Political technologist and right hand man to Putin. Experimental theater director. Architect of the age of disinformation. Playing all sides against all... in a non-linear war. Or is he? A wonderful and terrifying deep dive into Russian media and the Kremlin power structure.
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SOURCES:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-possible
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/hypernormalisation-2016/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39342784-almost-zero
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/22/the-literary-intrigues-of-putins-puppet-master/
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putin-s-rasputin
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/march/non-linear-war
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-russia-kremlin-vladislav-surkov-grey-cardinal-moscow-a8773661.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51553732
Welcome, listener, to the 80th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Vladislav Surkov episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression.
you From communism, to perestroika, to shock therapy, to penury, to oligarchy, to mafia state, to mega-rich, that its new heroes were left with a sense that life is just one glittering masquerade where every role and any position or belief is mutable.
It was only ten years later that I came to see these endless mutations, not as freedom, but as forms of delirium in which scare puppets and nightmare mystics become convinced they're almost real and march towards what the president's vizier, Vladislav Surkov, would go on to call the Fifth World War, the first non-linear war of all against all.
Those were the words of Peter Pomerantsev in his novel, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
He published it in 2014, before the Russiagate hysteria deformed Western coverage.
I used it extensively in my research for today's episode on none other than Vladislav Surkov, a.k.a.
Natan Dubovitsky, a.k.a.
the Grey Cardinal, a.k.a.
Grand Vizier of the Kremlin Court.
But before all that...
QAnon News, brought to you by the Sirkov News Network.
Lara Trump tweets out video by Joe M, aka Storm is Upon Us.
Nice.
So this was very exciting.
She's in Tomb Raider, right?
So on February 21st, President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law and a senior advisor to his re-election campaign, Lara Trump, tweeted out a YouTube video from Joe M. He is like, obviously, one of the biggest QAnon accounts.
We've interacted with him some.
And he refuses to get back to me ever since he came back.
He's too big for his britches.
Oh, big shot now?
I see how it is.
I mean, one could argue that he's like... Answer my DMs, you coward.
He's like one of the quintessential QAnon accounts.
He made the onboarding video.
Yeah, he made the onboarding video.
I call him like, he's like the chief QAnon propagandist.
He's massive in the community.
Fantastic.
The video that was tweeted out is called The Best Is Yet To Come, and it actually doesn't itself reference QAnon in any way.
But, Joe M., of course, is also a creator of, like, a Q the Plan to Save the World, so at the very least, it's going to serve as a funnel to sort of the QAnon content.
This is exactly what liberal brains were doing three years into Obama, by the way.
The pest is yet to come, they told themselves as they settled in front of the television.
As documented by a friend of the show, Alex Kaplan for Media Matters, that Joe Im video has also been shared by many Republican Party Facebook pages.
For example, it was shared on the New Mexico Republican Party's Facebook page, along with the Facebook page for that state's party chairman.
It was also shared on the Facebook pages for the Republican Party chapters of Cuomo County
in Texas, Calvert County in Maryland, Wacoola County, St.
John's County, and Highland County in Florida.
So Florida, living up to your reputation as QAnon Central.
Jefferson County in Alabama, El Paso County in Colorado, Cumberland County, and Craven
County, North Carolina, Snohomish County in Washington State, and Santa Barbara County
in California.
So Republican groups all over the country are sharing this Joanne QAnon propaganda video.
So clearly we get our first sort of image at the map of the country that is most QAnon
You're right.
Good point.
How many coincidences?
I mean, here we go.
We've got we've got Laura Trump.
We've got Laura Trump.
A person that we all remembered existed before we saw her name in the news.
Yeah.
But if she's on the re-election campaign, then at the very least we have a Trump campaign official pushing hard QAnon propaganda, not even soft propaganda, and it's being boosted in various areas that I'm going to choose to assume are QAnon very heavy districts.
So maybe Trump It is, after all, Q+, and it's all real.
And the best is yet to come.
And the best is yet to come!
He just looked empty, demented.
Well, keep together, because it gets worse.
For my second story, Donald Trump retweets praying medic.
Oh, crap.
No.
Is that a king?
No, he did.
Oh, you thought he wasn't religious, huh?
You thought he didn't care about God.
Let's see.
So the same day that Larry Trump tweeted out that video, President Trump retweeted Praying Medic.
The same day?
Same day.
Praying Medic has one of the biggest followings of all the QAnon pushers.
