2. The Soviet origins of Russian cyber strategy
"The history of espionage didn't end with the Cold War. Russia has a foreign intelligence service, whose job it is to obtain information. It's no secret that the most effective way to do this is through technology." [1]
Ilya Sackhov, cybersecurity expert at Group-IB
Imagine you are living as a citizen of the Soviet Union in the 1960s in one of the bigger Russian cities. You start your day listening to the national news, broadcast by a loudspeaker on the street, ending with the national anthem. The paper you read is the only one available to you: the government-issued Pravda. When you put on the television, you see only what the state lets you see. Newspapers and television are censored by a general directorate called Glavlit. You pick up a book to read, but it is only available to you because another directorate called Goskomizdat allowed this version to be published. If you have the rare privilege to use a telex or phone, you can be sure Glavlit is also listening in. Your radio has to be registered with the government, and you cannot listen to foreign broadcasting because they are jammed.Basically, you have no choice in what you hear, see or listen to. You live in what Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan call a "Prison of Information."[2]
The architecture of active measures
From the very beginning of the USSR, the Communist Party worked under the assumption that the West was actively seeking to subvert the Soviet State. Already in tsarist Russia, domestic politics were rooted in conspiracy theories and active myth-making, believing that there were plots in the making to overthrow Russia from Europe. [3]A free, independent press could therefore not be tolerated, because it is a powerful tool to mobilize the masses. And free flow of information was not necessary because, as Khrushchev stated, there was no stock exchange in the Soviet Union. [4]
In the Soviet Union, there were "special services" which served the interests of the totalitarian state by fighting all views which disagreed with it and blocking channels of communication.[5] These would later be associated as the Soviet Intelligence services.
The KGB's official definition of "Intelligence" was "a secret form of political struggle which makes use of clandestine means and methods for acquiring secret information of interest and for carrying out active measures to exert influence on the adversary and weaken his political, economic, scientific and technical and military positions".[6] Active measures (активные мероприятия in Russian) are highlighted because they encompass a wide range of operations that Wikipedia labels as political warfare.[7] It includes operations such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage, assassination, the collection of kompromat (compromising materials), counterfeiting documents and supporting underground insurgent movements. Active measures were used both abroad and domestically and all focused on combatting the enemy.
The first of these bureaus was set up within the framework of the OGPU, the Joint State Political Directorate (Russian: Объединённое государственное политическое управление), which was the Soviet Secret Police from 1923 to 1934 and had its roots in the Cheka, notorious for its repression of all political opponents of the Bolshevik regime. This bureau was called the bureau of sabotage, misinformation and special propaganda[8] In 1959, Department D was created as part of the KGB Main Directory, in which disinformation campaigns were conducted. It is assumed that a similar bureau was created in the military unit, the GRU.
Department D's first task was to discredit the Federal Republic of Germany as a 'country of neo-Nazism.'[9] The campaign utilized East German agents to perform acts of violence against Jewish artefacts, thus gaining West Germany international condemnation. Department D gained success in operations like these and eventually was transformed into Service A of the First Directorate of the KGB, with A standing for aktivka, meaning: active measures.
Active measures required recruitment and running of agents of influence, secret financial operations and build-up of influence on opinion-forming media. Whereas most of the active measures campaigns were primarily outward focused on influencing foreign policy and public opinion, censorship and jamming of foreign radio broadcasts were indirect consequences of this doctrine of political struggle against a foreign enemy. A warning statement from early 1960s by F.D. Bobkov, head of a department of the Second Main Directorate of the KGB, says: "Lacking a social base for launching widespread subversive work against our country, the imperialists are seeking to intensify the subversive activities of individual anti-Soviet elements".[10] Thus, the figure of the enemy which is central to the Soviet totalitarian consciousness was projected onto its own people. And the regime was eager to make everyone complicit in its goals.[11]
Living in the Prison of Information
The state controlled public space and which information was shared. In this Prison of Information it would be dangerous for you as a Soviet citizen to exchange unauthorized information. If you wanted to make such a phone call, the KGB would be quick to react. Therefore you know exactly what your friend means if she says "this is not a phone conversation". It means that someone else might be listening, namely the state and its vast network of informers. And you cannot possibly begin to imagine crossing the border without a long talk with a KGB Officer. If you ever were so lucky, you were only to remain with other Soviet citizens and not allowed to have contact with locals. If methods of ideological persuasion proved ineffective, arguments of 'force' were resorted to,[12] for instance acts of sabotage, provocation of conflicts and (para)military actions.
Partially due to Gorbachev's desire to improve relations with the West and later reinforced by the collapse of Russia's covert spy network following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the practice of active measures became less common during Gorbachev's reform era and in the chaotic 1990s. In 1991, the KGB attempted to preserve the system that had given it purpose via supporting the august 1991 coup, in which Communist Party hardliners tried to forcibly seize control of the country from Gorbachev. The failure of this coup did not just cost the hardliners their position; it triggered the final unraveling of Soviet Union itself. The republics declared independence one by one, Gorbachev resigned as president of a state that no longer existed, and the hammer and sickle came down over the Kremlin for the last time.
For the KGB, this meant more than a change of government. Its networks of agents abroad, built up over seven decades, were left without instructions, funding or a state to serve. Yet the doctrine that had animated these institutions, the conviction that Russia as surrounded by enemies, did not disappear along with the state that formalized it. It went dormant, waiting, much like the officers who would soon rediscover its usefulness in an emerging new Russia, stripped of its Soviet certainties.
Notes and references
Turovsky, D. (2016, November 7). Rossiyskie vooruzhennye kibersily: Kak gosudarstvo sozdaet voennye otryady khakerov [Russia's armed cyber forces: How the state creates military hacker units]. Meduza. https://meduza.io/feature/2016/11/07/rossiyskie-vooruzhennye-kibersily↩︎
Soldatov, A. A., & Borogan, I. P. (2017). The red web: The Kremlin’s wars on the internet (First trade paperback edition). PublicAffairs.↩︎
Galeotti, M. (2019, June). Active measures: Russia's covert geopolitical operations (Security Insights No. 31). George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. https://www.marshallcenter.org/en/publications/security-insights/active-measures-russias-covert-geopolitical-operations-0
Soldatov & Borogan, 2017, p. 14.↩︎
Darczewska, J., & Żochowski, P. (2017). Active measures: Russia's key export (Point of View No. 64). Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich (Centre for Eastern Studies). (p.5) Retrieved August 12, 2026 from https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/point-view/2017-05-30/active-measures-russias-key-export↩︎
Darczewska,& Żochowski, 2017, p.5
Active measures. (2026). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Active_measures&oldid=1361515725↩︎
Darczewska & Żochowski, 2017, p. 17↩︎
Darczewska & Żochowski, 2017, p. 17↩︎
Lyozina, E. (n.d.). VChK i preemniki. Chast' 1: Sozdanie mashiny terrora [The Cheka and its successors. Part 1: The creation of a machine of terror]. Uroki istorii / Argument. https://argumentua.com/stati/vchk-i-preemniki-chast-1-sozdanie-mashiny-terrora↩︎
Soldatov & Borogan, 2017, p. 13↩︎
Soldatov & Borogan, 2017, p. 13↩︎
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