Russians Weaponize Feigned Stupidity to Undermine Putin’s Regime - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Russians Weaponize Feigned Stupidity to Undermine Putin’s Regime
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The Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre, writing to his Russian counterpart Prince Pyotr Borisovich Kozlovsky in the autumn of 1815, could not help but express his profound displeasure with the amoral nature of the czarist bureaucracy. “Some strange spirit of dishonesty and deceitfulness circulates through all the veins of the State,” complained de Maistre, adding that in Russia “theft by deception is continuous. Buy a diamond and it will have a flaw; buy a match and it will have no sulphur. This spirit, which is to be found in all channels of the administration, does immense harm.” Another French visitor to the Russian Empire, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, found the situation no better at the other end of the 19th century, setting out in his three-volume L’Empire des tsars et les Russes (1895-1898) how “ignorance, laziness, and routine are merely failures of the Russian bureaucracy; its real vice is venality,” for “like a venom or a virus spread in the social body, administrative corruption poisoned all the limbs, impaired the vital functions, weakened the organism.”  

The parasitic Soviet civil service, with its penchant for bribery and embezzlement, was hardly an improvement. Sheila Fitzpatrick, in Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, described how “the stupidity, rudeness, inefficiency, and venality of Soviet bureaucrats constituted the main satirical targets of the Soviet humorous journal, Krokodil,” which “showed officials absent from their workplaces, slacking off when present, refusing desperate citizens’ pleas for the precious ‘papers’ that were necessary for even the simplest operations in Soviet life, like buying a railroad ticket.” Permanent shortages of consumer goods and services, the inevitable result of so-called scientific communism, necessitated nonstop underhand dealings in the form of so-called блат (blat) arrangements, by which favors could be procured through party contacts or black markets. Venality courses like a toxin through the present-day Russian body politic as well, with both “grand” and “petty” corruption unavoidable facets of daily life, the citizens of the Russian Federation, like their hapless forebears, being obliged to pay bribes to government officials, police officers, school administrators, hospital officials, and prospective employers in order to achieve the most basic tasks. (READ MORE: Ukraine Is More Alive Than Ever, While Its Enemy Is Rotting From the Inside Out)

Endemic corruption will, over such a lengthy period of time, produce a poisonous miasma of inanity and spite, with every bureaucratic obstacle, misstep, or debacle understandably attributed either to incompetence or bad faith. Goethe, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, suggested that “misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do,” a maxim that would later be embodied in Hanlon’s Razor, the adage that warns us never to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Yet century upon century of massacres, genocide, cultural repression, terror famines, exile and penal labor camps, ideological brainwashing, and ubiquitous venality cannot be blamed simply on garden-variety stupidity. 

Feigned ignorance, dumb insolence, blatant incompetence, malicious compliance — these can actually be forms of passive resistance to an overbearing autocracy.

At the same time, pure malice cannot explain every blunder perpetrated by the sprawling Russian civil and military bureaucracy. Just as Occam’s Razor is of limited practical utility — simpler explanations are not always better than more complex ones — Hanlon’s Razor can likewise prove overly reductive. What initially seems like stupidity may, upon closer examination, have a certain logic to it. Feigned ignorance, dumb insolence, blatant incompetence, malicious compliance — these can actually be forms of passive resistance to an overbearing autocracy, as we see so hilariously demonstrated in Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–1923), Vladimir Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1969), and other such timeless satires. In a despotic society, it can be difficult to disentangle the stupidity, malevolence, and passive resistance that may be present in a given fact pattern. Let us consider a few recent representative cases.

