‘Fake News’ has Been Part of Moscow’s Modus Operandi Since 1923

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 13 – Vladimir Putin’s regime is often presented as a pioneer in the production and use of “fake news;” but in fact, historical writer Nikolay Syromyatnikov says, “fake news” under various names has been part of Moscow’s modus operandi since January 1923, a tactic that Soviet leaders from beginning to end viewed as critical to their success. 

            On January 11, 1923, 13 days after the formation of the USSR, Iosif Unslikh, the deputy head of the NKVD, asked the Politburo to authorize the creation of a bureau of disinformation in the State Political Administration of his commissariat.  The Politburo agreed and that agency was set up (russian7.ru/post/feyk-novosti-v-sssr-zachem-nkvd-sozda/).

                (Syromyatnikov draws heavily on two sources, Yevgeny Zhirnov’s detailed history, “80 let sovetskoy sluzhbe dezinformatsii,” Kommersant, January 13, 2003, available at kommersant.ru/doc/358500  and Lenid Shebarshin’s memoirs, The Last Battle of the KGB (in Russian, Moscow, 2013).)

                In its decision, the Politburo directed the new institution not only to collect information which might interest foreign intelligence services and clarify the extent to which those services were informed about Soviet secrets but also to disseminate plausible but fake information to mislead them and their governments.

            Such misleading stories were to be distributed about the domestic situation in Russia, the state of its military, as well as the work of the government and its various commissariats. In the case of especially important disinformation materials, the Politburo decree specified, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was to make decisions.

            Many of the first such efforts were directed at discrediting the Russian emigration and its leadership, including Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich who aspired to be recognized as tsar and Vasily Shulgin, an important nationalist leader whose reputation was destroyed after he was led by the nose through Soviet Russia and wrote about it, only to be exposed.

            The Soviet Union’s “fake news” efforts continued in the 1930s with publications of books by Western journalists like Henri Barbusse celebrating the USSR and during World War II with an active radio program directed against German forces.  In the early 1950s, Moscow spread fake stories about a supposed American “bacteriological war” in Korea.

            According to Syromyatnikov, “Western left-wing media willingly swallowed and distributed this ‘fake news.’ Soviet ‘colleagues simply sent the needed Western scholars the stories and sufficient money and the latter didn’t reject anything.”

            Former KGB officer Shebarshin in his memoirs says, the Russkaya semerka writer continues, that “in the late Soviet period, it wasn’t all that hard to find in the West a print journalist who would for money agree to write a pro-Soviet article.” And once one did, others would pick up on it, not recognizing the source of the original story.

            Indeed, according to Shebarshin, “the Gorbi phenomenon” was created in the West largely thanks to this method. The problem with all such claims, of course, is to know whether they are factual or whether they too are part of the fake news that Moscow has used with such success.