The Soviet Legacy of Russian Active Measures: New Vodka from Old Stills?

摘要

While there is a robust literature on Soviet and Russian active measures targeting the West, there is a lack of comparative literature systematically placing active measures in their own specific global historical and political context in the West, the Third World, and the Soviet/Russian near abroad. Soviet and subsequently Russian political warfare is instead often viewed through a solely Western lens that attempts to analyze such behavior from the target (or victim) perspective (i.e., what "they" did to "us"). This imbalance in scholarly research has distorted academic understanding of active measures. Given that reliance on active measures for statecraft and strategy has bridged Soviet and Russian foreign policy, as illustrated in Moscow's long history of meddling in U.S. elections in 1964, 1984, and 2016, it is essential that observers accurately apprehend the global historical antecedents and diverse contexts from which these methods are derived as a prerequisite for further analysis of both contemporary and historical Russian efforts.