Exhibit A: On April 25, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin proudly announces the results of a state security raid against an alleged Ukrainian terrorist cell: “This morning, the Federal Security Service stopped the activities of a terrorist group that planned to attack and kill one famous Russian TV journalist,” namely the pro-Kremlin television anchor and regime lickspittle Vladimir Solovyov. The FSB agents claim to have arrested six individuals and confiscated an IED, eight Molotov cocktails, a grenade, six pistols, and a sawed-off shotgun, and they further produced a photograph showing the other “terrorist paraphernalia” discovered in the apartment, which the BBC’s Francis Scarr wryly called a bogus “Ukrainian neo-Nazi starter pack,” including a swastika-emblazoned T-shirt (evidently brand new and unworn, replete with fold lines), an SS Totenkopf patch, an image of Adolf Hitler, a copy of the Russian neo-Nazi activist Maxim Martsinkevich’s memoirs, forged passports, some drugs, and an awful green wig, all must-haves when you’re looking to decorate the headquarters of your ongoing clandestine operation. Atop this pile of planted evidence lay three perplexing items: an expansion pack and two “stuff” add-on packs for the 2009 life simulation video game The Sims 3 (not the base game, mind you).

“I genuinely believe,” wrote Bellingcat’s Elliot Higgins upon the release of the crime scene photograph, “this is a dumb FSB officer being told to get 3 SIMs.” No other explanation has ever been advanced for the presence of The Sims 3 in the state security service’s clumsily arranged mise-en-scène. But was this truly an example of Russian bureaucratic weapons-grade stupidity, as Higgins would have it? Or was this an example of dumb insolence rising to the level of passive resistance? The act of mixing up three SIM cards with three 13-year-old secondhand copies of The Sims 3 for the Xbox 360 console is so inconceivable as to support an inference not of abject stupidity but of tactical stupidity, of a kind that managed, subtly but effectively, to highlight the absurd nature of the FSB’s utterly implausible arrangement, while nevertheless maintaining a certain level of plausible deniability.

Exhibit B: On the evening of Aug. 20, 2022, the Russian journalist and propagandist Darya Dugina is killed in a car bombing in Bolshiye Vyazyomy, just outside Moscow, as she returns from an art festival held at the Zakharovo manor house. It is presumed that the intended target was her father, the neofascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who had switched cars with his daughter at the last minute. Credit for the assassination is taken by an obscure Russian insurgent organization calling itself the Национальная республиканская армия, or the National Republican Army. The spokesman for the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine chimes in, declaring that “the process of internal destruction of the Russian World has begun,” and that “the Russian world will eat and devour itself from the inside.” Given that Aleksandr Dugin had recently been criticizing Vladimir Putin for “not being fascist enough,” as Andrei Piontkovsky put it, warning that “the mighty forces of history have come into play, the tectonic plates have shifted. Let the old regime bury its dead. A new Russian time is coming. And it’s coming irreversibly,” there are rumors that the bomb was actually planted by Russian special services. 

The Russian FSB is quick to present another theory: the bombing was carried out by a middle-aged, Mini Cooper–driving Ukrainian woman by the name of Natalia Vovk, who carried out the operation with her young daughter and pet cat in tow. She was assisted, apparently, by another Ukrainian national, one Bohdan Tsyganenko, who described himself in social media posts on Vkontakte as a “sex instructor” and “beer lover” with a predilection for smoking hashish out of a Pepsi bottle. The blurry photo of Tsyganenko published by the Russian state-owned RIA Novosti news agency, taken from the suspect’s social media feed, depicts the Ukrainian super spy and most-wanted “member of a Ukrainian sabotage and terrorist group” emerging from a bush, holding a pistol in one hand and a rifle in the other, while sporting aviator sunglasses and a party store pirate hat. Thus, owing to yet more bungling by the FSB, what might have been a unifying occasion centered on the untimely death of a regime propagandist has been instantly reduced to the level of a risible farce, and in a manner that redounds in no way to the benefit of the Putin regime.

