were, Lenin argued, “inseparable from the political systems that engender them” (Lenin 1917, 25). Wars would inevitably occur by virtue of the existence of exploitative political systems, until the whole world has become communist. In the “Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution,” Lenin wrote, “Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap” (Lenin 1916b, 2, italics in the original). This view of perpetual conflict was confirmed by Frunze, one of the most acclaimed Soviet military theorists and commissar for the army and navy in 1925, who saw that “between our proletarian state and all the rest of the bourgeois world there can be only a state of long, stubborn, desperate war to the death” (Frunze 1921, 30; see also Svechin 1927, 91). Byely et al. (1972, 32) recapitulated that “wars are . . . a constant traveling companion to capitalism.” Lenin understood war as having more utility than Marx and Engels. He held that “the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars” (Lenin 1916b, 2). Thus, in Lenin’s view, war was necessary in the condition of transforming the world and reaching the ultimate good. For Soviet leaders, “the socialistic transformation of society without an armed struggle was unconceivable” (Lider 1977, 232). This struggle was not limited to an interstate-level; rather, it was militarizing the whole of social life (Lenin 1916b, 3) because the success of socialism

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in one country would not only create friction but also direct attempts by the bourgeoisie to crush the socialist state’s victorious proletariat (Lenin 1916b, 2). Frunze agreed, arguing that “absolutely all aspects of social life are absorbed by war and subordinated to them” (Frunze 1921, 28). Consolidating the internal front was seen, in the Marxist-Leninist view, as a key condition for the ability to conduct external battles (Peralta 2005, 116). In this sense, Lenin was mindful of both interstate war and revolution, a key concept in Marxist-Leninist thought. Revolution can be seen as the link between the class struggle and war (Peralta 2005, 95). The perception of war as having the potential to speed up the revolutionary process was strengthened by the First World War and the following Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks came to power and by the Second World War when the Soviet Union established control over half of Central Europe (Light 1988, 21). Byely et al. (1972, 15) stated that war could also delay or hasten the development of the class society. Here it is useful to add the context of the development of military theory in the early days of the Soviet Union. In a passage of history less remembered by Western states than in the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the United States were involved in the Russian Civil War, supporting the White movement against the Bolsheviks (Glantz 1992, 9). Thus, the foundational policy and military doctrine of the Soviet Union matured in the context of an “internal struggle and foreign intervention [that] threatened the fledgling Bolshevik regime’s existence” (Glantz 1992, 5). At the core of the Marxist view of war was thus a paradox. On the one hand, war was perceived as something evil that could be remedied only by the transformation of the whole world to communism and the concomitant eradication of class societies (Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1919, 116). On the other, war was a positive force that could speed up the revolutionary process, through which all societies would become communist, either through peaceful transformation or armed revolution (Vigor 1975, 17). Thus, “since war is necessary for achieving socialism, it must be instrumental: moreover, since socialism is inevitable, then war must be unavoidable” (Lider 1977, 240). This paradox (the necessity of peace / the inevitability of war) was found not only in ideology but also among policymakers (Light 1988, 209). The understanding of war as inevitable was maintained from the formation of the Soviet Union until Nikita Khrushchev amended it several years after the Soviet Union’s first successful test of an explosive nuclear device: “There is, of course, a Marxist-Leninist precept that wars are inevitable as long as imperialism exists . . . but war is not fatalistically inevitable. Today there are mighty

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social and political forces possessing formidable means to prevent the imperialists from unleashing war” (Khrushchev, cited in Booth 1981, 84–85, italics added; see also Burin 1963). The “formidable means” that Khrushchev referred to were, of course, nuclear weapons. This view concomitantly entered Marksizm-Leninism o voine i armii as “wars are no fatal inevitability in human social development” (Byely et al. 1972, 5). This led to a reconsideration of the view that the transformation to socialism absolutely necessitated armed struggle; rather, “the only condition necessary for the transition from capitalism to socialism is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Lider 1977, 233). That being said, Khrushchev maintained the view that imperialist systems were still the ultimate cause of war (Lider 1977, 241). To grapple with the inevitability of war, Khrushchev launched the idea of peaceful coexistence. He wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in 1959 introducing the concept to the American audience. Khrushchev argued that there were two ways to deal with a neighbor one dislikes: war (which in the age of atomic and hydrogen weapons of mass destruction would be dire for all) or peaceful coexistence (Khrushchev 1959). Peaceful coexistence was not an absence of conflict and disagreement but more a recognition that different systems should compete by their respective strengths rather than by war. Or, in less friendly words, “peaceful coexistence is conceived as a form of the international class struggle for the ultimate victory of socialism waged without the use of arms” (Lider 1977, 251). Khrushchev saw that “the new alignment of international forces . . . offers ground for the assertion that a new world war is no longer a fatal inevitability, that it can be averted” (Khrushchev 1959). Leonid Brezhnev maintained the concept of peaceful coexistence, even though he seemed less optimistic. For him, peaceful coexistence did not in any way lessen the conflict; rather, “we must be prepared for this struggle to become more intense and an even sharper form of confrontation between the two social systems” (quoted in Lider 1977, 265). While maintaining Khrushchev’s notion of war as avoidable, The Soviet Military Encyclopedia noted that it did not “signify the complete elimination of the possibility of war in the modern age. The nature of imperialism has not changed” (Grechko and Ogarkov 1993, 368). This underlies the Soviet view that the character of war depended on two things: economy and technology. Since the cause of war was economic in the Marxist-Leninist view and wars were caused by the ruling class to further their economic interests, the character of war depended on the economy. This was an idea originally proposed by Engels but maintained in Soviet thought

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(Peralta 2005, 96). The Soviet Military Encyclopedia saw that the class relations defined the type of war, and they changed over time. The different eras included wars in a slaveholding society, in which the goal was to capture slaves; wars in a feudal society, where the goal was to seize land; wars in a capitalist society to acquire labor and access markets; and imperialist war, which “exacerbates all of the contradictions of capitalism to extremes and to an enormous degree intensifies the scale, the intensity, and the sphere of [sic] spread of wars” (Grechko and Ogarkov 1993, 365–66). The varying character of war with the character of the economy can also be expressed as is in the foundation of Marxist theory: The economy—the means of production and people’s relation to production—was the base that conditions the superstructure (essentially everything else). The most common way of describing how technology affected the character of war in the Soviet Union was through revolutions or stages of warfare (Fink 1989, 320). This practice continued in post-Soviet Russia with the use of generations of warfare. The advent of a new generation was mostly seen to be driven by technology, but technological innovation alone does not suffice as a description. Rather, a revolution meant a radical change in capabilities, doctrines, and organization, so fighting took on a fundamentally different form. The most authoritative work on the subject is by Vladimir Slipchenko, whose taxonomy of warfare is still the basis for most modern Russian theorists. The first generation was 500 BC–900 AD, with hand-to-hand fighting and primitive arms. The second generation, 900–1700, featured firearms. Third-generation wars, from 1700 to 1800, were fought with increased firepower, trench warfare, and battles on the oceans. The fourth generation, from 1800 to 1945, included the advent of automatic weapons, tanks, and air battles. The fifth generation introduced nuclear weapons, which were seen by some to render political goals unachievable. The sixth generation started in 1990 and was characterized by precision weapons and information and electronic warfare; the goal was to destroy the enemy’s economy with noncontact (i.e., long-distance) warfare. Slipchenko saw that warfare was just about to enter its sixth generation in the 1990s (Slipchenko 2005, 15).

The Nature of War The Soviet understanding of war came directly from Lenin. He took Clausewitz’s classical dictum that “war is merely a continuation of politics by other means” (Clausewitz 1991, 42), with its implication that war is an instrument of policy, and put it at the core of Soviet military theory:

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With reference to wars, the main thesis of dialectics is that “war is simply the continuation of politics by other (i.e., violent) means.” Such is the formula of Clausewitz, one of the greatest writers on the history of war, whose thinking was stimulated by Hegel. And it was always the standpoint of Marx and Engels, who regarded any war as the continuation of the politics of the powers concerned—and the various classes within these countries—in a definite period. (Lenin 1915, 219)

This became the foundation for defining war in the Soviet Union. It is important to note that Lenin himself added “violent” and did not use Clausewitz’s formal definition that “war is thus an act of force to compel the enemy to do your will” (Clausewitz 1991, 29). Furthermore, Lenin also expanded Clausewitz’s definition in ways not intended by him and criticized Clausewitz for treating policy as the foreign policy interests of a unitary state. Rather, for Lenin, “war is a reflection of the internal policy conducted by the given country before the war” (Lenin 1919, 152). In this way, Lenin was criticizing both Clausewitz and Hegel, who viewed the state as in an “impartial position above the struggle of particular interests in society” (Gat 1992, 372). Like Lenin, Trotsky also saw violence as the defining feature of war. In a discussion at the Military Science Society, he stated that even though “the artificial milieu, or human technology, in the broad sense of the word, has transfigured war just as it has transfigured all other human relations . . . this most general basis [of war] remains unchanged. In other words, war is a hostile encounter between human groups equipped with instruments for killing and destroying, with the direct aim of winning physical dominance over the enemy” (Trotsky 1922). Trotsky thus emphasized the physically violent aspect of war and, like Clausewitz, supported the notion that war’s nature remains while the ways of fighting change. Trotsky continued to argue that war needed to have social organization and political objectives, otherwise it would merely be animals killing each other (Trotsky 1922). Another affinity with Clausewitz was that Trotsky saw “the task of war [as being] to destroy the enemy’s manpower. This can be achieved by means of a blow” (Trotsky 1922). This resembles Clausewitz’s emphasis on engagements as the main means in war. The leading Soviet military theorist Aleksandr Svechin expressed his view of war in his seminal book Strategiya (Strategy). Svechin saw that the political conflict that pervades all human existence is usually conducted within the framework of conditions set by ruling classes—that is, within a

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legal framework. However, there are times when a situation is created in which this conflict turns into violence. If we are discussing foreign policy, this means that standards of international law have been violated, and the offended party, if it possesses sufficient strength, it is not always limited to a mere protest, and a political conflict takes the form of war. If we are discussing domestic politics, then the resort to violence by a nonruling class or nonruling nationality becomes a civil war. (Svechin 1927, 83)

From this understanding of war, it becomes clear that Svechin held violence as the key defining factor of what differentiated the ever-ongoing political conflict with war or civil war. Nonetheless, Svechin, notorious in the Soviet Union for arguing for defensive strategy based on attrition, also focused on the economic front. He saw that “war is waged not only on an armed front; it is also waged on the class and economic fronts” (Svechin 1927, 84). Under Stalin, however, Svechin was purged and thereafter a “nonperson” in Soviet military theory whose books and articles were placed in a closed collection with restricted access (Kipp 1992, 56). His work was later revived and became especially prominent again in the 1980s. In correspondence with a Colonel Professor Rasin, Stalin elaborated his view of Lenin’s incorporation of Clausewitz. In response to a question from Rasin as to whether Clausewitz was obsolete, Stalin criticized the premise of the question. In Stalin’s view, Lenin had used the parts of Clausewitz—the relation of politics and war, how politics engender war, and war as a continuation of politics by violence—already present in Marxist theory (Stalin 1946). In Stalin’s view, Lenin “not as a military expert, but as a politician . . . used the works of Clausewitz” to gain support for the view of the role of war and politics (Stalin 1946). Therefore, Stalin did not go against Lenin’s reliance on Clausewitz; rather he accepted it and justified it as if they were already a part of Marxist theory from the start. Eager to distinguish Soviet military theory from Western, Byely et al. (1972) restated and amplified the difference between Clausewitz’s definition and Lenin’s, cautioning that seeing the Marxist-Leninist view of the essence of war as identical to Clausewitz would be “a gross error” (7). They saw that Clausewitz denied the class nature of conflict and societies by assuming that politics represented the interest of society. In this way, they argued (like Lenin) that Clausewitz fallaciously understood politics only as foreign policy. On the contrary, war was foremost the continuation of domestic politics in the Marxist-Leninist view (Byely et al. 1972, 7–8). Politics, rather than the relations between governments, the state apparatuses, and parties, was defined in

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their book Marksizm-leninizm o voine i armii as the relations between classes (Byely et al. 1972, 8). This relation in turn is defined by the mode of production that defined the classes, their relation to each other, and their interests (Byely et al. 1972, 8). Concomitantly, war was then understood as the continuation of class politics by violent means. This became the central definition of war in the Soviet Union. Soviet theorists were keen to distinguish themselves from Clausewitz in another sense too. In their view, Clausewitz’s description of war as an instrument of politics was both incorporated into Soviet thought but also criticized, as it implied that war was the result of voluntary decisions (Lider 1977, 249). Marx had “shown the folly of such a view by demonstrating that behavior is rooted in the material base, that is in the system of production and the socio-economic structure” (Lider 1977, 249). In other words, the Clausewitzian view of war failed to acknowledge the automaticity in Soviet thought, in which the material base inevitably led to wars. Up until the 1960s, Soviet military theorist Aleksandr Kalistratov saw broad agreement to treat armed conflict and war synonymously; war meant a “social armed struggle” or “an armed struggle in a class society” (Kalistratov 2004, 150). Prominent Soviet military theorist Vasily Sokolovsky argued in his seminal book Voyennaya strategiya (Military strategy) that war could be defined as armed violence between different groups for political goals (Sokolovsky 1963, 271). This was still, in essence, the Clausewitzian definition that insisted on the use of armed violence as the defining factor. He furthermore argued that a “perfectly clear and absolutely fundamental logical conclusion is that the concept of ‘war’ did not include peaceful ‘nonmilitary’ means of conflict” (Sokolovsky 1963, 275). In this way, he explicitly rejected the possibility of expanding the concept of war to include nonmilitary means. Similarly, MarksizmLeninizm o voine i armii dismissed the possibility of economic, diplomatic, and other forms of struggle: “The essence of war is the continuation of politics by means of armed force. . . . Therefore, this definition of the essence of war does not include many of the important ways that are used to secure victory in war, notably economic, diplomatic, and other forms of struggle” (Byely et al. 1972, 10). The book continued to assert that “armed struggle is the chief means, the specific element of war” (Byely et al. 1972, 13). This made it clear that armed violence was the defining factor of war and nonmilitary means were explicitly excluded. This was stated as a conclusion and unfortunately not elaborated on; the closest to a discussion was the assertion that the forms of economic, diplomatic, and ideological struggle differed substantially in war and peace

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(Byely et al. 1972, 11). The understanding of armed force as the defining factor of war rather than nonmilitary means can also be found in the thought of Khrushchev, who argued in a speech on October 10, 1959, that “coexistence is the continuation of the struggle between the two social systems, but a struggle by peaceful means, without war. . . . We consider it to be an economic, political and ideological struggle, but not a military one” (quoted in Sokolovsky 1963, 275, italics in original). Nonetheless, war as solely defined by armed force started to meet resistance from certain military scholars and philosophers in the early 1960s. Military theorists Svyatoslav Kozlov, Mikhail Smirnov, Ivan Baz, and Pyotr Sidorov argued that war was broader; in war, political, economic, ideological, and psychological means were used to influence the enemy and thus needed to be included in the definition of war. In their view, the strict definition of war as violence missed other effective ways of influencing the enemy. They argued that “just the armed struggle and methods of its conduct do not exhaust the concept of war. War is a broader concept representing not simply a change from one means to another. Contemporary war affects all sides of life of the belligerent countries” (Kozlov et al. 1964, 147). That view did not, however, gain any traction at the time. In 1976, The Soviet Military Encyclopedia, nominally edited by Minister of Defense Pavel Grechko and Chief of Staff Nikolai Ogarkov, defined war as “a sociopolitical phenomenon, the continuation of politics by violent means” (Grechko and Ogarkov 1976, 361). Thereafter they quoted Lenin’s notion of war as a continuation of class politics, emphasizing the fixed view of the nature of war (Grechko and Ogarkov 1993, 361). However, the encyclopedia also emphasized the role of other means in war while maintaining the principal emphasis on armed force: “In war the armed forces are used as the main and decisive means, as well as economic, diplomatic, ideological and other means of struggle” (Grechko and Ogarkov 1976, 361). Thus, Lenin’s view remained, even if the definition expanded to include nonmilitary means of war in some senses. The 1986 military encyclopedia (Voyennyy entsiklopedicheskiy slovar) defined armed struggle as “the main form of struggle in a war, its specific substance consists in organized employment of armed forces for the attainment of certain political and military ends. It represents a set of military actions of varying scope” (quoted in Kalistratov 2004, 150–51). In this definition, armed struggle held a prominent role, and one could assume that if armed struggle was the main method, it was also the defining one. However, the definition does not explicitly dismiss the role of nonmilitary means, as the discussions in the 1960s did. Military theorists B. K. Kanevsky

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and P. N. Shabardin argued that war was not solely an armed confrontation but rather included nonmilitary means such as economic, diplomatic, intelligence, technological, and ideological to support armed conflict (Kanevsky and Shabardin 1987, 121). While they included nonmilitary means in their concept of war, it is unclear if they thought that a confrontation with all means short of military could amount to war. In any case, the notion that war could be something more than strict violence had started to gain ascendance and now featured in the debates surrounding the nature of war. Meanwhile, formal definitions had a clear view of armed violence as the defining factor.

War as an Instrument of Politics In both the Marxist-Leninist and Clausewitzian definitions, war is understood as an instrument of politics and specifically class politics in Marxist-Leninism. This is not an uncommon way to see war, but it could differ somewhat from the Western understanding. In the Soviet view, the underlying policy of a government remained, while it used peace or war as instruments to further its policy depending on circumstance (Vigor 1975, 8). In other words, “Peace is assessed in precisely the same way as war” (Lider 1977, 223). In the West, Peter Vigor argued, perhaps provocatively, that war was conversely understood as a “terrible disaster which bursts upon men as a kind of act of god, erupting for no reason and conducted for purposes which are never implemented when the fighting has stopped” (Vigor 1975, 5). This argument hinted at clearer understanding of war’s instrumental role. The consequence of this view is both war and peace as instruments of policy. In Lenin’s view, Vigor contended, it would have been ridiculous to think of peace as apart from war; rather, if war was the continuation of politics, peace needed to be as well (Vigor 1975, 87). The Soviet view entailed an understanding that peace, in any other sense than an absence of fighting, was unattainable as long as a capitalist system existed (Scott and Scott 1988, 113). The class struggle was continuous, even though it did not necessarily require armed conflict when the political circumstances did not favor war (e.g., the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918). It is often thought that the Marxist-Leninist affinity for Clausewitz also came from Marx and Engels (see, e.g., Byron 1950), but that does not seem to be the case upon closer scrutiny. Azar Gat showed convincingly how Engels found Clausewitz burdensome and preferred Antoine-Henri Jomini, while Marx likely never read him (Gat 1992, 367). Their correspondence showed that they discussed, and approved of, the idea that war was an art rather than a science, but this exchange did not go much deeper (Gat 1992, 367). Rather, it

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was Trotsky who had the strongest admiration for Clausewitz. Related to seeing war as an instrument of politics, Trotsky argued that “one of the greatest theoreticians of military matters, the German Clausewitz, wrote that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’ In other words, war, too, is politics, realized through the harsh means of blood and iron. And that is true. War is politics, and the army is the instrument of this politics” (Trotsky 1918, 211). The issue of political supremacy over the military created debate in the 1920s, with leading Soviet military theorists Aleksandr Svechin and Mikhail Tukhachevsky on opposing sides. Svechin argued, along with Lenin and Clausewitz, that politics are necessarily superior to strategy; Tukhachevsky argued that strategy should be protected from interference from policymakers. For Svechin, “it is natural for strategy to try to gain emancipation from bad politics, but strategy cannot exist in a vacuum without politics and is condemned to for all the sins of politics” (Svechin 1927, 85). In the end, Svechin’s view prevailed on this question. The notion of political supremacy took even stronger hold during the totalitarian period under Stalin and the personality cult. Stalin dominated all Soviet strategic thought due to his control of both the Communist Party and the military apparatus (Scott and Scott 1988, 74). The supremacy of the political side, personified by Stalin, was further cemented by the purges of the 1930s. They not only removed a majority of senior officers but also led to, in Kokoshin’s words, “numerous Russian and Soviet military and political-military thinkers [being] for many years totally excluded from Soviet intellectual life” (Kokoshin 1998, 8). The purges also halted discussions and development in militarypolitical affairs. There was paralyzing fear among the remaining military leaders of taking the initiative and making independent decisions, thus hindering the development of the Red Army (Stone 2006, 189, 200). Even if the strictest subordination of the military to its political leadership ceased with Stalin’s death, it persisted throughout the Soviet Union. In Sokolovsky’s words, the relationship between military strategy and policy “is based on the principle of complete subordination of the former to the latter” (Sokolovsky 1963, 24). This insight was not only in theory but guaranteed by a rigorous institutional setup. A key instrument for ensuring the party influence over the military apparatus was the Administrative Organs Department, which controlled all the appointments of military and security personnel (Dziak 1981, 41–42). Another instrument was the Military-Political Administration, which dispensed party patronage and controlled all the military messages to external and internal audiences, such as books and the journals Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) and Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought) (Dziak 1981, 10, 34–35).

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Additionally, the military was controlled covertly by way of informant networks of the KGB’s Third Chief Directorate (Dziak 1981, 11). After the advent of nuclear weapons, there was discussion as to whether war could still be considered an instrument of politics or if it would lead to the annihilation of humanity (and thus fail to further political goals). There were Soviet voices, mainly civilian, that argued that war had ceased to be an instrument of policy (Nikolsky 1964; Talensky 1965; Garthoff 1992, 58). However, Sokolovsky refuted these claims at length in Voyennaya Strategiya (Military Strategy, Sokolovsky 1963, 98–99). Nuclear weapons did not change the nature of war, even if the nuclear weapons represented a “radical break in the methods of conducting war and military operations” (Sokolovsky 1963, 304). In other words, for Sokolovsky, they represented a change in the character of war and not the nature of it. Indeed, Sokolovsky saw that nuclear weapons in themselves might decide a war. Sokolovsky got support from other Soviet military theorists who claimed that both historical experience and thencontemporary crises (Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam) had shown that nuclear weapons were still under the control of, and directed by, politics, in line with the original Clausewitzian dictum (Shilyag, Popov, and Kondratkov 1966, 11). Khrushchev maintained in a 1960 speech that nuclear weapons were the primary armament of the Soviet armed forces (Scott and Scott 1982, 157). Nuclear weapons were not a secondary means of survival but its key guarantee. The notion that nuclear war was possible should also be seen in the context of NATO’s change of strategic concept in 1967 from “massive retaliation” to “flexible response.” The former concept entailed a direct strike with nuclear weapons as the primary means in a war with the Soviet Union, while conventional weapons were secondary. In other words, a war would directly escalate to nuclear war. The concept of flexible response came as a consequence of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the insight into what direct nuclear escalation could have led to. A flexible response meant that NATO would first have met aggression with conventional means and then, if this proved unsuccessful, with nuclear means. Until 1968, Soviet military doctrine maintained that a world war (if unleashed by the imperialists) would inevitably lead to a war where the main forms of combat were nuclear (Scott and Scott 1982, 158). After NATO’s change in strategic concept, Marksizm-leninizm o voine i armii acknowledged that there could be combat actions that did not necessarily involve the use of nuclear weapons (Scott and Scott 1982, 207). Seeing war as inevitable and peace as a mere pause between wars has implications for how war is viewed ethically, which is another aspect of the

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understanding of war. War was viewed positively in the Soviet Union in the sense that it could speed up the transformation of the world into communism (the ultimate goal of the Soviet regime). This built on an idea from Marx, who stated that war was “the midwife helping the birth of a new society from the loins of the old order” (Fedotoff-White 1936, 326). The Soviet way of classifying just and unjust wars was manifold and changed over time, but the essence of the view in Soviet ideology was straightforward: Soviet wars were just, and imperialist wars were not. The just and unjust wars were in turn divided into different subtypes depending on the period, but in Soviet textbooks the customary taxonomy was as follows. Just wars were those in defense of the motherland and socialist countries, revolutionary wars of the working classes, wars of national liberation, and wars in defense of imperialist aggression. Unjust wars were imperialist aggression directed at socialist states, wars between the exploiting classes and the working class, colonial wars, and aggressive imperialist wars within the capitalist system (Scott and Scott 1988, 34). Marksizm-leninizm o voine i armii thus argued that “just wars of liberation are a countermeasure—i.e., they are waged to repel the armed violence of exploiters against the working people, that of foreign invaders, or that of colonialists against enslaved peoples. Hence, the political, social, and economic aims pursued in these wars are just and noble, while the armed violence is legitimate, justified” (Byely et al. 1972, 7). Soviet ideology held that all wars stemmed from class struggle and that the only wars that could be just were those working toward its abolition, which the Soviet wars in whatever form did by virtue of their sociopolitical character (Miller 1964, 268). Thus, Soviet wars were legitimate because of what the Soviet Union was, not what it did. The moral thinking was based on a systematic character rather than particular actions. This view is notable since it made concepts such as justness in the means of fighting (jus in bello) aggression and self-defense less relevant (key concepts in Western just war theory). Rather, “those guided by just aims would use just methods, and from their progressive aims would come just consequences. The problem of evaluating means and results was therefore of negligible importance” (Lider 1977, 221). Vigor demonstrated this using the example of British-French aggression in Crimea in the 1850s; even though they were both capitalist states and aggressors, Marx and Engels supported them (Vigor 1975, 61). The key reason for this was that they thought the war would help to bring about the fall of the czar. Vigor thus concluded that in the Soviet view there is no “objective” definition of aggression or self-defense. Rather, even if a capitalist country is clearly attacked first,

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it would not have the moral right to self-defense, and the aggression would not be condemnable if it was taken to further the revolutionary process (Vigor 1975, 60, 62, 64). In the same manner as the justness of a war, the distinction between offense and defense was not decided by particular actions but rather by the sociopolitical constitution of states. Thus, the invasion of Finland in 1939, the deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba that led to the crisis of 1962, the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 were all considered defensive actions by Soviet military theorists and leaders (Scott and Scott 1988, 258). This is not to argue that the Soviet ethics of justifying their own wars as legitimate in all circumstances is unique but rather to illustrate how the ethics of war are reflected in Soviet ideology. In these cases presented above, the sociopolitical constitution rather than particular actions allow war to be perceived as offensive or defensive, just or unjust.

Evgeny Messner While they were not part of Soviet military thought, it is worth surveying the ideas of Evgeny Messner (1891–1974). Messner was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army and later fought for the Whites during the civil war (Domnin 2005, 22–23). He was a staunch anticommunist, and his works were prohibited in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, his thoughts were revived in Russian military thought in the 1990s and 2000s and are particularly evocative of many modern views of war in the Russian military debate (see Fridman 2018, 70– 73). The revival of Messner’s thought was due to his focus on the psychological dimension of war, the erosion of values and societal cohesion, the creation of revolts, and the blurring of the boundaries of war and peace, all of which regained popularity in the 2010s. Messner joined the army and 1910 and rose to the rank of staff captain during the First World War. After being decommissioned by the Soviet leadership, Messner joined the White movement, of which his uncle was a leader and a major general (Domnin 2005, 23). A particularly noteworthy event in Messner’s career and theorizing came in 1919 when he was tasked to run a newspaper, Voluntary Effort, to support the Whites, which Messner recalled as his first step toward specializing in propaganda (Domnin 2005, 24). In 1921, Messner settled in Belgrade, where he taught, wrote, and became a professor of military science. However, in the spring of 1945, when Soviet and Allied forces approached, Messner fled to Argentina (Domnin 2005, 38), where he published his most notable works, Lik sovremmeny voiny (The face of modern war)

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in 1959, Myatezh—imya tretyey vsemirnoy (Subversion—the name of the third worldwide war) in 1960, and Vsemirnaya myatezhvoina (Worldwide subversion-war). Messner’s theorizing centered on the concept of myatezhvoina, literally translated as “mutiny,” “insurgency,” or “rebellion.” However, as Messner was referring to myatezhvoina as distinct from guerrilla warfare and referred to eroding moral and societal cohesion, “subversion-war” is a more apt term (Fridman 2018, 66; Messner 1960, 109). Messner argued that “in the present era it is easier to disintegrate the state than to conquer it with weapons. The states became morally vulnerable, because the mythical significance of the state has weakened” (Messner 1959, 66). Furthermore, Messner argued that “the use of traditional weapons is associated with such danger and sacrifice to which the modern self-centered person is not inclined” and therefore “the center of gravity in war moves toward the struggle with lighter and more popular weapons. This changed the face of war” (Messner 1959, 79). Messner gave weight to the psychological dimension and psychological warfare. He argued that “in previous wars, the conquest of the territory was important. Henceforth, the conquest of souls in the hostile state will be the most important” (Messner 1960, 109). With this understanding of the center of gravity, Messner saw notable changes in war itself: In the past wars, the front line dividing the enemies was vague where the partisans in the rear of one side or another blurred it. In future wars, war will not be linear but on the entire surface of the territories of both enemies because behind the military front there will be political, social, economic fronts; war will not be two-dimensional [land and sea], as in the past, nor three-dimensional, as it became with the birth of military aviation, but fourdimensional, with the psyche of the belligerent populations as the fourth dimension. (Messner 1960, 109)

Messner saw that a subversion-war was “first and foremost psychological: If in classic wars, the psychology of permanent armies was of great importance, then in the present epoch of national troops and belligerent popular movements, psychological factors become dominant” (Messner 1960, 101). He continued: “The people’s army is a psychological organism, the people’s movement is a purely psychological phenomenon. The war of troops and popular movements—subversion-war—is a psychological war” (Messner 1960, 101). Likewise, he stated that “the revolution is a psychological phenomenon” (Messner 1960, 103) and that winning battles and territorial conquests were not important by themselves but rather that “they are valuable mainly for their psychological effect” (Messner 1960, 131).

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In the subversion-war, Messner saw that “there is no division between the army and the population—all are fighting with different degrees of intensity and persistence”—and that “the regular army has lost its military monopoly” (Messner 1959, 70). Thus, subversion-war becomes “a war of all against all” (Messner 1960, 110). Instead of what seemed to Messner clear divisions between earlier wars, he found a new hierarchy of goals in subversion-wars: “(1) The disintegration of the morale of the enemy people, (2) the defeat of its active part (the army, partisans, popular movements), (3) the capture or destruction of objects of psychological value, (4) the capture or destruction of objects of material value, (5) the effects of the external order for the sake of acquiring new allies, the upheaval of the spirit of the enemy’s allies” (Messner 1960, 132). To achieve these goals, Messner contended that “the art of revolution consists in recording what are the current deviations from the norm of the mental state of a given mass of people” (Messner 1960, 103). When these are identified, “the revolution formulates attractive, incendiary slogans. Then, from the composition of the amorphous masses, an active popular crowd is formed, led by revolutionary leaders” (Messner 1960, 103). With this understanding of war, Messner saw that the traditional distinction between war and peace was becoming outdated. He saw that “the line between war and peace has been erased. There is no longer a change between: peace, war, peace again. Peace is intertwined with war, war with peace, strategy with diplomacy” (Messner 1959, 72). In this way, he drew upon Trotsky, who “invented it: not peace and not war. . . . The definite border between peaceful and military international relations has been abolished” (Messner 1959, 70). For Messner, subversion-war did not need to include physical actions; rather, as pointed out by Fridman, “The true art of subversion-war, according to Messner, involves indirect and seemingly unrelated actions that encourage internal confrontations” (Fridman 2018, 69). Messner’s general ideas of subverting a state and eroding its morale and values through psychological means became central in Russian military thinking in the 2010s (see chapter 4). Moreover, a number of Messner’s terms (the blurring of war and peace, nonlinear war, a war of all against all, the fighting incorporating all of the population) became central topics for the understanding of war in the Russian Federation.

Conclusion This chapter has found that the understanding of war in the Soviet Union came directly from the Communist Party, which was relying on Marxist-Leninist

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ideology, to which all military theorizing was firmly subordinated. This made the understanding of the essence of war essentially static during the existence of the Soviet Union. In analyzing war, Soviet military theorists were working in a distinct tradition based on dialectical materialism, a holistic view of politics and war, and their special focus on history, all deriving from MarxismLeninism. The holistic approach to war remains a key feature for understanding Russian thinking today. The root cause of war in the Soviet view was the existence of class and exploitative societies, which were inherently aggressive. Private ownership of the means of production led to class antagonisms that pushed states into aggressive action and inevitably caused wars. This is the context for how the notion of the Soviet Union as a besieged fortress took hold. The only remedy to the inevitable existence of war was thus the transformation of the world to communism, something that presupposed war, according to Lenin. In this sense, Marxist thought contained a paradox of war as an evil that could be fully eradicated only by war. The Soviet understanding of war meant that wars conducted by the Soviet Union were always just, by virtue of their sociopolitical character. Consequently, concepts such as self-defense and aggression were not decided upon based on the particular actions of states, such as invasion, but the goal they could serve. After the advent of nuclear weapons, Khrushchev argued that wars were not inevitable anymore, a view that persisted until the end of the Soviet Union. The understanding of the nature of war thus remained constant throughout the Soviet Union. Lenin’s main definition of war, as the continuation of politics by violent means, remained in the authoritative works throughout this period. The definition was almost identical to that of Clausewitz, but Lenin emphasized the class nature of politics, seeing war as the continuation of class politics by violent means. This, in the Soviet view, went beyond Clausewitz’s narrow focus on a unitary state and its foreign policy and better reflected the relations between classes and the ownership of the means of production within states. In this definition, war is an instrument of politics. There was a clear grasp of this among Soviet leaders. Also, its opposite was true: Peace was also an instrument of politics. This meant that both peace and war were seen as instruments, to be applied when suitable without any particular moral barrier between them, to further the goals of the Soviet Union. Lenin’s definition carried through major works throughout the Soviet period, for instance, Sokolovsky’s Voyennaya strategiya and Marksizm-leninizm o voine i armii, the authoritative Soviet book on war. They both stated that war was defined by armed force and explicitly did not include nonmilitary means.

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Even though this view was prevalent, it was challenged in the late 1960s. Some theorists argued that seeing war as an armed struggle did not exhaust the concept of war but rather needed to include the other means of influencing the enemy. The definition of war started to shift modestly at the end of the Soviet Union. For instance, the 1986 encyclopedia, as quoted above, defined armed struggle as the main form of war, while mentioning the role of nonmilitary means in war. There seemed to be a paradox in the Soviet understanding of war. On the one hand, war was clearly defined as the continuation of politics by violent means, which implied a clear connection to advancing policy. On the other, the inevitability of war created by the sheer existence of exploitative systems seemed to make war an almost automatic, perhaps irrational occurrence. That said, Marxist theorists were clear that the exploitative class would use war as an instrument of its politics to protect and expand its positions. To conclude, this chapter found an essentially static way of understanding the nature of war among Soviet leaders and military thinkers. The only significant changes were that the notion of the inevitability of war was amended and, among some military thinkers, nonmilitary means were included in war, while armed violence remained the defining feature. Even if propaganda and subversion held an important role in the conduct of conflict, they did not affect the definition of war. This was the military thinking that the newly established Russian Federation inherited, which the next chapter will analyze.

chapter 2

The Russian Understanding of War after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union The definition of the essence of war must, to some extent, be reviewed. . . .  The threat is connected with information and other subversive actions, the creation of controlled chaos to provoke various kinds of unrest, overthrow undesirable power structures from within, and violate the internal stability of states, as was done in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine. —Gen. Makhmut Gareyev (2016)

A

fter the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the preconditions for military thought in the Russian Federation entered a period of significant flux. The Russian Federation inherited a vast military machine with Soviet matériel, manpower, and doctrines. From the outset, the Gulf War shocked Russian theorists and showed how numerically inferior, but technologically superior, US troops easily beat the Iraqi army, which relied on Soviet matériel and doctrines. Thereafter, the Chechen wars posed critical problems for the Russian Armed Forces, which were both deteriorating and unprepared to fight an insurgency. In 1998, an economic crisis hit Russia, and military expenditure reached a low point. The relative neglect of the armed forces continued up until the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, after which the reform of the armed forces was launched, and they once again became a key priority and an important instrument in Russia’s pursuit of power (e.g., see Vendil Pallin and Westerlund 2009). In the war in Ukraine, a decidedly more competent Russian Armed Forces, together with Russia’s intelligence agencies, swiftly captured the Crimean Peninsula without large-scale resistance and created and directed an insurgency in Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, Russia managed to achieve a high degree of coordination between its military means and its nonmilitary means 43

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and most notably the information arena. This included Russian soldiers taking control of television and radio stations as well as a coordinated effort on social media (Norberg, Franke, and Westerlund 2014, 43). However, seeing Russian conduct in Ukraine as a complete novelty “reflects a failure of imagination rather than novel Russian military capabilities” (Norberg, Franke, and Westerlund 2014, 48). In September 2015, Russia intervened in the Syrian Civil War. This time, the Russian Armed Forces managed to display another set of capabilities, namely those of out-of-area operations. The Russian intervention in Syria consisted mainly of air strikes, military advisers, special forces, and private military companies. According to Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov, the Russian military conducted nineteen thousand combat missions and delivered seventy-one thousand strikes in the intervention’s first year and a half (Petrov 2017). The Russian operations in Syria signified the improvement of another focus area in the Russian military debate—the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance (C4ISR) complex as well as the use of long-range weaponry. Thereafter, Russia conducted an influence operation of unprecedented scale toward the 2016 US presidential election with, at least, a combination of information influence in social and traditional media, the targeted penetration of election databases, and hacking and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee. It consisted of “covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, statefunded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls’” (DNI and NIC 2017). All the above-mentioned events were often seen as novelties in the Western debate. However, as this chapter will show, progress in the Russian militarytheoretical debate often precedes the conduct of war. The application of nonmilitary means and information warfare had long been a key theme before Ukraine. The interference in the 2016 US election is, for instance, strikingly consistent with Messner’s idea that it is easier to disintegrate a state from within than with military means (Messner 1959, 66). This chapter will analyze the development of the Russian military debate, particularly concerning the understanding of war and the nature of war. It is structured chronologically, covering three decades (the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s) to show the development over time. For each decade, the discussion is divided into two parts, with the first analyzing the debate among the military theorists and the second public security doctrines.