He might be second to Joe M and directly promotes QAnon on his Twitter feed, YouTube channel, and podcast.
Praying Medic also sells quack cures in the form of books on divine healing.
He has previously claimed that he gets messages for Q and his team From God.
Like he likened himself to a mailman who delivers messages for God to Q. He's also like a kind of mailman that delivers like relief from headaches and like supermarket shopping line.
You know.
That's right.
He just he just senses when people are you know kind of achy.
Much like the mailman helps my wife every single day.
I can help you as a mailman.
So, lots and lots of QAnon promotion going on from Trump figures.
Also, there was an incident recently in which a QAnon follower told the Trump campaign press secretary to ask the Q. After or during the recent Trump rally in Las Vegas, the press secretary Kayleigh McEnany interviewed a QAnon follower named Jason Frank.
He was being interviewed because before the rally, he helped carry an elderly World War II veteran to his seat.
Which was depicted in a video that went viral in MAGA World and was even quote tweeted by Trump.
So Jason Frank has actually been on my radar a bit because he's a guy who's been very active promoting QAnon locally in Las Vegas.
He has a QAnon tattoo on his arm and hosts these events they call QBQs in which he invites people to eat and watch Joe M videos.
Here's the last bit of that brief interview that he had with Trump's press secretary for the campaign.
You know, that's why I'm out here.
That's why I'm one of the digital soldiers General Flynn talks about.
That's why I don't sleep.
That's why all I do is share information and, you know, order them times.
It's a beautiful, exciting time to be alive.
Who is Q?
Okay, well I will pass all this along.
Thank you very much.
I will pass all this along.
Good to encourage them.
Give a promise to any cult member you meet.
I think that the Democrats, if they really want to win, they have to retweet more Common Joes, you know?
You only really see them retweeting each other.
Common Jo-ems?
Yeah, common Joe Ms.
They're only retweeting each other or like media accounts or like blue check marks or whatever.
But Trump, he'll tweet like, you know, Sally Maga 2020, you know, 4 3 7 5 6.
Which means social media.
No, it means that Bernie needs to start retweeting Prospector88, Don Hughes, TheHellDude.
He needs to get on it.
If Bernie isn't retweeting Drill, he's not of the people.
Yeah, I agree.
So, uh, the combination of, like, all of these events, like the Joe M tweet and Praying Medic getting a retweet and this video, they got the QAnon community very, very hot and horny.
Oh, how could they not be?
They're vibrating.
I'm a little bit chuffed.
Jake is slightly oozing.
He has sap like a tree trunk just appearing in droplets in different areas.
They're not getting like the military tribunals that they wanted, but they are getting validation from powerful people, which is like close enough.
Daddy notice, please!
And they got it.
Daddy may be noticed.
Through Lara.
Not a real Trump, but whatever.
The general sense of excitement and anticipation was aided by a recent Q drop which said this
You have come far Anons, Patriots. You are ready. Prepare for the storm. Q
I mean, he can get away with this forever, until they die.
I mean, honestly.
But, yeah, yeah, but they're hyped right now.
They really think something huge is gonna happen.
I can't believe that QAnon started in 2017 and now we're in 2020.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I don't understand our podcast or any of this.
It is weird.
You know, it's funny, a lot of QAnon people were, like, taunting me about this.
Be like, oh, look, look at this.
I see it.
I'm not... I mean, it's bad, but I expect it to get worse.
At this point, I'm a QAnon accelerationist.
I want Trump to tweet to tweet my fellow Americans, the storm is upon us.
I assume that's going to happen.
If anything less than that happens, I'm unimpressed.
Travis's version of Bernie or bust.
I also have two stories that are tangential to QAnon I want to cover.
One of them, German mass shooter releases manifesto that expresses belief in underground child sacrifice.
Late Wednesday night in the central German city of Hanau, a German opened fire at two bars that's popular with migrants.
43-year-old Tobias Rathjen killed nine and injured several others at two locations, then fled.
When police tracked Rathjen down and stormed his apartment at 5 a.m., they found his dead body next to that of his 72-year-old mother.
Apparently, he had shot her too.
Investigators found a manifesto with racist and ultra-nationalist views, and the federal prosecutor is treating the case as an example of extreme right terrorism.
The manifesto also expressed belief that he was under constant surveillance, that children were being sacrificed on an underground basis to Satan, and that he came up with the ideas for the films Collateral and Basic Instinct 2, which Hollywood then stole from him.
