Blowout

by Rachel Maddow

  We know that Russian military intelligence agents used fictitious American-sounding, American-seeming personas such as “Alice Donovan,” “Jason Scott,” and “Richard Gingrey” to drive traffic to the leaked material. We know the Russians handed over tens of thousands more pilfered emails and documents to WikiLeaks to ensure a wider distribution. We know that WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman on a day her opponent really needed a distraction from his own troubles.

  We also know that the Kremlin-run trolls at the Internet Research Agency were actively spewing incendiary provocations and content designed to promote Donald Trump leading up to, and all the way through, the 2016 general election campaign, and then through the start of the Trump administration. Content created by the Internet Research Agency and its brethren is known to have reached well over a hundred million Americans in the election season. The IRA greatest hits Facebook pages were “Stop A.I.” (meaning “All Invaders,” complete with many graphics of scary-looking Muslims), “Being Patriotic,” “Blacktivist,” and “Heart of Texas.” Each of those pages got more than eleven million discrete engagements. Heart of Texas, that original chestnut created way back in January 2015, had 200,000 followers by the time the election season was over, more than five million “likes,” and almost five million shares. The scary anti-immigrant Invaders page got even more. These engagements were dwarfed by the total interactions with the most popular IRA-invented Instagram accounts, all created with the sole purpose of ripping at divisions in the American electorate. One of the IRA’s fake American personas, Jenna Abrams (70,000 followers), started out trolling Kim Kardashian and then graduated to trolling people who thought the Confederate flags and monuments in the American South should come down. “Did you know that the flag and the war wasn’t about slavery,” Ms. Abrams scolded, “it was all about money.”

  The Internet Research Agency and its data analyzers paid Facebook for ads and “boosted posts” to stir resentments after police killed young unarmed African Americans in St. Louis, Baltimore, and Cleveland. And after a white supremacist gunman murdered eight African Americans at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. “Another level of hate. Unfortunately, American tolerance is not what we think it is,” read the ad for which Facebook pocketed $20 from the St. Petersburg troll farm. “What if America is still a deeply racist country? What if the church is not a safe place anymore?”

  When not forcing their dirty fingernails into our various national open wounds, the Savushkina Street trolls pummeled the Democratic nominee with paid advertisements, writ ugly: “JOIN our #HillaryClintonForPrison2016”; “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote”; “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison”; “Hillary is Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is.” African American voters—the bread and butter of the Democratic base vote—appear to have been targeted more aggressively than any other demographic, to turn them against Clinton or to dissuade them from voting altogether. “A particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary,” said the IRA-invented Woke Blacks. “We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.” The IRA-created United Muslims of America posted an ad that read, “American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”

  An official-sounding but fake “TEN_GOP” account—often assumed to be registered to the Republicans’ state party in Tennessee—shouted out a make-believe story about the election board in Broward County illegally counting tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots marked for Hillary. #VoterFraud!!! “Heart of Texas” was also actively corrosive. Its ads decried the “Islamization” of Texans’ once great republic and urged God-fearing Christians in Texas to protest the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston, which had opened its doors more than a decade earlier as a center for worship, education, and outreach to the wider community. The “Heart of Texas” post in the spring of 2016 called the Islamic center a “shrine of hatred” and suggested that protesters “feel free to bring along your firearms, concealed or not!” American anti-Muslim protesters in fact turned out, holding white power symbols and Confederate flags, denouncing the Da’wah Center, at the time and place directed by “Heart of Texas.” Houston police had a volatile situation on their hands when a separate and opposing group of protesters—there to support Muslims in general and the Da’wah Center in particular—showed up on the same day, at the same time, across the street. Turns out they’d been unwittingly summoned from St. Petersburg, too, by a separate Russian-controlled fake American entity called United Muslims of America.

  As the election neared, the Internet Research Agency pros turned both rhetorical barrels on Hillary Clinton. If the Democratic nominee won the presidency, a “Heart of Texas” Facebook ad screamed two weeks before the election, there would be no choice but to secede. Because another Clinton in the White House would mean “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens. More refugees, mosques, and terrorist attacks. Banned guns. Continuing economic depression.”

  We know the outcome of all this, too. We’re still living it. Americans can and do argue whether, absent the big Russian push against the Democratic presidential nominee and for the Republican, Trump would have won his narrow Electoral College victory in 2016. And Americans can and do argue whether the Trump campaign’s many open acts of boosting the efforts of Putin and his military intelligence cybercriminals and his army of Guccifer-descendant trolls at 55 Savushkina Street were provably criminal, or merely contemptible. But what is undeniably true is that Putin succeeded, probably beyond his wildest imaginings, in his highest real aim. The “goal seems to be not domination but chaos,” longtime Moscow correspondent Susan B. Glasser succinctly explained in an essay in Politico a year after the 2016 election. “The objective is not to destroy us, but to weaken and confuse us.”