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The 1990s: Continuity Gen. Makhmut Gareyev started his career in the Russian Armed Forces as an eighteen-year-old during the Second World War. After a career as a practitioner of military affairs, he became a leading figure in developing military theory. His most notable positions included serving as deputy chief of the General Staff, chief military adviser in Afghanistan, and president of the Russian Academy of Military Science from 1995, as well the author of the military section of the 2010 Military Doctrine (Bukkvoll 2011, 686). At the age of ninety-five (in 2019), he is still contributing to the military debate in Russia, and his voice remains influential. Throughout his life, Gareyev adhered to a view of war and defense strongly influenced by Soviet military thought (Bukkvoll 2011, 685). Gareyev’s view of war can be seen in the quote above from one of his major works, If War Comes Tomorrow? The Contours of Future Armed Conflict. It agrees with the tendency among some late Soviet theorists, discussed in the previous chapter, to shift away from defining war solely as an armed struggle. He argued that armed struggle is “a part of war—war being a complex social and political phenomenon embracing all spheres of life in the nations engaged, with diverse ways of fighting the enemy including industrial, political and psychological means, with armed struggle being paramount among them” (Gareyev 1998, viii). Gareyev thus landed somewhere between the revolutionary and the conservative alternatives, in that he recognized that armed struggle is both one component of many while also continuing to describe it as the most important component. He further argued that the essence of war cannot be changed, even by the invention of nuclear weapons (Gareyev 1998, 19). This is a response to arguments that nuclear war cannot be considered an instrument of policy since it would lead to mutually assured destruction and hence fail to achieve political objectives. Gareyev acknowledged that it is in general very hard to achieve political goals with nuclear weapons but that this was rather a question of expediency than a change in the nature of war. To support this, he referred to the only time when nuclear weapons have been used, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; both cases made it clear that they served US policy (Gareyev 1998, 20). This brought Gareyev into line with the Clausewitzian and Soviet distinction of how the nature of war remains, while its character shifts. Another area of continuity with Soviet understanding in Gareyev’s thinking is the causes of war, which he saw as economic, even if they were “disguised as religious, ideological, and other motives” (Gareyev 1998, 19). The causes of wars, Gareyev

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argued, were “the struggle for territorial gains, natural resources, wealth and manpower (slaves); attempts by conquerors to subdue other nations or even establish world domination; the seizure of colonies, and their expansion, raw materials and spheres of economic and political influence” (Gareyev 1998, 22). Furthermore, Gareyev contended that the main source of conflict in the near future will be the struggle for raw materials and survival (Gareyev 1998, 26). He insisted on the importance of enduring concepts in Russian military theory, such as moral superiority, technology only as a multiplier and not a substitute for manpower, and doctrine as leading the development of technology (Bukkvoll 2011, 687). The core of Gareyev’s argument was that regardless of the benefits technology can bring, strength of will and morale are decisive. That said, he was not a reactionary. For instance, when describing the main ways to combat an enemy, he argued that “the main efforts in the struggle with the enemy will be directed not towards the physical destruction of each unit of weaponry, but towards the destruction of their common information space, sources of intelligence, channels of navigation, and control systems of communication and targeting in general” (Gareyev 1998, 49; see also Kipp 1998, 10–12). The second significant military theorist in the 1990s was Maj. Gen. Vladimir Slipchenko, deputy head of the Academy of Military Science under Gareyev. Slipchenko published several books, the most important being Voina budushchego (Future war, 1999), Voiny shestogo pokoleniya: Oruzhiye i voyennoye iskusstvo budushchego (Sixth-generation warfare: Future weaponry and military art, 2002a), and Voiny novogo pokolenia: Distantsionnye i bezkontaktnye (New-generation warfare: Remote and contactless, 2004).1 In his books, articles, and speeches, he gradually developed the idea that a new generation of warfare (the sixth) was coming. This referred to a type of war conducted over long distances, mainly fought with long-range precision-guided missiles, without soldiers coming into direct contact with each other. Slipchenko criticized the analyses that treated innovations in weapon systems as a revolution—for example, those who saw a new tank, the Kalashnikov rifle, or satellites as revolutionary (Slipchenko 2005, 15). Rather, for him, there had been only six real generations of warfare. The 1991 Gulf War was seen by Slipchenko as a prototype of sixthgeneration warfare. That is to say, it could not fully be classified as a war of the sixth generation, but it displayed many of the characteristics of distance and noncontact warfare. Iraqi forces were numerically superior to the American forces, but they were in the fourth generation of warfare, just like Russia’s, and were easily defeated with superior C4ISR and precision-guided missiles and a

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small land force (Slipchenko 2005, 20). Thus, it was seen as a break from earlier wars of a close-contact nature (Slipchenko 2005, 18). The fifth generation of war (nuclear war) was also seen to be of a noncontact nature. However, since nuclear weapons were not considered usable and there has been no nuclear war, the Gulf War was the first prototype of a contactless war. Rather, Slipchenko saw the Kosovo War of 1998–99 in the former Yugoslavia as the first real noncontact, remote war of the future (Slipchenko 2005, 19). In the first six weeks of the conflict, he stated, “1,500 high precision cruise missiles were used, launched from very far away: Not one aircraft or ship entered Yugoslavia’s AAD [antiaircraft defense] impact zone” (Slipchenko 2005, 19). This meant that there was no theater of combat, and Slipchenko suggested using the term “theatre of war” (Slipchenko 2005, 20). After this initial period of the war, the United States shifted to fourth-generation warfare by deploying regular troops. The objectives of earlier types of warfare were seen by Slipchenko as threefold: to rout the opponent’s armed forces, to destroy its economic potential, and to overthrow or replace its political system (Slipchenko 2005, 16). In sixth-generation warfare, which the United States was argued to be conducting, there was only one goal: to directly destroy the enemy’s economic potential and to do so from a distance (Slipchenko 2002a; see also Slipchenko 2002b). In Yugoslavia, he saw that it was sufficient for the United States to destroy 80 percent of the adversary’s economic potential, after which the citizens changed the regime by themselves (Slipchenko 2005, 32). Slipchenko argued that “no one is ever going to come to us by land again” (Slipchenko 2005, 13). He saw that if war reached Russia, it would be via “aerospace and the strike will come from precision weapons” and that “this strike will not be against the armed forces, if they are still in the old generation, but against the national economy” (Slipchenko 2005, 13–14). Therefore, the priority was to prepare for a war like that in the former Yugoslavia and develop a reconnaissance-strike system (Slipchenko 2005, 31). This depended on support from information means to determine the opponent’s location, physically disable its communications, and win the information-psychological war in the media (Slipchenko 2005, 33). The information component and high-precision weapons were the two pillars of noncontact warfare (Slipchenko 2002b). On this topic, Slipchenko also mentioned the massive global psychological offensive waged by the United States after 9/11 to support its war aims (Slipchenko 2005, 45). This arguably implied the building of international support and UN approval for the subsequent operations in Afghanistan. Slipchenko anticipated radical change in the conduct of war. He even suggested that Russia needed “armed forces made up of two functional types:

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strategic-strike and strategic-defense forces” (Slipchenko 2005, 27). Nonetheless, he does not take a revolutionary position relating to the nature of war. Even with all the changes he saw in the character of war, he still adhered to the view that it was military force that defined war and that in sixth-generation warfare the range of precision strikes enabled military force to be unleashed from anywhere in the world (Slipchenko 2005, 26). Although a major innovation of Slipchenko’s thought was his view that “information had become a destructive weapon just like a bayonet, bullet or projectile” (Slipchenko 2005, 33), while considering the nature of war to be constant, he suggested adding a component that traditionally has been seen as nonviolent—information—as a destructive weapon. This is a potential contradiction, which he did not address explicitly. Slipchenko’s work was still, long after his death, influential in the study of the future of war in Russia (Popov n.d.). Even in the early days of post-Soviet Russia, there was an uneasiness about the potential impact of technological innovation on the conduct of war. This fear was arguably heightened by the technological lag between Russia and more advanced countries. During a roundtable discussion in 1994, Maj. Gen. Ivan Vorobyov, Maj. Gen. Vladimir Belous, and Maj. Gen. Slipchenko warned that “future war will employ ‘fundamentally new types of weapons’ to include: geophysical, electro-magnetic or radio frequency, infrasonic, genetic, ethnic, psychotronic, beam, laser, and non-lethal weapons” (Grau and Thomas 1996, 511). To a certain extent, the focus on weapons based on new physical principles—such as electromagnetic pulse and lasers—was already appearing on the agenda before the collapse of the Soviet Union but did not have a real impact on Soviet warfare before the collapse (Grau and Thomas 1996, 513–14). The most tangible of these technologies was already recognized as information technology. In a 1994 article in Delovoy Mir (Business World), the military theorist Sergei Modestov argued that “there is no need to declare war against one’s enemies and to actually unleash more or less large military operations using traditional means of armed struggle. This makes plans for ‘hidden war’ considerably more workable and erodes the boundaries of organized violence, which is becoming more acceptable” (Modestov 1994, 7). This argument is notable, as it states that a “hidden war” can be perpetrated without necessarily constituting a war and eroding the concept of violence. This has the consequence that conducting warfare via new means might not amount to what is considered an armed attack. At the same time, as the opportunities were seen to be rising to conduct warfare without it being classified as such, Vitaly Tsymbal at the Russian Ministry of Defense concluded in

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a conference paper that “from a military point of view, the use of information warfare against Russia will categorically not be considered a non-military phase of a conflict . . . considering the possible catastrophic consequences of the use of strategic information warfare means by an enemy” (quoted in Thomas 1996, 26). That is to say, the conduct of information warfare will be considered equal to military conflict. Taken together, Modestov and Tsymbal’s arguments suggest that the Russian view both permitted information warfare against others without seeing it as waging war but would at the same time consider the same measures taken against itself as war. It was with this in mind that V. P. Gulin proposed “a new conception of war.” He wrote that with the “informatization of all sides of social life we are witnessing a true revolution in the military sphere” that would necessitate qualitatively new armed forces (Gulin 1997, 50). Gulin stated that armed struggle had been believed to be the main feature of war but that social violence could now take many forms: political, economic, ideological, and diplomatic (Gulin 1997, 51). For this reason, Gulin argued, war should not be understood mainly in terms of armed struggle but rather by the consistent features of the uncompromising struggle (Gulin 1997, 51). The interesting part about Gulin’s argument is that he solved the question of what war is by expanding the definition of violence. For him, forms of warfare that are not violent in the physical sense (e.g., social violence) could still amount to war. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev wrote an article in 1999 outlining the Russian military-technical policy for the twenty-first century. The threats were, unsurprisingly, coherent with those of the forthcoming Military Doctrine from 2000 (discussed below), but the article also stated that a “new generation of weapons amounts to a qualitatively new phase of the arms race and a significant change in the content, forms, and methods of warfare” (Sergeyev 1999). Drawing on Slipchenko’s terminology, Sergeyev saw that the bombing of Serbia had become a full-scale prototype of noncontact warfare, which then led to the first stage of an RMA. For Sergeyev, this was because up until the Serbian campaign, large-scale ground troops had been needed. The main driver for this revolution was seen to be the informatization of warfare and the use of highprecision weapons. He further argued that the “main feature of the new stage of the revolution in military affairs is a sharp increase of the traditional weapons and the emergence of new types of conventional weapons” (Sergeyev 1999, italics added). This statement is particularly noteworthy because even if he perceived that a revolution in military affairs was ongoing, it was confined to traditional weapons or new conventional weapons. Furthermore, his usage of Slipchenko’s concept and thoughts underlined the latter’s influence.

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Military Doctrine 1993 With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation was left in a vacuum without the Soviet ideology that had formed the knowledge system dealing with war and conflict. Marxism-Leninism was not only the methodological foundation for military strategy but also provided a whole worldview, which military strategy had to reflect. When the Soviet ideology disappeared, a vehicle to replace it was the introduction of three new documents of security policy: the National Security Concept of the Russian Federation, the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, and the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, with the National Security Concept superior (De Haas 2010, 4). However, the National Security Concept was the last document of these three to be produced in 1997. The delay was the consequence of initial uncertainty over whether the concept was to cover the whole of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) or just the Russian Federation, as well as a power struggle between the departments involved (De Haas 2010, 6). The Military Doctrine was drafted singlehandedly by the Ministry of Defense (and approved by the Security Council), and the Foreign Policy Concept by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which made them quicker to produce. The 1993 Military Doctrine was broadly in line with the view of war from Soviet times from the last edition of The Soviet Military Encyclopedia, published just seven years earlier. The Military Doctrine noted that the main sources of external military danger to the Russian Federation were local wars, territorial claims against Russia, internal destabilization, and international terrorism (Ministry of Defense 1993, point 2.1). The 1993 Military Doctrine did not provide an explicit definition of war but contended that “social, political, territorial, religious, national-ethnic, and other conflicts and the desire of a number of states and political forces to resolve them by means of armed struggle constitute the main reasons for its persistence and for the emergence of armed conflicts and wars” (Ministry of Defense 1993, point 2.1). It is implied that conflicts would not amount to war without the armed element, which thus was the defining feature. In the doctrine, the concept of war was also followed by “armed conflict” in parenthesis for clarification (Ministry of Defense 1993, point 2.2). Therefore, the 1993 doctrine sees war and armed conflict as synonymous. Nonetheless, the doctrine departed from the Soviet view in three notable aspects. The first was the change from the view that wars were inevitable. The doctrine asserted that confrontation generated by ideological antagonism could be overcome via cooperation (Ministry of Defense 1993, point 2.1) in the

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context of improving East-West relations at the time. The doctrine even went as far as to state that the Russian Federation regarded no state as its enemy (Ministry of Defense 1993, point 2.1). Second, the policy declared by Brezhnev of no first use of nuclear weapons against nuclear states and nonuse against nonnuclear states was dropped (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 81). Rather, the doctrine did not mention any principles of no first use and that the nonuse of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states was valid only if they were a part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and were not cooperating with a nuclear state (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 81). This most likely reflected the loss of the Soviet Union’s conventional superiority over the West (Fitzgerald 1994, 178). Third, the doctrine did not identify the United States and NATO as the main sources of danger, although it did refer to the expansion of military blocs and alliances as detrimental to Russian military security (Ministry of Defense 1993, point 2.1). The 1993 doctrine was optimistic in regard to international security and military dangers, focusing on problems of internal social and economic character, which could be seen as a result of the internal turmoil Russia was going through at the time, with an economic downturn and Chechnya being de facto independent. The 1993 Military Doctrine had a clear focus on conventional military means. This included a priority for Russia to develop command, control, and communications (C3) systems and precision weapons (Fitzgerald 1994, 17). American analyst Mary Fitzgerald (1994) concluded that there was a strong civilian-military consensus on these requirements. The major innovations came from what was called “nontraditional” weapons, ranging from laser, superhigh-frequency, and infrasonic weapons to electronic and information warfare relating to C3 (Fitzgerald 1994, 171–73). Additional focus areas included stealth technology and advanced naval weaponry (Renz 2016b, 26). The discussions on the doctrine showed that the understanding of war was defined by military violence, even though the doctrine was conscious of new ways of applying it. The Foreign Policy Concept 1993 The understanding of war and international security in the 1993 Foreign Policy Concept closely approximated that of the Military Doctrine. It held a traditional view on the military threats that faced the Russian Federation, including existing and potential hotbeds of local wars and armed conflict close to Russia’s borders, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the threat from international terrorism (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1993).

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National Security Concept 1997 The National Security Concept differed from the Military Doctrine in some ways. It started by noting that the danger of direct aggression against the Russian Federation was virtually absent due to the strengthening of international law (President of the Russian Federation 1997, points I, III). The main military threat was seen to be local wars on Russia’s borders, followed by threats of an internal nature (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point III). It stipulated that Russia had an opportunity to solve internal problems, such as terrorism, the economy, and ethnonational struggles (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point III). Thus, military means were seen to be decreasing in their importance relative to other means. The focus on terrorism and ethnonational struggles also had an understandable explanation. The doctrine was published just after the cease-fire of the First Chechen War in 1996, when Russia was left de facto without control of its territory and the Chechen side morphed from nationalist separatism toward jihadism and terrorism (Hughes 2008). The concept noted—rightly, in retrospect, since it was published just before the financial crisis hit Russia—that the critical state of the economy was the main threat to Russia’s national security (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point III). Simultaneously, the concept held that international competition was intensifying for securing access to resources and markets (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point I). Moreover, it noted that a number of states were actively trying to destabilize Russia through their intelligence agencies, aiming to destroy the Russian Federation’s territorial integrity by using “interethnic, religious, and other internal contradictions” to ultimately reduce Russia’s importance (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point III). The concept stated that “a trend has emerged toward the buildup of the threat of foreign intelligence services’ agent and operational-technical penetration of Russia. The organs of state power, political parties and other public associations, banks and other credit organizations, industrial enterprises, scientific research organizations, and the mass media are becoming targets for their activity” (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point III). The threat of NATO was gaining more attention. The concept stated that “the prospect of NATO expansion to the East is unacceptable to Russia since it represents a threat to its national security” (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point I). Finally, the technological advancement of leading world powers enabled them to create “new-generation arms and military equipment,” which would lead to a new arms race (President of the Russian Federation 1997, point

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III). Thus, the concept gave more weight to both internal and external troubles than earlier. Nonetheless, the concept was met with disappointment within the military, which felt it neither reflected the situation in the world nor laid the ground for much-needed military reform (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 55). The Military Encyclopedia of the Russian Federation and the Great Encyclopedic Dictionary The 1994 version of the Military Encyclopedia defined war as “a militarypolitical phenomenon that is a form of resolution, through violence, of socialpolitical, economic, ideological as well as ethnic, religious, territorial and other contradictions between, states, classes, and social groups” (Kazarin 2002, 17). The important feature was the inclusion of all kinds of differences between entities to be solved by violence or armed violence. Thus, this definition continued the understanding of war as defined by armed violence. Similarly, the 1997 version of the Bolshoi entsiklopedicheskiy slovar (Great encyclopedic dictionary) defined war as “organized armed struggle between states, nations (people), social groups. In war, the armed forces are used as the main and decisive means, as well as economic, political, ideological, and other means of struggle” (Bolshoi entsiklopedicheskiy slovar 1997). The interesting detail is that this definition both affirms the centrality of armed struggle (vooruzhennaya borba) and the recognition that economic, political, ideological, and other means are part of war. Both definitions agree with Gareyev, placing armed struggle at the center of war, while recognizing the importance of other, nonmilitary means.

The 2000s: Confusion In 2002, Vladislav Orlyansky, a professor at the Military Academy of the General Staff, wrote a study on the relations of the concept of armed struggle and information struggle. He had noted confusion in the military debate, given the increasing popularity of the concept of information struggle. For him, armed struggle was “the main type of confrontation in wars,” and he saw that “armed conflict is the use of military means” (Orlyansky 2002, 42). Orlyansky then discussed how informatization improved the conduct of armed forces but also saw opportunities for a new way to affect an adversary, through the use of software (Orlyansky 2002, 45). Nonetheless, he saw that “the essence and objectives of [the information] struggle remain unchanged— only its means, content, forms and methods in various spheres of public life are

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improved” (Orlyansky 2002, 46). This led Orlyansky to conclude that the arguments that saw the information struggle as violent reflect a misunderstanding that brought confusion to the Russian military debate (Orlyansky 2002, 46). Thus, Orlyansky’s article confirms the centrality of violence but also that the information struggle was increasing on the agenda. Russian military theorist Pavel Kazarin argued that war needed to be interpreted as a sum of its total features, in opposition to the idea of armed violence as the defining feature of war. Rather, Kazarin held that economic and information warfare needed to be included in the analysis to reveal war’s proper content (Kazarin 2002, 19). This was because the economy is the foundation of a country’s might, and its weakening could be done by all kinds of means, especially nonviolent ones (Kazarin 2002, 19). When it came to information warfare, Kazarin argued that it had been used by the United States “to exert an all-round pressure on [unfriendly countries’] political and cultural life to undermine society’s national and state foundation and penetrate all level of state administration” (Kazarin 2002, 19). Thus, Kazarin contended that information warfare in the US view was a phenomenon outside the realm of war and peace since it was going on continuously (Kazarin 2002, 19). This, he concluded, made “information struggle a special form of war present in all other forms of struggle” (Kazarin 2002, 18). Arguing oppositely, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Serebryannikov warned against the expansion of the concept because it would remove the distinction between war and peace (Serebryannikov 2004, 177). He stated that even if the greatest victory in war is without fighting, as Sun Tzu suggested, there are many other means in war and the “main thing in a modern war is still the capability to achieve victory through warfare. This implied the capability to destroy physically an adversary’s armed forces, to crush his resistance potential, and to make him obey the winner’s will” (Serebryannikov 2004, 179). Serebryannikov also emphasized the need for the other means to backed by armed violence, or the threat thereof (Serebryannikov 2004, 179). Therefore, he argued, armed conflict needed to be the defining activity of war. Simultaneously, Serebryannikov acknowledged that in the last ten to fifteen years, the correlation between the utility of warfare proper and nonmilitary action had changed fundamentally (Serebryannikov 2004, 178). One effect of the revolution in science and technology, according to Serebryannikov, was that information and ideological technologies enabled the altering of the mentality and psychology of nations (Serebryannikov 2004, 178). This could force populations to support other countries and could destroy the adversary’s armed

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forces without a battle (Serebryannikov 2004, 178). This suggested the potential of the information-psychological battle, by which Serebryannikov arguably meant the West’s perceived ability to make citizens revolt. Serebryannikov concluded that nonmilitary means cannot be considered nonviolent, because they have such large effects that could amount to the use of force. This view, however, was too narrow for Aleksandr Kalistratov, a professor in operational art at the Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces, who wrote a study investigating the definition of armed conflict from historical and philosophical perspectives. Kalistratov argued for an understanding of armed conflict by drawing upon the term “struggle” (borba), which he defined as “efforts to overcome your adversary, [a] contest between two forces” and then simply added “armed” (vooruzhennaya) to describe when an entity is equipped with manufactured means for the struggle (Kalistratov 2004, 151– 52). He found this definition preferable to the narrower view that others, such as Sokolovsky, have held—that war was defined by armed violence and nothing else. The problem, Kalistratov contended, was that this missed the other essential activities in war. He continued to argue that in the previous ten years, there had been a gradual shift away from the traditional domain of armed violence to others. This shift meant that armed struggle will “embrace the geophysical, ecological, ethnic, psychological and emotional domains” (Kalistratov 2004, 153). Given his expansive definition of armed struggle, it could then be seen to be ongoing in all those nontraditional domains. Lt. Gen. Sergei Bogdanov of the General Staff ’s Center for Military-Strategic Studies, who became a popular theorist in the 2010s, wrote an article in 2003 outlining his vision of future war. It drew heavily on Slipchenko’s theorizing, and he argued identically that “the main objectives of the armed struggle will be defeat by using the ‘contactless’ method . . . [aiming at] the destruction of the economic potential of the state subjected to aggression” (Bogdanov 2003, 3). For Bogdanov, the initial period of war “will become the main and decisive” period, which relied on “a massive use of all types of conventional weapons, primarily precision weapons” (Bogdanov 2003, 3–4). In the initial period of war, the use of aerospace operations was so important that “the military and political goals of the whole war can be achieved even before the ground forces of both sides are brought into battle” (Bogdanov 2003, 3). For this to be done, however, earlier wars had shown that “it is impossible to achieve the goals of strategic actions and operations in future wars without gaining information superiority over the enemy” (Bogdanov 2003, 3). These are very interesting sentiments to compare to Bogdanov’s later views (see below), as his focus at

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this time was how the use of conventional military means deliver a victory. It is furthermore worth noting that his thinking about future war is almost identical to Slipchenko’s. Similarly, Col. Sergei Chekinov, also from the Center for Military-Strategic Studies, who later coauthored several articles with Bogdanov, discussed modern wars with Col. Oleg Orekhov. Chekinov and Orekhov also explicitly drew upon Slipchenko’s theories. They contended that “aerospace attack and defense are becoming . . . the main weapon of twenty-first century wars, especially in the initial period of war” (Orekhov and Chekinov 2004, 17). They saw that “the aerospace sphere is steadily increasing relative to actions in other spheres of armed struggle” (Orekhov and Chekinov 2004, 14). Moreover, they saw that the aerospace forces relied heavily on information and that “war acquires a qualitatively new component—information. This is due to the emergence of weapon systems based on the extensive use of information technology” (Orekhov and Chekinov 2004, 16). It is noteworthy that their emphasis on information is related to the application of military means rather than the information-psychological aspect, on which they would put primary emphasis later. Furthermore, Orekhov and Chekinov discussed the nature of war. They criticized the Military Encyclopedia and the dictionary, which both relied on Clausewitz and defined war as the solving of differences with violence and organized armed struggle, respectively (Orekhov and Chekinov 2004, 13). In their view, however, “after Clausewitz, mankind moved forward in two centuries. The wars of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries differ significantly not only in their content but also in their essence. Modern warfare is a qualitatively new phenomenon” (Orekhov and Chekinov 2004, 13). While criticizing the Clausewitzian definitions in the two volumes, the authors still insisted that “the main form of struggle [in war] was and remains the armed struggle” (Orekhov and Chekinov 2004, 14). From this duality, it is hard to draw any clear conclusions, but it is noteworthy to compare these thoughts to Chekinov’s later reasoning. The nature of modern war was also addressed by Vladimir Kvachkov, a GRU colonel and a fellow at Center for Military-Strategic Studies.2 He argued, similarly to Kalistratov, that the traditional concept of war focusing on armed warfare and the destruction of the enemy as the only way to achieve victory was too narrow (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). In this conception of war, nonmilitary means are omitted and could not grasp the Cold War, the “undeclared” Afghan war, or “restoring constitutional order in Chechnya” (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Rather, Kvachkov saw that there were more ways to winning than fighting and that the “primacy of armed warfare has denied the possibility of attaining

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decisive military and political objectives in war through the use of other forms of confrontation” (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Even so, Kvachkov argued that “the essence of war has not changed” (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Rather, it remained as Clausewitz defined it: the act of violence (akt nasiliya) to compel the enemy to do your will (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Nonetheless, he continued that the military threat needed to be viewed holistically with means other than armed force to achieve military-political goals (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Kvachkov then proposed a classification of war that aimed to remedy the failures of theory presented above. It entailed a subdivision of war into “war with the use of armed warfare” and “war with nonmilitary means” (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Of the nonmilitary means, he mentioned information, economic, financial, diplomatic, and cultural, giving particular weight to information means. While discussing the argument that the Cold War was the first information world war, he saw that “a new type of war has emerged, in which armed warfare has given up its decisive place in the achievement of the military and political objectives of war to another kind of warfare—information warfare” (Kvachkov 2004, 3.1). Interestingly, Kvachkov landed on a conclusion similar to Serebryannikov’s. On the one hand, he maintained that the essence of war remained as Clausewitz had defined it. On the other, he criticized this very understanding of armed violence as the defining factor of war and proposed a definition whereby war could be perpetrated solely by nonmilitary means. During the 2000s, Gareyev maintained his traditional view of primary importance given to armed conflict as the defining factor of war and an insistence on Clausewitzian concepts, such as the value of morale. In 2003, he addressed the increasing importance of nonmilitary means, arguing that “non-military means, especially information means, greatly affect the nature of armed struggle yet armed forces and violence are the main typical features of any war” (Gareyev 2003a, 187). He thus maintained that armed force and violence were the defining features of any war. Nonetheless, he opened the possibility of these means being perceived as violent, stating that “non-military forms of struggle can be used in the course of war [and thus] they become violent” (Gareyev 2003a, 187). This seems to be a recognition of the increasing potency of these means, while still seeing war as defined by armed force. In a 2005 article, “Otstaivaya natsionalnyye interesy” (Defending the national interest), Gareyev again attacked those who wanted to expand the concept of war. He regarded those who referred to economic, information, or trade confrontation as “war” as devaluing the uniformed personnel in harsh conditions (Gareyev 2005a). However, this counterargument was beside the

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point. Gareyev insisted that war was determined (as history and the federal law showed) by the start and cessation of armed hostilities (voyennykh deystviy) (Gareyev 2005a). He also contended that the “main feature of war is the use of armed force and violent acts” (Gareyev 2005b, 11). A change in Gareyev’s thought can nonetheless be noted regarding color revolutions. He contended that world wars and large-scale aggressions against Russia were becoming increasingly unlikely, both due to the existence of nuclear weapons and the growing utility of new forms of achieving political and strategic objectives (Gareyev 2005a). Due to the unlikelihood of large-scale wars, he held that “other ways of achieving political objectives have been devised: economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and information warfare. One country after another can be bent into submission using subversive means from within” (Gareyev 2005c, 66). The effectiveness of these means could have been seen in Serbia in the 1990s and in Georgia’s Rose Revolution, Gareyev added (Gareyev 2005a). Moreover, he argued that even if these nonmilitary forms of struggle have been present throughout history, it is only now that their utility has increased significantly in proportion to military means (Gareyev 2005a). Gareyev continued to argue that nonmilitary means “permeate all form of struggle, from the diplomatic, economic to the armed struggle” and mastering them was important not only for the spiritual cohesion but also the national security system of Russia (Gareyev 2005a). This was arguably because of the heightened potential for information warfare. The importance of information warfare also ascended on the political level. Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov stated in a speech for the General Staff in 2005, “Let us face it, there is a war against Russia underway, and it has been going on for quite a few years. No one declared war on us. There is not one country that would be in a state of war with Russia. But there are people and organizations in various countries who take part in hostilities against the Russian Federation” (quoted in Gareyev 2010, 729). Furthermore, Ivanov stated in 2007 that “information technology has resulted in information itself turning into a certain kind of weapon” (quoted in Blank 2013, 34). In this way, Ivanov saw that war was being conducted against Russia, albeit with nonmilitary means. This statement came in the context of the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, which carried over to some protest movements in Russia. Even though the defense minister stated that Russia was in a de facto war with nonmilitary means, this view was not broadly reflected in the military-theoretical debate or the doctrines. However, it was an indicator of things to come.

