Russians Weaponize Feigned Stupidity to Undermine Putin’s Regime – The American Spectator

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. 

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…