The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

Because Russia had hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, it had access to models of voter turnout—which it shared with a Republican activist. In general, Americans were not exposed to Russian propaganda randomly, but in accordance with their own susceptibilities, as revealed by their practices on the internet. People trust what sounds right, and trust permits manipulation. In one variation, people are led towards ever more intense outrage about what they already fear or hate.

In crucial states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, Russia’s ads were targeted at people who could be aroused to vote by anti-Muslim messages. Throughout the United States, likely Trump voters were exposed to pro-Clinton messages on what purported to be American Muslim sites.

An important scholarly study published the day before the polls opened warned that bots could “endanger the integrity of the presidential election.” It cited three main problems: “first, influence can be redistributed across suspicious accounts that may be operated with malicious purposes; second, the political conversation can be further polarized; third, spreading of misinformation and unverified information can be enhanced.”

Once Twitter started looking it was able to identify about a million suspicious accounts per day.

It seems possible that Russia also digitally suppressed the vote in another way: by making voting impossible in crucial places and times. North Carolina, for example, is a state with a very small Democratic majority, where most Democratic voters are in cities. On Election Day, voting machines in cities ceased to function, thereby reducing the number of votes recorded. The company that produced the machines in question had been hacked by Russian military intelligence. Russia also scanned the electoral websites of at least thirty-nine American states, perhaps looking for vulnerabilities, perhaps seeking voter data for influence campaigns. According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards.”

On Election Day itself, bots were firing with the hashtag #War AgainstDemocrats. After Trump’s victory, at least 1,600 of the same bots that had been working on his behalf went to work against Macron and for Le Pen in France, and against Merkel and for the AfD in Germany.

On October 7, Trump seemed to be in trouble when a tape revealed his view that powerful men should sexually assault women. Thirty minutes after that tape was published, Russia released the emails of the chairman of Clinton’s campaign, John Podesta, thereby hindering a serious discussion of Trump’s history of sexual predation.

Then Russian trolls and bots helped to work the Podesta emails into two fictional stories, one about a pizza pedophile ring and another about Satanic practices.

About one third of adult Americans chose to believe a Russian fiction about an American politician.

The information that Russia released concerned real people who were serving important functions in the American democratic process; its release to the public affected their psychological state and political capacity during an election.

All of this mattered at the highest level of politics, since it affected one major political party and not the other. More fundamentally, it was a foretaste of what modern totalitarianism is like: no one can act in politics without fear, since anything done now can be revealed later, with personal consequences.

Citizens are curious: surely what is hidden is most interesting, and surely the thrill of revelation is liberation. Once all that is taken for granted, the discussion shifts from the public and the known to the secret and the unknown. Rather than trying to make sense of what is around us, we hunger for the next revelation. Public servants, imperfect and flawed to be sure, become personalities whom we think we have the right to know completely. Yet when the difference between the public and the private collapses, democracy is placed under unsustainable pressure. In such a situation, only the shameless politician can survive, one who cannot be exposed.

Neither the Russians nor their surrogates released any information about the Republicans or the Trump campaign or, for that matter, about themselves. None of the ostensible seekers of truth who released emails over the internet had anything to say about the relationship of the Trump campaign to Russia. This was a telling omission, since no American presidential campaign was ever so closely bound to a foreign power. The connections were perfectly clear from the open sources. One success of Russia’s cyberwar was that the seductiveness of the secret and the trivial drew Americans away from the obvious and the important: that the sovereignty of the United States was under visible attack.

In addition to his participation in the Trump Tower meeting with Russians, Kushner had spoken multiple times during the campaign to the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. On one occasion he smuggled Kislyak into Trump Tower in a freight elevator—for talks about how to set up a secret channel of communication between Trump and Putin.

As soon as Trump named foreign policy advisors, they fell immediately into conversations with Russians or Russian intermediaries about how Russia could harm Clinton and help Trump.

second Trump advisor on foreign policy, Carter Page, had once briefly worked for an American firm whose director remembered him as pro-Putin and “wackadoodle.” Page then set up shop in a building connected to Trump Tower, and met with Russian spies. In 2013, he supplied Russian spies with documents about the energy industry. Page became a lobbyist for Russian gas companies; while working for the Trump campaign he promised his Russian clients that a Trump presidency would serve their interests. At the moment when he was named an advisor to Trump, he owned shares in Gazprom.

Page traveled as a representative of the Trump campaign to Russia in July 2016, right before the Republican National Convention where Trump was to become the Republican nominee for the office of president of the United States. By his own account, Page was speaking to “senior members” of the Putin administration, one of whom “expressed strong support for Mr. Trump.” Page returned to the United States and altered the Republican platform in a way that fulfilled Moscow’s desires. At the Republican National Convention, Page and another Trump advisor, J. D. Gordon, substantially weakened the section of the platform about the need for a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In the fog of mental confusion that surrounded Flynn, it was easy to overlook his peculiar connections to Russia. Flynn was permitted to see the headquarters of Russian military intelligence, which he visited in 2013. When invited to a seminar on intelligence at Cambridge in 2014, he befriended a Russian woman, signing his emails to her “General Misha”—a Russian diminutive meaning “Mike.” In summer 2015, he worked to promote a plan to build nuclear power plants across the Middle East with Russian cooperation, and then failed to disclose that he had done so. Flynn was a guest on RT, where he gave the impression of being outwitted by the hosts. In 2015, he appeared in Moscow as a paid guest ($33,750) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of RT. He sat with Vladimir Putin at the gala dinner. When the American media began to report that Russia had hacked the emails of Democratic activists, Flynn responded by retweeting a message that suggested a Jewish conspiracy was behind that claim of Russian responsibility. On Flynn’s Twitter feed his followers read: “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” Flynn followed and retweeted no fewer than five fake Russian accounts, pushed at least sixteen Russian memes through the internet, and was sharing Russian content with his followers right down to the day before the election. On December 29, 2016, weeks after Trump had won the election but weeks before his inauguration, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador and then lied to others,...

Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who was quick to endorse Trump, had multiple contacts with the Russian ambassador in 2016. Sessions lied about this to Congress during his confirmation hearings for the office of attorney general,

Trump’s secretary of commerce had financial dealings with Russian oligarchs, and indeed with Putin’s family.

The United States had never before had a secretary of state personally decorated with the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin. Rex Tillerson was such a person. Before his departure from office, Tillerson oversaw a vast purge of American diplomats, a group whom Putin regarded as the enemy.

As early as August 2016, three months before the election, he had convinced a former acting director of the CIA that “Mr. Putin has recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” After a year in office, only the “unwitting” part seemed questionable. By then, Trump had convinced a number of leading American intelligence specialists that he was a Russian asset. As one of them put it: “My assessment is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”

As president, the hoax had to protect itself from reality. And thus Trump fired U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who had ordered the raid on Trump Tower in 2013. He fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who had cautioned him against hiring Michael Flynn. And then he fired James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for investigating Russia’s attack on American sovereignty.

The day after firing Comey, Trump said the same thing to a pair of visitors to the Oval Office: “I faced great pressure because of Russia. Now that’s taken off.” The visitors were the Russian ambassador to the United States and the Russian foreign minister. They brought digital gear to the White House, which they used to take and distribute photographs of the meeting. Former U.S. intelligence officers found this unusual. More unusual still was that Trump used the occasion to share with Russia intelligence of the highest level of confidentiality, involving an Israeli double agent inside ISIS.

After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse. Every day in 2009, about seventy people lost their jobs at American newspapers and magazines. For Americans who lived between the coasts, this meant the end of reporting about life and the rise of something else: “the media.”

The partisanship of Heart of Texas was extremely vulgar: like other Russian sites, it referred to the Democratic presidential candidate as “Killary.” Despite all this, the Heart of Texas Facebook page had more followers in 2016 than those of the Texas Republican Party or the Texas Democratic Party—or indeed both of them combined. Everyone who liked, followed, and supported Heart of Texas was taking part in a Russian intervention in American politics designed to destroy the United States of America. Americans liked the site because it affirmed their own prejudices and pushed them just a bit further. It offered both the thrill of transgression and a sense of legitimacy.

Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair.

If Russia’s succession crisis can in fact be exported—if the United States could become authoritarian—then Russia’s own problems, although unresolved, would at least seem normal. Pressure on Putin would be relieved. Were America the shining beacon of democracy that its citizens sometimes imagine, its institutions would have been far less vulnerable to Russia’s cyberwar.

The rule of law requires that the government control violence, and that the population expects that government can do so. The presence of guns in American society, which can feel like strength to some Americans, appeared in Moscow as a national weakness. In 2016, Russia appealed directly to Americans to buy and use guns, amplifying the rhetoric of the Trump campaign. Trump called for his supporters to exercise their Second Amendment rights against Hillary Clinton were she elected, which was an indirect but transparent suggestion that they should shoot her to death. The Russian cyber campaign was enthusiastic about the right of Americans to bear arms, celebrating the Second Amendment and calling upon Americans to fear terrorism and to buy firearms to protect themselves.

Since all states have two senators, less populous states have a disproportionate number of electoral votes; individual votes in small states count for far more than individual votes in large states. Meanwhile, millions of Americans in territories (as opposed to states) have no vote at all. Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections.

gerrymandering,

From an American point of view, all of this might appear to be mundane tradition, just the rules of the game. From Moscow’s perspective, the system looks like vulnerability to be exploited.

In the early 2010s, as a new system was consolidated in Russia, the U.S. Supreme Court took two important decisions that shifted the United States towards authoritarianism. In 2010, it ruled that money talked: that corporations were individuals, and their campaign spending was free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This granted real companies, front companies, and various fake civic entities the right to influence campaigns and, in effect, to try to buy elections.

It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.

Oligarchy works as a patronage system that dissolves democracy, law, and patriotism. American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own populations.

As Warren Buffett put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Americans die in this war every day, in large numbers, in incomparably greater numbers than in wars abroad or as a result of terrorism at home. Because the United States lacks a functional public health system, inequality has brought a health crisis, which in turn has accelerated and reinforced inequality. It was in counties where public health collapsed in the 2010s that Trump gained the votes that won him the election.

When Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination, he did best in the primary elections in places where middle-aged white males were at greatest risk of death.

It was in the localities where the American dream had died that Trump’s politics of eternity worked.