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On January 25, 2006, Chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluyevsky wrote an article about the staff ’s objectives, arguing that “the essence of ‘military power’ has undergone a change” (Baluyevsky 2006). Specifically, this related to the creation of new types of weapons operating in different physical spheres and with artificial intelligence (Baluyevsky 2006). In this sense, Baluyevsky did not give the same emphasis as Gareyev to revolutions and nonmilitary means but focused on the application of conventional weapons and terrorism. Nonetheless, he mentioned that the range of threats was expanding to include “new (nonviolent) forms” and that the conduct of information-technical and psychological actions against Russia was a new geostrategic condition (Baluyevsky 2006). In 2007, Baluyevsky gave more emphasis to nonmilitary means. In the journal Military Thought, Baluyevsky contended that in neutralizing the threats against Russia, “requirements can no longer be met within the traditional framework of ‘preparing the country and the armed forces for a possible war and pursuing armed warfare in wars’” (Baluyevsky 2007, 19). Rather, Baluyevsky saw that a “state may suffer a ‘defeat’ without waging warfare” (Baluyevsky 2007, 19). For this reason, the chief of the General Staff argued that above military methods and the fighting of wars, the Military Doctrine needed to provide guidance for achieving military security by way of “preventive diplomacy, international legal, information, economic and other non-military methods” (Baluyevsky 2007, 19). A more traditional understanding of armed conflict was proposed by the chief of the Strategy Department at the General Staff Academy, Maj. Gen. Aleksandr Malyshev. In a 2007 article, he rejected expanding the notion of war to include cold war, economic war, psychological war, and information war (Malyshev 2007, 57). Regarding the onset of war, he contended, in a strictly Clausewitzian manner, that “the ongoing changes in the content of war do not affect its essence which is defined by the classical formula that it is the attainment of political aims by means of armed warfare” (Malyshev 2007, 57). The consequence Malyshev saw for an expansion of the concept of war was that the lack of the regulatory function of war and peace, restraining and permitting different behavior in different times, would be lost. Yet Malyshev was careful to emphasize that he was aware of the importance of economic, political, ideological, and information forms of warfare. He concluded that armed warfare was the factor that determined the “strategic aspect” and structural elements of war (Malyshev 2007, 57). Another counterpoint was given by retired major general Aleksandr Vladimirov, president of the board of Russian military experts for the Russian

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International Affairs Council. He published a book in 2007 titled Konseptualnyye osnovy natsionalnoy strategii Rossii (Conceptual foundations of Russian national strategy). The book became incorporated in the 2013 publication of Vladimirov’s collected texts, Osnovy obshchey teorii voiny (Foundation for a general theory of war), an important work for Russian military theorists. Vladimirov is notable for proposing a very broad way of understanding war. He wrote that “modern humanity exists in a state of permanent war . . . with constantly alternating phases of actual armed struggle and constant preparation for it” (Vladimirov 2007, 130). This type of war was “a war between civilizations and states . . . professing or having in essence their national genetics underlying different scale of values” (Vladimirov 2007, 121–22). Further emphasizing the importance of consciousness, Vladimirov argued that “modern wars are waged on the level of consciousness and ideas” (Vladimirov 2007, 105). He emphasized modern war as a struggle of ideologies of domination waged by geopolitical technologies, aiming for information, economic, and military superiority with the occasional application of military conflict (Vladimirov 2007, 121). While Vladimirov still referred to the use of military means, it is clear that he perceived the center of modern war to be ideological and ideational, with nonmilitary means as the most important tools in it. Vladimirov, who relied on Messner in his thinking, focused on the conflict between value systems and the erosion of a state from the inside. A similar exchange of views on Clausewitz’s relevance took place in VPK following a presentation of the Belarusian minister of defense, Leonid Maltsev, on nonclassical forms of warfare. Pavel Bruntalsky, a frequent contributor to VPK, summarized Maltsev’s argument in an article titled “Clausewitz uzhe otdykhayet” (Clausewitz is already resting). The Belarusian minister saw that “bloodless clashes” became much more efficient and impressive as the continuation of politics by other means and that economic and information confrontation could achieve strategic objects comparable to the widespread use of armed violence (Bruntalsky 2007). Maltsev argued that treating these types of war as simply combat support would be to “behave classically in a nonclassical situation” and would fail (Bruntalsky 2007). In particular, he saw that information warfare had moved from the first generation—mostly targeting, electronic warfare, and intelligence gathering—to a second generation. This included fostering a lack of spirituality, manipulating public consciousness, and impacting political relations with the goal of fomenting distrust and provoking conflict. The key part of this was that it could be done without armed violence. Bruntalsky concluded that he was in fundamental agreement with Maltsev that modern conditions had radically transformed the nature of war

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(Bruntalsky 2007). He saw that because of spiritual, political, economic, and other forms of repression and destruction of the enemy, “armed struggle is not always the determining factor of paramount importance and can be eliminated altogether” (Bruntalsky 2007). This view, then, explicitly rejected the understanding of war as based solely on armed violence. The article received a quick reply in VPK titled “Clausewitsa ne otmenish!” (Clausewitz is not abrogated!), from Sergei Brezkun, a professor at the Academy of Military Science. He argued that if one understood war like Bruntalsky and Maltsev, the collapse of the Soviet Union would be “the result of a certain victory of the aggressor in a war of some nonclassical ‘nth’ generation” and thus an “unprecedented violation from an aggressor (aggressors) of all the foundations of international law” (Brezkun 2007). If this was the case, he argued, the system would continue the aggression and then Russians would live in wartime conditions, acting under the laws of war (Brezkun 2007). Brezkun did not want to disregard the potential of nonclassical or nonviolent aggression but stated the importance of the information sphere was exaggerated and that if a state decided to combat the nonclassical aggression adequately, the only option left was classical military means, and therein remained Clausewitz’s relevance (Brezkun 2007). In 2009, Bogdanov and Col. Viktor Gorbunov, also at the Center for MilitaryStrategic Studies, published a study of armed confrontation in the twenty-first century, which they saw consisted of the following major novelties: broader use of weapons based on new technologies (bio- and nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and new physical principles), increasing importance of space and information arenas, significantly reduced time frames in war, and more frequent use of special forces (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 20–21). These trends would shape armed struggle to the extent that there is a possibility for a new kind of military confrontation of “unconventional wars (non-military forms of armed struggle) in which armed forces would conduct no operations or will play only a secondary role” (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 21). This possibility, coupled with the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, would make large-scale wars less likely and unconventional wars a real possibility (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 26). Furthermore, the dialectical development showed that the information component in a confrontation was increasing in importance (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 22). Thus, they contended that it was not the form of violence that differentiated war from other activities but rather the intensity, length, and victory or defeat (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 21). They even argued, drawing upon Sun Tzu, that military operations did not need to play a role in war: “Violence in war does not necessarily imply

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the use of all known forms of armed might. A war may be won, and the end goals and desired results achieved (in the best-case scenario), without conducting military operations, an opportunity whose realization has ‘grown immeasurably’ from recent technological innovation” (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 21). This statement is noteworthy because it sees violence in war as something broader than armed violence. The authors also invoked Clausewitz’s point that achieving one’s goal in war is accomplished by destroying the enemy or depriving him of his power or will to resist. The latter can be done by nonmilitary forms, and it is worth quoting at length how the authors understood them. Gorbunov and Bogdanov saw that the internal weakening of a state included “the taking of informational, psychological, moral, climatic, and organizational measures, setting up and encouraging destructive opposition, and secretly fomenting and intensifying ethnic strife and ethnic conflicts” (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 21). It is noteworthy that they are confirming the view that the state is being undermined by the use of informationpsychological means. They further saw that a state’s position in international relations could be weakened by encumbering it with financial debts that drain it of all resources and, thereby, slow down its economic development; surrounding the target country with the would-be aggressor’s satellite countries to manipulate its international ties; and building bridgeheads for launching an attack and keeping off any foreign aid in case of aggression. This scenario was played out shortly before the aggression against Yugoslavia, accompanied by military and economic espionage, reconnaissance, and sabotage. (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 21)

The reference to encumbering a nation with financial debt was arguably a reference to Russia’s large debts following the economic crisis, in which Russia tried, with Western advice, to quickly transform the communist economy to a capitalist one. This passage is interesting since it constructs Russia’s economic crisis as a deliberate form of warfare inflicted by the West, and especially the United States, to weaken Russia. The authors continued: Looking back to the armed conflicts fought in the last decade, we see that the warring sides have been increasingly using weapons designed on the basis of “artificial intelligence” and nanotechnologies, along with robot-controlled weapons systems based on new physical principles. In all likelihood, it is to be expected that the potentialities of these weapons will be rising during the 21st century and in the longer run (2020s–2030s) they can become no less effective than nuclear weapons. (Gorbunov and Bogdanov 2009, 22)

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This argument was echoed almost verbatim by Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov in 2010 and by President Putin in 2012. The later chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov also repeated the notion that armed forces would conduct no operations or only play a secondary role in future war. The arguments by Gorbunov and Bogdanov are thus interesting for two reasons. First, they were far-reaching in contending that the forms of competition were not the relevant factor. They viewed that in this confrontation, conventional military operations would hold little or secondary importance for the outcome. In this way, they proposed the concept of unconventional warfare that would be conducted by nonmilitary means. Second, they had a notable impact among key figures of Russian military theory, especially Bogdanov, who played a key role in the debate in the 2010s. The National Security Concept 2000 Three years after the last National Security Concept, a new one was adopted in 2000. It had a similar but less optimistic tone from the previous concept. It saw “attempts to create an international relations structure based on domination by developed Western countries . . . [and] for unilateral solutions (primarily by the use of force) to key issues in world politics in circumvention of the fundamental rules of international law” (President of the Russian Federation 2000, point I). It further stated that “a number of states are stepping up efforts to weaken Russia politically, economically, militarily, and in other ways” (President of the Russian Federation 2000, point I). This shift was largely due to two factors: Putin’s assumption of the office of the presidency in 1999 and the adoption of NATO’s new concept in 1999 that allowed for deployment outside the area of the Alliance (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 55). Nonetheless, the concept remained optimistic in declaring that “objectively, the commonality of interests between Russia and other states persists with regard to many international security problems” (President of the Russian Federation 2000, point I). In response, it was in Russia’s interest to continue “strengthening its position as a great power and one of the influential centers of a multipolar world” (President of the Russian Federation 2000, point I). One of the major novelties in the concept was the growing importance of information means. The concept declared, There is an increasing threat to national security in the information sphere. The striving of a number of countries to dominate the global information space and oust Russia from the external and internal information market

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poses a serious danger, as do the elaboration by a number of states of a concept of information wars that envisages creation of means of dangerous influence on the information spheres of other countries of the world, disruption of the normal functioning of information and telecommunication systems and of storage reliability for information resources, and gaining of unsanctioned access to them. (President of the Russian Federation 2000, point III)

Thus, the concept noted the potential from both information-psychological and information-technical threats. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also published the first Russian Information Security Doctrine (discussed in chapter 3), which dealt with this issue in more depth. Thereafter, under the heading “Threats,” the concept stated that “the growing technological edge of a number of leading powers and the buildup of their capabilities to develop newgeneration weapons and military equipment create the prerequisites for a qualitatively new phase of the arms race and for a radical alteration of the forms and methods of warfare” (President of the Russian Federation 2000, point I). Large parts of the 2000 concept are copied from the 1997 version; however, there are notable differences, such as a more pessimistic tone and a stronger focus on power politics (Godzmirski 2000, 78–79). The most significant change in the doctrine was the changed wording regarding the use of nuclear weapons. The 1997 concept stated that they could be used in the case of an existential threat, whereas the 2000 concept stated that all means, including nuclear, would be used against an armed aggressor (Main 2000). The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation 2000 Seven years after the first Military Doctrine, another was adopted. The new doctrine maintained some of the optimism of the former by, for instance, stating that positive changes in the international situation, the peace-loving foreign-policy course of Russia, and its nuclear deterrent capability had decreased the threat of direct military aggression against Russia (Ministry of Defense 2000, point I.4). In terms of the view of war, the 2000 Military Doctrine was less clear. It continued, like the 1993 doctrine, to explain war with armed conflict in parentheses. It noted that “the nature of modern wars and armed conflicts is determined by their military-political goals, the means of achieving these goals, and the scale of military operations” (Ministry of Defense 2000, point II.2). In the paragraph describing modern wars, the doctrine reads that they affect all spheres of human activity and include “the extensive use of indirect,

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non-close quarter and other (including non-traditional) forms and methods of operation” (Ministry of Defense 2000, point II.3). Furthermore, there was a desire on both sides to “disrupt the system of state and military command and control” (Ministry of Defense 2000, point II.3). Modern wars also entailed “the use of highly efficient state-of-the-art systems of arms and military hardware (including those based on new physical principles),” and these means could be directed against targets across the territory of the warring parties (Ministry of Defense 2000, point II.3). This can be seen as a new tone in the 2000 doctrine, which “reoriented priorities away from focus on small wars–type scenarios and towards the need for the creation of conventional forces with global reach” (Renz 2016b, 26). Two things are noteworthy in the description of modern war in the doctrine. The first is the systematic, or holistic, approach whereby the full sphere of human activity can be targeted. The second is that the doctrine’s description of modern war includes extensive use of indirect and nontraditional forms, which increases the emphasis on such forms. Third, this is the first Military Doctrine to list information warfare as a threat (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 57). The Foreign Policy Concept 2000 The Foreign Policy Concept of 2000 stated that the possibilities for cooperation in the world arena had substantially broadened due to the “end of confrontation, steady elimination of the consequences of the ‘Cold War,’ and the advancements of Russian reforms” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000b, point II). The concept stated that while military power remained significant, an even greater role was played by economic, political, technological, and information factors (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000b, point II). Among the main components of national might, the concept listed information, intellectual, and communication capabilities (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000b, point II). Furthermore, the concept expressed dissatisfaction with the increasingly unipolar world order and the introduction of concepts of “humanitarian intervention” and “limited sovereignty” to bypass the UN Security Council (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000b, point II). The Military Encyclopedia 2007 The encyclopedia of the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces defined war in 2007 as “an extreme form of resolution of conflicts, characterized by an

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abrupt change of relations between states, nations, policy actors, etc. and the transition to the use of military means and other kinds of violence in order to achieve sociopolitical, economic, ideological, regional, national, ethnic, religious, and other goals. The main content of the war is the armed struggle” (Ministry of Defense 2007). The encyclopedia also determined that armed struggle is the main content of war. Simultaneously, the definition specified “military means and other kinds of violence.” In this way, the encyclopedia not only differed from earlier versions that stated armed violence was the defining factor but also by including other means of violence in the definition of war. The Foreign Policy Concept 2008 The 2008 Foreign Policy Concept continued the positive tone, which reflected Russia’s strong domestic development at the time. The concept started by calling for a rethink of Russia’s priorities after its increased role in global affairs (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008, point I). The concept also held that the “threat of a full-scale war, including a nuclear one, has diminished” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008, point I). Interestingly, the concept then noted that “differences between domestic and external means of ensuring national interests and security are gradually disappearing” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008, point II). This is the first foreign policy document that mentioned the blurring of the internal and external spheres. The concept continued (like the 2000 concept) to emphasize the dangers associated with a unipolar world, with states acting outside the UN Charter and the UN Security Council (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008, point II). Moreover, the expansion of NATO, especially concerning Ukraine and Georgia, were singled out as “violating the principle of equal security” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008, point III). The National Security Strategy to 2020 from 2009 Similar to the Foreign Policy Concept, the 2009 National Security Strategy gave a positive outlook. This came from a combination of factors, as Russia had shown economic growth and survived both the financial crisis and the Second Chechen War. The strategy, which was now titled a strategy and not a concept, declared that “Russia has overcome the consequences of the systemic political and socioeconomic crisis of the end of the twentieth century” (President of the Russian Federation 2009, point I). However, in other security-related aspects, the strategy offered less optimism. It affirmed that the imperfect nature

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of international mechanisms was a threat to international security, as was the one-sided use of force in international relations. Furthermore, the strategy saw that threats to military security include the policies of a number of leading foreign countries directed at achieving predominant superiority in the military sphere, primarily in terms of strategic nuclear forces but also by developing high-precision, information, and other high-technology means of conducting armed warfare, i.e., strategic nonnuclear arms, by unilaterally creating a global missile defense system and militarizing space, which could lead to a new arms race, and likewise policies directed at the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological technologies, and the production of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, or components. (President of the Russian Federation 2009, point 30)

The emphasis on high-precision, information, and nonnuclear means is noteworthy here. In the sphere of state security, the activity of security services and organizations of foreign countries were listed as the first threat, and listed later were organizations and structures that were destabilizing the social or political situation in Russia (President of the Russian Federation 2009, point 37). Another noteworthy point was the call for the rebirth and preservation of cultural/moral values and more spiritual unity (President of the Russian Federation 2009, point 84). In sum, the views in the strategy can be seen to further the notion of a blurring between internal and external dimensions of security since social and political domestic problems in Russia are seen to be incited by foreign actors.

The 2010s: Change At the start of 2010, a professor of the Academy of Military Science, Vladimir Mikryukov, wrote a study of the nature and content of war. In it, he surveyed twenty definitions of war, including both of Clausewitz’s (war as an act of force to compel the enemy and war as the continuation of politics by other, violent means). In the end, Mikryukov argued for an understanding of war as the use of armed force. He contended that despite all the talk of economic and financial war “without the use of armed force [voyennoy sily], war has never been and cannot be, including the so-called unconventional war” (Mikryukov 2010). This could be seen as a reference to Bogdanov and Gorbunov. Mikryukov also pointed out that the federal law On Defense was based on the understanding

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of war as defined by armed force. Nonetheless, Mikryukov saw great potential in information warfare. He wrote that it had always been present, but, “with the advent of new information technologies, . . . information struggle [informatsionnoye protivoborstvo] began the transition to a new, higher stage—information war [informatsionnoy voiny]” (Mikryukov 2010). He further argued that in the Gulf War, information technologies were for the first time used as a weapon of war (Mikryukov 2010). This echoed Slipchenko, who had also argued that information had become a weapon. In the 2010s, General Bogdanov formed a prolific duo with Colonel Chekinov. In a 2010 study, “Asymmetrical Actions to Maintain Russia’s Military Security,” Chekinov and Bogdanov argued that while the threat of military force was persistent, military security could now not be decoupled from all other forms of security, such as political, economic, and information (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2010, 3). They put particular focus on information operations, which they saw as capable of achieving strategic goals by themselves (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2010, 8). This unified understanding of security and current trends of the world led the authors to argue as follows: “To restrain and prevent aggression by any country (or a coalition of countries) and maintain the Russian Federation’s military security, it makes sense to take asymmetrical measures of systemic and comprehensive nature combining political, diplomatic informational, economic, military, and other efforts” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2010, 9). In a subsequent article, they contended that the struggle for geostrategic space, economic, and natural resources was exacerbating tensions between states and causing conflict on various levels. This socioeconomic and political rivalry, they held, would make military clashes a continuing feature of the first half of the twenty-first century (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2011, 3). These views are interesting as they saw a hierarchy of an underlying and ongoing rivalry. In this rivalry, the most important means of breaking the enemy’s will to resist was nonmilitary (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2011, 3). US intelligence services were argued to have mastered techniques of “psychologically manipulating and affecting individual, social institutions, corporations or states” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2011, 9). Their effective application was seen by the authors as a major reason for the Soviet Union losing the Cold War as well as for the color revolutions that took place in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2011, 6, 9). The mention of the US intelligence services as psychologically manipulating individuals and social institutions is notable because the Military Doctrines and Security Strategies touched on the attempt to alter the psychological situation of Russia in similar terms but without naming

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a perpetrator. Furthermore, is interesting to see how their focus has shifted from earlier, when they were almost exclusively focusing on ideas connected to Slipchenko’s sixth-generation warfare. In opposition to the broad understanding of war, the Russian historian Vladimir Makhonin proposed a terminological hierarchy in a study of how war and armed conflict is related. The hierarchy saw social conflict—defined as extreme and intense differences between entities—as the preceding stage to all more intense forms of conflict (Makhonin 2011, 155). In this hierarchy, military conflict represented a clash on a limited scale, whereas war was a large-scale clash (Makhonin 2011, 152). In Makhonin’s view, war was the highest stage of conflict, followed by social conflict; in the view of Chekinov and Bodganov, for instance, armed conflict was just one of the tools in war, and the state of war preceded its application. This represents a division whereby Makhonin saw war as the most intense form of fighting (and potentially anachronistic) and social conflict as the relevant legitimizing factor, while the other notion of war saw it as a condition that allows a variety of means, including (but not limited to) armed violence. Indeed, more theorists started to argue against the concept of war as solely defined by armed violence. In consequence, there was growing agreement that the changing understanding of war was making the dichotomy between war and peace anachronistic. This is, for instance, plainly stated by Pavel Antonovich (chair of electronic warfare in the Russian Combined-Arms Academy), who argued that “dividing lines between war and peace can be eroded conveniently in cyberspace. Damage (whatever its nature) can actually be done to an adversary without overstepping formally the line between war and peace” (Antonovich 2011, 37). Yuri Starodubtstev, Vladmir Bukharin, and Sergei Semyonov contended similarly in their article “Warfare in the Technosphere” that a distinguishing feature for this type of warfare is that “war can be conducted on any scale without declaring it as a legal fact” (Starodubtstev, Bukharin, and Semyonov 2012, 53). On General Staff ’s Day, January 25, 2012, Gareyev published a noteworthy article in VPK that showed a potential shift in his understanding of war. Since nuclear weapons prohibited large-scale war, he saw two main ways to achieve policy objectives: first, “subversive ‘color revolutions’ in the opposing countries, with large-scale information actions,” and, second, “when needed, the use of military force, to achieve the strategic objectives in part by unleashing local wars and conflicts” (Gareyev 2012). In this way, Gareyev saw “a blurring of boundaries between military and nonmilitary means of international confrontation, the building of a hidden, asymmetrical violent military and nonmilitary

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actions” (Gareyev 2012). For this reason, internal security problems needed to be understood differently, Gareyev argued; it was not enough to just look at riots in isolation (Gareyev 2012). Rather, he saw the need for “systematic scientific development of the problems of confrontation with nonmilitary means” (Gareyev 2012). Particularly, he saw a pressing need in the realm of spiritual security, to which one of the remedies was patriotic education (Gareyev 2012). Regarding the second threat, from war, he emphasized the threats from longrange precision weaponry, unmanned aerial vehicles, robotics, special forces, and private military forces (Gareyev 2012). Nonetheless, Gareyev maintained that “the object of military science is war as a whole, the subject is armed struggle [vooruzhennaya borba] and everything that is connected to the use of military violence, including in the form of direct and indirect actions” (Gareyev 2012). Thereafter, he cautioned against those who wanted to reinterpret war as the pursuit of politics by military and nonmilitary means rather than the pursuit of politics by violent means (Gareyev 2012). In the former case, the expansion of war would lead to “the loss of its essence and meaning” (Gareyev 2012). On the other hand, he saw that “some of the actions of economic, information, and other forms of expansion—so-called nonmilitary means—become essentially violent in nature” (Gareyev 2012). Yet Gareyev saw that it would not be in the interests of the international community to define war in this way (Gareyev 2012). Last, Gareyev argued that “under the new conditions, military force as the primary means of achieving goals will increasingly give way to political and other nonmilitary means” (Gareyev 2012). In this sense, Gareyev’s article again displayed a duality. On the one hand, he saw that nonmilitary means were replacing military force as the primary means of achieving political goals and also a primary threat to the Russian Federation. In this two-step approach, he argued for what Gerasimov later titled the “adaptive approach” to the use of force. Furthermore, he saw that these nonmilitary means can be violent in nature as well as blur the boundaries of confrontation. These two notions are, together with the heightened emphasis on color revolutions, novelties in his thought. On the other hand, he insisted on seeing war as defined by military violence and did not want to incorporate the use of nonmilitary means into the definition of war, even though he saw that the use of such means could be violent. About a month before the 2012 Russian presidential election, Putin outlined his vision for the defense of Russia in an article titled “Byt silnymi: Garantii natsionalnoy bezopasnosti dlya Rossii” (Being strong: National security guarantees for Russia). The article was unusually detailed from a military-theoretical

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perspective and one of few times that the president set out his view in depth or, perhaps more accurately, a view that had been approved by the president. Putin saw that “new models of weapons and military hardware and information and communications technology have fundamentally changed the character of armed conflict” (Putin 2012a). Furthermore, military capabilities in space and information warfare, particularly in cyberspace, as well as the creation of weapons based on new physical principles, will be “as effective as nuclear weapons but will be more ‘acceptable’ from the political and military point of view” (Putin 2012a). Moreover, he saw the current security situation characterized by “zones of instability and artificially maintained, controlled chaos [upravlyayemogo khaosa] emerging” and that “some are purposefully provoking such conflicts in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s borders—and those of our allies” (Putin 2012a). This speech highlighted several interesting features of the authoritative understanding of war in Russia. The first is that the view was evolving during the 1990s and 2000s among theorists. War was changing from something solely about armed conflict to a fundamental change in the character of armed conflict. Putin had a clear focus on color revolutions, discussed as “controlled chaos.” This included discussion of zones of artificially induced instability on Russia’s borders. The second notable feature is that for the drivers that fundamentally change the character of conflict, Putin held information technology to be equally important as new military means. Also, Putin’s statement closely mirrored the wording of Gorbunov and Bogdanov’s writings in 2009. Maj. Gen. Sergei Kuralenko—then chief of military art at the Academy of the General Staff—also saw fundamental changes in the conduct of war. He noted the shift from close-quarters fighting to exchanging fire at a distance due to long-range, high-precision weaponry and thus felt that information superiority, special operations forces, and electronic warfare were increasingly important (Kuralenko 2012, 30). This very much echoed the “Slipchenko school” notion of future war, in which long-range precision weapons and the information-reconnaissance strike complex were key. In addition, Kuralenko discussed the potential of cyber operations. He argued that the “development of information technologies has caused significant changes in the ways wars are fought and led to a buildup of cyber-troops” (Kuralenko 2012, 32). As a consequence, he saw that information had become a realm of armed struggle (Kuralenko 2012, 35). In 2013, General Gareyev wrote an article titled “Predchuvstvovat izmeneniya v kharaktere voiny” (Anticipate changes in the nature of war). He restated his understanding of war, which saw opposition without weapons as “struggle”

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(protivoborstvo), and with the use of weapons as “war” (voina) (Gareyev 2013b). Nonetheless, in recent years, the growing importance of other means of conflict—most notably political-diplomatic, economic, information, cyber, and psychological—begged the question for Gareyev as to whether a cardinal change in the concept of war and its entire system of knowledge was taking place (Gareyev 2013b). This is no small statement, given Gareyev’s earlier views, and he acknowledged again that the “borderline between war and peace is more vague and less defined” (Gareyev 2013b). He contended that this partly depended on technological development that enabled nonmilitary means to take a dangerous and “practically violent” character (Gareyev 2013b). However, Gareyev seemed cautious of the logical extensions of his thoughts. He stated that if these actions truly are to be considered as war, then the world would be in a continual state of war, and this is a concept of war that Russia could not introduce unilaterally (Gareyev 2013b). It is not a stretch for him to conclude that these new means would count as war. Rather than rebutting the intellectual merits of that argument, he countered them with a practical one. He argued that Russia could not itself introduce a new concept of war, which needed to be done multilaterally. However, this is not a fully persuasive argument. It would seem he was reaching for a legal/practical way to avoid what he reasoned theoretically. That is to say, if the progress of technology and society has allowed nonmilitary means to be seen as violent, then there is a case for including them in the concept of war if war is defined by violence. Gareyev followed up the same train of thought in a 2016 article. He stated that “war itself was understood primarily as a continuation of politics by means of armed violence,” even though “nonmilitary forms of confrontation were widely used” (Gareyev 2016). This was also the understanding of war reflected in the federal law On Defense (Gareyev 2016). Nonetheless, while addressing the ongoing debate on whether the use of nonmilitary means could equal war, Gareyev stated that “the definition of the essence of war must, to some extent, be reviewed” (Gareyev 2016). However, such laws and concepts could not, according to Gareyev, be done by each state by itself but required discussion by the UN (Gareyev 2016). For clarification, Gareyev stated that “the threat is connected with information and other subversive actions, the creation of controlled chaos to provoke various kinds of unrest, to overthrow undesirable power structures from within, and to violate the internal stability of states, as was done in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine” (Gareyev 2016). Yet again, it is significant that Gareyev, probably the best-known military theorist in Russia, reconfirmed the notion that the essence of war needs to be

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reviewed, particularly as he had earlier been a staunch proponent of the view that the nature of war could never change. A more explicit argument on whether war had entered a new era came from Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov. In an oft-cited speech for the Academy of Military Science in 2013, he spoke of “blurring the distinctions between a state of war and peace” (Gerasimov 2013). Gerasimov was referring to the effectiveness of nonmilitary means whose destruction and impact can have effects comparable to a real war. The blurring boundaries of war and peace is a repetition of earlier theorists’ ideas, notably Gareyev’s. Gerasimov saw that “the very ‘rules of war’” were changing and that conventional military means might be used only in a later, final stage (Gerasimov 2013). The next year, Gerasimov termed this “the adaptive approach to the use of force” (Gerasimov 2014a). This meant that the West’s main response to the use of force was nonviolent color revolutions, and should they fail to produce the desired regime change, there would be an escalation to the traditional use of force (Gerasimov 2014a). Gerasimov also proposed in his 2013 speech that rather than see the Arab Spring as not being war, the opposite could be true—that Arab Spring–style revolts could be the typical war in the twenty-first century (Gerasimov 2013). This type of war was seen to include the use of special forces and the protest potential of the local population, supported by information warfare, to create a permanently operating front on the territory of the enemy state (Gerasimov 2013). Gerasimov echoed this in a later speech during 2014. He saw the increasing importance of political, economic, diplomatic, and other measures, as well as the demonstration of hidden measures, such as the use of NGOs and private military companies in Syria and Ukraine and Greenpeace activities in the Arctic (Gerasimov 2014a). Gerasimov’s speech is notable for three reasons. First, he is the highestranking officer in the Russian Armed Forces, and the General Staff leads the military-theoretical debate. This makes him the utmost authority on militarytheoretical matters. Second, Gerasimov’s view of war argued what Gareyev only hinted at. If well-orchestrated attempts by external actors to influence nations with nonmilitary means are seen as equivalent to war, then the world could, indeed, be said to be in a more or less continual state of war. This has the consequence that the regulatory function of the dichotomy of war and peace, of permitting and restricting means, has to give way. This was arguably why Gerasimov saw the boundary of war and peace blurring. Third, many of the ideas contained in Gerasimov’s speech did not originate with him. Rather, as above, the idea that the nature of war is changing, that the boundaries of war

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and peace are blurring, and that color revolutions are becoming the West’s main form of warfare have well-established precedents in the Russian debate. Nonetheless, even if those views existed, they had not entered the mainstream in the way that the chief of the General Staff confirmed them. A similar viewpoint was held by military theorist Igor Popov, who saw a radical change in today’s wars. He argued that “the armies have become qualitatively different in all respects, and military actions have become fundamentally different—by the means, forms, and methods used, by the scale and pace of action” (Popov 2013). For Popov, “the form of a military conflict that has arisen in recent years, starting with ‘peaceful’ antigovernment actions and ending with a brutal civil war and external intervention, may well be called a new type of war” (Popov 2013). In Popov’s eyes, this new type of war “goes beyond the traditional idea about war, acquiring a combined character, turning into an intricate tangle of political intrigues, a fierce struggle for resources and financial flows, irreconcilable civilizational clashes” (Popov 2013). Thus, the primary goal of the armed forces was “not the physical destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, but demoralization and the imposition of their will on the entire population of the state” (Popov 2013). Thus, Popov both highlights the threat from color revolutions and internal unrest while simultaneously seeing these as precursors to violence and civil war. In a study on the essence and content of modern war, retired major general and professor Yuri Kirshin stated that there is no common understanding of the nature and content of war, neither in Russia nor in the rest of the world (Kirshin 2013). He went on to criticize the definition of war stemming from Lenin, who defined war as the continuation of politics by violent means (Kirshin 2013). Rather, Kirshin argued that “such an understanding of war does not allow an adequate response to contemporary global challenges and threats” (Kirshin 2013). He then criticized Clausewitz for defining war only as a continuation of foreign policy and so narrowly that it excluded the nonmilitary forms of struggle, such as diplomatic, economic, social, and others (Kirshin 2013). Nonetheless, he held it as unacceptable that information warfare was mixed with the concept of war. War was necessarily armed struggle, and the lack thereof was peace (Kirshin 2013). Even while maintaining the original sentiment of Clausewitz, he concluded that the notion of war was expanding both because of the importance of nonmilitary factors and fundamentally new and different types of weapons (Kirshin 2013). This thus put Kirshin on both sides of the argument: He saw that Clausewitz’s definition of war was too narrow but simultaneously maintained that it should remain.

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In December 2013, Chekinov and Bogdanov published an article titled “The Nature and Content of a New-Generation War,” which became widely circulated among Western analysts after the onset of the war in Ukraine. Some even saw it as a blueprint for Russian contemporary warfare. The way the authors envisioned contemporary warfare did indeed sound like a good description of the initial phase of the Crimean operation: The aggressive side will be first to use nonmilitary actions and measures as it plans to attack its victim in a new-generation war. With powerful information technologies at its disposal, the aggressor will make an effort to involve all public institutions in the country it intends to attack, primarily the mass media and religious organizations, cultural institutions, non-governmental organizations, public movements financed from abroad, and scholars engaged in research on foreign grants. All these institutions and individuals may be involved in a distributed attack and strike damaging point blows at the country’s social system with the purported aims of promoting democracy and respect for human rights. (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 17)

They saw that the Arab Spring revolutions offer enough evidence that we have entered a new military age of “high-tech wars” as described. Rather than being read as a full description of American conduct, it could arguably be a description of Russia’s own way of visualizing warfare, tweaked to simultaneously be sold as what others are doing, to legitimize its own view. This was indeed a common practice during the time of the Soviet Union (Thomas 2016a, 555). In this new generation of war (the sixth in Slipchenko’s typology), the deployment of ground forces was seen to mostly take place only after the aggressor’s military and political goals have been reached and thus relegated to a secondary role (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 21). The role of information and psychological warfare was the crucial means and was seen to lay the groundwork for victory (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 23). Chekinov and Bogdanov saw that the strategy of indirect action—which includes a variety of nonmilitary techniques, most notably information warfare—could level off the enemy’s advantage and reduce freedom of maneuver (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 16). This was done by deception, giving an unflattering image in public opinion and “making sensational denunciations” of the adversary (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 17). Deception was essential for freedom of maneuver, and deceiving the adversary’s political and military leaders was being done by “large-scale carefully coordinated measures carried out through diplomatic

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channels by government-controlled and private media and top government and military agencies by leaking false data, orders, directives, and instructions” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 18). These efforts would take place several months before the start of this “unconventional war.” Coupled with information efforts, the attacker would try to bribe, blackmail, intimidate, and manipulate officials to abandon their duties (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 19–20). Simultaneously, undercover agents would be used for subversive activities, such as inciting civil disobedience and committing unlawful acts (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 20). It was through these means, together with missile and long-range artillery strikes, that political goals could be reached and the enemy’s will broken before the deployment of ground forces. The authors saw that “nonmilitary options will lessen, and ultimately remove, military hazards and threats” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 22). In this way, Chekinov and Bogdanov go far in arguing the importance of nonmilitary means over military ones. In analyzing their work, Thomas argued that they were drawing heavily on Slipchenko and that he was likely the most important source behind their thinking (Thomas 2016a, 555). It is notable that Chekinov and Bogdanov suggested that the Arab Spring was a sign of a new age of war. They also relied on the two-step approach to war, whereby the first and major effort was via nonmilitary means, and, should they fail, the second would be military means, in line with their earlier article from 2011. The perception and importance of engineered and controlled revolutions by the West, and particularly the United States, was also expressed by President Putin in his speech following the annexation of Crimea. He stated that the events in Ukraine mirrored what has been happening in the world the past decades with “controlled ‘color’ revolutions” (Putin 2014a). Putin stated that he sympathized with those who came out on Maidan to protest corruption and poverty but that “those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots” (Putin 2014a). Another interesting contribution came from Maj. Gen. Vasily Burenok, president of the Russian Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences and a highranking official in the Ministry of Defense who had contributed to three state armament programs. He argued that due to new instruments of influence, “the essence of war began to change” (Burenok 2014). Burenok thought that war was not primarily aimed at matter or flesh but rather the mind. Previously there had not existed any means that could make the impact of the enemy’s

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mind effective (Burenok 2014). He held that there have always been orators, agitators, and preachers as tools of war but that the advent of global communications has vastly increased the potential to impact the minds of others (Burenok 2014). This, Burenok argued, had developed in Yugoslavia, where the goal of the information war was to affect the consciousness of the people and justify the actions taken. In North Africa, such methods had been used to degrade the state and in Libya specifically to promote civil war. Last, he saw that the refinement of information warfare continued with Ukraine, where “the aim [was] regime change by the changing of mass consciousness” (Burenok 2014). Burenok’s argument is noteworthy both because of its merits and because he argued more straightforwardly than others that these changes indeed represented a change in the essence of war. Other theorists that have seen information warfare as equally important have often not argued for a change in the nature, or essence, of war. In 2014, the military theorists Valery Konyzhev and Aleksandr Sergunin published a book titled Sovremennaya voyennaya strategiya (Modern military strategy), in which they analyzed the state of Russian military theory. They presented a typology of the development of Russian thinking on war that contained two broad schools: traditionalists (conservatives) and nontraditionalists (innovators) (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 87). The differentiating factor between the traditional and nontraditional school was whether they were based on Clausewitz or not. Unfortunately, the authors were not explicit in their understanding of Clausewitz, but it is likely that they meant defining war by armed violence. Depending on how the theorists saw future war, the nontraditionalists were divided into four subcategories: war of consciousness (konstsiyentalnoy voiny), subversion-war (myatezhvoina), remote/contactless war (distantsionnoy/bezkontaktniya voiny), and cyberwar (kibervoiny). Proponents of the notion of war of consciousness saw it as a psychological war in which “the object of destruction and transformation is the value orientations of the enemy population” (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 99). Thus, even if physically violent means could be used, the defining factor of the war was the impact on national psychology and values. This is in line with Vladimirov and Burenok, who saw that the most refined form of information warfare was the manipulation of mass consciousness by the West in Ukraine. In particular, Vladimirov was relying on Messner’s thought. This school could also be seen to have gained some recognition in the statement from the 2013 Foreign Policy Concept that war is an ongoing global competition on a civilizational level. The second subcategory, subversion-wars (myatezhvoina), was in part related to the first, which sees as leading activities the use of terrorism, illegal

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armed groups, information, and psychological means of influence (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 88). The Military Encyclopedic Dictionary defined myatezhvoina as armed fighting by insurgent or rebel forces (Ministry of Defense 2007). The dictionary emphasized that there were no pronounced lines of confrontation but rather that action included disruption of political and military control, aggravation of the humanitarian situation, and financial support from abroad (Ministry of Defense 2007). This, however, creates some confusion with the thought of Messner, who explicitly differentiated myatezhvoina from insurgencies (see chapter 3). Konyzhev and Sergunin went further, noting that this train of thought is particularly popular among nationalist ideologues, who see an ongoing offensive against Russia by those who want to spread Western values (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 88; Popov and Khamzatov 2016, 322–25). The third subcategory, of remote/contactless war, relied heavily on the teachings of Slipchenko. The fundamental difference consisted in the distance at which the fighting took place, due to long-range and high-precision weapons. This was seen to change the nature of fighting and enable a win without coming into direct contact with the enemy. Nonetheless, Konyzhev and Sergunin concluded in their discussion that its popularity has waned since the 1990s and 2000s due to both the demonstrable need for ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and the fact that Slipchenko predicted that war would have fully entered the noncontact generation by this time (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 90). This conclusion, however, seems questionable, given Slipchenko’s influence on Gerasimov and Chekinov and Bogdanov. The last subcategory of nontraditionalists was cyberwar. The focus was on the shift of “confrontation from the real battlefield to the struggle in the virtual, information sphere” (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 96). The key defining features were that a cyberwar could start in peacetime and gave the attacker freedom of maneuver because of poor or outdated legislation. The focus of this school was more on cyberattacks than information-psychological warfare. It was thought that cyberattacks might displace the traditional use of force. Last, it would change information superiority from an auxiliary tool to the main weapon of war. Nonetheless, Konyzhev and Sergunin cautioned against the conclusions of this school, feeling that fully replacing military means would be very difficult in practice and that cyberattacks alone were unpredictable and unreliable (Konyzhev and Sergunin 2014, 98). These four subcategories capture the key ideas of each strand and provide a good basis for discussion. The authors unfortunately did not attempt to gauge the relative prominence of the various competing strands, but they objected to the theoretical value of wars of consciousness. Nonetheless, this strand cannot