  Putin and his techno-warriors figured out what differences and disagreements and prejudices were corroding the health and cohesion of American society. They found the most ragged faults and fissures in our democracy: immigration, race, religion, economic injustice, mass shootings. Then they poured infectious waste into them. They used traditional media, social media, and disinformation to try to make citizens of differing experiences and viewpoints hate and distrust each other as much as possible; made public discourse and discussion as evil and mean-spirited and alienating as possible; created miserable expectations for coarseness and cruelty and blatant dishonesty in politics and civic life.

  The Russian operation pushed American politicians and political parties to more and more extreme positions; it celebrated all manner of fringe, splinter, and radical politics and demonized centrists, moderates, and anybody on any point of the ideological spectrum who actually believed the levers of government could be harnessed for anything useful at all. And his achievement came cheap. A thousand—ten thousand—highly trained Illegals chatting up middle managers at conferences and dead dropping their expense forms could never have pulled off something this high-impact. This new type of operation was infinitely more effective, and bargain-basement affordable, and, because it worked, the blowback has been minimal. At basically zero cost, Putin succeeded in his biggest aim: he corrupted and polluted our most treasured possession, our democracy. Pobeda!

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  Even with an understanding of how he did it and how well it worked, what has not really been answered in any satisfying way is the question of why Putin went out of his way to muck around in our democracy. There are plenty of plausible explanations floating around out there. The most widespread is that Putin really did revile Hillary Clinton and blamed her for roiling the political dissent against him—inside Russia!—while she was secretary of state. She had been so eager and so aggressive in criticizing Russia’s Kabuki theater d
emocracy. So when Hillary Clinton seemed very likely to win the U.S. presidency in 2016, Putin figured he could at least rough her up pretty good, turn as many Americans against her as possible, and make it that much more difficult for her to govern effectively. Maybe even cast doubt on the legitimacy of her election, the way she had cast such withering doubt on the legitimacy of the Russian elections in 2011 and 2012, when she kept piping up about all the irregularities and stuffed ballot boxes that Putin really didn’t want to have to explain, especially not to her. All that was true enough. But not exactly a full and compelling explanation.

  Go back further than that, back to the root of the thing, back to when Vladimir Putin first became president of the Russian Federation, when it still had the makings of a potential superpower revival. Whatever its hard knocks on the way out of communism, this was the largest country on the face of the earth, with the only nuclear arsenal to match the United States of America. This was the country that gave us Tolstoy and Bolshoi and Pavlov. This was the country that launched the first man-made satellite into space. Launched the first man into space! And Russia, at the beginning of our century, also had the most impressive reserves of the most prized and remunerative commodities on earth—oil and natural gas. It was the sort of inheritance that, husbanded wisely and well, could have funded a border-to-border revival: education, infrastructure, health services, even fair elections. Could have financed new industry and technological advances. Could have provided a rich and loamy bed in which a modern republic capable of serving the general welfare of the Russian people would grow. Russia had the wherewithal to remake itself, again, into one of the most influential and powerful nations on the planet. A free, first-world Russia would have been a fearsome and worthy competitor in commercial and international affairs.

  President Putin chose a different path, not least because establishing a diversified economy in post-Soviet Russia would have been really hard, requiring Russia to build and sustain a lot of things it hadn’t ever had on a national scale: a reasonable expectation of the impartial rule of law, a reasonably competent government responsive to its people, reasonable public investment in the kind of physical and financial infrastructure that allows businesses to get established and grow, reasonable prospects for upward mobility and maybe even getting rich if you had talent and gumption and a little good luck. Results may vary as to what counts as “reasonable” in any one time and place. But a few things were certain: building that kind of a Russia would take a ton of work. And it would provide no guarantee of a lifetime leadership job for any one ruler—no matter how good he looked shirtless on a bear.

  Putin opted for a shorter and easier path, which solved two problems: it gave him permanent job security, and it saved Russia the pain in the butt of actually building itself a modern twenty-first-century economy and government. Putin’s most fateful decision for his country was that oil and gas wouldn’t just be the profitable crown jewel in Russia’s diversified economic array; it would be Russia’s everything. And Putin would exercise almost complete control over it and use it in whatever way he saw fit.

  It turns out to have been a colossal mistake, with grotesque consequences. For Russia, for the United States, for pretty much everyone except the oil and gas industry, and maybe Putin himself.

