Another Soviet-Era Practice Returns: Republishing Foreign News Stories Based on Old Data to Boost Kremlin

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 5 – In Soviet times, Moscow often republished stories that appeared in foreign outlets to boost its own position, counting on the authority that such outlets enjoyed within the Soviet population and assuming that it could post them as news because of when they were first published even if the information in them was old.

            Now, the Kremlin is doing the same thing, not only publishing stories that have appeared in foreign outlets that support its own ideological agenda but using the information in them however old to suggest that its current policies have widespread support and thus are correct regardless of what has happened more recently.

            A clear example of this is an article in the Russian nationalist portal, Stoletiye, by Vladimir Malyshev who cites articles in the Western media suggesting that nostalgia for the Soviet Union and socialism are growing in the former Soviet republics but do so using data that was gathered before Putin’s war in Ukraine (stoletie.ru/vzglyad/nostalgija_po_sssr_244.htm).

            Among the articles he cites are one from a Russian publication in Greece that uses data from several years ago to argue that “residents of many former republics of the USSR consider that they lived better within the Soviet Union” and another from a US outlet, the American Conservative, which cites data of five years ago to make a similar claim.

            Malyshev even uses a poll taken in 2018 in Kyiv to suggest that even Ukrainians feel that way, implicitly suggesting that they still do even in the face of the Russian “military action” there. That is unlikely, but a casual reader of articles like his may be ready to accept the idea that the reported hostility of Ukrainians now is not genuine and deep.

            The Russian journalist cites more recent data from the Russian Federation to argue that nostalgia for the Soviet past and the socialist system is especially strong there but clearly wants his readers to believe that it is rapidly becoming just as strong in the former republics even though other polls show that opinions there are moving in precisely the opposite direction.

            “It is clear,” he says, “that today it is already impossible to turn back to the USSR. But what is happening [as shown in the old polls he cites] is the occasion for the most serious reflections about which path Russia ought to move along in the future.”