Exhibit C: Now it is May 23, 2023, and Vladimir Putin is meeting with the chairman of Russia’s constitutional court, Valery Zorkin, who comes bearing an offering for his master: a copy of a 1674 map made by the French cartographer Hubert Jaillot, entitled La Russie Blanche ou Moscovie Divisée Suivant l’Estendue Des Royaumes, Duchés, Principautés, Provin, et Peuples qui sont Presentement sous la Domination du Czar de la Russia, Cogneu sous la Nom de Grand Duc de Moscovie [White Russia, or Muscovy, Divided According to the Extent of the Kingdoms, Duchies, Principalities, Provinces, and Peoples which are Presently under the Dominion of the Czar of Russia, also known as the Grand Duke of Muscovy]. “Why did I bring it [the map] here?” Zorkin asks rhetorically. “Vladimir Vladimirovich — there’s no Ukraine there.” “Of course,” the murderous dictator responds, adding that “the Soviet government created Soviet Ukraine. This is well known to everyone. Until then, there was never any Ukraine in the history of humanity.” 

The bizarre Russian idée fixe that Ukraine simply does not exist, or alternatively that “Не должно быть ни государства этого, ни языка … Никакого украинского языка быть не должно [there should be neither this state nor this language, there should be no Ukrainian language],” as Alexei Didenko, Russian State Duma deputy and member of the Duma Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building recently asserted, has intensified the genocidal fervor with which the Russian Federation has waged its war against Ukraine. And here, courtesy of Valery Zorkin, we are presented with evidence of Ukraine’s supposed nonexistence, in the form of an authoritative 17th-century map of the region.

A great deal has changed since the time of the cartographer Hubert Jaillot. Bessarabia has become Moldova, the Duchy of Courland is now part of Latvia, the Swedish province of Ingria, with its fortress city of Nyenskans, is now Russian Saint Petersburg. You will search for, say, Slovakia in vain, though I struggle to see how that would provide a justification for overrunning Slovakia’s borders with a horde of genocidal zombies, murdering Slovak civilians, burning Slovak libraries and looting Slovak museums, destroying Slovak civilian infrastructure, all the while ranting about how there never was a Slovakia and there shouldn’t be a Slovak language, and so on, solely on the basis of a 349-year-old copper engraving. Thus the presence or absence of Ukraine on Jaillot’s map would seem to have precious little bearing on Russia’s illegal invasion of its neighbor.

Even a cursory glance at Hubert Jaillot’s diagrammatic representation of 17th-century Eastern Europe, however, reveals something blindingly obvious: Ukraine is very much on the map, marked plainly as “Vkraine ou Pays de Cosaques” — Ukraine, or the Land of the Cossacks, a territory distinct from the domains of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the west, the Muscovites to the north, and the Tatars and Circassians to the south and east. Jaillot’s map actually constitutes evidence of the deep historical roots of Ukraine, notwithstanding nonsensical Russian chauvinist claims that Ukrainian identity is some sort of Soviet-era experiment. The Russian regime was promptly mocked when video footage of the Zorkin-Putin summit was released, with one social media account uploading an early 18th-century map by Johann Baptist Homann entitled Ukrania quae et Terra Cosaccorum cum vicinis Walachiae, Moldaviae, Minorisq[uae], Tartariae Provinciis exhibita alongside the caption “Такое дело, коллеги. Обнаружена карта 1702 года, на которой Украина есть, а города, где родился Владимир Путин, нет [Well, colleagues. A map from 1702 has been found, which has Ukraine on it, but the city in which Vladimir Putin was born is missing.”

Can this be attributed to malice, or stupidity, or something else?

How could Valery Zorkin have committed so monumental a blunder, in the very presence of Vladimir Putin, with cameras rolling all the while? He is presumably an intelligent man, and a well-respected judge of considerable standing. We know he is not altogether devoid of conscience, having famously dissented from a 1995 ruling that legitimated the decision to move the Russian military into Chechnya, and having presciently warned in the 1990s that “completely different times are coming, more cynical and in some ways very similar to the previous ones.” And here he is in 2023, procuring a copy of a fairly obscure map in order to make a point refuted by the map itself, and then humiliating Russia’s dictator in front of the eyes of the world. Can this be attributed to malice, or stupidity, or something else?