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be discarded, because the ideas of an ongoing war of values, and perhaps civilization, does appear in public doctrines. In terms of the findings of this chapter, it seems that wars of consciousness and subversion-wars are the schools of thought that have gained most traction in recent years. Furthermore, both of these schools draw on the teachings of Messner and are part of his influence in Russian military thought. In 2015, Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, head of the Main Operational Directorate (a key position in the General Staff), wrote an article on direct and indirect actions in modern conflicts. He argued that “the beginning of the 21st century is marked by a large number of different international conflicts with the change of the political leadership of states, first of all, by the method of ‘color revolutions’” (Kartapolov 2015, 26). In modern conflict, “the aggressor state exerts pressure on the victim state, increasingly using an unconventional model of confrontation” (Kartapolov 2015, 26). This could be used to legitimize a military intervention. This method, according to Kartapolov, started long before the Ukrainian crisis and represented a qualitative increase in the anti-Russian campaign (Kartapolov 2015, 28). The goal of the United States and its allies was no longer the destruction of the enemy but rather to subordinate the will of the elites, which was achieved with so-called hybrid actions, both military and nonmilitary (Kartapolov 2015, 28). Most notable to Kartapolov, these included the use of information-psychological warfare, armed groups of internal opposition, and special forces (Kartapolov 2015, 29). For Kartapolov, a so-called hybrid action could then escalate to “classical war” if necessary (Kartapolov 2015, 29). For Kartapolov, the Internet was a key means: “The mass impact on consciousness through the global Internet network contributed to the spread of the ‘color’ revolutionary movement in a number of states” (Kartapolov 2015, 30). Furthermore, he saw that the Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine demonstrated that this type of action was “no less destructive than large-scale external aggression” (Kartapolov 2015, 30), arguing that “the internal conflict . . . arose as a result of an information operation” (Kartapolov 2015, 31). He continued, “The use of indirect actions and methods of conducting wars of a new type allows us to achieve the necessary military results, such as demoralizing the enemy, inflicting economic, political, and territorial damage on him without explicit application of his armed forces” (Kartapolov 2015, 33). First, Kartapolov’s arguments are noteworthy given his key role on the General Staff as head of the operations directorate. Indeed, he was compared to Gareyev and Gerasimov in terms of prominence in Thomas’s study on Russian theorists’ views of the nature of war (Thomas 2016b, 3). Second, he referred to

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indirect action as a new type of war, discussed in parallel with what he called “classical” war, in agreement with Chekinov and Bogdanov. This also resembles what Gerasimov called the adaptive approach to the use of force. Third, he emphasized the key role of information operations, especially online information, while drawing a direct connection between them and color revolutions. In this way, he has continued Gerasimov’s argument, seeing nonmilitary means as more important than military, but he is more specific in saying that propaganda and information operations are the most important. Chekinov and Bogdanov wrote an article in 2015 in which they argued, along with the traditional, Clausewitzian understanding of war, that “the substance of future wars, indeed their basic attribute—warfare involving the use of arms—has not changed from the past. The growing role of other types of warfare (economic, ideological, psychological, informational, and so on) will not alter the essence of future wars” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2015, 93). Simultaneously, they emphasized information warfare, which they saw as “the starting point of every action now called the new type of warfare” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2015, 93). They further saw that “information warfare and psychological operations lay much of the groundwork for victory” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2015, 94). In terms of conventional war, they saw that weapons based on new technological principles (focusing on what Slipchenko called the reconnaissance-strike systems) would have overwhelming superiority and that this could take over the functions that nuclear weapons have (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2015, 96). Thus, they insisted on the traditional definition of war, while simultaneously seeing that information warfare is a new type of warfare that lays the groundwork for victory. Another theorist using the concept of hybrid war is Andrew Korybko, a member of the expert council at RISS (Russian Institute for Strategic Studies) and a host at Sputnik News. Korybko argued in a book titled Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach to Regime Change that the joint use of color revolutions and unconventional warfare was “a new theory of warfare in and of themselves” (Korybko 2015, 12). He used Gerasimov’s definitions of the adaptive use of force and hybrid war interchangeably to describe the phenomenon. In Korybko’s words, “By [adaptive approach] he [Gerasimov] means that nonmilitary means (identified as Color Revolutions) are aided by the concealed use of force and open military interference” (Korybko 2015, 10). In modern war, Korybko argued, “social media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions as the ‘surgical strike’ capability of the aggressive party, and chatrooms and Facebook pages will become the new ‘militants’ den’” (Korybko 2015, 9). He also argued that “traditional occupations may give way

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to coups and indirect regime change operations that are more cost effective and less politically sensitive” (Korybko 2015, 10). For Korybko, color revolutions and unconventional warfare were two ways to seek regime change: “Both methods seek to overthrow governments that are unfavourable or noncompliant to the US and its foreign policy goals, with a Color Revolution being the soft coup and Unconventional Warfare being the hard one” (Korybko 2015, 72). While not explicitly calling color revolutions nonviolent, he saw them as an “indirect assault on the government of the targeted nation because no conventional forces are being utilized” (Korybko 2015, 23). Thereafter, Korybko argued, “if the Color Revolution fails, however, then Unconventional Warfare morphs into its insurgency stage and begins emphasizing extreme lethality in methods,” and this included “guerrilla fighting, urban insurgency, sabotage and terrorism (irregular warfare). It specifically includes nonconventional combatants, such as mercenaries and other non-state actors, as well as uniformed special forces operatives” (Korybko 2015, 54–55). For Russia to meet this hybrid war or adaptive approach, Korybko called for “civilisational safeguards.” He saw that the strongest deterrent needed to involve the citizens in a project larger than themselves and to encourage them to identify with their government (Korybko 2015, 75). Therefore, “the strong promotion of patriotic (in the sense of national or civilizational) ideas by the state and its affiliated NGOs can lead to the eventual creation of a progovernment hive mind that can engage in counter swarms against any enemy insurgents” (Korybko 2015, 75). It is noteworthy that Korybko suggested that patriotism and prostate ideas would be an antidote to color revolutions, especially as the public security doctrines had put increasing emphasis on patriotism and the Russian state’s role in promoting social cohesion. The most interesting part of Korybko’s general argument is that he stated that he is creating a new theory of warfare. This theory rested on two ideas: the nonviolent or “soft” overthrow via color revolutions and the violent overthrow of unconventional warfare. Korybko also saw an inverse relationship between the traditional application of direct warfare and indirect means. He stated that “the closer that US destabilization operations get towards their targeted cores (Russia, Iran, China), the lower the probability of direct warfare and higher the chances that indirect means . . . will be applied” (Korybko 2015, 71). Also, the nucleus of Korybko’s theorizing is focused on the information and psychological sphere and the intangible, rather than the use of military means (see further the discussion in chapter 6 of Korybko 2015). In a later article by Chekinov and Bogdanov, their focus was again on color revolutions. They contended that the previous decade had seen the “emergence

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of a new type of warfare, namely, wars of controlled chaos” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016, 24). This was because of “US actions undermining global security based on that country’s informational, economic, financial, and military dominance” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016, 24). They furthermore criticized The Military Encyclopedia’s definition of armed strategy because it “overlook[ed] the drastic changes that occurred in the last few decades in state activity (politics, economics, the military strategic situation), expansion of new forms of employing not only the Armed Forces, but also all the structures in the state’s military organization, emergence of new methods of warfare, transformation of the content of armed struggle, principally thanks to actively used nonmilitary methods” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016, 25–26). They argued that it was customary to see war as armed struggle but that modern military strategy also needed to include military and nonmilitary measures (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016, 31–32). Thus, they seem less certain that they agreed with the idea of war as armed struggle. They contended that a new form of war (controlled chaos / color revolutions) had emerged and that nonmilitary means have changed the nature of armed struggle. In early 2016, Gerasimov’s yearly speech for the Academy of Military Sciences discussed Syria. He started by arguing that “the rapid development of science and technology is changing the nature of armed struggle” (Gerasimov 2016a). For him, “the main way to achieve the goals is remote, contactless impact on the enemy due to the massive use of high-precision and long-range weapons from air, sea, and space” (Gerasimov 2016a). This argument is very similar to those expounded by Slipchenko. Later in the article he contended that “in modern conflicts, the methods of struggle are increasingly shifting toward the integrated application of political, economic, information, and other nonmilitary measures implemented with reliance on military force. These are the so-called hybrid methods” (Gerasimov 2016a). Thereafter, Gerasimov stated that “‘color revolutions’ are used as the main means . . . to a nonviolent change of power” (Gerasimov 2016a). He continued, “At the core are information technologies that involve manipulation of the protest potential of the population in combination with other nonmilitary means” (Gerasimov 2016a). Furthermore, he saw that information technology could have a massive impact on national consciousness because of the reach of the Internet, and, therefore, “information resources have become one of the most effective weapons. Their wide use allows in a few days to shake the situation in the country from within” (Gerasimov 2016a). While describing the main components of hybrid warfare, Gerasimov emphasized that falsification of events and restriction of mass media were among

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the main effective asymmetrical ways of waging wars, which he supported with the example of the incitement of nationalism in Ukraine (Gerasimov 2016a). He concluded by stating that with the “increase in importance of nonmilitary measures in resolving interstate contradictions, the role of the Armed Forces in ensuring the country’s security does not decrease but only increases” (Gerasimov 2016a). The key takeaways from the article are that Gerasimov is using the same argument about the changing character of armed struggle to emphasize longrange precision weapons rather than nonmilitary means as before. Thereafter, however, he focused again on the importance of nonmilitary and asymmetrical means for waging modern wars. He restated his view from 2014 that color revolutions were the main means for foreign powers to pursue their interests. He also made an explicit connection between the protest potential of the population (which the Military Doctrine mentions frequently) and color revolutions (which the doctrine does not mention). It is also notable that the term “hybrid warfare” had entered the Russian discussion after its popularity in the West (e.g., see Kartapolov 2015 and Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016; see chapter 1). Last, Gerasimov’s statement that “information resources have become one of the most effective weapons” is a consequential one and notable in relation to whether information should be seen as violent or not. A study in the use of different concepts, with a focus on hybrid warfare, was done by Igor Nikolaychuk, head of the regional security center at RISS. He saw that hybrid wars included a number of different themes, such as “the use of chaos theory . . . , controlled chaos in international politics, the activities to change political regimes in different countries, and the preparation and implementation of ‘color revolutions’” (Nikolaychuk 2016, 88). Nikolaychuk measured how many times different versions of war were mentioned on RUNET (the Russophone Internet) in the period 2007–15. The type of war mentioned the most was cold war, followed by information war and nuclear war (Nikolaychuk 2016, 92). Nikolaychuk did not find large-scale use of the term “hybrid war,” rather that it had entered the Russian discussion only in 2011 and received little attention before 2014 (Nikolaychuk 2016, 94). This underlines that it would be unhelpful to capture Russian military thought via the concept of hybrid warfare or, in the Russian term, gibridnaya voina. In 2017, Gareyev again touched on the Russian debate on the nature of war. He stated that war has been “understood as the continuation of politics by means of armed violence” and that this was how war is interpreted in the law On Defense (Gareyev 2017). However, Gareyev saw that “now, when the scope and technological opportunities of nonmilitary means of confrontation have

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significantly expanded, it is increasingly being asked whether their use means aggression” (Gareyev 2017). Therefore, Gareyev argued that wartime laws, or their interpretation, needed to be changed (Gareyev 2017). Gareyev saw that scholars in the Russian debate had started to divide the definition of war into the traditional one—the use of armed violence (nasiliya)— and the nontraditional one, which involved nonmilitary means (Gareyev 2017; see also Gareyev 2018). Therefore, Gareyev called for a clarification of the definition of the essence of war, which should be done together by the Academy of Military Sciences and the Foreign Ministry, whose results were to be sent to the UN (Gareyev 2017). Gareyev saw that the reasons for these military threats was that nuclear weapons had become an impediment for large-scale war and that, “therefore, the leadership of the modern world seeks to achieve political goals through ‘color revolutions’ in the opposing countries, large-scale information-campaigns, and unleashing local clashes” (Gareyev 2017). Thus, Gareyev’s article emphasized the split in the Russian debate on the thinking of the nature of war. Moreover, he was not conclusively promoting the idea that the traditional definition should be the superior one but, rather, settled on the need to clarify what the nature of war was today. Moreover, due to the increasing effectiveness in the use of nonmilitary means, he also advocated for a change in the laws of war. Gerasimov also reflected on the debate in Russia on the changing nature of war. He first criticized the US debate on hybrid war and stated that the Russian debate was more balanced (Gerasimov 2017a). Gerasimov then stated that the essence of war today was disputed, as some experts rely on the classical, Clausewitzian definition of war as armed violence and others “propose to fundamentally reconsider the content and essence of the term ‘war,’ seeing that armed struggle is not its mandatory feature” (Gerasimov 2017a). He stated that the scientific council of the Security Council even held a session on what was the essence of war. Gerasimov insisted on the traditional definition and saw that “the main content of the wars in the present and the foreseeable future will remain the same. Their main feature—the presence of the armed struggle” (Gerasimov 2017a). While sounding conclusive, he also added that “however, the question of the essence of war is not closed” (Gerasimov 2017a). That being said, Gerasimov simultaneously stated that “today, it is obvious that the line between peace and war is blurring” and that “nonmilitary forms and means of struggle have received an unprecedented technological development and acquired a dangerous and sometimes violent nature” (Gerasimov 2017a). For him, “hybrid actions are actively used by the US and NATO countries in

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the international arena” and that this “emphasis in content of methods of confrontation is shifting toward the widespread use of political, economic, diplomatic, information, and other nonmilitary measures implemented with the inclusion of the protest potential of the population” (Gerasimov 2017a). The full duality in the Russian debate can thus be captured in Gerasimov’s statement. On the one hand, he wants to insist that war is defined by armed violence, but on the other he also says that unarmed means are becoming violent and that they are blurring the boundary of war and peace. The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation 2010 The 2010 Military Doctrine applied five different concepts to describe war and conflict: military conflict, armed conflict, local war, regional war, and largescale war (each clearly defined in the introduction). “Military conflict” was a general term that encompassed all the others. “Armed conflict” meant an armed clash on a limited scale. A “local war” referred to states pursuing limited military goals with military action that primarily affects those states. “Regional war” was seen to have more important aims, and both conventional and nuclear means could be involved, as well as air, sea, or space operations. Finally, “large-scale war” included a significant number of states that pursued radical military-political goals (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.6d-h). The Military Doctrine stated that military conflicts are defined by their objectives and the forms and methods of struggle (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.11). This appears similar to the view of Gareyev, who reasoned that it is the method that distinguishes the perpetration of war from warfare (perhaps unsurprising, as Gareyev was one of the authors of the doctrine). The first characteristic of contemporary military conflicts was the integrated use of military and nonmilitary means (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.12a). Another was the increasing role of information warfare. Information warfare was seen to be implemented before military force to either achieve political objectives by itself or to shape a favorable response from the world community to allow a nation to utilize force (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.13b). In this way, the application of information warfare transcended the boundaries of war and peace and is able to achieve political goals by itself. The third characteristic was the utilization of weapons based on new physical principles that would be as effective as nuclear weapons (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.12b). Among the military dangers, the expansion of NATO and its encroachment on areas close to, and including, Russia was highlighted. The

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Military Doctrine also contained threats not strictly military, such as the undermining of sovereignty and interference in the internal affairs of Russia and its allies (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.8e, II.9b). In this way, the Military Doctrine contained dual messages on the view of war and armed conflict. It still described armed conflict as synonymous with war but also emphasized threats that are not necessarily armed. The definitions of war agreed with the traditional Clausewitzian view that war needed to be violent. The content of the latest Military Doctrine agreed with the view of many theorists who had started to express views that military means were not the most important and, potentially, should not be the defining factor. Nonetheless, the bulk of the work of the 2010 doctrine was done in 2005–7. Thus, it did not fully reflect the New Look reforms, which began in earnest in 2009, following the Russo-Georgian War in August 2008. The Foreign Policy Concept 2013 In the 2013 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, the main strands of thought remained from the Foreign Policy Concept of 2008, such as the view of NATO, Russia’s role as a great power, regional priorities, and the importance of the UN Security Council as the main locus for ensuring international security. However, the 2013 concept was more explicit on security policy and the understanding of war. Under the heading “Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation in the Modern World,” the concept argued that “efforts to build up or modernize offensive potentials, to create and deploy new types of weapons erode the global security architecture” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013, point II.7). The concept saw that “economic, legal, scientific, environmental, demographic and IT factors become as important for states in influencing the world politics as the military power” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013, point II.10). The concept stated that “some concepts that are being implemented are aimed at overthrowing legitimate authorities in sovereign states under the pretext of protecting the civilian population” and described these as a threat to world peace and stability (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013, point II.15). The concept continued to state that “for the first time in modern history, global competition takes place on a civilisational level” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013, point II.13, italics added). The concept saw that “values and models of development based on universal principles of democracy and market economy start to clash and compete with other” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013, point II.13). Another novelty was the first mention of “soft power.” The concept stated that it could be used to “exert political pressure on sovereign states,

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interfere in their internal affairs, destabilize their political situation and manipulate public opinion, including under the pretext of financing cultural and human rights projects abroad” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013, point II.20). The Foreign Policy Concept was the first official document to raise the notion that competition was on a civilizational level. The points that received stronger emphasis—other factors becoming as important as military means and the overthrowing of legitimate regimes while using the protest potential of the population—also resonated with the shift in the military-theoretical discussion. The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation 2014 The deputy secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation (the body in charge of drafting the doctrine), Mikhail Popov, saw that events after 2010 required further clarification of certain provisions in a new doctrine. These provisions, he said in an interview, primarily related to the emergence of new military dangers and threats to the Russian Federation, seen in the Arab Spring, Syria, and “the situation in Ukraine and around it” (RIA Novosti 2014a). More specifically, Popov claimed that the use of radical organizations and involvement of the protest potential of the population has become typical indirect action for the leading nations of the world (RIA Novosti 2014a). Therefore, the Military Doctrine was updated after only four years. The 2014 doctrine followed the main strands set out in 2010, including the divisions of military and armed conflict and local, regional, and large-scale war. Nonetheless, there were a number of areas where the new doctrine went further. The first was that the doctrine painted a more negative image of international relations. Similar to the Foreign Policy Concept, the 2014 doctrine saw that global competition was on the rise, including rivalry within values and models of developments, whereas the 2010 doctrine stated that ideological confrontation was weakening (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.7, 9; 2014, point II.9). Another novelty was the need for a nonnuclear deterrence. Among the core tasks for the armed forces was, the doctrine stated, “to have strategic deterrence (nuclear and non-nuclear) and therefore stop military conflicts” (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.32:B). This is most likely referring to a combination of military means, notably high-precision long-range weapons, and nonmilitary means. That was what Andrei Kokoshin—the ranking civilian in the Ministry of Defense until 1997 and former head of the Security Council—called for in 2011. He saw that too much faith in nuclear deterrence would be detrimental

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to Russian security and that high-precision and long-range weapons gave an opportunity to enhance the overall deterrent (Kokoshin 2011, 57–58). In terms of nonmilitary measures, General Baluyevsky (author of the 2010 and 2014 doctrine) called for a system of military-political, scientific, research, militarytechnical, and other measures to protect national interests (NVO 2014). This agrees with Adamsky’s description of Russian deterrence as going through three intellectual waves, developed in two time periods. The first time period and wave was from 1991 to 2010 and focused on nuclear deterrence, whereas the second period was from 2010 onward and was oriented toward nonnuclear and information deterrence (Adamsky 2018, 34). This division captured the increasing emphasis on nonnuclear deterrence. The most important change was the increased focus on nonmilitary and information aspects of military conflict. The first point under the heading “Characteristics of Modern Military Conflict” was “the integrated use of military force, political, economic, information, and other measures of nonmilitary nature through the extensive use of the population’s protest potential and special operations forces” (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.15a). This is to be compared with the earlier version, which merely mentioned a broad range of military-political, economic, strategic, and other objectives. The doctrine also saw that a characteristic of modern conflict was the “use of externally funded and run political forces and social movements” (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.15j). A particular novelty was the inclusion of external threats connected to color revolutions, such as information influence undermining spiritual and patriotic traditions, under the heading “Domestic Military Threats” (Sinovets and Renz 2015, 2). The doctrine gave special emphasis to the information sphere and the incitement of domestic unrest. The section on characteristics of war then stated that the use of indirect and asymmetrical methods was an important feature, and the following paragraph listed the use of political forces and societal movements financed and controlled from abroad (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.15.i). This was also dealt with more extensively in point II.11, where the doctrine stated that military dangers and threats were shifting toward the information arena (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.11). Seeing the protesting potential of a population as a part of warfare was likewise a major novelty in the Military Doctrine of 2014, which is directly linked to the notion that the United States initiated the Arab Spring (Persson 2015, 51–52). Aleksandr Golts argued that wording regarding the protest potential of the population “equated with the actions of enemy saboteurs leads to a stunning

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conclusion: ‘Color revolutions,’ it turns out, are a new form of military action” (Golts 2017). The threat from color revolutions was also underlined under the heading “External Military Dangers,” including the involvement of internal affairs and the use of information and communication technology aimed at states’ sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity as well as overthrowing regimes on Russia’s borders and setting up new ones hostile to Russia (Ministry of Defense 2014, points II.12.E, I, K, M). Similarly, the doctrine introduced a novelty under the heading “Internal Military Dangers”: “The activities of information influence on the population, especially young citizens of the country, aiming to undermine the historical, spiritual, and patriotic traditions in defense of the fatherland” (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.13:c). It is notable that the influence of information on the population is listed as an internal military danger, as it would be the responsibility of other agencies, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the security agencies rather than the military. Nonetheless, it seems to be a direct reference to color revolutions. As Gudrun Persson puts it, “The Russian view of ‘war’ and ‘national security’ has a much wider definition where Russia’s history and spiritual traditions are included” (Persson 2015, 63; see also Persson 2013). Similarly, Galeotti also emphasized the perceived cultural offensive from the West (Galeotti 2016b, 287). This was indeed a part of “a culture of ‘total war’ [that] still informs doctrinal thinking” (Galeotti 2016b, 297). This notion is helpful to understand the emphasis on political, economic, and information arenas that were included in the understanding of war. The 2014 doctrine “stands out for emphasizing domestic threats to national security” (Sinovets and Renz 2015, 74). It represented “the Kremlin’s anxiety over social stability, expressed in the explicit fear of subversive activities conducted by the intelligence services of Western states aimed at provoking social unrest in Russia” (Sinovets and Renz 2015, 75). Defense Minister Shoigu argued in the run-up to the 2014 doctrine that color revolutions were taking on a new meaning as a tool for external influence after the unrest in Ukraine (RIA Novosti 2014b). In the same article, Shoigu continued that “the US and EU have provoked the removal from power of the legitimate president of the country” (RIA Novosti 2014b). This aimed to create an “advance line of pressure” on the Russian Federation and Belarus and their union (RIA Novosti 2014b), as reflected in the doctrine. Many of the elements regarding foreign involvement in internal affairs and the use of intelligence agencies were not novel in themselves in the 2014 doctrine; rather, they received significantly more emphasis and detail in the 2014 doctrine.

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The National Security Strategy 2015 The 2015 National Security Strategy was similar to the 2009 version, with certain additions and changes in nuance. The most notable addition was the use of the term “color revolution.” The strategy stated, under the heading “Main Threats to the State and Public Security,” that “the activities of radical public associations and groups using nationalist and religious extremist ideology, foreign and intergovernmental organizations, and financial and economic structures, and also individuals, focused on destroying the unity and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, destabilizing the domestic political and social situation—including through inciting ‘color revolutions’—and destroying traditional religious and moral values” (President of the Russian Federation 2015, point 43). On a similar note, the strategy held the United States and the EU responsible for the armed conflict in Ukraine. It stated that their support “for the anticonstitutional coup d’état in Ukraine led to a deep split in the Ukrainian society and the emergence of an armed conflict” (President of the Russian Federation 2015, point 17). The following point stated that “the practice of overthrowing legitimate political regimes and provoking intrastate instability and conflicts is becoming increasingly widespread” (President of the Russian Federation 2015, point 18). Although the strategy was not explicit about what kind of support the United States and the EU were thought to have given to Ukraine that led to war, it was a clear accusation. The doctrine also put a frequent emphasis on spiritual-moral values that was notably stronger than in the 2009 version (Oliker 2016).

Conclusion This investigation of the Russian understanding of war confirms that it has broadened and widened in the post-Soviet era. In the 1990s, there was a large degree of continuity with the late-Soviet view of armed force as the defining factor of war. In the late 1990s and mid-2000s, some voices argued for an expansion of the understanding of war because of the increasing importance of nonmilitary means. However, these voices did not receive a lot of mainstream traction, and the authoritative views of war still clearly focused on military violence as the defining factor. Nonetheless, many of the key notions that were later incorporated into mainstream military theory first appeared then, such as the blurring boundary between war and peace, nonmilitary means being

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violent, information being a weapon, and nonmilitary means being more effective than military means and sufficient in and of themselves to achieve strategic outcomes. This underlines the long-term evolution of Russian military thought, often overlooked in the Western debate. The discussion has run in parallel with a discussion of how conventional military means are seen to change, which has focused on the increasing utility of high-precision, longrange weapons, depending mostly on Slipchenko’s work. Even though the then defense minister Ivanov stated in 2005 that Russia was in an undeclared war, it took until after the Arab Spring and the protests in the Russian elections of 2011–12 for the idea to gain ascendancy in Russia that the concept of war needed to be broadened. Thereafter, the majority of the authoritative actors in Russian national security and military theory started seeing that nonmilitary measures were so effective that they were affecting the understanding of war. This shift was also reflected, although less explicitly, in the public security doctrines. The broadening of an understanding of war is due to the increased importance of nonmilitary means and especially information warfare and the threat from color revolutions. The most notable leaders have opined for a broadening understanding of war. President Putin warned of color revolutions and controlled chaos, and saw that new weapons and information warfare were as effective as nuclear weapons but more acceptable. Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov saw that war and peace were blurring into each other due to the effectiveness of nonmilitary means, whose impact were exceeding that of military means. In today’s wars, he saw little or no role for conventional means (a secondary one at most) and asked if the Arab Spring was the typical war for the twenty-first century. He furthermore saw that information resources had become one of the most effective weapons. Similarly, Chekinov and Bogdanov saw that unconventional warfare and warfare of controlled chaos were defining international relations today, in which nonmilitary means, notably information and psychological warfare, were key to victory. This made military means secondary, and they saw that nonmilitary means could remove military threats. Moreover, Kartapolov saw that indirect actions were a new type of war in parallel with classical war. Many theorists, most notably Gareyev, also saw that the nonmilitary means were so effective that they should be considered violent in nature. Therefore, Gareyev called for a reconsideration of the whole system of knowledge surrounded war, traditionally defined by armed violence. Even though several theorists have argued for views that would entail a change in the nature of war, only a few have explicitly stated that the nature

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of war should not be understood as armed violence alone anymore. Rather, a common way to handle the paradox of defining war by armed violence and the increasing utility of nonmilitary means has been to introduce new concepts. Examples include nonmilitary war, wars of controlled chaos, unconventional warfare, information warfare, hybrid warfare, subversion-war, and wars of consciousness. Similarly, the adaptive approach to the use of force as proposed by Gerasimov (and relied on by others) sees the West’s primary use of force as nonmilitary and nonviolent and traditional military force as the backup option. In this way, introducing a new concept, such as nonmilitary war, is a way to reconcile the changes taking place in the Russian understanding of war without having to go against the long-held axiom that the nature of war never changes. From the first Military Doctrine in 1993, there has been a notable expansion in both the mentions and importance of different nonmilitary means. The two most notable innovations of the 2014 Military Doctrine were the increasing emphasis on information warfare and on the creation of color revolutions as well as the inclusion of these threats as domestic military dangers. The 2010 Military Doctrine also saw that information warfare was so effective that it could reach strategic objectives by itself, without the need for armed force. The security doctrines list threats from a civilizational level, interference and destabilization that lead to overthrow of leadership, as well as information warfare and foreign powers using the protest potential of the population. The 2015 National Security Strategy explicitly referred to color revolutions in its threat perception. While none of the security doctrines has explicitly rejected the traditional understanding of war as defined by armed violence (the federal law On Defense understands war as being defined by armed violence), there has been a clear shift between 1993 to today. The foremost factors in changing this understanding have been the increased importance of information warfare and the fear of color revolutions. They are interrelated, and information warfare is perceived to be crucial for the impact of the society to that leads to revolt, destabilizing the Russian state and military. They are the key means in the rivalry between values, cultures, and, potentially, civilizations, as the Military Doctrine, National Security Strategy, and Foreign Policy Concept have pointed out. This way of understanding war also reduces the boundaries between internal and external security when the primary means of external actors are seen as the creation of domestic problems. The broadening of the understanding of war by information warfare and color revolutions will be addressed in the forthcoming chapters.

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Notes 1. Slipchenko’s work is included in the 1990s section of this chapter because that is the period during which he was most active in the military debate. He first voiced his concept of generations of war in 1989, and some of his major works were published in the 2000s, but these to a large extent restated and expanded the same ideas. 2. Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye is the Russian military intelligence service. The GRU has now been renamed GU (Glavnoye Upravleniye) but is still most commonly referred to as the GRU.

chapter 3

Information Warfare

The development of information technology has resulted in information itself turning into a certain kind of weapon. It is a weapon that allows us to carry out would-be military actions in practically any theater of war and most importantly, without using military power. —Sergei Ivanov (2007, quoted in Blank 2013, 34) Information resources have become one of the most effective weapons. Their wide use allows in a few days to shake the situation in the country from within.  —Valery Gerasimov (2016a)

T

he revolution in ICT might be one of the most profound societal changes of the last two decades. It has not only changed the way in which we access and consume information but also politics, the economy, and our ways of understanding the world. Likewise, it has led to profound changes in the Russian understanding of war as seen, among other places, in the Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine, which Russian leaders believed was created by the West largely through information means, and the Russian approach to grand strategy, with global media channels that are amplified with pro-Kremlin online influence agents (popularly called “troll factories”) to influence these information processes. Today, Russia’s approach to the West is characterized by an information struggle, where the dominant metanarratives are targeting Western unity, confidence for democratic processes, and pro-European and pro-NATO incumbents (Kragh and Åsberg 2017, 806; see also Jonsson 2018, 2019; Pynnöniemi and Rácz 2016). In this struggle, the Russian leadership can reach those goals without the use of military power, as Ivanov stated above, or with military and nonmilitary means. This is worth keeping in mind as the Russian influence in the US elections have mostly taken place in the information arena, in social media and traditional media. 94 

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As the previous chapter concluded, the Russian understanding of war has expanded to include and give stronger emphasis to nonmilitary warfare and notably information warfare. Nonetheless, information warfare is not always clearly defined, and so discussion of what is included in the Russian understanding of information warfare is warranted, particularly as the Russian understanding is not directly approachable with a Western vocabulary or understanding. This has been put persuasively by Keir Giles and William Hagestad, who argued that it was not only a difference in threat perception that hampered mutual understanding but also that the same terms could have very different connotations in Russian and English. For instance, “information space” in the Russian case includes the cognitive sphere, which it does not in the Western understanding (Giles and Hagestad 2013, 7). Similarly, a joint report by the United Kingdom’s Conflict Studies Research Centre and Moscow State University’s Institut Problem Informatsionnoy Bezopasnosti (Information Security Institute) emphasized that the main difference between the Russian and Western understandings of information security is that the Russian understanding includes the content of information, whereas the Western focuses on the infrastructure for its transmission (CSRC 2012, 27). In the Russian language there are three main terms for information warfare: informatsionnaya voina (information war), informatsionnoye protivoborstvo (information confrontation, although protivborstvo is often used to mean information war), and informatsionnaya borba (information struggle) (Thomas 2011, 138; see also its appendix on definitions, 365–74). Timothy Thomas found that the most authoritative way of understanding information warfare in the General Staff was that information warfare is a way of resolving a conflict between opposing sides. The goal is for one side to gain and hold an information advantage over the other. This is achieved by exerting a specific information/psychological and information/technical influence on a nation’s decision-making system, on the nation’s populous [sic] and on its information resource structures, as well as by defeating the enemy’s control system and his information resource structures with the help of additional means, such as nuclear assets, weapons and electronic assets. (quoted in Thomas 1996, 27)

This serves to highlight the two different spheres of the Russian understanding of information warfare: information-technical and informationpsychological. The former is concerned with machine-driven data components, the means of transmission, and information infrastructure. The latter includes anything to do with influencing the minds of the population, elites,

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and military on both sides. More simply put, the former refers to hardware and software, and the latter to cognitive aspects (Thomas 2011, 138). The two different spheres are both distinct and overlapping, as conveying information in the information-psychological domain depends on the functioning of information-technical means. This chapter analyzes the Russian understanding of information warfare, starting with the information security doctrines. Thereafter the informationtechnical and information-psychological spheres are scrutinized, starting with the key events in each and thereafter the view of theorists. The informatization of conventional warfare is seen as the key driver of the capabilities for the military reform in the information-technical sphere, while the informatization of society, economy, and politics is the key driver for the heightened importance of information-psychological warfare.

The Information Security Doctrines The official view of information security has been codified in a number of doctrines. The first one was published already in 2000 before information security was a central issue and lasted up until 2016 when it was updated. Moreover, both the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry have adopted doctrines and conventions guiding their activity in the information space. The Information Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation 2000 The 2000 Information Security Doctrine defined the information sphere as composed of “information, information infrastructure, entities engaged in the collection, formation, dissemination and the use of information, and a system of governing public relations arising out of these conditions” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.1). Notably, this definition is very wide, as it includes everything from information in itself to infrastructure and systems. The doctrine declared that information security was the “protection of its national interests in the information sphere, as determined by the overall balanced interests at the level of the individual, society, and state” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.1). This balance was further clarified in the doctrine when it stated that “the current political and socioeconomic development in the country give rise to sharp contradictions between the requirements of society in a wider free exchange of information and the necessity of retaining individual regulated limitations on its dissemination” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.4).

