Disinformation: born in the last century, thriving in this one
‘Dezinformatsiya’—meaning ‘disinformation’ in Russian—is a 20th century word that symbolizes perfectly the communications field between the Moscow elite and the West in the 21st century.
During the current confrontation over Ukraine—and the different portrayals of that crisis in press and public opinion in the West and Russia—that field has become a virtual battlefield, shadowing the drawing up of troops and tanks on snow-covered borderlands.
The word’s exact origins—perhaps like the most effective disinformation itself—are obscure. The Oxford English dictionary suggests that the first printed usage was in 1949 in a Soviet dictionary of the Russian language. Yet while that volume supposedly offered a French origin, the word was not—according to the OED—recorded in French until 1954.
Disinformation–a word born at the dawn of the Cold War
Whichever date is correct—1949 or 1954—the era is significant. It was in September 1949 that the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, included the phrase ‘Cold War’ in one of his reports. The term was then so new to the reader that it merited inverted commas. It was in 1954 that the Soviet leadership transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine—a move that mattered far less in terms of international politics when both Russia and Ukraine were parts of the Soviet Union.
It is also the era when the last warmth of wartime alliance between Moscow, London, and Washington faded away. While the Khrushchev era that followed the death of Stalin did bring some improvements compared to what had gone before—the ending of censorship of foreign correspondents’ reports before they were sent was the main example—the decades that followed, almost to the end of the Soviet era, were tough for international correspondents in Moscow.
Their task was to tell the story of a society which saw the world very differently from the way it was seen in the West. That society itself was transformed beyond recognition more than three decades ago. The collapse of the Soviet system was followed by a period of friendship and cooperation.
It also raised a number of unanswered and difficult questions. After the Soviet state fell, there were—in the form of territorial disputes—reminders that it had been designed not to be easily disassembled. Crimea was one of those difficult questions—one that Moscow decided to resolve in its favour by force of arms when, in 2014, it annexed the peninsula from Ukraine.
Journalists caught in the conflict between Russia and the West
Today international news organizations find themselves at the centre of renewed confrontation between Russia and the West. In early February 2022, the suspension of the licence permitting RT (formerly Russia Today) to broadcast in Germany was swiftly followed by the closure of Deutsche Welle’s bureau in Moscow. As with RT U.K.’s earlier difficulties with the British regulator Ofcom (in 2019, RT was fined £200,000 (€236,000) for ‘failing to preserve due impartiality’) the regulatory authorities’ move was a response to breaches of their rules. The steps they took were inevitably seen in Moscow as politically motivated.
The Russian government’s response shows how much importance it places on the media as a tool of international relations. The early post-Soviet era was characterized by an era of unprecedented press freedom in Russia, both for Russian and international journalists. That did not last. In the case of international journalists, negative reporting of the Russian army’s military campaigns in Chechnya in the mid-1990s led to greater controls on reporters when that conflict flared again at the end of the decade. Since then, the Russian authorities seem to have learnt from their mistakes—and sought to correct them. In 2006, they hired western public relations advisers in the hope of gaining more favourable coverage. Now they seek to shape narratives themselves using social media and, of course, RT.
For in this age of disinformation—which may have similarities with such eras in the past, but which far surpasses them in the quantity of material made available to modern audiences—information is an indispensable part of international diplomacy and conflict. ‘In this century, and in a conflict where you have a huge power against a small state, I think that’s almost as important as the military battle,’ Shota Utiashvili, a Georgian government spokesman, told me in a programme I made for the BBC World Service about the public relations battle that accompanied Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008.
That importance is clear to see in the current confrontation over Ukraine, too. However that ends, policy makers, combatants, journalists and audiences alike will have to wade through waves of unreliable content to get close to a truthful picture of what is happening. The United States’ decision to make public apparently secret information–presumably gathered by spies–on Russian intentions has added an intriguing new dimension to this particular crisis.
All text and photos © James Rodgers.
This is a version of a comment I was invited to contribute to Russland-Analysen, a German-language website that publishes analysis of Russia. You can read the German version here.
I will be talking about my latest book, Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin at the Frontline Club in London on March 1st at 1900. Tickets available here .