Clock and hammer

Recently, some Russian commentators could detect notes of irritation at the way the Kremlin's current global role is assessed in the American media - and not only in the American ones. Putin’s Russia, as it seems to them, appears above its own stature, as a sophisticated manipulator who is not only able to mix up all the cards in neighboring Ukraine or distant Syria, but even bring down the US electoral system that has evolved over centuries, taking away the victory from the favorite of the presidential election and placing him in White House of the preferred candidate.

Please understand, when reading this list of triumphs, that we are talking about a country that has just experienced a deep economic crisis, whose state budget is only a small fraction of the American one, where the elite is formed not according to the principle of meritocracy, but in the crucible of corruption. And in any case, it is unpleasant for the opposition when the opponent is portrayed in epithets of such obvious superiority.

Similar complaints have already been made not so long ago by the former editor-in-chief of Vedomosti, and now a columnist for Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky, and the head of Alexei Navalny’s election headquarters, Leonid Volkov. And in an extensive article in Atlantic magazine devoted to an overview of the current internal Russian situation, Yulia Ioffe quotes Gleb Pavlovsky, ridiculing Putin’s illusion of greatness, in the creation of which he himself once took part. It is impossible not to admit that there is a rational grain in these complaints - from time to time one reads in serious American magazines a detailed transcript of Putin’s alleged plans for reorganizing the world.

And yet, in this dispute, as often happens, both sides are wrong - the American side in its overestimation of the strategic depth of the Kremlin’s plans, and the Russian side in underestimating the damage that these plans were able to inflict on US domestic and foreign policy. All weighty arguments are well built in the mentioned article. You can start with the fact that there were no strategic plans, but there was a desire to take revenge for real and imaginary grievances. According to Ioffe’s Russian interlocutors, Vladimir Putin was greatly shocked by the footage of the capture and execution of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, he reviewed them several times. And soon after that, the second “Maidan” happened in Kyiv with well-known consequences for Viktor Yanukovych, albeit less radical than in the case of Gaddafi. And although Putin’s first open challenge to the global dominant role of the United States was his Munich speech in 2007, the immediate impetus for the “retaliatory” measures was the Maidan, in which Putin saw American interference, and how real this suspicion was is not important in this case. The fact that all this culminated in a downed passenger Boeing, the Donbass zugzwang and a poorly swallowed Crimea is further evidence that the games in this game are not thought through beyond the first moves. The third blow was the publication of the Panama Papers about offshore transactions and fortunes, including the unexpected $2 billion nest egg of Putin's friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin. Putin was convinced that the CIA was involved and seemed determined not to let this revelation go unanswered.

What Russian critics of Putin's theoretical strategies are certainly right about is that they are mostly imaginary. In fact, it’s always like Napoleonic on s’engage et puis on voit, “let’s start, and then we’ll see,” but at the “let’s see” stage, the troops usually get bogged down in the swamps. The attempt to violently sabotage the American elections was actually nothing new - it goes back to the Soviet practice of disinformation , stuffing anonymous articles into the Western press through inconspicuous foreign media. In this case, the operation appears to have been carried out not so much by supposed intelligence professionals, but by disparate groups of hackers, some of whom apparently collaborated voluntarily for a reward, while others, having been caught doing illegal things, joined in as atonement. The lack of professionalism, not to mention a unified strategic plan, can be judged by the fact that two separate groups, associated, according to Western experts, with the FSB and the GRU, acted without any mutual coordination. Nevertheless, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on digital maneuvers of this kind, the order to carry out the entire operation most likely came from Putin himself. Its initial goal was to create confusion in the American presidential campaign and discredit Hillary Clinton, with whom the Russian president had personal scores. There could be no plans to elect Donald Trump at this stage, although he was certainly considered, for many reasons, more friendly to Moscow. The fact that the operation had such a seemingly chaotic nature was the reason that the Barack Obama administration, well aware of it, failed to assess its possible catastrophic consequences in time.

A long paragraph could be inserted here about the means employed by both of these groups, and how the tactics accepted today as strategy have changed as a result of reaction to specific events, but many have written about this already, and I will allow myself to make just a point: which Julia Ioffe considers to be a turning point for the entire operation. During the presidential campaign, the FBI received a document , allegedly from the annals of Russian intelligence, that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke with a representative of Hillary Clinton's campaign and assured that the case about Clinton's use of a private email server would be dropped. Fear that the document would be made public led FBI Director James Comey to make unprecedented public statements about the case, which ultimately, according to many commentators and Clinton herself, played a decisive role in her defeat in the election. The document is suspected to have been a forgery, one of the tools of Russian disinformation. In other words, if you shoot at random in the dark long enough, one of the bullets has a chance of hitting the target.

People with a passing knowledge of the US federal election system may be perplexed as to how this indiscriminate small-caliber shooting could cause such a seemingly well-oiled machine to malfunction. The fact is that presidential elections are conducted by state, and the result in each is counted as a discrete group of votes that are awarded to members of the Electoral College. As a rule, it is enough to influence the results in two or three key states to change the result in the country, and a minimal advantage in these states may be enough: the majority does not distribute its electors proportionally, but gives them all to the winner. This is exactly what happened: Donald Trump's victory was ensured by 6 states out of 50 , where his advantage was minimal - only 2 percent, while nationwide Clinton received 3 million votes more. It turned out that it was enough to instill doubts in small local contingents of the undecided to completely change the picture throughout the country.

Ultimately, as I have already noted, both sides are mistaken in assessing the sabotage of the American election campaign: American analysts - mistaking improvisation for strategy, and their Russian critics - taking them at their word. The mistake, in fact, almost at the level of pure logic, lies in the assumption that in order to damage a complex mechanism, it is necessary to be at least as complex, and for a powerful one to be at least as powerful. It is not difficult to verify the opposite: just test the strength of a ten thousand Swiss watch with a five dollar hammer or drop a wrench into a rocket engine.

Moscow compensates for tight budgets and shortcomings in long-term planning with the simplicity of its methods and the president's reduced sense of risk, as we know from a leaked profile of his former bosses. On the one hand, American intelligence agencies, for all their confidence in radical Russian intervention, have so far failed to convince not only a significant part of the electorate, but even many leading representatives of the Republican Party, despite its reputation for suspicion of the Kremlin. On the other hand, we have before our eyes a clear moral defeat of the previous American president in Syria, where the Russian opponent, taking advantage of his indecisiveness, managed, using minimal leverage, to almost completely turn the situation in his favor. However, it is Syria that most clearly demonstrates how the most desperate tactics are inferior to a thoughtful strategy, which was absent here as in other large-scale operations of the Kremlin. As Yulia Ioffe notes, in Iraq and Syria, more people from Russia took part on the side of the now defeated “Islamic state” than from any other country - about 400 of them have already returned from there, and one must assume not with the warmest feelings and intentions, but their own tactics are all too well known. This brings to mind an old joke about a hunter who shouts to a friend that he has caught a bear, but cannot bring him in because the bear won’t let him in.

It is not yet very clear how events will develop in the United States and what the investigation into Russian interference led by special prosecutor Robert Maller will lead to - judging by the latest data , his long silence is causing mistrust and disappointment among the local audience. And yet, as can be seen from the case of the bear, a defeat theoretically inflicted on an enemy does not always count as one’s own victory.