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Among the threats related to information warfare, the doctrine listed threats related to the freedom of man, such as “illegal use of special means of influence on individual, group, and public consciousness” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.2). Furthermore, the doctrine listed disrupting Russian media from the national information sphere and an increasing “dependence of the spiritual, economic, and political areas of public life in Russia on foreign information entities” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.2). Similarly, threats to state policy consisted of the monopolization of the Russian information market by domestic and foreign entities as well as the blocking of Russian state media both domestically and internationally (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.2). Little attention was given to “cyberwarfare,” which has received great attention in Western debates. This is not that surprising, given that it did not enter mainstream discussions in Russia until the late 2000s. Nonetheless, the doctrine listed “information and technical influences (including electronic attacks, penetration by computer networks) by likely adversaries” among the external threats in the defense sphere (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.6). External threats included “activities of foreign political, economic, military, intelligence, and information entities” as well as certain countries seeking the “dominance and the infringement of Russia’s interests in world information space and to oust it from external and domestic information markets” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.3). Particularly interesting was that the doctrine listed the “development by a number of states of information war concepts [kontseptsii informatsionnykh voin] that provide for creating means for dangerous attack on the information spheres of other countries” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.3). The doctrine further saw foreign intelligence services as a threat, carrying out subversive and sabotage activities by methods of information and psychological influence (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.6). The doctrine saw that “the precariousness of citizens’ rights to information access and information manipulation evoke a negative reaction among people, which in a number of cases leads to a destabilization of the social and political situation in society” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.4). Similarly, “national harmony” and the stability of state authority are listed as challenges in the domestic policy sphere (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.6). These points can be seen as a perception where information influence can lead to color revolutions. Even though the Information Security Doctrine explicitly mentioned human and constitutional rights, the warnings about the dangers of uncurbed

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freedom justified restricting citizens’ constitutional rights to information, as they could destabilize the social and political situation in the country. It was not only the right to information that was perceived as a threat by the Russian regime; the doctrine also saw an array of threats to the information security in the spiritual sphere. It is noteworthy that threats to the spiritual sphere received their own section, on the same level as domestic and foreign policy. Threats to the spiritual sphere included “a deformation of the system of mass information owing to media monopolization as well as to uncontrolled expansion of the foreign media sector in the national information space” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.6). Another threat was “the inability of contemporary Russian civil society to ensure the formation in the growing generation, and maintenance in society, of socially required moral values, patriotism, and civic responsibility for the destiny of the country” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000, point I.6). Not only was civil society unable to ensure “socially required” values and patriotism; the Information Security Doctrine also explicitly called for measures in the sphere of spiritual life to control which values should be formed. The doctrine calls for “elaborating civilized forms and methods for public control over the formation in society of spiritual values meeting the national interests of the country and over the education of patriotism and civic responsibility for its destiny” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.6) and the need for mechanisms for “preventing illegal information and psychological influences on the mass consciousness of society” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2000a, point I.6). The threats to information security in the spiritual sphere are therefore securitizing culture and moral values. The doctrine therefore sees the provision of information, but also foreign information, as destabilizing Russian moral values. This is notable to read in parallel with Jardar Østbø’s argument that spiritual-moral values did not become securitized and discussed by central political actors until 2012 (Østbø 2016, 201). While this is a correct assessment, it is worth noting that the ideas surfaced earlier. This threat perception was already present in 2000 and is critical for understanding Russia’s increasing nationalist and patriotic fervor. The Information Security Doctrine did not spark great discussion at the time. It predated comparable Western doctrines by about five years and was probably the first public information security doctrine in the world (Thomas 2009, 486). However, the prevailing US definition of information operations in the early 1990s (later removed from public documents) was confined to crisis and war, as opposed to the Russian view that information operations are

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ongoing in peacetime (Thomas 1998, 6). The difference in understanding can lead to completely different perceptions of information operations, both in terms of severity and to what extent they are breaching the sovereignty of the state (Thomas 1998, 18). Rather, the idea of the Russian government was that “media are a tool of the state for shaping public opinion in a manner favourable to the authorities” (Giles 2012b, 70). The Russian view—seeking a balance in the trinity of the individual, society, and the state—has notable differences from the Western view. The Western view is focused on the free flow of information and threats to the systems of transmission (President of the United States 2010, 5; UK Cabinet Office 2011, 22; US Department of Defense 2011). The difference can be seen in the entry on information war (informatsionnaya voina) in a glossary by the Military Academy of the General Staff, which saw “a clear distinction between the Russian definition—broad, and not limited to wartime—and the Western one—which it describes as limited, tactical information operations carried out during hostilities” (in Giles 2016b, 4). Similarly, Blank noted a difference in that the US theorists “see these new capabilities as useful to disrupt enemies’ physical infrastructure and military command and control,” while the Russian theorists “see IW [information warfare] and IO [information operations] as new means to conduct large-scale political warfare to reshape the thinking of an entire political community” (Blank 2013, 31). The 2000 doctrine placed strong emphasis on the information-psychological sphere while focusing on the threats in the spiritual sphere and against public consciousness. This was seen to lead to social and political destabilization in Russia. The doctrine also warned against the use of foreign entities and foreign intelligence services in psychologically influencing Russia. The doctrine clearly warned against the uncurbed freedom on the Internet at the expense of state stability, something that was distinct to Western doctrines. It becomes clear that the internal dimension is the most prevalent, even though it is influenced from abroad. Conceptual Views regarding the Activities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Information Space 2011 In 2011, the Russian Ministry of Defense published a protodoctrine for the armed forces’ activities in the information space. It was a short document lacking theoretical depth, but two things were noteworthy. The first is that it gave a clear definition of information war: “Information war—confrontation between two or more states in the information space for damaging the information

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systems, processes, and resources, which are of critical importance, and other structures, undermining the political, economic, and social systems, and massive brainwashing of the population for destabilizing the society and the state and also forcing the state to make decisions in the interests of the confronting party” (Ministry of Defense 2011, point 1). The definition thus emphasized both the information-technological and information-psychological spheres and reflected a broad threat that contained the need to ensure the functioning of political, economic, and social systems. Furthermore, the threat from the “brainwashing of the population” is also worth pointing out. The document noted that all activity is expanding into the information space. This understanding is worth bearing in mind while considering that leading Russians see themselves in an information war (see below). The document further stated that “the role of information war has substantially grown. The Russian Federation, which is rapidly moving in the direction of the informatization of all spheres of the vital activity of the society, is currently facing a new serious threat arising from the global information space” (Ministry of Defense 2011). Furthermore, creating the conditions to counter interference in internal affairs was listed as an objective for the Russian Armed Forces’ activity in international information security (Ministry of Defense 2011). This is noteworthy since this is a task that would fit more naturally with the Interior Ministry or the intelligence services. The 2011 Convention on International Information Security In 2011, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a Convention on International Information Security to guide international negotiations. It used the same definition of information warfare as the Conceptual Views document. There are two particularly notable threats to international peace and security in the information space listed. First, the draft convention saw a threat in the act of undermining political, economic, and social systems as well as psychological campaigns to destabilize society (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2011, point 4.4). Second, it viewed the broadcast of information in a manner countering international law or national legislation as a threat (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2011, point 4.6). Other threats included purposefully destructive behavior; illegal use of state resources; the use of the information space for extremist, terrorist, and criminal purposes; denial of access to information and communication technologies; and information expansion (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2011, point 4.1-11).

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In the international negotiations on information security, the key disagreement has been between the Western consensus and that of states such as Russia and China who wanted to restrict the content of information. The aim of this document was to gain support to restrict information that would “interfere in the internal affairs of other states” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2011, point 6.5-9). The 2013 Basic Principles for State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Information Security to 2020 In 2013, the Security Council adopted a document setting out a long-term vision for the Russian Federation in information security until 2020. The document saw that the major threat to international information security is the use of information and communication technologies “as an information weapon for military and political purposes that are inconsistent with international law, for hostile actions and acts of aggression aimed at discrediting the sovereignty and violation of territorial integrity of states and threatening international peace, security, and strategic stability” (Security Council 2013, point 8a). The document included the threat of terrorism and interference in internal affairs with the aim of inciting unrest and violence (Security Council 2013, point 8b-c). In response, the document outlined Russian state policy goals that included the desire to reduce the use of information and communication technologies for these purposes (Security Council 2013, point 10:b). The principles also sought ways to counter the use of ICT “for extremists’ purposes, including for interfering into the internal affairs of sovereign states” (Security Council 2013, point 10:d). The Basic Principles did not go into military-theoretical depth, but the most important points were ICT technologies as a weapon for military and political purposes and the strong focus on noninterference in internal affairs, which was the same as the Convention on International Information Security. 2016 Information Security Doctrine Sixteen years after the first Information Security Doctrine, its sequel echoed the key tenets set out in 2000. Despite such a long time between the doctrines, they had greater continuity than, for instance, the military doctrines or foreign policy concepts. In the information-psychological sphere, the doctrine saw that “opportunities for cross-border circulation of information are increasingly being used to achieve geopolitical, military-political, as well as terrorist,

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extremist, criminal, and other illegal purposes to the detriment of international security and strategic stability” (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 10). It stated, “The scope is expanding for the use of special services of individual states as means of providing information-psychological influence aimed at destabilizing internal political and social situations in different regions of the world and undermining sovereignty and violation territorial integrity of other states” (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 12). Directions for information defense included “the neutralization of information and psychological effects, including those aimed at undermining the historical foundations and patriotic traditions,” as well as improving the armed forces’ capability to conduct and counter information warfare (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 21). Another priority was “to neutralize the impact of information aimed at the erosion of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 23). The clearest innovation in the doctrine was perhaps the call for the “development of a national management system for the Russian segment of the ‘Internet’ network” (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 29). In the informationtechnical sphere, a major negative factor was “the buildup of a number of possibilities for foreign countries of information-technical impact on the information infrastructure in the military purposes” (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 11). The doctrine further predicted “increased coordination of computer attacks on critical information infrastructure” (President of the Russian Federation 2016, point 16). The proposal to develop a Russian part of the Internet had been on the mind of the Russian government for some time, but its popularity increased after the onset of the war in Ukraine. It was discussed by the Russian Security Council in September 2014 (Soldatov and Borogan 2015, 304). Putin also stated in April 2014 that the Internet was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project and that he wanted a Russian-made alternative (MacAskill 2014). To conclude, the 2016 doctrine maintained the same tenets as the 2000 one, with a strong emphasis on threats coming from the information-psychological sphere and its impact on values and social and state stability. The 2018 Convention on International Information Security In 2018, Russia gained support for its international efforts in information security. On December 5, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution titled Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the

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Context of International Security, which Russia proposed but over thirty states supported. The resolution continued many of the trends mentioned earlier: respecting sovereignty in the information space, combating criminal and terrorist use, and preventing the proliferation of malicious ICT techniques (e.g., cyberattacks) (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2018). The resolution also stated that actors should not use proxies for cyber actions, something that Russia itself have been known to rely on (see Popescu and Secreriu 2018; Rid 2016). The interesting part is that the resolution gave support for the writings on sovereignty that have been used by Russia as a reason to avoid criticism of its actions (see chapter 4). The Military Doctrines While it is insufficient to only count the number of times a word is mentioned to gauge its impact, it can nonetheless be suggestive. The 1993 Military Doctrine contained only four instances of the word “information”: two references to confidence-building, one to the importance of openness in soldiers to the media, and one to the importance of information support to the military system (Ministry of Defense 1993, points 2.1, 2.2, 3.2, 4.1). In the 2000 Military Doctrine, released a couple of months before the Information Security Doctrine, information was mentioned thirteen times. The Military Doctrine started by stating that the exacerbation of the information confrontation was one of the factors defining the military-political situation (Ministry of Defense 2000, point I:2). It listed hostile information-technical and hostile information-psychological operations as major external threats (Ministry of Defense 2000, point I:5). Furthermore, the doctrine saw that armed conflict was characterized by, among other things, “the complex moral and psychological atmosphere in which troops operate” (Ministry of Defense 2000, point II:5). This wording is likely the result of the experiences gained from the Chechen wars. Between the 1993 and 2000 doctrines is a slight increase in the importance given to information warfare, but this document was still strictly focused on how information affected the armed forces. In the 2010 Military Doctrine, information was also mentioned thirteen times but in notably stronger phrasing. The doctrine stated that the disruption of the state information infrastructure is a major internal military danger (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.9c). As a characteristic of contemporary conflict, it predicts the “intensification of the role of information warfare [protivoborstvo]” (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.12d). The doctrine also saw

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that “the prior implementation of measures of information warfare in order to achieve political objectives without the utilisation of military force” (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.13d) and advised the development of forces and resources for information warfare (Ministry of Defense 2010, point II.41c). The 2010 doctrine perceived information warfare to have the ability to reach political objectives instead of the use of military force. This is an argument that became highly publicized after Valery Gerasimov’s 2013 speech and the start of the war in Ukraine (see McDermott 2016). However, the 2010 doctrine already expressed this notion. The 2014 Military Doctrine mentioned information nineteen times. Beyond the points that featured in earlier doctrines, the 2014 document added that there was a tendency of military threats and dangers to enter the information sphere (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.11). The doctrine furthermore listed information’s ability to “undermine historical, spiritual, and patriotic traditions in defense of the motherland” as a major internal military danger (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.13c). A major external military danger was the “use of information and communication technologies for military-political purposes for carrying out actions contrary to international law, against the sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity of states and threatening international peace, security, global, and regional stability” (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.12k). The 2014 Military Doctrine thus continued the trend from the earlier military doctrines in anticipating the increased importance of information means. Other military dangers and threats were entering the information sphere, and information’s influence on spiritual and patriotic traditions was explicitly listed as a military threat. The national security documents do not go into any more detail on information warfare than already outlined in chapter 3. In terms of the military doctrines, one can note a strong shift from 1993 to 2014 and particularly from 2000 to 2010. In the 2010 and 2014 doctrines, information-psychological warfare that went beyond influence on the military was given a key role. The statement in the 2010 Military Doctrine that information warfare could be used to reach political objectives instead of military means is particularly noteworthy, as it comes from the Ministry of Defense itself. In this way, comparison of the military doctrines shows a clear progression where information warfare had entered the military’s understanding of war with full force in 2010. A (perhaps natural) difference can be noted in which the documents drafted by the Foreign Ministry and the Security Council have a stronger focus on the information-psychological sphere, while the military doctrines emphasize

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both. Both the armed forces and Ministry of Foreign Affairs were using the same definition of information warfare, which emphasized both spheres. The key goal of the draft international convention and basic principles was to reach an international agreement that reduced other states’ ability to influence Russia, to protect Russia’s information-psychological sphere (Thomas 2014, 102). Protecting Russia from external psychological influence was given such priority because it was perceived to be both dangerous and ongoing. This is particularly noteworthy considering the connection to color revolutions and the fact that information-psychological warfare was key to undermining societal stability and inducing protests. An analysis of Russian information warfare explained this overlap by stating that the takeover of Russian media was needed to manipulate public opinion and was “aimed against potential and genuine internal and external-psychological threats” (Zaitseva 2014, 59).

Information-Technical Warfare Development in the information-technical sphere impacted the Russian understanding of war in two ways. First was the way in which the ICT revolution could improve the conventional capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces. This discussion started with Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov’s theory of MTR at the Soviet General Staff in various forms (sixth-generation warfare, noncontact warfare, and NCW). Second was the potential of cyberattacks as a complement or alternative to the use of armed force, a discussion that largely ran in parallel but gained increased attention in the late 2000s. The key event that highlighted the importance of the informationtechnical sphere of warfare was the Gulf War (1990–91), which came to embody the theory of MTR (Thomas 1991). Numerically inferior US forces managed, with very few casualties, to defeat Iraqi armed forces, whose doctrines and weaponry were mostly Soviet. The success of the US troops was seen by Russian theorists to depend on “the overwhelming superiority in combat and information support systems” (Grau and Thomas 1996, 510). An important part of the US-led coalition forces’ success was their targeting of the Iraqi communications and information infrastructure (Heickerö 2010, 15). The Russian theorists Ivan Vorobyov and Valery Kiselyov saw the war as a turning point in methods of armed struggle. They found that the Iraqi military, despite its superior size, was beaten by cutting-edge technology with new cruise missiles, aircraft, and communications systems that could rapidly supply them with targetacquisitions data (Vorobyov and Kiselyov 2014, 132). Thus, they proclaimed that the end of the twentieth century saw “the age of the next-generation

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warfare, the information-network kind” (Vorobyov and Kiselyov 2014, 133). This echoed the arguments of Vladimir Slipchenko: In his terms, this was a sixth-generation fighting force with precision weapons beating a fourthgeneration industrial army (Kipp 2007, 150). Since it did not involve conflict between two sixth-generation armed forces, the Gulf War was considered a prototype rather than full representation of sixth-generation warfare. The Gulf War was a wakeup call for the Russian military in terms of how vulnerable Soviet-era equipment could be against new equipment, concepts, and doctrine aided by information technology. The war also showed the importance of relative weight to mobility, range, speed, and situational awareness. It was for this reason that Slipchenko saw a fundamental change in the character of war (Slipchenko 2002b). It came from new capabilities and a concomitant change in doctrines and organization, which enabled the creation of long-range precision-strike systems (Slipchenko 1999). Such noncontact wars were conducted by long-distance firing of precision-guided munitions, enabling speed, range, and short decision-making cycles and supported by an improved C4ISR complex that quickened the armed forces’ decision-making cycles by decreasing the time it took to process data into actionable information, reducing the time from target acquisition to firing. Since then, long-range weaponry and the informatization of the Russian Armed Forces have been key priorities for military reform and the understanding of war. When the military reforms started in 2008, these ideas started to change from rhetoric to practice. The core focus of the reforms was to provide Russia with “a credible modern conventional force in the information age” (Kipp 2014, 38). The goal was to create the capability for NCW (setetsentricheskaya voina), or sixth-generation warfare in Slipchenko’s terminology (McDermott 2011b, 3; Blank 2013, 36; Thomas 2011, 4). The reforms focused on “abandoning cadre units, forming permanent readiness brigades, enhancing command control and communications (C3I), reducing the number of tiers in command and control (komandovaniye i upravleniye), downsizing the officer corps, optimizing the military education system, developing professional noncommissioned officers (NCO’s) [sic], raising officer standards, adjusting the procurement program and aiming at achieving a target (even if unrealistic) of 70 percent new weapons and equipment by 2020” (McDermott 2011b, 3). The chief of the General Staff, Nikolai Makarov, stated that the armed forces were shifting to a “network-centric principle” of command and control (quoted in McDermott 2011b, 5). Likewise, the 2010 Military Doctrine emphasized the presence of network and automated command-and-control systems as a

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feature of modern conflict (Ministry of Defense 2010, II.12). A more extensive example can be taken from key theorists Chekinov and Bogdanov, who wrote that “the new type of armed struggle derives from the network-centric pattern of military operations that will henceforth be conducted within an integrated combat environment combining all realms of armed struggle in synchronism, be interrelated and continuous under a single command in a shared information and communication medium” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2012, 20). They saw that these new-generation wars would take “the form of fire strikes, electronic strikes, robot-controlled warfare, aerospace and mobile aerial operations, air assaults, information reconnaissance strikes, antireconnaissance and similar operations” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2012, 24). In these wars, “remote engagement of the enemy ‘at arm’s length’ is turning into the principal tactic to achieve to goals of a combat action” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013, 13). Thus, new information capabilities were key for improving situational awareness in military operations and provided an integrated command and communication for the different branches. “Network-centric warfare” is an American term that originated from the RMA, its core consisting of the informatization of command-and-control and precision-strike capabilities and stressing the importance of information dominance in the battlefield (Heickerö 2010, 14). NCW can be understood as the latest iteration of the RMA (Betz 2015, 73). A key rationale for the reform of the Russian Armed forces was that “new methods of combat necessitated a shift to a new structure and to more modern weapons linked in a single information-communication space” (Thomas 2011, 4). The notion of new command levels was specifically important because of the perceived capabilities of new weapons to make the whole of Russia, and not just a sector, a zone of combat operations (Thomas 2011, 15). It is important to note here that contactless war refers to the use of conventional long-range weapons, as opposed to information-psychological warfare, which it has been misinterpreted to mean. Gareyev put the two in contrast to each other while writing that US military operations “are most often explained by technological superiority, contactless weapons. But in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, political and information components played a much greater role” (Gareyev 2003b). The capabilities related to NCW are still the key priority in the reform of the Russian Armed Forces (see McDermott and Bukkvoll 2017). It is also within these the (too) popular concept of A2/AD (antiaccess / area denial) fits. In relation to Russia, it encapsulates how antiaircraft and precision weapons with long ranges hinder the United States from operating in regions close to

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Russia. Antiaircraft and long-range weaponry has also been a key component of Russia’s intervention in Syria (even though most of the bombs dropped have been “dumb bombs”). Cyberwarfare belongs to the information-technical realm, and it has gained increasing attention since the attacks on Estonia 2007 and cyberattacks in conjunction with the Russo-Georgian War in 2008. Neither has been conclusively attributed to the Russian state, but they involved a high degree of sophistication and coordination from pro-Russian actors, enough for suspicion to be raised (Carr 2011). Likewise, in the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian agencies and critical infrastructure companies have been hit by large-scale cyberattacks (Pernik 2018). Russia did not have a particular cyber-security doctrine, but its activities are situated more broadly under the category of information security, which includes everything from strategic communications, psychological operations, and deception to electronic warfare and computer network operations. Cyberwarfare has received much attention in Russia, which had good preconditions for developing theory and means of information-technical warfare, with its high educational standards in mathematics, physics, and later information technology (Peterson 2005, xi). Many theorists agree that cyberattacks blur the boundaries of war and peace. One of the first to discuss cyberwarfare was Sergei Modestov, who stated in 1994 that “there is no need to declare war against one’s enemies and to actually unleash more or less large military operations using traditional means of armed struggle” (Modestov 1994, 7). Rather, for Modestov, cyberwarfare “erodes the boundaries of organized violence” (Modestov 1994, 7). Similarly, Pavel Antonovich stated that “dividing lines between war and peace can be eroded conveniently in cyberspace” (Antonovich 2011, 37). Starodubtstev, Bukharin, and Semyonov likewise noted that “war can be conducted on any scale without declaring it as a legal fact” (Starodubtstev, Bukharin, and Semyonov 2012, 53). In terms of the potential of cyberwarfare, one of Russia’s authoritative writers on information warfare, Sergei Komov, argued, together with coauthors from the Ministry of Defense and the GRU, that “the damage done by cyber weapons may include man-made disasters at vital industrial, economic, power, and transportation facilities, financial collapse, and systemic economic crisis. Besides, cyber weapons can cause government and military operations to spin completely out of control, leave the population demoralized and disorientated, and set off widespread panic” (Bazylev et al. 2012, 11). This article is particularly noteworthy since it is likely that the authors were among the authors of the Conceptual Views document (Franke 2015, 27).

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Because of the potential of cyberattacks, they argued that the statement by the states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in June 15, 2006, was crucial because it saw that “employment of modern information technologies for military and political purposes may cause worldwide catastrophes similar in devastating consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction” (Bazylev et al. 2012, 11). A word of caution here is warranted: This argument does not necessarily differ from the stronger rhetoric on the issue in the West, and it has been misconstrued both to mean that Russia sees the use of information warfare in the same way as it sees the use of nuclear weapons or that it would equal a nuclear response. As pointed out by Ulrik Franke, this is a misrepresentation: It is the potential consequences of information warfare that can be equal to those of a weapon of mass destruction (Franke 2015, 27). Nonetheless, having the potential impact equal to weapons of mass destruction certainly represents an effective weapon. As well as being effective, cyberwarfare was also perceived as cheap to perpetrate: “The development costs of cyber weapons . . . are significantly lower than the development of other weapons of inflicting similar damage” (Bazylev et al. 2012, 11). Even though the authors gave less focus to the informationpsychological sphere, they found it important. They concluded that social media, as shown in the Arab Spring, can aid destructive forces and offer opportunities equal to other forms of cyberspace warfare (Bazylev et al. 2012, 12). Kokoshin argued similarly in an interview that in the Russian thinking on future war, “cyberwar, including EW [electronic warfare], is a means of reducing the ‘opponent’s’ real combat effectiveness, a means of disorienting and disinforming him, of fragmenting his command and control system” (Litovkin 2011). A similar notion was described by Chekinov and Bogdanov, who saw that “new information techniques . . . will be capable of paralyzing the barely protected computer systems used to control troops and weapons and depriving the enemy of information transmission function” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2015, 93). The potential of cyberattacks is thus notable in the Russian understanding. However, for natural reasons of operational security, there has not been a large degree of discussion of concrete cyber operations but rather on a theoretical level. In that way, it is hard to establish a closer analysis. The importance of informatization in the military reform of the Russian Armed Forces was described as follows: “Russian analysts use their own vocabulary to describe the transformation of warfare in the 21st century, which they see as dominated by the ‘informatization of warfare’ and the centrality of systems-of-systems in its conduct. Sixth-generation warfare, no-contact warfare,

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long-range no-contact warfare and information warfare have been used to refer to the directions of the evolution of warfare in all spheres” (Kipp 2014, 42, italics added). The key part of the statement above is that the informatization of conventional weapons represented an evolution in warfare rather than a change in the nature of what war is. Even if improved C4ISR systems and long-range, precision weapon systems significantly improved the armed forces’ capability and allowed war to take place at larger distances, they did so only in terms of the application of armed violence. This part of information warfare received most of the attention in regard to Russian military reform and the Russian understanding of war. Nonetheless, cyberwarfare, also included in the informationtechnical sphere, seemed to have an impact on the nature of war. Russian cyber theorists saw that the potential of cyberwarfare was erasing the boundaries of war and peace. In extension, this calls for an idea of war broader than armed violence alone.

Information-Psychological Warfare The Chechen wars were pivotal in placing the information-psychological sphere in the minds of the Russian leaders. They believed they lost the first war from a lack of morale, due to unfavorable reporting, while the Chechens’ use of the Internet was a key difficulty in the second war (Thomas 2003, 223). While Russian forces avoided the press during the first war, “Russian journalists would fly into Daghestan’s Makhachkala airport and get free taxi rides into Chechnya. The Chechens would pay for the taxi ride once the journalist arrived at his or her destination, give interviews, and remunerate the journalists for articles” (Thomas 2003, 219). The war was already unpopular from the start, but the Chechen advantage in the media contributed greatly to the negative image of the Russian government. The Russian media was often critical of the Russian government and exposed its attempts to conceal the number of casualties Russian forces suffered (German 2003, 134, 153). President Putin concluded that it was to a large degree society’s morale that led to Russia’s defeat (Gevorkyan, Timakova, and Kolesnikov 2000, 2). This came as “Russian independent television . . . , the great bulk of the newspapers, and even, in a more veiled way, Russian state television were all bitterly critical of the military intervention” (Lieven 1998, 107). The Russian leadership even saw that the domestic media were “helping the militants to wage a ‘massive propaganda war’ to incite ethnic and religious intolerance and promote a change in Russia’s borders” (German 2003,

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153). The most reliable news outlets for the Russian government were the Ministry of Defense’s newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and the government’s own daily, Rossiyskaya Gazeta. The most critical outlet was Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV. In 2003, the defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, even went so far as to state that Russia’s conduct was “the quintessence of helplessness in the information sphere” (quoted in Giles 2016b, 35). Because of critical reporting, the Russian government saw a need to control information flow about both society and the armed forces. Writing in 1996, Thomas correctly predicted that the future Russian view of information warfare would contain both internal and external propaganda above the militarytechnical aspects of information warfare (Thomas 1996, 33). The Russian government adapted its approach from the first war to the second and took firm control of broadcasting. This was done by allowing access only to journalists with permission from the government and only in certain locations, as well as by censoring their output both in terms of visuals and text (Thomas 2003, 225). The Russian government’s information specialists further prohibited the broadcasting of material that could reduce morale, such as stories of wounded Russian soldiers or military hardware that had been captured (Zaitseva 2014, 62). In the Second Chechen War, the perceived center of gravity in the Russian strategy was the domestic public opinion rather than the hearts and minds of the enemy, the Chechens (Blank 2013, 38). This thinking was indeed reflected in the indiscriminate bombing of Grozny and other cities. Despite the Russian government’s updated media strategy and the focus on the home front, it still struggled in the information-psychological sphere due to the widespread use of the Internet by the Chechens when the Russian government was trying to silence their voices in other media. While the Chechens were technologically inferior to the Russian forces, they managed to transmit their narrative on the Internet. Russia was “outmanoeuvred by a notionally weaker and less capable enemy . . . more adept at use of the internet to bring its message to a global audience” (Giles 2015b, 2). An example is the Internet-based news outlet Kavkaz Tsentr that was set up in March 1999 by the Chechen government. Kavkaz Tsentr was also the target of what was perhaps the first distributed-denial-ofservice (DDoS) cyberattack in Russia in 2002, which originated in Tomsk and was applauded by the local branch of the Federal Security Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB) (Soldatov and Borogan 2015, 151). The Chechens received money, rallied their diaspora, disseminated stories of successful attacks on Russian soldiers, gained support for jihad, and spread information about Russian atrocities (Thomas 2003, 227). In the second war,

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the Chechens showed that a small guerrilla-like actor could succeed in the information war, thanks to the Internet, against a bigger state regardless of its control over state media (Zaitseva 2014, 62). Moreover, “despite the fact that the war began with an unprovoked invasion of a Russian republic [Dagestan] from Chechnya, in global media Russia found itself incapable of overcoming the adversary narrative of Russian aggression” (Giles 2015b, 2). The experiences from the Second Chechen War contributed a twofold response: It served to confirm the earlier view held by the FSB and the other security services that the whole Internet was a threat and the need for the services to develop the means to target their adversaries abroad (Giles 2016a, 28–29). The Chechen wars were, however, not the only driver of increasing governmental control of the media. Before the 1996 presidential election, Boris Yeltsin was only the fifth most popular candidate, and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov had a clear lead. The situation shifted, however, when oligarchs Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky formed a pact to support Yeltsin. Gusinsky’s NTV had a reputation for standing up to the Kremlin but changed to support Yeltsin, something Gusinsky regretted later (Hoffman 2002, 345–46). Their key asset was control of the main television channels, NTV and ORT (later Perviy Kanal). Through the use of smear campaigns against Zyuganov and positive coverage of Yeltsin, Yeltsin was assisted to win the election. Nonetheless, the oligarchs’ loyalty lasted only so long. By the spring of 1999, both had sided with Yuri Luzhkov and Evgeny Primakov, and Yeltsin came under increasing attack (Soldatov and Borogan 2015, 87). Again, Yeltsin’s popularity figures were dropping until Putin was appointed prime minister and managed to get Berezovsky on his side. Thereafter, television was “the decisive force in transforming Mr. Nobody into Mr. President, and Vladimir Putin did not want this powerful political resource of his opponents—or even his mildest critics” (Shevtsova 2005, 104). One of the first things Putin did after winning the election was to consolidate control over broadcast media, often through a mix of pressure and Kremlin-friendly oligarchs buying the stations (Soldatov and Borogan 2015, 106; see also A. Wilson 2005, 44). The takeover was successful, and both Berezovsky and Gusinsky fled Russia. In 2005, “not a single national television channel was free from state control” (Bacon, Renz, and Cooper 2006, 76). Putin’s coming to power cemented how important the information arena is for gaining and maintaining power in Russia. Similarly, the 2008 war in Georgia reinforced the sense of loss in the information arena. Although Georgia fired the first rounds, Russia had difficulty gaining support on the international stage. Rather, there was “a stark contrast

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between Mikheil Saakashvili speaking to Western audiences directly in their own languages . . . and Russia’s own belated and stilted attempts at organising press conferences by the monolingual and uninspiring Deputy Chief of the General Staff Anatoliy Nogovitsyn” (Giles 2015b, 2). The sense of loss in the Georgian war led to calls for the creation of information troops within the armed forces, which would consist of “hackers, journalists, specialists in strategic communications and psychological operations and crucially, linguists” (Giles 2015b, 2). However, such troops did not materialize, at least not formally. Other key events for the Russian leadership were the Arab Spring and the concomitant protests in the Russian elections in 2011–12. Before these events, the Russian view of Internet freedom was split into two camps: those calling for more restrictions on the Internet and those seeking to uphold freedom on the Internet (largely Dmitry Medvedev and his team) (Pigman 2019, 23). However, the protests in the Russian elections, which were building on the momentum from the Arab Spring, were “a unifying experience that conveyed the severity of the threat to regime security emanating from cyberspace” (Pigman 2019, 24). Thereafter, the camp seeking to restrict the Internet took precedence and launched several initiatives to increase control over it from 2012. Theorists The information-psychological aspect refers to the cognitive aspects of information warfare or, in simpler terms, questions concerning the mind. A good illustration of how information-psychological warfare is understood in Russia is given by one of the leading theorists, Sergei Rasturguyev, in his book Informatsionnaya voina (Information warfare), commissioned by the Security Council. He told of a turtle that withdrew into its shell every time a fox tried to attack it. Then the fox put a TV screen outside the turtle’s “house,” showing films of turtles without shells flying. After a while, when the turtle decided to leave its shell and try to fly, the fox caught it. The key part of the analogy for Rasturguyev was that information warfare was the purposeful training of an enemy to remove its own defenses (Rasturguyev 1999, 6–7). This thinking can naturally be seen to underlie the strong anti-EU and anti-NATO narratives underlying Russian information warfare today. This fable is also helpful in explaining how information means achieve strategic effects. That is to say, the best outcome is, of course, to make the adversary do what you want by making it want to do it itself. This thinking is elaborated in the theory of reflexive control, which is a theoretical school on how to control and influence the behavior of an adversary. A US study defined

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it as “a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action” (Thomas 2004, 237). It is about provoking certain stimuli or providing certain incentives to make an adversary make a particular decision. The closest US term for the phenomenon is “perception management” (Thomas 2004, 250). An integral part of this is, of course, deception. The term maskirovka has become popular to describe this in the West, even though an array of terms is used in Russian. Maskirovka most often refers to camouflage, whereas obman translates as deception, dezinformatsiya as disinformation, and vvedeniye v zabluzhdeniye as misleading. These all tie together in the term voyennaya khitrost—military cunning or stratagem (see Thomas 2011, appendix 4). It is unclear if the concept of reflexive control is meaningfully different from long-standing insights of strategy as a dynamic interaction—for instance, as articulated by the control school of strategy: “The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control of the patterns of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent” (Wylie 1989, 77–78). Nonetheless, the Russian school of thought is argued to venture a lot further and include subfields such as philosophy, psychology, and semiotics; the study of signs and symbols; and their use or interpretation (Thomas 2004, 251). The importance of reflexive control lies less in how well the Russian government conducts it than in that information warfare is a key means of conducting it and that the West is seen to conduct it against Russia. One example of a case that is believed to be reflexive control on a grand scale is the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a US missile defense initiative. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and one of the most important figures in national security, stated in an interview that the CIA identified the Soviet Union’s economy as its weakest link. Thus, the United States designed a two-pronged approach to reduce the USSR’s income from foreign trade and to increase its expenditures; SDI was a key initiative in the latter aspect (Yegorov 2014). Already in the 1990s, conflict in the information domain was seen as a key reason for the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russian analysts argued that the loss in the Cold War was due to a “successful information operation by the West that destroyed not only the Soviet Union, but communism, the country’s unifying ideology” (Thomas 1998, 18). A similar conclusion was offered by

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Chekinov and Bogdanov (2011) and the Russian information warfare theorist Igor Panarin, a former officer of the KGB (Committee for State Security) and FAPSI (Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information), who was a professor at the diplomatic academy, a member of the Academy of Military Science, and a Eurasianist ideologue. Panarin’s thought is not necessarily representative yet holds authority as he was one of the authors of the 2000 Information Security Doctrine (Darczewska 2014, 14–15). Panarin argued in his 2010 book Pervaya mirovaya informatsionannaya voina: Razval SSSR (Information world war I: The collapse of the Soviet Union) that the first information world war started with an assault against Russia in 1943. The main ideologue was Winston Churchill, who was later accompanied by George Kennan. This aggression went on until the election of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Panarin saw as responsible for the dissolution of the USSR (Panarin 2010). In a follow-up article in 2012 titled “Vtoraya mirovaya informatsionnaya voina: Voina protiv Rossii,” (Information world war II: War against Russia) he launched the idea that a second information world war was ongoing. The war’s main purpose was seen to be the West’s goal of eliminating an alternative world model that rivaled liberal colonialism (Panarin 2012). The alternative model was strongly on the rise in China, India, Brazil, and within the Eurasian Union. Panarin saw that Russia was not ready for this information aggression, and this led to defeat in Georgia when faced by the “dirty war” of the American and British media. He saw that the international audience was being fed anti-Russian information and the Russian government was not adequately prepared to meet this (Panarin 2008). Likewise, the Russian government was not ready for the “information offensive” from the United States and the United Kingdom in connection with the Russian elections of 2011–12. Panarin saw that it represented “a new stage in the information warfare campaign against Russia,” where the main objective was the destruction of the Russian state (Panarin 2011). As a part of this aggression, he mentioned $190 million that the United States had donated for “Russian civil society development” (Panarin 2011). He saw the information warfare campaign as subtle and sophisticated, exploiting the Russian government’s “actual mistakes, as well as the government’s inaptitude in online media campaigning” (Panarin 2011). This drew on lessons from the Arab Spring, where he saw that the United Kingdom had successfully used social networks for the destabilization of targeted states (Panarin 2012). Panarin argued for a set of measures to protect Russia: the creation of an informationwarfare system; a public tribunal for Gorbachev; the blocking of external