So it's very important to note that at this point we have Germany saying they have a Nazi problem, which is not a good development, but at least Germans have had some training in recognizing what they are and just saying it immediately.
They go, oh, this person was a white nationalist.
We have trouble with neo-Nazism.
This is a problem that's worth addressing.
Thank God, at least that.
But still, it's not a good thing.
It's good.
And to be clear, this guy, obviously, there's no evidence he was ever into QAnon, but he obviously expressed a lot of sympathetic views.
He was sort of delusional.
Was there any evidence that he did write Basic Instinct?
No.
No, of course not.
Terrible.
What a piece of shit.
Don't answer him.
In his manifesto, actually, he talks about, like, oh, I had this idea for a sequel to, like, Basic Instinct, and I told a friend to it, and then the movie was made a few years later.
It was, like, exactly like my idea.
That's happened to me before.
I'm sure lots of people have had stories like that.
Okay, well, it's gotta happen with my Matrix 4 idea.
Moving on.
Moving on, moving on.
You don't want to hear my Matrix 4 pitch?
A diseased mind.
If coronavirus has spread to this house, it's in only your brain.
So also sort of tangential to QAnon, amateur rocket builder intent on proving that the Earth is flat dies in a rocket crash.
Oh no.
So since 2017, the daredevil Mad Mike Hughes has been building and launching homemade rockets as part of his quest to take a photograph of the presumed disk of Earth.
Unfortunately, he went all the way up and back down towards the disc, and he kind of burst through the disc because it's kind of papery, and then he was lost into the nothingness below.
So on Saturday, Hughes was killed while trying to launch himself 5,000 feet into the air with a steam-powered rocket in the California desert.
For fuck's sake, man.
I mean, this is very sad, but at the same time, he was going all out.
He knew this was a possibility.
He died doing what he loved.
He died doing what he loved, and he believed in what he was doing to the point where he was risking his life.
Who among us can say the same?
How do you get back down if you launch yourself up?
Did he have a parachute?
Yeah, a parachute that failed.
This was the issue.
Oh, that's what happened.
So the rocket got him 5,000 feet up, and then the parachute... I didn't confirm how well the rocket did, but the parachute did fail, unfortunately.
And did they get from him while he was up there, like, it's flat?
Or did they get the last data he needed to transmit?
This was a preliminary.
He wanted to go past the atmosphere.
This was sort of a preliminary.
Breakout?
And then look in on it?
Julian, I read that they did recover the tapes, but when they played it, it was just 17 minutes of static.
Oh my God.
Yeah, this guy literally, yeah, he's like, I want to go hang out with the machine elves at the margin of reality.
Right.
He expressed belief in sort of the Flat Earth views, but it's possible, some people have speculated, he faked his Flat Earth views in order to scam GoFundMe money from the Flat Earth community.
I don't know if that's true.
We don't know.
We'll never know.
A mad king, if true.
Yeah.
I feel like one day there's going to be like amateur astronauts, it's just a common thing, and they'll look at him as sort of a pioneer who died for the cause.
That's right.
Uh, you know, I just got a new piece of news here that just popped up on my phone.
What do you mean?
Like what?
You have an app that we don't have?
Someone pasted this into the document.
I'm just gonna read what it says here.
It says, Vladislav Surkov fired, but the BBC is dubious.
It says here, Putin's disinformation czar was dismissed by the Kremlin on February 18th, 2020.
Here is a quote from the BBC.
The secretive strategist was known as the Grey Cardinal in Russia due to his perceived influence on the President behind the scenes.
He was widely seen as an aide who helped Mr. Putin cement his hold on power.
Mr. Surkov oversaw policy towards Ukraine but was recently relieved of some of that responsibility.
The Kremlin did not make it clear whether Mr. Surkov would be given a new position.
A statement on its website also gave no indication as to why he had been dismissed.
But the night editor Gabriel Gatehouse then weighed in with some extra snark.
There was a time at the height of his powers when nothing could happen in Russian politics without the hand of Vladislav Surkov being in some way detected behind the scenes.
His first fall from grace came during a mass protest against Mr. Putin's rule in 2011-2012.
His air of omnipotence was so complete, his inability to control the streets looked to many like failure, or worse, treachery.
When he resurfaced as the man effectively running Russia's war in eastern Ukraine, those who knew him well sensed a restless man with diminished powers.
A quote, golden cage, was how one former friend described his new role.
Now that too is gone.
But this isn't the first time Mr. Surkov has been sacked.
It may not be the last.
So why is the BBC being so dubious?
