USSR’s Disintegration ‘Inspired West’ to Believe It Could Have More Such Victories without War, Chadayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 5 – Western leaders were “very impressed by the collapse of the USSR” and their victory in the Cold War, Aleksey Chadayev says. They won both conflicts without the application of significant additional military means at the end and believed that they could achieve the same thing again with the Russian Federation.

            The Moscow political technologist and government advisor says that they correctly believed that the USSR capitulated not because its military and economic might had been undermined but because the leadership of the USSR did not believe that it had the right to use force to defend what had existed (business-gazeta.ru/article/589328).

            Because “everyone tacitly agreed with what happened in the late 1980s to 1991,” there was no one ready to defend the existing system. It thus collapsed as it were on its own; and this inspired the West: “They decided that if it worked once, it would work again” and thus the West focused on how to affect the consciousness of people in order to win without war.”

            And that leads to an especially valuable outcome for those who adopt this strategy, Chadayev says. “If you have broken someone else’s will and subjugated the mind of the enemy, it isn’t necessary to kill him because he can become a very useful and valuable animal.” At the very least, the goal of defeating him “has been achieved.

            This is the essence of cognitive warfare and why it is not about news and interpretation as is the case with information warfare. “It’s about who I am and why I am. Who I am against, who is my friend, who is my enemy … Literally, following Dostoyevsky, the battlefield in this case is the human heart.”

            According to Chadayev, “cognitive warfare is waged both at the levels of society and the state and at the level of individuals. For that reason, the ability of a society to withstand shock depends on the basic literary and training of everyone. In a conventional war, only those who go to the front receive special training; in the case of a cognitive war, everyone needs it.”