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sources of information influence, especially on the Internet; advocacy of the protection of the constitutional system; and effective action to create a positive image of the Russian Federation (Panarin 2012). A practical example of the international dimension of informationpsychological warfare can be taken from the Georgian war. Before the outset of the war, journalists from NTV (a TV channel now owned by Gazprom, a Russian gas company mostly controlled by the government), TV Tsentr (a state-owned TV channel), Russia Today (an international state-owned TV network), and TV Zvezda (the Defense Ministry TV and radio channel) started arriving in South Ossetia, while the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta was denied accreditation (Titov 2008). This meant that they were able to report the Russian view from the outset. The deputy chief of the General Staff, Anatoly Nogovitsyn, commended Russian journalists for their unprecedented unity with the Russian army, which enabled the West to see the Russian point of view (Thomas 2011, 307–8). Moreover, the Russian Armed Forces managed to disable the Georgians in the information domain. The Georgian government lacked the capability to communicate with its own citizens due to cyberattacks against its communications infrastructure. The Russian forces cut off the main Georgian fiber-optic and telephone line in the Black Sea (Deibert, Rohozinski, and Crete-Nishihata 2012, 6). This could be seen as learning from the Chechen wars the importance of morale and psychological factors. Severing Georgians’ access to the Internet would increase confusion and decrease their ability to receive their government’s communications. Also underlining the importance of information warfare in future wars, Nogovitsyn warned that “leading world powers in the next few years will have the opportunity to conduct a full-scale war in the information sphere” (Usov 2009). For Vladislav Sherstyuk, the information realm was the key priority for national security. He argued in an article that “in modern conditions, information security becomes the most important base of the entire national security system of the Russian state” (Sherstyuk 2005, 48). Thus, he saw that “the information sphere is one of the system-shaping factors of the life of the state” (Sherstyuk 2005, 48; see also Sherstyuk 2003). This meant, for Sherstyuk, that information systems’ “influence on politics, economics, and economic life, the spiritual and ideological sphere and people’s mind-set have now become decisive and all-embracing” (Sherstyuk 2005, 48). It is furthermore worth examining the views of Anatoly Streltsov, another information warfare theorist and coauthor of the Information Security Doctrine. Since 1995, Streltsov has been attached to the Security Council and served as

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an adviser to Sherstyuk at the Institut Problem Informatsionnoy Bezopasnosti at Lomonosov Moscow State University. In a 2011 article, he argued (as in the 2009 National Security Strategy) that the worldwide information struggle was becoming a fact (Streltsov 2011, 35). Streltsov saw that conflicts arose because of the interest in countries to influence others’ policies on one side and countries trying to be politically independent and sovereign on the other (Streltsov 2011, 36). A constituent part of sovereignty, according to Streltsov, was the ability to enforce national laws and hinder illegal interference. If the state is not able to fulfill this function, political rivalry could degenerate into a power struggle of social and individual violence and color revolutions (Streltsov 2011, 36). Outside actors would then support the internal political actors of their preference and increase their chances of coming to power. Streltsov thus made a direct connection between the ongoing global information struggle and potential color revolutions, linked by the question of sovereignty and enforcing national laws. The objective in an information struggle, Streltsov continued, can be achieved either with technology (an information-technological struggle) or without (a political struggle). The former struggle entailed using information to damage the adversary’s interests and the security and stability of its information infrastructure, sometimes referred to as “soft power” (Streltsov 2011, 38). However, as the national infrastructure was merging with the global and an information “arms race” began, the technological struggle’s significance in the overall information struggle became greater (Streltsov 2011, 38). Streltsov argued that this arms race acquired urgency because of the competition among countries for resources, markets, and cultural domination and the “many unresolved political, economic and cultural differences in relations between Russia and several other countries” (Streltsov 2011, 38). Last, he argued for information support for state policy. This included spreading a positive political image of the state, both to the international community and nationally, and informing society about state policy (Streltsov 2011, 40). It thus becomes clear that Streltsov offered a broad perspective on information warfare, including views of an ongoing information arms race affecting cultural competition as well as foreign actors’ policies to affect legislation and sovereignty. The emphasis on sovereignty does not sound too controversial perhaps, but here it is useful for context to consider the international criticism that the Russian regime has received for increasingly restrictive measures in Russia. The critique can thus be constructed as a part of an information struggle that can make conflicts and color revolutions arise. The sentiment

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presented by Streltsov can be seen reflected in less explicit phrasing in the 2014 Military Doctrine, which listed the use of ICT aimed at states’ sovereignty and political independence as an external military danger. Information-psychological warfare was perceived to be the main arena in which Western states have managed to spread their values, fomenting the color revolutions and the Arab Spring. Putin stated in a speech in 2012 that Russia’s experience shows that “cultural identity, spiritual and moral values, and value codes are the realm of tough competition and sometimes targets of open information warfare [protivoborstvo] and well-orchestrated propaganda attacks. Attempts to influence the outlook of entire peoples, the desire to subordinate their will, to impose one’s system of values and concepts—are an absolute reality” (Putin 2012b). This statement particularly pointed out the influence on values and culture that information warfare gives and the connection to color revolutions. Putin also saw that this phenomenon was an ongoing reality. This information confrontation is seen to have the potential to lead to the loss of a national idea and of spiritual and material values, as well as to a political or economic crisis or the disintegration of the army (Zaitseva 2014, 58). The Russian perception was argued to be that information warfare could ultimately unhinge society and the state (Blank 2008b, 491). The then chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, particularly emphasized the role of propaganda in modern wars. He argued that a “classical war of the twentieth century consisted usually of 80 percent violence and 20 percent propaganda. New-type wars consist of 80 to 90 percent propaganda and 10 to 20 percent violence” (Kartapolov 2015, 33). He also drew a direct connection between the impact on consciousness through Internet and the creation of color revolutions (Kartapolov 2015, 30). He furthermore argued that the Euromaidan uprising showed that these actions “were no less destructive than large-scale aggression” (Kartapolov 2015, 30). This illustrates the growing role of information means in modern conflict, and it is noteworthy, given Kartapolov’s senior role on the General Staff. Going further on the EU and the US role in Ukraine, Vasily Burenok argued that “the refinement of information warfare continued with Ukraine where the aim [was] regime change by the changing of mass consciousness” (Burenok 2014). Likewise, Chekinov and Bogdanov saw a strong potential information-psychological dimension of warfare: “Information and psychological warfare will come on top of all forms and methods of operations in future wars to achieve superiority in troop and weapon control and to erode the morale and psychological spirit of the opposing side’s armed forces

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personnel and population. Indeed, information warfare and psychological operations lay much of the groundwork for victory” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2015, 94). The broad view of information-psychological warfare has led many Russian theorists to conclude that they are in an ongoing information war. This view was also stated by Putin in a series of interviews in 2000 before he was elected president. He stated that accusations of the involvement of Russian security services in the apartment bombings in Moscow 1999 were nothing but part of the information war against Russia (Gevorkyan, Timakova, and Kolesnikov 2000, 120). This was stated in the context of the large-scale international criticism of Russia’s conduct of the Second Chechen War. Other theorists, such as Sergei Komov, Sergei Korotkov, and Igor Dylevskiy, argued that Washington would “do its best to actively apply all its above-mentioned arsenal of resources of modern information operations in peacetime” (Komov, Korotkov, and Dylevskiy 2008, 21). A 2008 study of Russia’s view of information wars found this notion to be common among Russian analysts, notably including leading theorist Gareyev and Eurasian ideologist Aleksandr Dugin. They “openly state their belief that the country is facing an information or network war (by which they mean hostile media criticism of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime)” (Blank 2008a, 238). However, it is worth remembering that not all writing about propaganda refers to the perceived threat from the West. The long-standing problem with terrorism in Russia, especially from the North Caucasus, has also played out in the information sphere. As described above, an integral part of the Chechens’ strategy was their ability to conduct information operations, recruitment, and propaganda dissemination on the Internet. Nonetheless, it is clear that the main perpetrator of this information war against Russia was perceived to be the West. The idea of Russia being in the middle of an information war has been shared by many Russian theorists since. For example, while commenting on relations with the EU over Ukraine, Aleksandr Mikhailov, a retired FSB major general, stated that information warfare has been going on since the birth of humanity (Pravda 2014). However, now technology has advanced so far that its potential has increased significantly. Regarding Russia being under attack, he saw that the goals of the enemy were obvious: “a complete demoralisation of the Russian population and then the demoralisation of Russian authorities and administration” (Pravda 2014). Thus, it seems that the conclusion of the wide definition of information-psychological warfare is that there is an ongoing attack against Russia. Expressing a similar notion, Anatoly Maruyev, a military

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theorist, argued that “since Russia’s geopolitical opponents, in particular, the U.S. and its allies, have intensified geopolitical rivalry and the information war they have started against Russia, it is important for this country to respond to the information war adequately to maintain its own information security” (Maruyev 2009, 8). A similar view was given by Nikolai Borduzha, secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and a former secretary of the Russian Security Council and chief of presidential staff. He stated that “essentially, a full-scale information war has been launched in the global information space” (Borduzha 2014, 31). This was done by “powerful media pressure on states subject to external intervention” (Borduzha 2014, 31). This perception was later echoed by Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov, who, in 2016, stated that “a number of states actually launched an information war against Russia” (Gerasimov 2016b). In 2017, Gerasimov saw that “Western countries are increasing the scale of a tough information war unleashed against Russia” (Gerasimov 2017b). For Gerasimov, this consisted of European and American media blaming every negative in the world on Russian security services or hackers, with the goal of besmirching Russia (Gerasimov 2017b). In October 2018, Gerasimov echoed the notion of Russia being in an information war in the foreword to the new edition of Gareyev’s book Battles on the MilitaryHistorical Front (Pershutkin 2018). This view of the information war was also shared by the Russian public. In December 2014, 80 percent of the respondents to a Levada Center poll felt that Russia was in an information war, divided more of less equally as to whether Ukraine or the West had started it (Levada Center 2014a). In November 2015, the share of respondents believing Russia was in an information war was down to 44 percent (Levada Center 2015). Two and a half years later, in June 2017, the number had surged again, and 69 percent believed that Russia was in an information war (Levada Center 2017). This notion was also echoed by a few Western analysts. Giles saw that “examining Russian assessments of current events makes it clear that it considers itself to be engaged in full-scale information warfare” (Giles 2016b, 27; Giles 2015b, 1). He added that “the perceived threat is an existential one” (Giles 2016b, 37). Blank saw that “we may believe we are at peace with Russia, but Russian leaders do not share this view” (Blank 2013, 42). It is clear that a number of theorists felt that Russia was in an information war, a notion that grew the strongest after 2011. However, it is still unclear whether they are referring to a war in the full sense of the word or if information warfare is seen as a lower-intensity form of warfare. The views that seeing

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information and information warfare as violent and as effective as a large-scale war would imply that it should be perceived as war. It is, however, unclear how arguments such as Kartapolov’s that war today consists of 80–90 percent propaganda and only 10–20 percent violence relates to the idea of war defined by violence. In all cases, it is clear that the importance of information warfare had increased significantly among Russian theorists. Indeed, while Russian offensive actions recently have been analyzed, Russian elites’ threat perception “remains relatively neglected by observers” (Pigman 2019, 22). The lack of attention to Russian views makes analysts also miss the extent to which Russian threat perception is the backdrop to Russian offensive action. For example, the Arab Spring and the protests in the Russian elections were seen to have been largely mobilized and coordinated on social media. Thereafter, the Russian leadership both increased resilience with Internet censorship (expanding the definition of “traitor” and increasing scrutiny of blogs) and conducted a counteroffensive with DDoS attacks, automated accounts (bots), and pro-Kremlin “keyboard warriors” (Soldatov and Borogan 2015, 149–74; Aro 2016).

Conclusion Information warfare has led to great changes in the Russian view of conventional military force as well as nonmilitary warfare. The way in which information warfare has revolutionized conventional military force is roughly captured by the term “network-centric warfare,” which relies on the increasing importance of the C4ISR complex to conduct military operations. Its predecessor came from the MTR and entered Russian thinking with force after the Gulf War and was later carried further by Slipchenko. NCW is seen to have changed the speed, range, and capabilities of conventional military conflict to the degree that it represented a fundamental shift in the character of war but not its nature. Nonetheless, the debate in Russia on conventional military means still circles around how informatization is affecting the application of military means. Cyberwarfare is seen to have the potential for large-scale destruction without military force and can be used without a formal declaration of war. However, its effect on elites and doctrines is not significant enough to conclude that it has changed the nature of war. The fundamental novelty in the understanding of the nature of war is, rather, information-psychological warfare. As the information arena is key for domestic and international power, information-psychological warfare is seen to be so effective that it can alter the consciousness of a country, eroding trust in public

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institutions and state policy to the degree that the citizens are prepared to revolt, creating color revolutions. In this way, information warfare is understood to be more effective than military force and able to reach strategic goals by itself. Several Russian theorists and elites see that information should be considered violent and that Russia is in an ongoing information war. Therefore, information warfare is seen to blur the boundaries between war and peace. A crucial difference between the Russian and Western threat perceptions has been that the Russian view includes the content of information as a threat, whereas the Western view has, at least up until recently, focused on the free flow of information. It is because of this understanding of information warfare that the Russian threat perception has been notably broad, including everything from the influence on the mass consciousness and social and state stability to values of patriotism. This is also the background against which the domestic Russian media was claimed to be a part of a propaganda war against the Russian state during the First Chechen War. The impact of the information-psychological sphere can be seen in that a large number of central theorists and political elites have argued that Russia is in an information war with the West. Some have contended that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was actually due to a successful information campaign from the West. Notably, Kartapolov and Burenok saw that information warfare was a key means for the West to create the Euromaidan uprising, which led to, in the Russian rhetoric, a civil war. In this light, actions such as the promotion of democracy and criticism of human rights abuses can be seen as ways to conduct information wars. The difference in values is an integral part of this, wherein Russia sees the need both to internally strengthen the support for its own model and spiritual renewal and to isolate foreign actors’ abilities to influence it. The 2000 Information Security Doctrine explicitly formulated unsuccessful government control of the media as a threat. This securitization is the background against which both traditional and social media came under governmental, or government-friendly, control. The imminent sense of threat among the Russian leaders has also been an essential part of the Russian conduct of information warfare. Because it perceived it lost the First Chechen War due to a lack of morale, which came from open traditional media and the free movement of journalists in the conflict zone, the leadership restricted broadcasting and used loyal journalists in the Second Chechen War. Because Russia felt it lost the global information battle in the war in Georgia, it significantly increased Sputnik (a government-run international news agency) and RT’s international operations. Because it believed the Arab Spring and the protests in the Russian elections of 2011–12

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were organized on social media, the leadership increased restrictions and created its own organization (the Internet Research Agency) to combat grassroots dissent internationally. To be clear, this is not to make a justification for Russian information operations—simply to give the context in which they evolved. The importance of information warfare, and particularly informationpsychological warfare, has become reflected among Russian military theorists and doctrines. For instance, the 2010 Military Doctrine stated that information warfare could achieve political objectives without the use of force. The 2011 Conceptual Views saw it as the armed forces’ task to counter information interference in internal affairs. There has also been a notable shift among military theorists to see information-psychological as more important than armed force rather than a complement to it (e.g., Chekinov and Bogdanov; Gerasimov, Kartapolov, and Burenok). It would not be an exaggeration to state that there has been a militarization of information warfare, particularly information-psychological warfare. Furthermore, information-psychological warfare is intrinsically linked to color revolutions by its potential to destabilize the state, society, and public consciousness as well as patriotic and spiritual values. The question is thus whether the increasing utility of informationpsychological warfare is causing a change in the Russian understanding of the nature of war. While difficult to state conclusively, this investigation suggests that this is the case. Information-psychological warfare is so effective that it should be considered violent, that it blurs the boundaries of war and peace, and that Russia considers itself to be engaged in a large-scale information war. Furthermore, it is seen as a key enabler for the creation of color revolutions, the major threat from the West in the Russian view. If these statements hold true, they are hardly compatible with the customary definition of war as defined by armed violence. Rather, its definition then would have to expand and thus lead to a change in the nature of war. Information warfare is not just changing the understanding of war in isolation—it is also seen as an integral component in the creation of color revolutions, which have become the main threat for the Russian leadership. This will be investigated in the next chapter.

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Color Revolutions

It was this fear of “regime change” and a “color revolution” that prompted the Putin regime to go to war [in Ukraine]. —Heidi Reisinger and Aleksandr Golts (2015, 114)

T

he threat of revolutions has long been present in the minds of Russian leaders, but it took until the early 2010s for them to take center stage in terms of the threat perception and understanding of war among Russian elites and military theorists. This shift started with a series of nonviolent uprisings in the former Soviet Union from 2003 to 2005 known as the color revolutions.1 In Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, the opposition succeeded with nonviolent protest tactics, the training for which was often financially supported by Western organizations and/or governments (Mitchell 2012; Spoerri 2008, 81; Beacháin and Polese 2010, 37; Beissinger 2007, 261). The protesters rallied under calls for better relations with the West and “Western values,” and they received political support from Western governments. The pinnacle of the threat from color revolutions came with the Euromaidan revolt in Ukraine 2013–14, which the Russian leadership countered with an invasion of Ukraine and an illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula. As the second chapter concluded, the understanding of war in Russia had widened because of the increasing utility of nonmilitary means, most prominently information warfare and the threat of color revolutions. This chapter analyzes the Russian understanding of color revolutions among political elites and military theorists. It furthermore demonstrates how the Russian understanding of the color revolutions changed among political elites from being seen as mostly spontaneous events to a central threat to the Russian government. This is an integral part of the shift in military elites’ understanding of war, which sees nonmilitary and nonviolent means becoming more important than military ones. The color revolutions were understood as a way in which Western states—in the beginning mainly the United States—could engineer 124

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regime change in hostile states with nonmilitary means. This was achieved via information warfare, NGOs, youth organizations, promotion of Western values, and diplomatic pressure. With these tools, Western states were perceived to destabilize a society, generating a popular uprising in the name of democracy that, when successful, led to citizens overthrowing their ruling regime.

The Political View At the outset of the color revolutions, they were not seen as nonmilitary warfare by Western governments. Rather, this understanding developed gradually. Among the Russian political elites from 2004 up until the 2007–8 elections in Russia, the threat of color revolutions was increasingly securitized, but it was seen to come from NGOs and the Russian opposition. When the 2007–8 elections passed without major criticism and after the “reset” between Russia and the United States in 2009, the threat subsided momentarily on the Russian agenda. This came to change with the Arab Spring and the protests during the elections in Russia 2011–12. After this, the threat of color revolutions took a central role in the threat perception of the political elites and was directly attributed to Western governments. The epitome of this threat came with the Euromaidan revolution in 2013–14, which the Russian leadership saw as a success for Western color revolutions against a critical ally of Russia. 2003–5 The Rose Revolution in Georgia was not met by strong protests from the Russian government, and it helped to mediate President Eduard Shevardnadze leaving office in 2003. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Russian government’s criticism of the West grew stronger. On December 23, 2004— three days before the rerun of the second round of voting in the Ukrainian presidential elections, in which Viktor Yushchenko was elected president— Putin held his end-of-year press conference. In it, he criticized the double standards of the United States and the EU in propagating democracy and human rights but not supporting the Serbs in Kosovo, the Albanians in Macedonia, or the ethnic Russians in Latvia (Putin 2004). Putin criticized the promotion of democracy by the US and EU as selective and instrumental, but he did not accuse them of creating the revolution. However, he stated that “the most dangerous [thing] . . . is the creation of a system of permanent revolutions” (Putin 2004). Three weeks later, on January 13, 2005, Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov also criticized the West for double standards in its Ukrainian policy.

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In his view, the Western nations had stated that they would acknowledge the election only if “their” candidate won. Ivanov felt that “in regard to a sovereign state . . . [such statements] are fraught with the most grave consequences. The entire history demonstrates that democracy cannot be imposed upon from the outside” (Ivanov 2005). He also stated that the importance of the CIS states to Russia is “why we react and will react the way we do to exports of revolution to the CIS states, no matter and what color—pink, blue, you name it” (Ivanov 2005). In February 2005, Putin was asked about the impact of the Orange Revolution and other potential revolutions around Russia. He stated that “the most important concern for me personally is not that there are some turbulent events there but that they go beyond the current legislation and constitution” (Putin 2005a). He also asked why some countries had the privilege to live within law and with stability while other countries in the post-Soviet space were doomed to Leon Trotsky’s state of permanent revolution (Putin 2005a). He and Ivanov saw revolutions as exported by NGOs rather than directly attributing them to Western governments. Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff at the presidential administration and responsible for managing domestic policy, highlighted that Russia was threatened. In an interview with Der Spiegel in June 2005, Surkov noted that Russia must look to the West for “the technological and intellectual solutions” to modernize (Klussman and Mayr 2005). However, when asked if the color revolutions worried him, Surkov stated that “there will be no uprisings here. We realize, of course, that these events have made an impression on many local politicians in Russia—and on various foreign non-governmental organizations that would like to see the scenario repeated in Russia. We understand this. By now there are even technologies for overthrowing governments and schools where one can learn the trade, so to speak” (Klussman and Mayr 2005). Thus, he highlighted foreign NGOs as important actors in color revolutions and the schools for fomenting revolutions. This is interesting in conjunction with the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Serbia, which received funding from Western NGOs and trained opposition activists in Georgia and Ukraine (Jones 2006, 40). Surkov, like Putin, did not directly attribute the color revolutions to Western states but rather foreign NGOs. A month later, Putin stated that financing of political activity from abroad was to be forbidden, a reaction that an editorial in the Russian newspaper Vedemosti labeled “Maidanophobia” (Vedemosti 2005). The sense of threat was shared by the population; in July 2005, 42 percent thought that an event similar to those in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan could happen in Russia (Gazeta 2005).

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In September 2005, Putin stated at a press conference before the EU-Russia summit that he did not see that the United States or the EU were working against Russia. However, he also said he knew that “certain non-governmental organisations in Ukraine were financed by foreign governments” (Steele 2005). These statements laid the basis for the NGO law that significantly reduced their ability to operate under bureaucratic pressure. One of the coauthors of the bill and Duma deputy, Valery Galchenko, saw that NGOs were leading to a gradual destruction of the Russian state, most acutely in the spiritual sphere (Farisova 2005). The law was introduced in November 2005 and ratified in January 2006. It emphasized Russia’s unique character and need for national unity. Sinikukka Saari noted that the law was directly tied to fear of color revolutions: “The link between the Orange Revolution and the urgency of passing the laws was made explicit in public comments before the laws were approved. The aim was claimed to be the elimination of the potential for Western-sponsored uprisings” (Saari 2009, 743–44). At the same time, the Russian government created the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, which was supposed to be a consultative platform for civil society to analyze draft legislation and provide oversight. However, the selection process was rigged, and the chamber was filled by pro-Kremlin activists (Greene 2014, 87). The Civic Chamber was another way to counter the fear of opposition NGOs to give the impression that NGOs already had an influence on politics. In discussing the potential of color revolutions, Vladimir Frolov, a political analyst, argued that Russia was facing a fundamentally new phenomenon in the post-Soviet space. In an article titled “Democracy by Remote Control,” he argued that elections in the CIS “turned into a convenient pretext for outside multilateral interference” (Frolov 2005). Frolov saw that the outside factors consisted of a combination of Western NGOs, mass media, election observation missions, and Western countries’ political leadership (Frolov 2005). He argued that they succeeded in managing election results by declaring which ones were legitimate and which were not, acting as a “political and legal instrument for regime change” (Frolov 2005). Western mass media and local media played a crucial role in conducting an “intensive information campaign . . . [that] aims to convince the world at large that the ruling regime of the country ‘X’ is undemocratic, corrupted and authoritarian, and that it intends to falsify the forthcoming election” (Frolov 2005). The increasing fear of color revolutions should be seen in the context of the unilateral US drive under George W. Bush, in which democracy promotion became the administration’s “central foreign policy proposition,” especially in

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Bush’s second term (Baev 2011, 11). This included the invasion of Iraq (without the consent of the UN Security Council), which aimed to replace Saddam Hussein’s regime with a democratic government. In Afghanistan, the US operation that NATO later joined also adopted the end goal of democratic governance. From 2005 to 2009, conflict over the idea of democracy and what means are legitimate to promote it became a “key factor in the deterioration of US-Russia bilateral relations” (Deyermond 2015, 29). The disagreement was also exacerbated by a clear instrumentalization of the United States in its promotion of democracy. An example is how criticism of the government of Kyrgyzstan was moderate as long as it supported the United States and hosted a military base in Manas; criticism increased once the US was expelled (Deyermond 2015, 31–32). This instrumentalization was one reason why the Russian leadership came to see democracy promotion as a geopolitical tool where it suited US interests. Another factor that supported the view that the color revolutions were created by the United States is that the Bush administration included the “democratic revolutions in Georgia, Lebanon, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan” in a list of President Bush’s accomplishments (Deyermond 2015, 33; White House 2005). Similarly, incumbent rulers in the color revolution states blamed Western forces. Shevardnadze in Georgia called the revolution a coup caused by USfunded election monitors, who had diminished the authority of the elections, and by George Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI), which had financed youth and media organizations, fomenting revolution (Horvath 2011, 3). The Leonid Kuchma government in Ukraine saw international organizations and Western officials’ statements and support for NGOs as foreign interference in internal affairs (Sushko and Prystako 2006, 126). In this way, there was a confluence of interest both from the Bush administration and the incumbent regimes to overstate the importance of foreign actors to the revolutions. Prior to the adoption of the NGO law in 2005, Putin and Surkov were cautious. They emphasized cooperation with the West and blamed the involvement in the color revolutions indirectly on NGOs rather than directly on Western governments. The Russian leadership’s first reaction to the Rose and Tulip Revolutions was mild, whereas the Orange Revolution was met more harshly. Indeed, Putin made no mention at the time of foreign involvement in the revolution in Kyrgyzstan while speaking at a press conference on March 25, 2005. Rather, he stated that he was not surprised by the revolution and saw that it was a result of weak authorities and accumulated socioeconomic problems (Putin 2005b).

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2006–8 A notable change in the Russian government’s public statements came in late 2005 and early 2006. A milestone was Surkov’s concept of “sovereign democracy,” which was launched in a speech for the party United Russia in early 2006. He saw that sovereignty and democracy were the two strategic conditions that would ensure Russia’s long-term sustainability (Surkov 2006). The insistence on sovereignty focused on the nonintervention of other states in Russia’s internal affairs. The use of democracy as the second strategic condition sought to undermine the legitimacy of democracy as a basis for criticism of Russia by the West; domestically, it meant Russia’s right to choose for itself and, internationally, more democracy in the international system, as opposed to US hegemony (Deyermond 2015, 37). Surkov saw the main threats to Russia’s sovereignty to be “international terrorism; . . . direct military confrontation; lack of competitiveness of the economy; soft absorption of modern ‘orange technologies’ while reducing the national immunity to outside influences” (Surkov 2006). Surkov connected the threat from orange technologies, by which he meant “eroding values, declaring the state ineffective, and provoking internal conflicts” with “soft capture” (Surkov 2006). Soft capture could be seen as a reference to “soft power,” a term launched by Joseph Nye and that had become a prominent concept in the US foreign policy community to describe how the United States should conduct foreign policy based on attraction rather than coercion. Surkov warned that orange technologies were “a very real threat to sovereignty,” and since they had been utilized in four countries (arguably Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan), why not in a fifth (arguably Russia) (Surkov 2006)? The concept of sovereign democracy was reiterated by Sergei Markov, then a member of the Civic Chamber and later a Duma deputy and a doverennoye litso (envoy) of President Putin. Markov saw sovereign democracy as a way to emphasize the development of the Russian political system toward democracy and away from subordination to external forces such as the United States and EU. He continued to state that the concept was explicitly in opposition to the phenomenon of the “Orange Revolution” (RIA Novosti 2006). For Markov, the Orange Revolution had been intended to subordinate Ukraine to Western forces. Likewise, Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin stated that Russia could not agree to a violent “democratization” of the post-Soviet space (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2006): “‘Color revolutions’ or information and political pressure on the current government . . . inevitably leads to

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destabilization of the situation in the region, with serious long-term complications with unpredictable consequences, including in terms of the growth of extremism” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2006). Thus, the deputy foreign minister understood color revolutions to consist of information and political pressure as well as the growth of extremism. In February 2007, President Putin gave a speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy. His main focus was not on the threat of color revolutions, although he criticized foreign governments’ support of democracy movements as an abuse of the concept of democracy. Rather, he criticized the United States and an uncontained “hyper use of force” in international relations (Putin 2007a). He discussed foreign governments’ support for NGOs in the questionsand-answers section, outlining that “when these non-governmental organizations are financed by foreign governments, we see them as an instrument that foreign states use to carry out their Russian policies” (Putin 2007a). Putin concluded that the financing from foreign governments in the name of democracy was “simply one state exerting influence on another” (Putin 2007a). Thus, he underlined the view of democracy promotion as a cover for foreign countries to pursue their interests, using NGOs as the means to that end. In another interview, Putin added election monitors to the threat and asserted that Russia was a target. He saw that the decision by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to monitor the Russian elections as a result of pressure from the United States intended “to disrupt the Russian elections and delegitimize its outcome” (quoted in J.L. Wilson 2010, 25). Thus, the Russian government made it so difficult for international monitors to work in Russia that they refused to try (Finkel and Brudny 2012, 18). This was part of a four-pronged approach to counter color revolutions; the other three were to regulate NGOs, channel youth activism toward support of the government, and manage elections (J.L. Wilson 2010, 22). The notion that NGOs were political weapons was echoed by Markov, who suggested in an interview that the NGO was the “main political weapon” in the twenty-first century and that “in anticipation of the Russian federal election, financing of NGOs from the West has intensified” (Romanov 2007). This is interesting to read in parallel with Putin’s yearly address to the Federal Assembly in April 2007, a week after Markov’s interview: Some, making skillful use of pseudo-democratic rhetoric, would like to return us to the recent past, some in order to once again plunder the nation’s resources with impunity and rob the people and the state, and others in order to  deprive our country of  its economic and  political independence. There

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has been an increasing influx of money from abroad being used to intervene directly in  our internal affairs. Looking back at  the  more distant past, we recall the talk about the civilising role of colonial powers during the colonial era. Today, “civilisation” has been replaced by democratisation, but the aim is the same—to ensure unilateral gains and one’s own advantage, and to pursue one’s own interests. (Putin 2007b)

On the domestic level, Putin’s criticism of foreign governments’ use of NGOs and democracy promotion also increased. The notion of foreign, and more specifically Western, interference was then codified in law two weeks later in the Duma. The law spoke of “unprecedented attempts” by the United States to influence the 2007 parliamentary elections and 2008 presidential elections (J.L. Wilson 2009, 378). The director of the FSB and later head of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, echoed this sentiment. He saw that Western politicians were “nurturing plans aimed at the dismemberment of Russia” (Zyatkov 2007). 2009–12 After the 2007–8 Russian election passed without major criticism from the West and the reset by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and US president Barack Obama in January 2009, the strongest criticism relating to color revolutions faded for a while. The Obama administration “reduced the public emphasis on Russia’s democratic and human rights failings, which had become central both to the Bush administration’s criticism of Russia and, in consequence, to the deterioration of the bilateral relationship” (Deyermond 2013, 506). On the Russian side, Medvedev seemed to improve the situation regarding human rights and democracy by, for instance, revising the NGO law (J.L. Wilson 2010, 27). The initial Russian reaction to the Arab Spring reflected this more cooperative atmosphere. Medvedev stated that President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia in January 2011 should serve as a lesson to governments to develop their societies, and after Hosni Mubarak’s fall, he supported a “strong, democratic Egypt” (Katz 2012, 4). Russia did not block UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which formed the legal basis for the military operation in Libya, and agreed with Western leaders that the leader Muammar Gadaffi had to leave. Moreover, the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Chirkin, expressed Russian support for the protection of Libyan civilians, even with force (Averre and Davies 2015, 818). However, there was a rift between Putin and

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Medvedev when Putin called the Western intervention in Libya a “crusade,” which Medvedev denounced two hours later as unacceptable language (Katz 2012, 5). The Russian view on the West’s role in the Arab Spring and the Russian elections worsened during late 2011 and early 2012. This happened as relations between Russia and the West deteriorated due to domestic pressures in Russia and US criticism of the Russian elections and the Russian government’s handling of the protests (Deyermond 2013, 513). Medvedev stated in a meeting of the National Anti-Terrorism Committee that the Arab Spring “is the kind of scenario that they were preparing for us, and now they will be trying even harder to bring it about” (Medvedev 2011). Putin, then prime minister, claimed at the United Russia congress in November that foreign governments sought to influence the outcomes of the elections by paying so-called grant recipients (News.ru 2011). By now, it was clear that the Russian leaders saw Western governments as responsible for color revolutions. After the parliamentary elections on December 4, 2011, reports of election fraud led to street protests. The protests escalated and continued until the spring of 2012. The protesters came to rely on online mobilization, given the control and censorship of traditional media in Russia (White and McAllister 2014, 79). When asked in the end-of-the-year press conference in 2011 if the protesters’ white ribbon was a symbol of a color revolution in Russia, Putin responded that “everything is clear. This is a proven scheme of destabilization of society. I do not think that this scheme was born by itself ” (Putin 2011). Thereafter, he connected the roots of the protests with the Orange Revolution, arguing that “some of our opposition at that time were in the Ukraine and officially worked as advisors to the then president Viktor Yushchenko. They naturally carry this practice to Russian soil” (Putin 2011). Putin claimed that the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, “gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work” (BBC 2011). He thus saw the United States as the actor that started the Russian protests. The Russian opposition was active in the Orange Revolution, and it later cooperated with Orange Revolution activists. For example, both opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov and Ilya Yashin participated in the Orange Revolution. Yashin became the leader of Oborona, a Russian youth organization. The Ukrainian organizations Pora and Znayu held seminars on their experiences and techniques from the Orange Revolution with Russian youth organizations that the United States and European states funded (Schwirtz 2007, 74). The bulk of the US support came mainly from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, a prodemocracy organization primarily funded by

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Congress), the National Democratic Institute (NDI, a prodemocracy organization mainly connected to the Democratic Party), and the International Republican Institute (IRI, a prodemocracy organization mainly connected to the Republican Party) and focused on political youth organizations in the Russian opposition, such as Oborona, Yabloko, Za Rodinu, the youth wing of the Soyuz Pravykh Sil (Union of Right Forces), and the National Bolshevik Party (Schwirtz 2007, 74). The protests also relied on imagery from the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution, such as the clenched fist that had become the signature for the color revolution movements (Monaghan 2016a, 47). In February 2012, Putin made a number of programmatic speeches before the presidential election in March. In an article titled “Russia and the Changing World,” he said that he had watched the Arab Spring with hope, but then the revolts turned violent. He stated that “foreign interference in support of one side of a domestic conflict and the use of power in this interference gave developments a negative aura” (Putin 2012c). Thereafter, he emphasized the information sphere in the Arab Spring revolts in which “the Internet, social networks, cell phones etc. have turned into an effective tool for the promotion of domestic and international policy on a par with television” (Putin 2012c). Putin saw the concept of soft power as “tools and methods to reach foreign policy goals without the use of arms but by exerting information and other levers of influence” (Putin 2012c). He lamented the use of these methods to provoke extremist sentiments and interfere in the domestic policy of other countries and noted that “the activities of “pseudo-NGOs” and other agencies that try to destabilize other countries with outside support are unacceptable” (Putin 2012c). Putin then stated that mutual US-Russia understanding was not helped “by regular US attempts to engage in ‘political engineering,’ including in regions that are traditionally important to us and during Russian elections” (Putin 2012c). It is noteworthy that Putin equated soft power with the outbreak of color revolutions. 2013–19 The Euromaidan protests and the fall of Yanukovych increased the significance of the color revolutions. Putin saw the protests as another achievement of “controlled ‘color’ revolutions” (Putin 2014a). After the annexation of Crimea, Putin stated that the people’s “feelings were taken advantage of cynically. Standards were imposed on these nations that did not in any way correspond to their way of life, traditions or these people’s cultures” (Putin 2014a). Furthermore, he argued that “our Western partners have crossed the line”