  Now in his twentieth year running the show, Vladimir Putin presides over a metaphysical unforced error: the tragic scuppering of one of the potentially great nations in the world. Russia has been assiduously engineered into a sclerotic dictatorship; its economy wholly dependent on its one indispensable industry, which is by design almost solely monopolized by its big, lousy, noncompetitive state-controlled oil and gas companies, which are all run by spies or thugs or judo guys, and almost exclusively for the benefit of Vladimir Putin and his global aims. Their companies are not exactly soaring on the strength of their R&D prowess. And there’s a good reason for that. No one, in any major Russian enterprise, has been allowed to succeed or prosper legitimately and on his own terms. Anyone who rose to any station must owe that ascent to Putin, and answer to him for it. That has been doubly true in the energy sector, which has been Putin’s crucial lever of power. No one in that industry held on to money or power or property except with his say-so and on his ugly terms. If you were trying to become a clean businessman, running a capable and profitable energy company outside the control of the Kremlin, you were going to lose that business. Goodbye, Yukos. And maybe do a prison term. Hello, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Alternatively, if you were a businessman or a crony who played along and served a useful purpose, you’d be rewarded with stolen goods. And you’d better stay loyal or you could do a prison term, too—look, you’ve got stolen goods!

  That’s how Russia’s premier natural gas company, Gazprom, earned its reputation as “the worst managed company on the planet.” And that’s how the most Putin-loyal yes-man in Russia, Igor Sechin, became one of the most powerful figures in Russia. And how his company, Rosneft, became the behemoth of the country’s oil industry—the Death Destroyer of Worlds, eating Yukos and Bashneft and any other cash-making morsels. It is not incidental that as an oil company Rosneft sucks. It wasn’t as if it got big and powerful by streamlining its supply chains and inventing stuff. Rosneft sucks all the time, but especially lately, when—because of sanctions against Russia for its terrible international behavior—it no longer has access to all that nifty Western Arctic- and shale-drilling technology it needs to reap that increasingly hard-to-get Russian oil.

  The country, meanwhile, has eroded into a stultifying economic sinkhole for average Russians. “Despite receiving $1.6 trillion from oil and gas exports from 2000 to 2011, Russia was not able to build a single multi-lane highway during this time. There is still no interstate highway linking Moscow to the Far East,” Karen Dawisha wrote in her richly detailed 2014 book, Putin’s Kleptocracy. “The inability of well-trained young graduates to succeed as entrepreneurs and innovators in Russia has stimulated emigration and plans to emigrate.” Dawisha went on to quote a pollster in Moscow on the plight of young Russians: “They have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing to hope for.”

  “The lack of adequate medical care produces five times more deaths from cardiovascular disease among women in Russia than in Europe,” the professor wrote. “More Russian women die annually from domestic violence than the number of soldiers the USSR lost in the entire Afghan war. For Russian men, the situation is even grimmer. Poor workplace and road safety standards, plus high rates of suicide and homicide combine with the negative health effects of high alcohol consumption to make life especially precarious….According to the World Health Organization, the life expectancy of a fifteen-year-old male is three years lower in Russia than in Haiti.”

  Let that sink in for a second: if you’re a fifteen-year-old boy, your life expectancy is three years longer if you are in Haiti than in Russia.

  Russia under Putin has become warped and stunted—a gigantic multi-continental country of 150 million souls, living on an economy considerably smaller than Italy’s, with male life expectancy so low that you might think the national pastime really was Russian roulette.

  This is a manifestation of a recognizable and widespread phenomenon—the Resource Curse—which has happened over and over again, with varying degrees of despair, from the Gulf of Guinea to the southern Great Plains. But Russia added a whole new twist to the Curse, a twist that helps explain the international order of things right now—or the lack thereof. When the Resource Curse takes hold in a country as big and influential and aggressive as twenty-first-century Russia, it turns out to be the entire world’s problem. What has happened to Russia is like when a faraway humanitarian concern morphs from a charity cause into an international terrorism threat. Russia’s Resource Curse has become a malignant tumor spreading through the rest of the world.

  Unlike Soviet-era Russia, which used its oil and gas to provide for its own energy needs and the needs of its worldwide comm
unist satellites, modern petro-state Russia has to sell its fuel on the global market without the benefit of a separate Soviet checkout lane. Which went pretty okay for a while. As recently as the George W. Bush administration, there were those in the United States who thought that Putin might be the great hope for a new Middle East–free global energy supply line. But as Putin’s Russian Federation revealed itself to be a robustly corrupt, authoritarian regime happily committed to securing its own survival by force, it repeatedly and increasingly put itself into rogue state territory, and that ultimately screwed up its ability to play in the global markets as if it were some kind of normal country. Putin’s best-known exports list has lately comprised the most dreaded organized crime syndicates on earth, money laundering on such a massive industrial scale that it can bring down whole national cornerstone banks in any part of the globe, exotic assassinations, rogue-state-friendly weapons systems, illegal out-of-uniform military incursions, and the first seizure of another country’s territory in Europe since World War II. That sort of activity can get in the way of a country’s global business operations, on the odd chance that there’s anyone on the face of the globe who sees it as their responsibility to punish and isolate the kinds of international bad actors that invade their neighbors, shoot down civilian airliners, and send intelligence officers armed with nerve agent to assassinate their exiles in British cathedral towns.