Well, Surkov has long manipulated his public image, and shuffling him around the Kremlin while sending contradictory signals to the press is absolutely par for the course, as you'll soon find out.
The Great Cardinal.
Vladislav Surkov.
In the mid-90s, a new type of operative began to rise in Russia.
The political technologists.
They combined marketing, PR, and entertainment with an old czarist tradition.
The co-option of anti-state forces.
These political manipulators made themselves indispensable to those in power by claiming they could drastically affect political outcomes.
And they were right.
In 1996, an oligarch named Boris Berezovsky used political technologists and the power of television to propel Yeltsin to power.
It was no easy task.
Yeltsin's popularity in the lead-up to the election was at an all-time low.
The economy was contracting, and the president had botched a hostage situation with Chechen rebels in Kislyar months prior, resulting in dozens of civilian casualties.
No matter.
The political technologists aired relentless cycles of fake stories about impending pogroms and surging far-right parties.
When they were done, what seemed like an impossible victory for Boris Yeltsin had become a landslide.
Nobody recognized the power of television as much as Putin.
Here's from Pomerantsev.
The first thing the president had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television.
It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would allow as its puppet opposition, what the country's history and fears and consciousness should be.
And the new Kremlin won't make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did.
It will never let TV become dull.
The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment.
21st century Russian television mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism.
And at the center of the great show is the president himself, graded from a no-one, a grey fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of a soldier, a lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, czar, Superman.
Those involved were keenly aware of what they were undertaking.
Here are the words of one of the biggest Russian TV presenters in the early aughts,
spoken in a private meeting with other execs and recounted by Pomerantsev.
We all know there will be no real politics, but we still have to give our viewers the
sense that something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. So what should we play with?
Shall we attack oligarchs?
He continued.
Who's the enemy this week?
Politics has got to feel like, like a movie.
In the age of Putin, this system was refined and consolidated under the most powerful political technologist of our era, Vladislav Surkov.
Here's from Pomerantsev.
In the 21st century, the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the independent party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night.
The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.
One moment, Tsirkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs.
The next, he would quietly support nationalist movements that accused the NGOs of being tools of the West.
With a flourish, he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attack the modern art exhibitions.
The Kremlin's idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls.
Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner, and a totalitarian state by bedtime.
Surkov's first job was in 1992 when he helped handsome Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorovsky launch an ad campaign featuring the grinning millionaire handing out cash.
Quote, Join my bank if you want some easy money, I've made it, so can you, the billboard stated.
This was a clever move by Surkov who sensed that the post-Soviet Russian population, many having never seen a millionaire advertised or celebrated, was ready to covet wealth.
And he was right.
After this success, Surkov was made head of PR at Ostankino's Channel One, before joining the Kremlin in 1999, when Putin jailed one of his ex-bosses and exiled the other.
The exilee in question, Khodorovsky, did remain the protagonist of Surkov's ads, but he was no longer handing out cash and grinning.
Poor old Mikhail was now behind bars in every photo, a cautionary tale to anyone who might challenge Putin's new power structure.
But Tserkov has a bizarrely artistic background.
Here's from Adam Curtis in his 2016 documentary, Hypernormalization.
Tserkov came originally from the theater world, and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avant-garde ideas from the theater and bring them into the heart of politics.
Serkov's aim was not just to manipulate people, but to go deeper and play with and undermine
their very perception of the world, so they are never sure what is really happening.
Serkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre.
So...
He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups, From mass anti-fascist youth organisations to the very opposite, neo-Nazi skinheads.
And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government.
Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin.
But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing.
Which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia.
As one journalist put it, it's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.
A ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable.
Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere.
Incredible stuff.
It's just, he's destroying the concept of authenticity.
Yeah, it's interesting that he has this, yeah, this sort of, this theater background, which is all, I guess it was all about sort of like perceptions and sort of the audience's experience.
And it's like, oh, okay, political news consumers are just my audience and I can manipulate my audience and make them feel, make them question, like any other audience.
Yeah, yeah, and I mean, Pomerantsev talks a little bit about this in his book about these contradictions.
Here he is.
Elsewhere, Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern text just translated into Russian.
The breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only simulacrum and simulacra.
And then, in the next moment, he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism.
Before quoting Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra in English and by heart.
Rubber dollar bills.
Skin of machinery.
The guts and innards of the weeping, coughing car.
The empty, lonely tin cans with their rusty tongues alack.
What more could I name?