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(Putin 2014a). Thus, he emphasized the color revolutions as a pattern and foreign values as part of color revolutions. On another occasion, he equated color revolutions with extremism, arguing that “in the modern world extremism is being used as a geopolitical instrument for remaking spheres of influence. We see what tragic consequences the wave of so-called color revolutions led to” (Korsunskaya 2014). The downfall of the Yanukovych government only increased the fear within the Russia leadership. In Russia’s (formerly) closest state, the population had overthrown a corrupt and autocratic leader. While analyzing the Russian debate on what happened in Ukraine, Aleksandr Sergunin noted that “the proKremlin analysts fear that the ‘Maidan-type virus’ can spread to Russia and jeopardise the Putin regime which has much in common with the Yanukovych one” (Sergunin 2014, 86). This fear indeed is an important backdrop to understand why Russia invaded Ukraine. Roy Allison argued that “for Putin, the presumed association between these protests, earlier ‘color revolutions’ and now the new Maidan revolution in Kiev was difficult to swallow. From this arose a determination to limit the political gains of the new Ukrainian leadership, constrain its foreign policy options and seek ways to reverse the political and normative model represented by what he characterized as a western-learning ‘clique’ which had seized power illegitimately” (Allison 2014, 1296–97). More explicitly, Heidi Reisinger and Aleksandr Golts saw that “it was this fear of ‘regime change’ and a ‘color revolution’ that prompted the Putin regime to go to war” (Reisinger and Golts 2015, 114). The threat of color revolutions had taken center stage by 2014 and was the main theme for the 2014 Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS). The conference included a comprehensive view of the top elites in Russian national and military security. Putin’s introductory remarks added little to earlier statements but underlined his view that color revolutions were being used to “impose home-grown formulae and values on other peoples” (Putin 2014b, 6). Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also emphasized values, stating that color revolutions were becoming “a major factor in destabilization of the situation in many countries of the world. Foreign values are being imposed on peoples under guise of expanding democracy” (Shoigu 2014, 10). Foreign powers were seen to exploit local problems. Notably, Shoigu saw information warfare and the use of special forces as primary resources (Shoigu 2014, 10). He argued that where “regime change proves impossible, the conditions are created for armed confrontation” (Shoigu 2014, 10). Thus, in Shoigu’s view, color revolutions were a two-step approach, where the first would be seen as nonmilitary (as in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan), followed by military

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intervention if the first step did not succeed (as in Serbia, Libya, and Syria) (Shoigu 2014, 10). Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s understanding of color revolutions was similar, describing them as a threat to international stability and a means of imposing values or democracy on others, which was destructive to international relations (Lavrov 2014, 12). The Russian reaction to the Arab Spring, just like the color revolutions, was initially more cooperative than confrontational. However, in conjunction with the protests in the 2011–12 elections, the Russian leadership directly held the United States responsible for the protests in Russia. At the same time, the Arab Spring revolutions also became seen as an application of Western color revolutions’ technology rather than spontaneous revolutions. A key part of the West’s approach was through information means, and the Arab Spring “confirmed Russian perceptions of social media as a dangerous and destabilising tool of Russia’s enemies” (Giles 2016b, 43). The 2013–14 Euromaidan revolt further cemented the view of the color revolutions as a successful tool of Western states and a major threat for Russia—a view that had solidified by late 2014. In the Russian government, “there is a clear perception that Russia is one of the main targets” (Gorenburg 2014, 2). Likewise, Peter Duncan concluded in his study that “at least some people at the highest levels of the regime had a genuine fear that there might be a colored revolution in Russia, financed by and supported from the West” (Duncan 2013, 20). Furthermore, this view was not only shared by political and military elites but held by the public as well. A poll from the Levada Center in December 2014 showed “the desire of the US to organize another color revolution in Ukraine” to be by far the most popular response (48 percent) to the question asking why the crisis in Ukraine started (Levada Center 2014b). The second most popular explanation was Yanukovich’s corruption, at 28 percent (Levada Center 2014b). This understanding was reflected by Lavrov. In a speech at the end of 2014 touching on the topic of hybrid war, he argued that it had been popular to accuse Russia of waging it in Crimea and Ukraine but that he “would apply the term above to the United States and its war strategy—it is truly a hybrid war aimed not so much at defeating the enemy military as at changing the regimes in the states that pursue a policy Washington does not like” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2014). For Lavrov, this strategy consisted of “using financial and economic pressure, information attacks, using others on the perimeter of a corresponding state as proxies and of course information and ideological pressure through externally financed non-governmental organisations” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2014). This strategy was, for Lavrov, also used

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directly against Russia. He stated that by “the use of coercive measures the West unequivocally demonstrates that it does not merely change Russian policy (which in itself is illusory), but it seeks to change the regime” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2014). Another example of stated Russian threat perception can be taken from the leak from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca known as the Panama Papers. The papers displayed a myriad of shell companies and proxies together worth around $2 billion that belonged to key actors around Putin. In a press conference, Putin stated that this was the work of US officials and agencies that sought to destabilize Russia (Putin 2016). He saw that Russia’s opponents’ greatest fear was “the unity and solidarity of the Russian nation, the multiethnic Russian people” and therefore “attempts are made to weaken us from within, make us more acquiescent and make us toe their line” (Putin 2016). Thus, the political understanding of color revolutions has gone through notable development within the political leadership. From the outset, they were seen as morally and politically supported by the West and later perceived as the West’s main geopolitical approach and a form of warfare to engineer regime change in both Russia and countries bordering Russia. The key means were information and ideological and sought to undermine that stability and the societal cohesion in Russia.

The Military View In 2003, the major threat facing Russia was small conflicts such as the North Caucasian insurgency, while the threat from NATO and Western countries was downplayed (Bouldin 2004, 620). In January 2006, Chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluyevsky stated that “the forms and methods of armed force have changed. The essence of ‘military power’ has undergone a change” (Baluyevsky 2006). However, he was not referring to nonmilitary methods, as later theorists would while calling for radical changes in forms of military power, but to how conventional combat capabilities would be aided by progress in different physical spheres (Baluyevsky 2006). It took until 2007 for the notion of color revolutions to start to impact military thought. The ascent of the threat from color revolutions can be seen in Baluyevsky’s changing rhetoric from a sole focus on military means to giving more weight to nonmilitary means: “On the experience of the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia and on the examples of the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and others, one can clearly see that the main threats objectively exist and are realized not only by military means but mainly by covert and overt methods of political-diplomatic,

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economic, and information influence, various subversive actions, and interference in the internal affairs of other countries” (Kalikh 2007). For Baluyevsky, color revolutions were a “major threat” consisting of diplomatic, economic, information influence, and subversion. Baluyevsky’s statement is notable given his authority and that he is considered a traditionalist who was fired for his opposition to the 2008 reforms (Blank 2010, 61). Another traditionalist who updated his narrative was General Gareyev. In an interview for Krasnaya Zvezda in February 2007, he stated that “the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the parade of ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and so on show how principal threats exist objectively, assuming not so much military forms as direct or indirect forms of political, diplomatic, economic, and information pressure, subversive activities, and interference in internal affairs” (Mironovich 2007). Even though both Gareyev and Baluyevsky were influential, their views on color revolutions were not strongly reflected in the 2009 National Security Strategy. Nonetheless, the strategy stated that “values and models of development have become subject of global competition” (President of the Russian Federation 2009, point 8) and that a main threat in the sphere of state and public security was “the destabilization of the internal political and social situation” (President of the Russian Federation 2009, point 38). On balance, however, the threat from color revolutions was not prominent. The 2010 Military Doctrine likewise discussed a number of factors associated with color revolutions. For instance, the second external military danger listed was “attempts to destabilize the situation in individual states and regions and to undermine strategic stability” (Ministry of Defense 2010, point 8.B). The internal military dangers included “attempts to change the constitutional structure of the Russian Federation by force,” “undermining of the sovereignty and . . . territorial integrity of the Russian Federation,” and “the disruption of the functioning of organs of state power” (Ministry of Defense 2010, point 9.A-C). The doctrine also emphasized the importance of information warfare in modern conflicts. However, those mentions aside, the major focus was on NATO and larger, conventional armed conflict. An analysis of the doctrine concluded that “the ideas presented in the doctrine, especially its focus on NATO as a major challenge and . . . the maintenance of a strong mobilization capability, were very much in line with the thoughts of the traditionalist school” (Bukkvoll 2011, 702). Speaking a month later, Gareyev argued that the Arab Spring was an example of the disruptive technologies of the West. He stated that the threats from information and subversive activities to create controlled chaos (upravlyayemyy

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khaos) and provoke unrest to overthrow unwanted powers were “very real” (Interfax 2011). He then placed the Arab Spring in the tradition of color revolutions, stating that “you know how it was done in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and it is today carried on in the Middle East” (Interfax 2011). In January 2012, Gareyev wrote that there were two main ways to achieve policy objectives in the modern world. The first was “information, cyber, electronic, psychological, and other subversive activities, the creation of controlled chaos to provoke in the opposing countries various kinds of unrest, overthrowing the unwanted power structures within and disturbing the internal stability of the state, as was done in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and is carried out today in the Middle East” (Gareyev 2012). This type of threat, Gareyev continued, led to a “blurring of boundaries between military and nonmilitary means of international confrontation, capacity building of hidden, asymmetrical violent military and nonmilitary actions” (Gareyev 2012). The second way was through using armed force to unleash local conflicts as in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan and as was then being tried against Syria and Iran (Gareyev 2012). Another early mention of color revolutions from a chief of the General Staff was from Nikolai Makarov in November 2011. He presented a report by the General Staff that saw that “the military-political leadership of some countries continues to use the technology of ‘color revolutions’ to achieve their strategic interests, which allows them to forcefully dislodge unwanted political regimes (Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen)” (Safronov 2011). Thereafter, he emphasized that the threat was real and could be directed against Russia (Safronov 2011). More explicitly, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov said in his 2013 speech that the boundaries between war and peace were blurring and that “the very ‘rules of war’ have changed” (Gerasimov 2013). Then he proposed that the Arab Spring could be the typical war for the twenty-first century (Gerasimov 2013). The main features were utilizing the protest potential of the population, information warfare, and creating an internal front in the territory of the opposing state (Gerasimov 2013). Gerasimov also included a graph that stated nonmilitary means were four times as effective as military ones (Gerasimov 2013). In December 2013, Gareyev published an article titled “Na ‘myagkuyu silu’ naydutsya zhestkiye otvety” (For “soft power” there are hard answers), which illustrates how his argument had developed. He saw a threat to Russia in “information and other subversive activities, the creation of controlled chaos to provoke opposing countries into various kinds of unrest, overthrow the unwanted

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power structures within, and disturb the internal stability of the state, as it did in Libya, and more recently—in Syria” (Gareyev 2013c). For Gareyev, there was no formal armed conflict with NATO, but there were “in essence other forms of threats against Russia being realized. How should we counter these so-called nonmilitary threats—‘soft power’?” (Gareyev 2013c). In this way, he saw an ongoing conflict in which nonmilitary threats and soft power were realized against Russia. The most elaborate statement of the role of color revolutions as a new form of warfare came from Gerasimov at the MCIS in May 2014. Beyond the “traditional” military action seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, he saw that “we are now seeing completely different approaches from Western countries,” which included “disseminating democratic values, the employment of non-military resources and the adaptive use of military force” (Gerasimov 2014a, 15). Of the two, the nonmilitary color revolution approach was the most important and was “becoming the main means of achieving [Western] political ambitions” (Gerasimov 2014a, 15). He saw that the perpetrators of color revolutions thought of it as a nonviolent way to achieve regime change. The methods of color revolutions were “external manipulation of a population’s potential for protest, combined with political, economic, humanitarian and other non-military measures” (Gerasimov 2014a, 15). “During the past decade,” Gerasimov continued, “a wave of these ‘color revolutions’ has been instigated by the U.S. in the post-Soviet space, North Africa and the Middle East” (Gerasimov 2014a, 15). Initially, Gerasimov stated, the Arab Spring was seen as the victory of mostly nonviolent color revolutions. However, he found that color revolutions proved not to be “an absolute means of political transformation” but that they may degenerate to large-scale military action as in Libya and Syria (Gerasimov 2014a, 15). Gerasimov saw the Ukraine as such as well. He stated that “we are currently witnessing yet another ‘color revolution’—this one in Ukraine. . . . This conflict moved into an intrastate confrontation and almost degenerated into a civil war” (Gerasimov 2014a, 17). Col. Gen. Vladimir Zarudnitsky, chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff and responsible for key capabilities of force employment and planning, took the view that color revolutions have created a major change in world politics. In his view, they are “a real change in the nature of military threats and challenges to security” (Zarudnitsky 2014, 45). The West, Zarudnitsky continued, saw color revolutions as a nonviolent means to overthrow undemocratic regimes. However, “military analysis of the events that occurred in the Middle East and North Africa makes it possible to claim the

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reverse—that military force is an inalienable feature of ‘color revolutions’” (Zarudnitsky 2014, 45). Indeed, he saw that violence “is present at every stage of the escalation” (Zarudnitsky 2014, 45). He also argued against the perception of color revolutions as of nonviolent nature: The “reason to reject the peaceful and non-violent nature of ‘color revolutions’ is that the condition of countries that have suffered military aggression as classically understood and of countries experiencing ‘color revolutions’ is almost identical” (Zarudnitsky 2014, 45). Thus, he saw widespread change in the nature of military threats and security due to color revolutions in their capacity as a key threat, but he rejected the notion that they should be understood as nonviolent and saw their effects as similar to military aggression. Zarudnitsky saw that the way color revolutions were applied in Libya and Syria was as “masked aggression using new technologies to defeat undesirable states” (Zarudnitsky 2014, 46). In this way, Zarudnitsky saw that color revolutions had a dual nature with the features of classical warfare (as seen, for instance, in Libya with air strikes and special forces), but they also differed significantly in five notable ways: There was no front and rear, hostilities were mainly in residential areas, hostilities that went beyond humanitarian law became war without rules, they included the criminalization of warfare, and hostilities included extensive use of private military formations and special forces (Zarudnitsky 2014, 47). The MCIS conference can be seen to be the culmination of the increasing role of color revolutions in the Russian understanding of war. The heightened focus is natural since the conference was held only four months after Yanukovich fled Ukraine, but its increasing emphasis is more enduring. An analysis of the conference concluded that “it turns out that Moscow considers ‘color revolutions’ a new type of warfare” and that “according to them, Western intelligence agencies conspire to foment ‘color revolutions’ around the world” (Golts 2014; see also Popov and Khamzatov 2016, 212). Golts also emphasized that the consequence of color revolutions entering the military agenda was that the military could increasingly be used to combat internal dangers and political protesters (Golts 2014). The main agreement at MCIS was that the West’s approach was twofold, called “the adaptive approach to the use of force,” where the primary method was inciting a color revolution and, if this failed, conventional military means. The main disagreement was over whether color revolutions could be considered fully nonviolent, given that they either relied on force or, if being nonviolent but effective, could still amount to violence. There was no clear conclusion, although the second argument was more prevalent. Two military theorists, Aleksey Belsky and Olga Klimenko, offered a typology of color revolutions. They discussed four different scenarios: a classic

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“orange revolution”; an elite-led conspiracy; a “march on Rome” / Mussolini scenario, as they saw Mikheil Saakashvili do in Georgia; and a “revolution in tow,” which meant that members of the elites exploit the outcome of protests (Klimenko and Belsky 2014, 23–24). There were two common threads uniting the color revolutions. The first was that they were engineered by NGOs, and the second was immorality “sweeping the country,” which required “ideological, patriotic and moral development and education of young people” (Klimenko and Belsky 2014, 26). This view connected values competition and the spiritual dimension to color revolutions. Aleksandr Bartosh, director of the Information Centre for International Security at Moscow State Linguistic University and a member of the Academy of Military Science, saw vast opportunities for the US application of a “model of controlled chaos.” He argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the color revolutions showed “a very real possibility of achieving military-political goals through indirect, noncontact action with the wide use of information and others, including nontraditional tools and technologies” (Bartosh 2014). For him, the technology of “controlled chaos” was both an internal military and external military threat. He saw Western NGOs as a key instrument for training agents of influence and educating future leaders in “Western liberal values” (Bartosh 2014). He gave the IRI, the NDI, the OSI, the Goldman Democracy Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, and others as examples of this. Furthermore, Bartosh also suggested that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the first successful application of a wide range of technologies of controlled chaos” (Bartosh 2014). This is an example of how the understanding of color revolutions and controlled chaos (terms used interchangeably) came to expand. In a subsequent article, Bartosh expanded on his view of color revolutions. He saw that the main adversaries of the United States and NATO were Russia and China but that “they are still unattainable for direct actions to destabilize them” (Bartosh 2015). Therefore, Bartosh argued that “efforts focus on subversive actions aimed at destabilizing countries on the periphery of these states. . . . It is for this purpose that color revolutions are provoked in Ukraine, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East” (Bartosh 2015). Bartosh proposed that the Cold War was reborn and that other military theorists who relied on armed struggle as the defining factor of war were ignoring this phenomenon (Bartosh 2015). For Bartosh, Russia’s opponents, “perhaps not bothering themselves with terminological subtleties, waged this unconventional war very skillfully, having managed to win it without a direct armed clash with grave geopolitical results” (Bartosh 2015). In this way, “it can be assumed that destabilizing and destroying Russia is once again expected by the tried and

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tested technology of the Cold War combined with modern developments, including color revolutions and hybrid wars” (Bartosh 2015). Bartosh distinguished color revolutions from hybrid war in that the latter was implemented after the failure of “the protest movement to achieve the overthrow of the government by nonviolent means” (Bartosh 2015). Bartosh discussed the tools of color revolutions: “The power methods of overthrowing the political regime are increasingly being used in conjunction with more sophisticated information technologies for the manipulative management of mass consciousness and the mass behavior of the broad masses of the civilian population” (Bartosh 2015). He further stated that the “main tool is a specially organized youth protest movement” (Bartosh 2015). He concluded that “the effectiveness of information impact in the course of a color revolution by results becomes commensurate with military means” (Bartosh 2015). For Bartosh, violence was the distinguishing factor between what was a color revolution and what was a hybrid war. He also criticized other military theorists for insisting on a definition of war exclusively relying on violence. For him, this missed the key dynamics of war in general and the Cold War in particular, as well as how the West had successfully conducted color revolutions. He further argued that the results of color revolutions are equal to those achieved by military violence. Last, he also emphasized the manipulation of mass consciousness, an idea reflected in the security doctrines. In an article the following year, Bartosh was even more explicit and argued that “the color revolution represents the initial stage of the destabilization of the situation and is based on the strategy of crushing the government of the victim state: ‘Color’ revolutions increasingly take the form of armed struggle” (Bartosh 2016, 42). He continued: “Color revolutions are built on nonmilitary methods of achieving political and strategic goals, which in some cases are much more effective than military means” (Bartosh 2016, 42). Bartosh relied on Gerasimov’s framework of the adaptive approach to the use of force and described it as a three-step approach with nonviolent color revolutions: Should they fail, hybrid (violent) methods would be used next, and, last, conventional military means (Bartosh 2016, 41–42). It is thus interesting that Bartosh emphasized both that color revolutions could be part of armed struggle and that he saw them as a use of force. In 2018, Bartosh directly attributed the Euromaidan revolt to the West while stating that “through a hybrid war, conditions are created for the color revolution, providing for a coup d’état and the overthrow of a government by a controlled crowd” (Bartosh 2018). This he

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saw was done by shifting to the nonforceful part of the spectrum, which “allows for depriving the opposing side of actual sovereignty without seizing the territory by military force” (Bartosh 2018; see also Bartosh 2017). Another detailed view of how color revolutions function came from Andrew Korybko. He saw a common framework for color revolutions, arguing that “since the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’2 in Serbia over a decade ago, the Color Revolution has evolved into the Arab Spring, and now morphed into EuroMaidan, a new type of warfare for our century” (Korybko 2014). The framework consisted of six different infrastructural categories: ideology, finance, social, training, information, and media (Korybko 2015, 77). For Korybko, ideology was “the initiator of all Color Revolutions. It presents an opposite form of development for a domestic society, and it motivates sympathetic segments of the population to engage in tangible demonstrations and demand change” (Korybko 2015, 79). Korybko was also clear that “the traditional ideology motivating all Color Revolutions is Liberal Democracy” and that it was “expansionist and aggressive” (Korybko 2015, 79). Through ideology, foreign actors manipulated a target population. Korybko saw that “the vast majority of these active protesters may not even be aware that their activities are being orchestrated by a higher power (NGO, foreign government)” and also that “most of them, as a result of a heavy-handed information campaign . . . have truly been led to believe that their actions are spontaneous and ‘natural’ and that they represent inevitable ‘progress’” (Korybko 2015, 79). The second category was finance, which was likely to come from abroad, as seen in the original color revolutions and the Arab Spring (Korybko 2015, 80). He particularly focused on crowd-funding as a technique for foreign powers to contribute money in a clandestine manner (Korybko 2016). The third category was social, which included the infrastructure and organizations needed for a revolution (Korybko 2015, 81–83). The fourth was training, a prerequisite for enhancing the other categories (Korybko 2015, 83). The fifth category was information, divided into social media and propaganda. Korybko saw that social media enabled ideology promotion, mobilization, and the spread of news that challenges the reporting of the government’s media outlets (Korybko 2015, 84). Propaganda meant material used to multiply the impact of the movement and make it appear more potent (Korybko 2015, 84). The sixth category was media, which was seen as “the culminating point of the Movement’s entire infrastructure” (Korybko 2015, 85). The special importance of media in legitimizing “the ideology of the Movement, [to] make it seem reputable . . . solidifies the perception of a strong presence in society. Most importantly, it also

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has a prime aim of reaching the international audience” (Korybko 2015, 85). Last, he saw that a color revolution needed an initiating event that “releases all of the Movement’s built-up energy” (Korybko 2015, 88). Color revolutions were, for Korybko, “less direct than outright war, but no less efficient” (Korybko 2015, 79), and the information sphere was of key importance. Korybko argued that “information outreach (‘propaganda’) is at its core, and the anti-government ideas must be propagated in a coordinated fashion in order to engineer the consent of an appropriate (critical) amount of the population to participate in the Color Revolution” (Korybko 2015, 35). The information campaign sought to make the audience “internalize the ideas being presented and make them seem as though they arrived at the outsidedirected conclusions on their own. The anti-government ideas must seem natural and not forced” (Korybko 2015, 35). This recalls the school of reflexive control discussed above that seeks to control behavior via carefully planted stimuli (often information). Korybko put extra emphasis on the use of social media and contended that “this entire destabilization owes its genesis to the role of social media” (Korybko 2015, 46). An intrinsic goal for a color revolution was to “go viral”—that is, to achieve a massive and rapid spread in social media—and that would help to create the international pressure of states to intervene (Korybko 2015, 46). Another theorist who emphasized that the effects of color revolutions were equal to war was Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, retired from the Ministry of Defense. He saw that the armed forces had an important role in facing color revolutions and argued that color revolutions “are developed according to the rules of military art, therefore they must be dealt with accordingly” and also that they are “planned precisely as military operations” (quoted in Mardasov 2015). For Ivashov, “the set of measures that the Americans call ‘soft power’ lead to the same effect as if the state had been attacked with all the means of classical wars—with air strikes and invasions of large armies” (quoted in Mardasov 2015). In this way, Ivashov emphasized the ends of the color revolution as more important than the means and disregarded whether those means are nonviolent. It is also worth pointing out that soft power has become almost synonymous with the use of nonmilitary warfare or the creation of color revolutions. As argued by Andrew Monaghan, “for Moscow, soft power represents Western interventionism as a destabilising force, part of a regime change, or ‘Color Revolution’ agenda” (Monaghan 2016a, 82). In 2016, Gerasimov confirmed the centrality of color revolutions to the military threat perception. Gerasimov stated that “‘color revolutions’ are used as the main means . . . to achieve a nonviolent change of power” (Gerasimov

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2016a). In relation to color revolutions, he argued that “information resources have become one of the most effective weapons [oruzhiya]. Their wide use in a few days allows the situation in the country to be shaken from within” (Gerasimov 2016a). He also cautioned about the influence of Western values, stating that “attempts to transfer the values of Western democracy to countries with their own spiritual foundations, cultural traditions, and mentalities lead to the opposite result. Artificial implantation of alien ideals blew up North Africa and the Middle East” (Gerasimov 2016b). In this way, he confirmed color revolutions as nonviolent. He also cautioned on the cultural and spiritual side, a focus on which had increased notably in the security doctrines. The fear of color revolutions was further reflected in the 2014 Military Doctrine, and it was a key difference from the 2010 Military Doctrine. The events in the Arab Spring and in Ukraine were seen to have created new military threats and dangers and were an explicit rationale for the need to update the Military Doctrine (RIA Novosti 2014a). The most notable external military dangers in relation to color revolutions in the 2014 Military Doctrine were “interference in internal affairs,” “the use of information and communication technologies for military-political purposes,” “the overthrow of legitimate public authorities,” and “the subversive activities of special services . . . against the Russian Federation” (Ministry of Defense 2014, points II.12 e, k, l, m). Similarly, the main internal military dangers included “the activities of information influence on population, especially young citizens of the country, which has to undermine the historical, spiritual, and patriotic traditions in defense of the fatherland” (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.13.C). Last, the doctrine presented the nature and characteristics of modern conflict, which included “integrated use of military force, political, economic, information, and other nonmilitary measures, implemented with the extensive use of the protest potential of the population, and special operations forces” and “the use of externally funded and run political forces and social movements” (Ministry of Defense 2014, points II.15 a, j). The debate among military theorists further increased with the creation of the National Guards (Rosgvardiya) in 2016 by taking existing units, mostly from the Ministry of Interior and police special forces, to create a vast federal security force. The main goals of the guards are to protect public order, ensure public security, and combat terrorism (Petrov 2016). Interestingly, the National Guards are also allowed to subordinate military units in carrying out their work. This led Golts to argue that “such subordination can only mean one thing: The Kremlin regards the internal threat as much more dangerous than the external one” (Golts 2017). The idea of a national guard is in itself not novel

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for the Russian Federation, first having been floated by Boris Yeltsin, who instructed Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi to begin forming such a force, aiming to protect constitutional order and democratic gains against revolution (Kramnik and Bogdanov 2016). This, however, never fully materialized under Yeltsin. The head of the National Guards, Viktor Zolotov, made a clear connection with color revolutions when he stated in an interview that “protest actions are explicitly systematic and conducted according to similar scenarios as color revolutions” and they sought “the creation of chaos” (Interfax 2017). Thereafter, he emphasized the importance of the information sphere. For Zolotov, “the media of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States are constantly conducting information attacks to discredit the political leadership of our country” (Interfax 2017). Last he emphasized that the first line of defense against political and social destabilization needed to be in the information space (Interfax 2017). An even more explicit statement of the National Guards’ role came from General Baluyevsky, former chief of the General Staff and now an adviser to Zolotov. Baluyevsky started by reflecting on the Guards’ task and stated that “our activities are aimed at protecting citizens, protecting public order and public safety, ultimately preventing color revolutions” (Baluyevsky 2017). He furthermore stated that “the emergence of the national guard troops is the answer to the challenge to our society, to the threat of the use of technologies of so-called nonviolent resistance, which nevertheless is more accurately called a color revolution” (Baluyevsky 2017). Thereafter, Baluyevsky traced the origins of color revolutions to the work of Otpor in Serbia, which was the leading opposition group and whose core created CANVAS with support from the IRI and Freedom House, according to Baluyevsky (Baluyevsky 2017). He continued that CANVAS had worked in thirty-seven countries after Serbia and gave the example of Saakashvili as someone who had been trained with foreign money (Baluyevsky 2017). Baluyevsky stated that war was traditionally the most effective form of changing the architecture of the world but that “the goal of wars in the twentyfirst century will not be the seizure of territories but the subordination of the state apparatus and the formation of a system of external governance of the peoples residing in these territories” (Baluyevsky 2017). Baluyevsky saw a three-stage approach: creating an internal crisis in the victim country, turning the country into a failed state, and conducting a so-called rescue operation, whereby loans through the International Monetary Fund with conditions attached lead to “the establishment of full economic control over the country”

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(Baluyevsky 2017). For Baluyevsky, the blows of modern war are “not applied to the armed forces but to the civilian population, as the least stable . . . part of society for impact of psychological warfare. The scenario of the developments of events is known from the experience of color revolutions” (Baluyevsky 2017). For him, “this is how modern war develops” (Baluyevsky 2017). He concluded that “just like in Ukraine, the situation could develop in Russia” and that “the main threats to Russia may not be outside it, but inside” (Baluyevsky 2017). The views of Baluyevsky are particularly notable, given that he spent his entire career as a military officer and ended as the chief of the General Staff. At that time, he did not place strong emphasis on color revolutions. Ten years later, he held them as the primary threat to Russia. It is important to note, however, that his shift in views could of course, partly or fully, have resulted from his changing role in charge of dealing with color revolutions. Nonetheless, there was agreement among analysts that the threat of color revolutions was a key rationale for the creation of the National Guards. Since the color revolutions of the 2000s and the Arab Spring of 2011, and above all since the protests against election manipulation in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2011 and 2012, the Kremlin’s security discourse has been dominated by the specter of a “Russian Maidan” (Klein 2016, 4). Similarly, Thomas argued that “in particular Putin hopes to use the NG [National Guards] as insurance against the development of a color revolution in Russia” (Thomas 2017, 13). Likewise, Galeotti concluded that “there is no real reason for creating the NG out of the Interior Troops and other forces unless you have a serious worry about public unrest” (Galeotti 2016c). The threat of color revolutions became a central feature of the Russian understanding of modern war in 2014. Most notably after the Euromaidan uprising, as Persson stated, “It is at the heart of understanding how the Russian view of modern conflict has evolved” (Persson 2017, 6). The clearest statement of this could be seen in Gerasimov’s attitude in 2013 and 2014, when he saw color revolutions as the West’s main approach to the use of force, the explicit need to update the 2010 Military Doctrine to give stronger emphasis to color revolutions. Likewise, key military theorists such as Gareyev and Baluyevsky had also changed their views to put primary focus on nonmilitary means and color revolutions. The question is thus why color revolutions became so important for the military theorists. One would assume that less attention would be given by them to a threat that is domestic and nonmilitary rather than external and military. The threat from color revolutions would, rather, be handled by the security and intelligence agencies, as well as by the Interior Ministry and the

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National Guards, rather than the military. On the contrary, the military elites had wholeheartedly embraced the threat by the end of 2014. The most likely explanation is that the threat from color revolutions became too important to those on the political level for the military leadership to ignore it. Therefore, the military elites needed to signal to the political level that they understood their problems and were taking actions to solve them. The ability to respond to the political leaders’ needs, of course, reflects resource allocation. In this way, the threat from color revolutions went from being securitized to militarized (Bouchet 2016, 1). This interpretation gains further support if one compares the statements of the military leadership with the direction of the ongoing military reform. While there has been an increased focus on the threat of color revolutions in military thought and in national and regional military exercises (Bouchet 2016), there has been no radical shift in the Russian military’s goals and capabilities, which suggests that color revolutions have become more important than conventional military conflict. In other words, the military reform is still focusing to a large degree on improving the C4ISR complex and long-range weaponry and updating the nuclear triad. To some degree, there has been a similar focus on the increasing utility of nonmilitary means among Western militaries. However, the focus in the West has been dissimilar in roughly two ways. First, the threats from nonmilitary means seen by Russian military theorists have to a larger degree focused on an internal enemy, whereas for Western states it has until recently been focusing on counterinsurgency abroad. This is reflected in the Russian Military Doctrine’s inclusion of information influence as both an internal danger and a military one (Ministry of Defense 2014, point II.13.C). Second, among Russian military theorists, there is a particular focus on values both because Russian values can be undermined from abroad and because fostering patriotic/ nationalistic values in Russia builds resilience against color revolutions. The question still remains why it took until 2012–14 for the threat of color revolutions to become central to military thought. As the Arab Spring revolts were initially met with understanding by the Russian leadership rather than condemnation (as outlined above), they are unlikely to be the proximate cause. Rather, it was the protests in connection to the elections in Russia in 2011 and 2012 that are the most likely cause of the heightened focus on color revolutions. The protests signified a large-scale and sustained threat to the Russian leadership, for which Putin directly blamed foreign powers. Thereafter, the Arab Spring became increasingly included in the cluster of color revolutions. This also explains why some of the most far-reaching articles on color

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revolutions’ impact on modern war were published in 2013, which was before the Euromaidan revolt (Gareyev 2013c; Gerasimov 2013; Chekinov and Bogdanov 2013). What then happened on Euromaidan only strengthened the views among Russian elites that the threat from color revolutions was central to modern war.

Conclusion Color revolutions have grown from being seen by the Russian leadership as unfortunate and sporadic events to a central part of contemporary warfare. This reached its pinnacle with the Euromaidan revolt in Ukraine, which led to the downfall of the pro-Russian president Yanukovych. This was a major geopolitical setback for Russia, when one of its key partners overthrew its leadership in the name of closer ties to the EU and the West. Putin explicitly saw that Ukraine was the victim of another color revolution created by the West. The specter of color revolutions were also haunting the Russian government, which perceived that color revolution technology was being applied to itself in a forceful manner. The international network of youth groups that played key roles in the color revolutions was partly financed by Western NGOs. Within this network, Russian youth organizations were also participating and received training and contacts. Leaders of the Russian opposition participated in the protests that became the Orange Revolution. Furthermore, the prerevolution leaders in the color revolution countries all blamed Western forces. And meanwhile, the Bush government listed these “democratic revolutions” as achievements (Deyermond 2015, 33). The threat of color revolutions rose up the Russian agenda to be seen as the West’s main geopolitical tool against Russia and a nonmilitary form of warfare. In the period 2005–7, the threat from color revolutions gained increasing prominence among the Russian political elites, who blamed the revolutions on foreign interference, although not explicitly on the West to begin with. Likewise, the Arab Spring revolutions were initially met with ambiguity, but after the protests in connection with the 2011–12 Russian elections, both the protests and the Arab Spring were perceived as created by Western governments, mainly the United States. The threat of color revolutions first entered the agenda of the political elites, while they were absent (with a few exceptions) in the military-theoretical debate until the Arab Spring and the first protests in Russia. Thereafter, the threat of color revolutions came to the center of mainstream military thought. The role of color revolutions was cemented with the Euromaidan protests.

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Among Russian military theorists, consensus has emerged that the West’s grand strategic approach relies on a two-pronged use of force, which Gerasimov called the adaptive use of force. The West’s main, and most important, way to achieve its geopolitical goals is through the nonviolent means of a color revolution. If this fails, armed force would then be applied. This shift among military elites is particularly interesting, as they should be less likely to emphasize domestic threats. Regardless of the driver, color revolutions became a major military issue by the end of 2014. Color revolutions were seen by the Russian leadership as a form of nonmilitary warfare, consisting of information warfare; NGOs; youth organizations; the exploitation of the populations’ protest potential; the erosion of values, spiritual traditions, and patriotism; and the use of intelligence services. Color revolutions are nonviolent phenomena, although some saw them as effective as, and/or reliant on, violence. Color revolutions are seen to be key tools against Russia in an ongoing nonmilitary conflict. Among the Russian elites, there is a perception that Western states are responsible for the creation of the color revolutions and are directing this technology against Russia. The threat of color revolutions has been well established in Russian military theory and has expanded the role of the armed forces, as can be seen in how the Military Doctrine lists information and spiritual influence—cornerstones of color revolutions—as military dangers. It is particularly worth emphasizing that the erosion of values that leads to societal instability is a part of this. As one theorist put it, “The traditional ideology motivating all Color Revolutions is Liberal Democracy” (Korybko 2015, 79). Color revolutions are key in how nonmilitary means affect the Russian understanding of war. Moreover, color revolutions as a nonmilitary means have become seen as a form of warfare that is more important than military means and with effects commensurate to military means. Armed violence is not understood as a necessary criterion for the color revolutions, yet they are seen to blur the boundary between war and peace, as suggested by Gareyev, Gerasimov, and others. Color revolutions are understood either as a separate form of nonmilitary warfare or as violent and thus tantamount to war. The argument that color revolutions should be seen as violent and/or a part of war because of their effects is interesting, as it suggests a shift of focus from what means constitute war (armed violence) to how consequential any means are to reach political goals. These factors underline the difficulty of squaring the traditional definition of war, based on armed violence, with the increasing importance of color revolutions. They are seen rather to represent a form of nonmilitary war.