With the Russian bureaucracy rife with corruption, venality, and incompetence, it is eminently possible to disguise subtle acts of resistance in a cloak of ineptitude, and so to follow Russian affairs is to be presented constantly with the questions raised by Hanlon’s Razor. How is it that RIA Novosti can accidentally publish a pre-written Febr. 26, 2023 editorial proclaiming that “Ukraine has returned to Russia…. It will be reorganized, re-established and returned to its natural state as part of the Russian world,” even as the Russian offensive was petering out before reaching Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv? How is it that the Russian Ministry of Defense can release embarrassing reports on the state of mobilization, only to hastily withdraw them? How can the Russian Ministry of Defense and RIA Novosti publicize footage of the purported destruction of Ukrainian Leopard 2A4 tanks, when it is plain as day that the vehicles being targeted by Russian helicopters are in fact pieces of agricultural equipment, namely John Deere 4830 self-propelled sprayers? Was it really necessary for the TASS news agency, in its article about claims made by the pro-Kremlin former UN weapons inspect Scott Ritter, “Russia’s newest satellites to change course of Ukrainian conflict — former UN inspector,” to use an AP photo of a nervous-looking, sweat-bedewed Ritter taken during his 2011 trial and conviction for “unlawful contact with a minor”?

Perhaps these are all just innocent mistakes, which just so happen to embarrass Putin’s regime. Or perhaps they are instances of malicious compliance and dumb insolence, perpetrated by bureaucrats looking to undermine the dictatorship while maintaining plausible deniability. We must admit that malevolence remains the Russian Federation’s primary export these days, as we have seen in the deadly attacks on the theater and hospital in Mariupol, the apartment blocks in Dnipro and Uman, the train station in Kramatorsk, the shopping mall in Kremenchuk, and far too many other places to name, and now the destruction of the dam in Nova Kakhovka, with all the humanitarian, ecological, and economic damage that will ensue. And we must acknowledge that stupidity remains a close second, summed up best by the clearly inebriated Kremlin-appointed Kherson oblast governor Volodomyr Saldo, standing in an office overlooking the comprehensively flooded Nova Kakhovka as he slurs into the camera that “everything is fine in Novaya Kakhovka, people go about their daily business like any day.” The retired Russian Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, a critic of the Putin regime, has cautioned his countrymen that “if sober-minded people are muzzled, then you only become dumber and more corrupt, but not stronger in any way. We are being defeated by intellect. And in our country, instead of intellect, people are twisting arms, intimidating, and imprisoning. In such a situation, the country always loses and does not have long to live.”

Russian society, as Curzio Malaparte wrote in The Kremlin Ball (1957), “is the mirror of European society, but dominated by fear.” In a Russian World marked by corruption, state violence, and learned helplessness, subtle forms of passive resistance are perhaps the best we can hope for, with the exception of brave democracy activists like Vladimir Kara-Murza, Memorial co-chair Oleg Orlov, and certain others. The achievements of Russian bureaucrats in slightly undermining regime propaganda rather pale in comparison to the heroism of Belarusian partisans destroying railway tracks, the protesters of the Euromaidan withstanding hails of sniper fire, or the Ukrainian soldiers fighting in muddy trenches against the second-largest army in the world, but they are suggestive of germs of humanity that survive, secreted away in pockets of resistance within the increasingly inhuman Russian World, waiting for the chance to grow into something less reprehensible.

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

Here’s What to Tell Those Who Believe Putin’s Schizo-Fascist Regime Is Some Sort of Noble Traditionalist Bulwark

Odesa’s Catherine the Great Monument and the Legacy of the Russian World

Dead Friends: The World of Hryhorii Skovoroda

Matthew Omolesky
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Matthew Omolesky is a human rights lawyer and a researcher in the fields of cultural heritage preservation and law and anthropology. A Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he has been contributing to The American Spectator since 2006, as well as to publications including Quadrant, Lehrhaus, Europe2020, the European Journal of Archaeology, and Democratiya.
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