The smoked ashes of some cock cigar.
The cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars.
All these entangled in your mummy roots.
If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package, parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism.
Surkov's genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representations to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism Until it meets the reverse of its original purpose.
And this is, I guess, goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
Is he finding the inherent contradictions or is he destroying an otherwise good system?
I would argue he just came at just the right time.
And I mean, this guy came up in the 80s and 90s, which was the kind of era of marketing was starting to go.
PR was starting to go and the political technologist came to be.
And so I'd argue that he actually could see some of the inherent contradictions in the American system and has been able to exploit them in an incredible way.
And we'll see how that maybe, maybe, resulted in Trumpism.
So then, in 2009, a book by a mysterious new author named Natan Dubovitsky was published in Moscow.
Here are the opening lines.
You.
And you.
Humans.
Lions.
Eagles.
And chickens.
Do you all have enough room?
Do you all have enough time?
Are you all prepared?
Are you all comfortable?
Can everybody see everything?
So the book, titled Almost Zero, subtitled Gangsta Fiction, was a dark satire of post-Soviet Russia and the corrupt machinations of the ruling class.
Its Hamlet-inspired protagonist was a criminal-turned-book publisher who spends a good amount of the narrative agonizing over this snuff film that may or may not exist.
Soon after publication, an anonymous call was placed to a St.
Petersburg newspaper informing them that Vladislav Surkov, then Russia's Deputy Chief of Staff, had authored the novel under a pseudonym.
The protagonist Igor's experiences seem to correlate with Surkov's.
Born to a single mother, Surkov's Chechen father left when he was still a young child, Igor spends the 80s hanging out in Moscow's bohemian scene and the 90s becoming a PR guru.
Sirkov's early life in Moscow saw him pursuing a range of activities from soldier, with potential intelligence training, to theater director, to metallurgist, Pomerantsev explains.
As Surkov matured, Russia experimented with different models at a dizzying rate.
Soviet stagnation led to perestroika, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal euphoria, economic disaster, oligarchy, and the mafia state.
How can you believe in anything when everything around you is changing so fast?
He was drawn to the Bohemian set in Moscow, where performance artists were starting to capture the sense of dizzying mutability.
No party would be complete without Oleg Kulik, who would impersonate a rabid dog to show the brokenness of post-Soviet man.
Or German Vino Gradov, who would walk naked into the street and pour ice water over himself.
There was even, like, they described a lot of cross-dressing as well, crazy costume parties.
Sounds like a good time.
It really kind of does.
Yeah, right.
Honestly, from Pomerantsev's book, I just kind of wanted to be in Moscow partying at this time because it seemed like there was an excess of new money and everyone was just going completely crazy and, like, anything can be anything.
Of course, it led to a lot of bad things, but at the time... Yeah, the possibilities were endless, and that's what we really live for.
When it came to describing his, quote, vulgar Hamlet's inner life, Surkov showed his cards a little bit more.
His self was locked in a nutshell.
Outside were his shadows, dolls.
He saw himself as almost autistic, imitating contact with the outside world, talking to others in false voices to fish out whatever he needed from the Moscow squall, books, sex, money, food, power, and other useful things.
The book was a success, but it drew a strange set of reactions from critics.
Here's Barry Yourgrew for the New York Review of Books.
Russian reviews of Almost Zero ranged from awestruck to contemptuous.
The ultra-nationalist, pro-Putin film director Nikita Mikhalkov, who made Burnt by the Sun, hailed the novel as, quote, a truly great and amazing book.
A masterpiece.
A book we have not seen since The Master and Margarita.
Which, by the way, if I may interject, I recommend reading The Master and Margarita.
Fantastic Russian novel.
But another reviewer in Russian Pioneer's own pages sneered that, quote, the author clearly has nothing to say, so he clowns.
There is nothing under all his paraphrases, retellings, and rehashings.
It's a quasi-novel, a doll, or a scarecrow.
That critic was, naturally, Vladislav Surkov himself, writing under his own name.
Shortly afterward, he changed his mind and declared at a Russian Pioneer public event that Almost Zero was, quote, a wonderful novel.
He had not, he averred, read anything better.
Just kind of, I mean, it's hard not to admire this king.
Like he is a fucking sick weirdo in many ways, but he's also has such flair.
Like it's such bizarre.
It's so bizarrely grandiose what he comes up with.
It's, it's like a magician.
Yeah, it is.
He's like a magician, but he's sort of contemptuous of the stable reality we think we're in.