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Notes 1. There is a problem with the term “color revolutions,” as they were not quite revolutions, being neither violent nor about radical changes to political institutions. Rather, violence has been scarce, and people have mainly protested about lack of compliance with existing constitutional rules in the respective countries (McFaul 2006, 165). However, the meaning of the term came to be broader in the view of the Russian leadership. 2. The Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia, which led to Milošević’s downfall, was a key predecessor of the color revolutions. In the Bulldozer Revolution, student groups pioneered the nonviolent protest methods that became a trademark of the later revolutions.

Conclusion

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. —Michael Walzer (1977)

K

nowing how the Russian leadership thinks about war is a critical precondition for deterring Russia and also identifying when to cross, or not to cross, Russia’s “red lines.” A distinguishing feature of Russian strategy and warfare is a higher acceptance of risk and a lower threshold for the use of force, be it military or nonmilitary. This, however, becomes comprehensible in light of how Russian thought about war has developed during the past decades. The traditional Russian understanding of the nature of war as defined by armed violence has broadened to include nonviolent means of informationpsychological warfare and color revolutions, which are now seen to be so effective that they are equivalent to violence, blurring the boundaries of war and peace. The Russian leadership sees information warfare and color revolutions as the West’s main approach to the use of force today and the biggest threat to the survival of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Russia has seen itself as the victim of these forces but also has sought to master them for both domestic stability and its own offensive purposes. This shift has not been a sudden revolutionary one but a continuous evolution in Russian thought about war. It has been, rather, the long-term neglect by analysts of Russian thought that has made Russia’s current understanding of war seem novel. Whether it is Russia’s successful combination of military and nonmilitary means in Ukraine or its information offensive and subversion against the United States in the 2016 election, all of the key features had been discussed for years before in the Russian militarytheoretical debate. Put differently, it is critical to understand Russian theorizing about war because Russian conduct often follows it. The nature of war has, since the creation of the Soviet Union, been defined by armed violence applied to a political goal while explicitly rejecting nonmilitary means. This understanding remained in the 1990s, but a notable shift came in the mid-2000s with the ICT revolution and the color revolutions, after which theorists gave increasing attention to nonmilitary means—information,

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ideological, and cultural. Nonetheless, this view of war was not broadly held at the political level and was absent from the military one.1 The clearest shift in Russian thought, however, came as late as 2012–14 after the Arab Spring and the elections in Russia. This was evident in President Putin’s statement 2012, in which he argued that the character of armed struggle had gone through a fundamental change. For Putin, new technologies as well as information warfare and controlled chaos accounted for this change. Another notable representation of this shift came from Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. In a 2013 speech, he saw a blurring of the boundaries between war and peace and that nonmilitary means were now four times as important as military ones (Gerasimov 2013). He also suggested that the Arab Spring could be a typical war for the twenty-first century, and he listed the use of protest potential of the local population as an element in the use of force (Gerasimov 2013). For Gerasimov, the creation of color revolutions had become the main approach of the West for the use of force (Gerasimov 2014a). Likewise, Gen. Makhmut Gareyev, who had always rejected the possibility of a change in the nature of war, questioned in 2013 whether the growing importance of nonmilitary means constituted a cardinal change in the concept of war and its entire system of knowledge. He saw that these means were practically violent and that this made the borderline between peace and war less defined (Gareyev 2013b). This marked a notable shift in Gareyev’s reasoning, as he had long insisted that the nature of war, as defined by armed violence, could not change. In 2017, he again noticed the divided debate in Russia and called for an investigation of the essence of war and the need to reinterpret the laws of war (Gareyev 2017). In 2016, Col. Sergei Chekinov and Lt. Gen. Sergei Bogdanov argued for the “emergence of a new type of warfare, namely, wars of controlled chaos” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016, 24). In this way, they saw color revolutions (used synonymously with “controlled chaos”) as a form of war. They also suggested that color revolutions led to the “transformation of the content of armed struggle, principally thanks to actively used nonmilitary measures” (Chekinov and Bogdanov 2016, 26). A final example can be taken from Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, then head of the Main Operations Directorate at the General Staff, who saw that conflicts before were 80 percent violence and 20 percent propaganda, whereas today they consisted of 80 to 90 percent propaganda and 10 to 20 percent violence (Kartapolov 2015, 33). In essence, the view that nonmilitary and nonviolent means are becoming so effective that they are blurring the boundaries of war and peace, amounting

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to violence, and are removing the need for military means is hardly reconcilable with the traditional understanding of war defined solely by armed violence. Rather, this view, as expressed by the key military theorists, political elites, and, to a lesser degree, security doctrines represent a broader understanding in the nature of war. This means a shift with a larger focus to the political goal of war rather than its means (the armed violence). To be clear, this is not to argue that armed force has lost its relevance for Russia today or that nonmilitary means are making military means obsolete. Rather, this book has made a conceptual argument about how war and violence are understood and that the augmented role of nonmilitary and nonviolent means is changing the traditional understanding of war. Arguing that military means are no longer relevant would be incorrect and miss both the views of Russian military theorists and the current priorities of the Russian military and political leadership, which is in the middle of a large-scale military reform focused mainly on conventional and nuclear means. The current Russian thought is well captured in the concept of the adaptive use of force as it holds nonmilitary means to be the preferred method and military means to be the last resort. Russia’s active and risk-prone use of nonmilitary means is underpinned by its conventional military and nuclear capabilities. There are practical reasons for Russia’s political and military leaders to not state publicly and unilaterally that the nature of war is changing. Such a declaration would, among other things, go against the concepts that inform international law, most notably the concept of armed attack but also the Russian federal law On Defense, which relies on an understanding of war defined by armed violence. In effect, such a declaration would mean an explicit recognition that Russia would—given the leadership’s perception of Russia as a target for these means—be at war. This is why Gareyev argues that such a declaration would have immense effects on international security and could not be introduced unilaterally by Russia (Gareyev 2013b). Nonetheless, as has been captured by astute Russia-analysts, this might already have happened in practice. Charles Bartles concluded that “while the West considers these nonmilitary measures as a way of avoiding war, Russia considers these measures as war” (Bartles 2016a, 34). Similarly, Keir Giles contended that “recent Russian activities in the information domain would indicate that Russia already considers itself to be in a state of war” (Giles 2016b, 11). While neither of these studies directly engaged with the question of a change in the nature of war, it is implicit in their arguments. The drivers of the broader Russian understanding of war are information warfare and color revolutions. While several nonmilitary means are affecting

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war today, these are at the forefront.2 The importance of information warfare in the Russian understanding of war can be seen in two spheres: informationtechnical (hardware and software) and information-psychological (content and cognitive aspects) (Thomas 2011, 138). The threat from the informationtechnical sphere with C4ISR-enabled, long-range precision weaponry is still the key focus for the Russian leadership and military theorists in the conventional military sphere. Nonetheless, they are dealing with improving the application of armed force rather than changing its nature. The potential exception, included in information-technical warfare, would be cyberwarfare. Cyberwarfare has been argued by Russian theorists to not cross the boundary to war, to blur the boundaries of war and peace, and to be able to have consequences comparable to weapons of mass destruction. Russia has successfully used cyber means for striking against critical infrastructure in Ukraine and beyond (Pernik 2018) and infiltrated US election databases and control rooms of US power grids (Sanger 2018). Nonetheless, the potential of cyber means to impact the nature of war has not manifested itself in the debates of theorists, elites, and doctrines. Rather, it is the development in the information-psychological sphere that provides the key innovation. Among Russian theorists and elites, information warfare was also seen to be so effective that it can achieve strategic outcomes by itself and destabilize the state and its institutions, and information itself has been suggested to be a weapon. This has led several key members of the elite, such as President Putin and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov, to contend that Russia is in an ongoing information war perpetrated by the West. Information-psychological warfare was particularly feared to brainwash the population of target states, undermining the spiritual foundation and values of their citizens and leading them to revolt. This is the connection to color revolutions. In the color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and the Euromaidan revolt, Western information influence was seen as the key condition making the populations revolt. This key fear is why the Russian leadership perceives it needs to insulate its information space from Western influence. Nonetheless, the Russian leadership has gone beyond insulation. Its threat perception in the information space is now a central foundation to its offensive strategy in the information arena. As Russia saw it lost the global information battle in the Chechen and Georgian wars, it created RT and expanded its reach to include RT US in the United States and RT UK in the United Kingdom, as well as channels in Arabic, Spanish, German, and French. As the Russian leadership saw the Arab Spring and the protests in the 2011–12 Russian elections were largely coordinated on social media, it created ways of blocking it

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domestically and used the “troll factory” to undermine its potential both domestically and internationally (Aro 2016). The second nonmilitary means affecting war is the creation of color revolutions. They are understood by the Russian leadership to be a Western form of nonviolent warfare relying on information warfare, the financing of NGOs, political subversion through intelligence agencies, ideological confrontation, and the utilization of an international network of nonviolent protestors. The threat of color revolutions entered the political agenda in the mid-2000s but were at the time notably absent from the military agenda. At the start, however, color revolutions were not construed as a Western form of warfare but mostly seen as the spontaneous events they were, albeit supported by the West.3 Afterward, however, they became seen as part of a coherent pattern of Western-organized regime change. The epitome of this pattern was the Euromaidan revolt in Ukraine, which Putin saw as another achievement of the West. It took until the Arab Spring for Russian military theorists to give primary concern to color revolutions. The perceived threat from color revolutions has then been reverse-engineered in Russia’s nonmilitary warfare against the West. Russia now uses information warfare tactics that polarize the target population, use NGOs created and controlled by the government, find allies to promote Russian values and views, and support extremist political parties to undermine the status quo (Jonsson 2017b). The difference is, of course, that the color revolutions took place in support of democracy and better relations with the EU, whereas the Russian approach focuses on autocracy or “illiberal” democracies and Eurosceptic movements. The threat from information warfare and color revolutions is seen as existential to the Russian leadership. Not only have a large number of leaders been overthrown in post-Soviet states and replaced by pro-Western leaders, but it is also seen as an ongoing warfare against them. A decent Russian intelligence analyst would quickly realize that NATO is not interested in, or in a position to launch, a military offensive against Russia. However, the threat from Western nonmilitary means—sanctions, political and economic support to democracy promotion in Russia, and diplomatic measures—are ongoing threats to the legitimacy of Russian leaders. This train of thought was seen in the protests in Russia in 2011 and 2012, which Putin accused the US State Department and Hillary Clinton of initiating. The creation of the National Guard likewise underlines how serious Russia takes the threat of color revolutions. The senior leadership of the National Guard sees it as its task to combat color revolutions and has stated that war today is more about subversion and utilizing the potential of domestic populations protesting rather than seizing territories.

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Policy Implications In the conflict with Russia, there is a fundamental assumption that is fallacious: Western states believe it is up to them to choose whether they enter a war with Russia or not. This underpins every action that simultaneously seeks to punish Russian hostility while “avoiding escalation.” The problem is that this view assumes that the current situation is one of peace. Rather, as the Russian leadership sees itself in an information war, being targeted with color revolution subversion is equivalent to a use of force. The borderline between war and peace has been blurred, with the current confrontation already in the blurred area. It is only necessary for one party to see itself in the blurred area of war for war to exist. This mirrors the Russian understanding of war, which has always been closer to the view of the permanent struggle and insatiable insecurity, whereas the Western understanding has been more binary, with a war/peace divide. As the use of armed violence is losing its role as a relevant criterion for the onset of war, what legitimizes the other forms of violence becomes more arbitrary and a matter more of perception. Actions of Western states that are supposed to be a way of avoiding war, a substitute for escalating to war, can often be seen as acts of war by Russian leaders. The Western sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine were a typical example of a very limited response instead of acting more forcefully. However, because Western policymakers were explicitly stating that it would disunite the Russian elite and force Putin out, the Russian leadership interpreted the sanctions as a form of warfare to engineer regime change in Russia (Reuters 2014). To be clear, this is not an argument against sanctions or similar measures, as they can have ethical or strategic benefit, but a call for awareness among policymakers about the consequences. The mismatch between perceptions of war also stems from a fundamental mismatch in national interests, values, and the desired world order. This means the underlying conflict will not be solved by a détente. Rather, the Barack Obama administration’s reset of 2009–12 saw successful cooperation in few and limited areas (Deyermond 2013), but the underlying conflict remained and resurfaced. An intrinsic aspect of how Western states construct their security is based on the idea of expanding democracy and rule of law. However, the Russian leadership, whose power is predicated on the absence of both, sees this as attempts to destabilize states (or, at least, its grip on power) and make populations revolt in the name of Western values. In this way, it is worth remembering that Andrew Korybko described liberal democracy as the ideology motivating color revolutions as well as said that the fostering of

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patriotic values was its antidote (Korybko 2015). That in particular helps us understand many developments in Russia today. It need not be hopeless to state that there is a fundamental incompatibility. Rather, as aptly argued by Keir Giles, a recognition of the incompatibility can be more workable than misguided assumptions and hopes of partnership. There is thus a lesson from the Cold War that “once the irreconcilable differences between the West and the Soviet Union had been recognized, the security policies of both came to be geared to managing rather than resolving the conflict between the two sides” (Giles 2019, 171). Indeed, handling the conflict becomes a lot easier when dealing with “the Russia that exists, rather than the Russia one might hope for” (Giles 2019, 173). A starting point for handling the conflict is a sound understanding of Russia, including its national interests, politics, society, and history. Russian expertise has long been in decline, and regaining it requires a serious effort that goes beyond an unending iteration of popular concepts. Western policymakers need to be exposed to Russian thought of war and security to avoid the recurrent temptation to base their Russia policy on wishful thinking and best-case assumptions. The good news is that while it takes ten years and $10 billion to order and implement a new weapon system, it only takes ten years and $200,000 to educate and train a new Russia expert. This might sound like a long time of course, but it is already eleven years since the Georgian war and over five and a half years since the invasion of Ukraine. The problem of misunderstanding is, of course, not limited to Western analysts and practitioners. On the contrary, the Russian interpretation of Western actions and intentions is compounded by equal bits insecurity and paranoia, which can turn mostly benign but ill-conceived and uncoordinated actions into perceived master plans to dismember Russia. As Russian warfare consists of coordinated action in multiple spectra, it would be a tad simplistic to hope that a single new institution would solve it. One estimate is that at least six departments of the Presidential Administration of Russia are involved in active measures (Galeotti 2019, 64). Indeed, a “broad sense of quite what constitutes war . . . leads to a broad sense of what might be warfighting assets” (Galeotti 2016b, 297). Among the states facing Russian aggression, the threat needs to be prioritized on a governmental level and worked by multiple agencies. Not only that—it also requires a concerted international effort. Russia’s tools in the information sphere span from state-controlled international news media and government NGOs to troll factories guided by the presidential administration and intelligence and security services’ active

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measures that are amplified in social media. All of these are united in their goal to undermine societal cohesion and support for Western unity. This is not countered by simply debunking incorrect content. Rather, it requires a coordinated effort to increase the general public’s resilience by informing it of the extent of the threat and educating it in media literacy as well as debunking propaganda and counterintelligence work. One way of doing so is to continue and reinforce the recent trend to expose Russia’s failed intelligence operations, such as the attempted assassination of the defected GRU agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain and operations against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World AntiDoping Agency. This is useful not for shaming Russia to stop operations, which is unlikely to happen, but for increasing the overt political cost of such operations and for building an understanding by the public of the threat and hence a resilience. The Russian approach seeks to destabilize not only the cohesion in individual states but also the broader West, which is manifested in the EU and NATO. These actors are a large network of individual actors, which are vulnerable through small cracks. Put another way, a small bank can bankrupt a bigger bank, which can bankrupt a country; a small actor can affect a political party, which can tip an individual government, which can then affect the EU or NATO. Thereafter, actions such as adopting sanctions or shielding against Russia leveraging the EU’s need of energy can crumble. In this way, Russian support to indigenous problems in the West—anti-immigration parties, antiEU parties, Brexit, or anti-free-trade movements—stands a decent chance to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The boundary between war and peace is blurring in the Russian view, and it will become even blurrier as the utility of nonmilitary means keeps on increasing. This understanding underlies why Russia is more determined, more willing to take risks, and more proactive than a complacent West believing itself to be in a period of peace. Even though Russia’s power base is weaker than the West’s, it takes a unified and determined West to acknowledge being in a conflict with Russia and to succeed when the nature of war is changing in the Russian mind.

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Notes Epigraph: This quote is often misattributed to Trotsky, which Walzer correctly notes. Trotsky’s closest statement was “Burnham doesn’t recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net” (Trotsky 1942, 179), which later became shortened to “You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.” 1. Rather, a number of key theorists explicitly rejected the notion that the essence of war could ever change and/or that the increasingly effective nonmilitary means affected the essence of war. See Kvachkov (2004), Gareyev (2005a), Malyshev (2007). 2. For instance, the use of economic warfare has also been discussed, particularly of late, but has not received as much attention in doctrines and among theorists. 3. For instance, Putin stated that the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan was the result of weak governance and accumulated socioeconomic problems, and Medvedev saw that Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia should serve as an example for governments to develop their societies.

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Index active measures, 13, 153, 158–59 Adamsky, Dima, 13–14, 23–24, 88 adaptive approach, 70, 73, 80–81, 92, 139–42, 150, 154 Afghanistan, 38, 47, 78, 107, 128, 138–39 Antonovich, Pavel, 69, 108 Arab Spring, 6, 15, 19–20, 73–76, 87–91, 109, 113–22, 131–56 armed: conflict, 16, 19, 24, 32, 43, 50–59, 64, 69–71, 85–87, 90, 137–39; confrontation, 19, 34, 61, 134; force, 3–5, 12, 32–33, 41, 57–58, 67–68, 90–92, 105, 123, 136–38, 150, 154–55; struggle, 3–4, 19, 26–33, 42–66, 70–74, 82–84, 105–8, 141–42, 153; violence, 3–5, 10, 15–18, 32–37, 42, 53–77, 83–84, 91–92, 110, 123, 150–57 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 59, 62 Baluyevsky, Yuri, 59, 88, 136–37, 146–47 Bartles, Charles, 14–15, 154 Bartosh, Aleksandr, 21, 141–43 Berezovsky, Boris, 112 Bērzinš, Janis, 11–12 Bogdanov, Sergei, 4, 12–14, 55–56, 61–83, 91, 107–9, 118–19, 153 Borduzha, Nikolai, 120 Brezhnev, Leonid, 28, 51 Burenok, Vasily, 76–77, 118, 122–23 Bush, George W., 127–28, 131, 149 CIA (US foreign intelligence service), 102, 114 Chechnya, 51, 56, 110–12 Chekinov, Sergei, 4–5, 12–14, 56, 68–83, 91, 107–9, 118–19, 153 class: politics of, 33–34, 41–42; ruling, 26, 28; societies, 25–27, 32; struggle, 27–28, 34, 37; war 26, 31–32, 41 Clausewitz, Carl von, 3, 10, 25, 29–36, 41, 45, 56–67, 74, 77, 80–86 Clinton, Hillary, 132, 156 Cold War, 10, 56–59, 65, 68, 83, 114, 141–42, 158 Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), 120 color revolution: Bulldozer Revolution, 126,

129, 143, 146, 151; Orange Revolution, 6, 68, 125–29, 132–33, 141, 149; Rose Revolution, 58, 125, 128, 133; method of, 81, 90, 133, 139–44, 147–49; Tulip Revolution, 6, 58, 68, 124–29, 134–41; West as responsible for, 128, 132, 139, 157 Communist, 26–27, 37, 114; military theory (see Soviet Union: military theory of); party, 22–23, 35, 40, 112 controlled chaos, 11: creation of, 43, 71–72, 137–38, 141; wars of, 82–83, 91–92, 153 Crimea, 1, 9, 37, 43, 75–76, 124, 133–35 CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), 120 Cuba, 36, 38 cyber, 44, 72: attacks, 16, 103, 105, 108–9, 111, 116; security, 108; space, 69–71, 108–9, 113; war, 77–78; warfare, 12, 15, 97, 108–10, 121, 151 C4ISR, 44, 46, 106, 110, 121, 148, 155 DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), 111, 121 democracy, 2, 4: liberal, 143, 145, 150, 157; promotion of, 2, 20, 75, 86, 122, 125–35, 156; sovereign, 129–35 destabilization, 6, 50, 81, 92, 97–99, 115, 130–32 deterrence, 6, 87–88, dialectical materialism, 22, 24–25, 41, 61 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), 111, 121 economy, 28–29, 47, 52–54, 62, 94, 96, 114; economic crisis, 43, 62, 108, 118; economic war, 2, 59 elections, 20, 91, 94, 113–15, 121–35, 148–49, 153 electronic warfare, 29, 51, 60, 71, 95–97, 107–9, 138 Engels, Friedrich, 23–24, 26, 28, 30, 34, 37 escalation, 2, 5–6, 36, 73, 140, 157 Estonia,106 European Union (EU), 1–2, 5, 9, 19, 89–90, 118–19, 125–29, 149, 156, 159 Euromaidan, 2, 6, 20, 79, 118, 124–25, 133–35, 142–49, 155–56

  183

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Fridman, Ofer, 10–11, 40 Foreign Policy Concept: in 1993, 50–51; in 2000, 65–66; in 2008, 66; in 2013, 77, 86–87, 92 Frolov, Vladimir, 127 Frunze, Mikhail, 24, 26–27 FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service), 111–12, 119, 131 Galeotti, Mark, 9–10, 14, 89, 147 Gareyev, Makhmut, 18, 45–46, 57–59, 69–73, 83–91, 107, 137–39, 147–54 General Staff (Russian), 18, 73, 79, 95, 99, 105–6; Center for Military-Strategic Studies, 18, 55–56, 61 Georgia: color revolutions in (see color revolution); war in, 7, 43, 86, 108, 112–16, 122, 155, 158 Gerasimov, Valery, 1–2, 5–8, 11–15, 44, 63, 70–85, 91–94, 120, 138–50, 153–55 Giles, Keir, 11, 15–16, 95, 120, 154, 158 Golts, Aleksandr, 88–89, 124, 134, 140, 145 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 115 Gorbunov, Viktor, 61–63, 67, 71 GRU (Russian Military Intelligence), 56, 93, 108, 159 Gulf War, 12, 20, 43, 46–47, 68, 105–6, 121 Gusinsky, Vladimir, 111–12 Hegel, Friedrich, 24–25, 30 Hoffman, Frank, 9–10, 16 holism, 22–24 human rights, 20, 75, 87, 122, 125 131 hybrid warfare (gibridnaya voina), 1, 8–14, 21, 82–83, 92 ICT (Information and Communications Technology), 4, 94, 101, 103, 105, 118 ideology: communist, 22–23, 27, 37–38, 41, 50, 114; influence of, 4, 32–33, 50–54, 80, 87, 90, 136, 143, 156; liberal (see liberalism) information: operations, 79, 114; -psychological warfare, 6, 12, 16, 20, 47, 55, 78–79, 96, 99–123, 155; security, 95–108, 120; security doctrine, 64, 96–98, 101–3, 115–16, 122; struggle, 13, 53–54, 68, 94–95, 117; -technical warfare, 20, 59, 64, 95–96, 105–10, 155; war, 6–7, 11, 59, 77, 83, 95, 97, 99–100, 119–23, 155, 157; warfare, 6–7, 11, 51, 74, 77, 80, 92, 94–123; world war, 57, 115 international law, 31, 61, 63, 100–101, 104 Internet, 79, 82–83, 99, 102, 110–23, 133 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 123

Iraq: Gulf War (see Gulf War); US invasion of, 43, 72, 78, 128, 139 Ivanov, Sergei, 58, 91, 94, 111, 125–26 just war, 36–38 Kalistratov, Aleksandr, 21, 32–33, 55–56 Kartapolov, Andrei, 12, 79, 83, 91, 118, 121–23, 153 Kavkaz Tsentr (news outlet), 111 Kazarin, Pavel, 3, 53–54 Kennan, George, 10, 115 Khrushchev, Nikita, 27–28, 33, 36, 41 Kiselyov, Valery, 25, 105–6 Kokoshin, Andrei, 35, 87–88, 109 Komov, Sergei, 109, 119 Korybko, Andrew, 80–81, 143–44, 150, 157–58 Krasnaya Zvezda (magazine), 18, 35, 111, 116, 137 Kvachkov, Vladimir, 56–57 Kyrgyzstan, 6, 68, 124, 126, 128–29, 134–38, 160 Lavrov, Sergei, 2, 135 Lenin, Vladimir, 3, 20, 23–31, 35, 41, 74 Levada Center, 120, 135 liberalism, 115, 141, 143, 150, 156–57 Libya, 7, 43, 72, 77, 131–32, 135, 138–40 Lider, Julian, 3–4, 26–28, 32–34, 37 Makarov, Nikolai, 14, 63, 106, 138 Marx, Karl, 23–26, 30, 32, 34, 37 Marxist-Leninism, 24–28, 31, 34, 40 Marksizm-Leninism o voine i armii (book), 3, 28, 32, 36–37, 41 media: government use of, 99, 105, 111, 158; in color revolutions, 14, 52, 127–28, 143; social (see social media); takeover of, 111–12, 122, 132; threat from, 98–98, 110, 119, 120, 122, 135, 143, 146; in war, 47, 75–76, 82–83, 94, 103, 111–12, 115 Medvedev, Dimitry, 113, 131–32, 160 Messner, Evgeny, 38–40, 44, 60, 77–79 military (Russia): force, 1, 11, 48, 68–70, 82–85, 92, 104, 121–22, 139–45; power, 13, 59, 65, 86, 94, 136; reform, 7, 43, 53, 96, 106–7, 109–10, 148, 154; theory, 3, 8, 18–31, 45–46, 63, 77, 90–91, 150 Military Doctrine (Russia): in 1993, 50–52, 92, 103; in 2000, 49, 64–65, 103; in 2010, 18, 45, 59, 85–86, 103–7, 123, 137, 145–47; in 2014, 15, 83, 87–89, 92, 104, 118, 145, 148; Soviet, 22–23, 27, 36

index  Military-Technical Revolution (MTR), 13, 22, 105, 121 Ministry of Defense (Russia), 48–51, 111 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Russia), 84, 96, 104–5 Modestov, Sergei, 48–49, 108 myatezhvoina (subversion war), 11, 39–40, 77–79, 92 National Guard (Russia), 145–48, 156 NATO: as threat, 16, 51–52, 66, 84–86, 136–39, 141, 156; defense of, 1–2, 6, 9, 36, 128, 159 Nationalism, 52, 78, 83, 90, 148 National Security Strategy (Russia): 1997 Concept of, 50, 52–53; 2000 Concept of, 63–64; in 2009, 66–67, 117, 137; in 2015, 90, 92 new physical principles, 61–62, 65, 71, 85 New-Generation Warfare (NGW), 1, 12–14, 46, 52, 75, 107 New-Type Warfare, 12, 79 118 Network-Centric Warfare, 22, 105–7, 121 Nogovitsyn, Anatoly, 113, 116 noncontact warfare, 29, 46–49, 55, 77–78, 82, 105–7, 141 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 75, 127–28, 130–31, 143 nonmilitary means: blurring boundaries, 69–70, 138; increasing utility of, 5, 7, 20, 90–92, 124, 147–48; relation to military means, 70, 94, 136; Russia’s use of, 1, 8, 10–11, 87; in the understanding of war, 4–5, 15, 31–43, 53–63, 72–73, 82–85, 150–59; the West’s use of, 2, 6, 76–80, 124–25 nonviolent: color revolutions, 6, 73, 81–82; means, 5–7, 11, 19, 48, 54–55, 61, 92, 124, 150, 152–53, 156; protests, 4, 124, 139–42, 144–46 NTV, 111–12, 116 nuclear: strategy, 18, 36, 64, 87–88; war 36, 45, 47, 66, 83; weapons, 7, 29, 36–51, 61–69, 80–87, 95, 109, 148, 154 Obama, Barack, 131, 157 Ogarkov, Nikolai, 33, 105 Orlyansky, Vladislav, 53–54 Panarin, Igor, 115–16 patriotism, 70, 81, 89, 98, 102, 104, 122–23, 141–150, 158 Patrushev, Nikolai, 114, 131 peaceful coexistence, 28–29 Persson, Gudrun, 15, 88–89, 147

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political supremacy of the military, 34–38 precision weapons, 13, 29, 46–51, 55, 67, 70–71, 78–91, 106–7, 155 Presidential Administration (Russia), 126, 158 propaganda, 2, 9, 38, 42, 80, 110–11, 118–22, 143–44, 153, 159 protest: and color revolutions, 105, 141–43; of elections, 20, 92, 113, 121–22, 125, 132–35, 155; nonviolent (see nonviolent: protests); potential for, 73, 82–83, 85, 87–88, 91, 138–40, 145–50, 153 public opinion: of color revolutions, 126, 135; of information war, 120, Putin, Vladimir; on color revolutions, 71, 76, 91, 118, 125–28, 132–32, 148–49; on information warfare, 6, 71, 102, 110, 112, 118–19, 155; on modern war, 62–63, 70–71, 153; on threat from West, 2, 6, 130–31, 136, 156 reflexive control, 113–14, 144 regime change, 2, 5, 12, 20, 73, 77, 80–81, 118, 124–50, 156–57 religion, 45, 50, 52–53, 75, 90 reset, 125, 131, 157 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 13, 22, 49, 107 RISS (Russian Institute for Strategic Studies), 80, 83 Rosgvardiya. See National Guard (Russia) RT (Media), 116, 122, 155, RUNET (Russophone Internet), 83 Russia: Armed Forces, 7, 43–45, 73, 100, 105–9, 116; civil war, 27, 38; federal law On Defense, 5, 67–68, 72, 83, 82, 154; intelligence agencies, 43, 52, Russian Academy of Military Science, 18, 45–46, 61, 67, 73, 82, 84, 115, 141 Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS), 80, 83 Russophone Internet (RUNET), 83 Saakashvili, Mikheil, 113, 141, 146 sanctions, 2, 5–6, 14, 58, 156–59 Security Council (Russia), 17, 50, 84, 87, 101–4, 113–16, 120, 131 Security Doctrines. See military doctrine, specific type of security doctrine Serbia, 49, 58, 126, 129, 135, 143, 146 Serebryannikov, Vladimir, 54–55, 57 Sergeyev, Igor, 49 Sherstyuk, Vladislav, 116–17 Shoigu, Sergei, 89, 134–35

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Sixth-Generation Warfare, 12, 29, 46–48, 69, 75, 105–6, 109 Slipchenko, Vladimir, 12, 29, 46–49, 55–56, 71–82, 91, 106, 121 social media, 44, 80–81, 109, 121–23, 143–44, 155–56, 159 soft power, 117, 129, 133, 138–39, 144 Sokolovsky, Vasily, 25, 32, 35–36, 41, 55 sovereignty, 65, 86, 99, 101–3, 117–18; sovereign democracy, 129–35 Soviet Union, 10, 17; dissolution of, 2, 7, 50, 61, 68, 114–15, 137, 141; military theory of, 3, 18, 20, 22–42, 45, 152 Sputnik, 80, 122 Stalin, Josef, 24–25, 31, 35 Starodubtstev, Yuri, 69, 108 strategic culture, 8, 16 Streltsov, Igor, 116–18 struggle: armed (see armed: struggle); ideological (see ideology: influence of); information (see information: struggle) subversion, 1–2, 42, 137, 152, 156–57; war (see myatezhvoina) Sun Tzu, 54, 61 Surkov, Vladislav, 126, 128–29 Svechin, Aleksandr, 24–26, 30–31, 35 Syria, 7, 44, 73, 82, 87, 108, 135, 138–40 television (TV), 113, 116 terrorism, 9, 51–52, 59, 77, 81, 101, 119, 145 Thomas, Timothy, 12, 14, 16–17, 76, 79, 95, 111, 147 threat perception (Russia), 6, 15, 92, 95, 98, 121–25, 136, 144–45, 155 Troll Factories, 94, 156, 158 Trotsky, Lev, 23–24, 30, 35, 40, 126, 159 Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 24, 35 Ukraine: Euromaidan uprising in, 1–2, 43, 72–79, 83–94, 149, 156; Orange Revolution in, 6, 58, 66, 68, 147; war in, 5–9, 12–14, 20, 44, 75, 102–8, 118–14, 145, 152, 155–59 United States, 1–2, 5, 6; creation of color revolutions by, 14, 20, 54, 76–79, 88, 124–46, 149; intelligence services of, 68; military of, 16, 20, 22, 43, 105–7, 128; presidential election in, 1,

7, 44, 152–55; threat from, 27, 47, 51, 62, 90, 107–8, 114–15 United Kingdom, 1, 11, 95, 115, 146, 155, United Nations (UN), 47, 65–66, 72, 84, 102, 128, 131, values: erosion of, 38, 60, 77, 79, 129, 150, 157; patriotic, 122–23, 148, 158; promotion of, 6, 134–35, 156; spiritual-moral, 67, 98, 102, 118, 123, 155; struggle over, 15, 57, 86–87, 92, 137, 141; Western, 124, 139, 145 Vladimirov, Aleksandr, 59–60, 77 Vorobyov, Ivan, 25, 48, 105–6 Voyennaya Mysl (journal), 18, 35 Voyennaya Strategiya (book), 32, 36, 41 VPK (magazine), 18, 60–61, 69 war: cause of, 23–28, 41; character of, 3–5, 13, 19–23, 28–29, 36, 48, 106, 121, 153; civil, 31, 44, 74, 77, 122, 139; cold (see Cold War); of consciousness, 60, 77–82, 92, 121; future, 14, 26, 46, 48, 55–56, 63, 71, 77, 109; inevitability of, 26–28, 32, 36, 41–42, 50; and peace, blurring of, 1, 5–7, 38, 40, 73–91, 152–53, 159; state of, 5, 15–16, 58, 69, 72–73, 154. See also specific types of war warfare: asymmetrical, 1, 68–69, 83, 88, 138; conventional, 9, 12, 16, 36, 76, 80, 96; electronic (see electronic warfare); generations of, 12, 29, 46–49, 69, 75–78, 105–9; ideological (see ideology: influence of); information (see information: warfare); modern, 12–13, 56; political, 10, 99; psychological, 39, 75 (see also information: -psychological warfare); unconventional, 61, 63, 67, 79–81, 141 weapons of mass destruction, 28, 51, 67, 109, 155 World War: First, 27, 38; information, 57, 115–16; Second, 27, 45; third, 2, 28 Yanukovych, Viktor, 133–35, 140, 149 Yeltsin, Boris, 112, 146 Yugoslavia, 47, 62, 77, 107, 136–38 Yushchenko, Viktor, 125, 132 Zyuganov, Gennady, 112

Aboutthe the Author About Author Oscar Jonsson Jonsson is,is during the 2019 director of ofthe 2019, Director theStockholm StockholmFree Free World World Forum (Frivärld), aa Swedish Swedishforeign foreignand andsecurity securitypolicy policy think tank, an associthink tank, andand associated reated researcher at the Swedish Defence University. Previously, Dr. Jonsson was searcher at the Swedish Defence University. Previously, Dr. Jonsson was a subaject-matter subject-matter the Policy and Department Plans Department at the Swedish expertexpert at the at Policy and Plans at the Swedish Armed Armed Forces Headquarters. holdsfrom a PhD the Department of War Forces Headquarters. He holdsHe a PhD the from Department of War Studies at Studies at King’s College London. King’s College London.

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