Like all magicians, they're secretly genocidal criminals.
I think he just believes magicians believe that their audience are rubes and that they can make them believe silly things with a quick motion of their hand.
Who could believe that?
So if you're feeling bewildered, that's the point.
Peter Pomerantsev, the guy whose novel we've been reading, now, he once worked for a state-owned Russian TV company called TNT, and he attempted to describe an entire Serkovian cycle from within the system.
Living in the world of Surkov and the political technologists, I find myself increasingly confused.
Recently, my salary almost doubled.
On top of directing shows for TNT, I have been doing some work for a new media house called Snob, which encompasses TV channels and magazines and a gated online community for the country's most brilliant minds.
It is meant to foster a new type of, quote, global Russian, A new class who will fight for all things Western and liberal in the country.
It is financed by one of Russia's richest men, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owns the Brooklyn Nets.
I have been hired as a, quote, consultant for one of Snob's TV channels.
I write interminable notes and strategies and flowcharts, though nothing ever seems to happen.
But I get paid.
And the offices, where I drop in several times a week to talk about quote, unique selling points and quote, high production values, are like some sort of hipster fantasy.
Set in a converted factory, the open brickwork left untouched, the huge arches of the giant windows preserved, with edit suites and open plan offices built in delicately, the employees are the children of Soviet intelligentsia, with But Pomerantsev was savvy enough about Russia's media to understand that not all was above board with Snob and outlets of its ilk.
for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, and her articles in glossy western
magazines attacked the president vociferously. But Pomerantsev was savvy enough about Russia's
media to understand that not all was above board with Snob and outlets of its ilk.
For all the opposition posturing of Snob, it's also clear there is no way a project so high
profile could have been created without the Kremlin's blessing. Is this not just the sort of
managed opposition the Kremlin is very comfortable with.
On the one hand, allowing liberals to feel like they have a free voice and a home, and a paycheck.
On the other, helping the Kremlin define the, quote, opposition as hipster Muscovites, out of touch with ordinary Russians, obsessed with marginal issues such as gay rights in a homophobic country.
The very name of the project, Snob, though meant ironically, already defines us as a potential object of hate.
And for all the anti-Kremlin rants on Snob, We never actually do any real investigative journalism.
Find out any hard facts about money stolen from the state budget.
In 21st century Russia, you are allowed to say anything you want, as long as you don't follow the corruption trail.
After work, I sit with my colleagues, drinking and talking.
Are we the opposition?
Are we helping Russia become a freer place?
Or are we actually a Kremlin project strengthening the president?
Actually doing damage to the cause of liberty?
Or are we both?
A card to be played.
Sure enough, in the next presidential elections, Prokhorov will become the Kremlin-endorsed liberal candidate.
The snob project helps endear him to the intelligentsia.
But as a flamboyant oligarch best known for partying in Courchevel with busloads of models, he's an easy target for the Kremlin.
Again, Moscow's chattering classes speculate.
Is Prokhorov a genuine candidate?
Is it better to vote for him?
Or does that mean you're playing the Kremlin game?
Or should one vote for no one and ignore the system?
In the end, Prokhorov gains a fairly impressive 8% before elegantly retreating from the political scene to wait for his next call-up.
We are all just bit part players in the political technologist's great reality show.
So that's a pretty interesting, I think, vision of how it works from beginning to end and then quiets down for another cycle.
And it's mind-bogglingly well-developed and smart.
It's incredible.
We're on our way to organically recreating that in this country.
I mean, obviously, there are movements pushing it in that direction.
But a lot of the stuff you're reading here, I'm like, oh, that's what the conversation feels like now in the Democratic primary.
Yeah, it is pure WWE style politics.
Is Pete Buttigieg CIA?
Is he not?
We don't know.
It's unclear.
Did they fuck us in Iowa?
It's not clear.
We don't know.
And at the end, you're crazy.
You're half crazy, they can call you conspiracy theorist, they marginalize you, and they win in a way, you know?
It's controlled opposition.
is a very smart thing to do.
They do it in a more intelligent way because it's top-down, completely top-down, whereas the Americans, and we'll explore what Sirkoff thinks of this later, they do like to give you the illusion of choice, and then they nudge you in many, many invisible, invisible ways towards what they want for you.
It's much more insidious in, I think, American media.
It's insidious and it's designed in a way to maintain your idea of yourself as an independent human being, working in a system that you can affect even if it's in small ways.
Whereas in Russia it's designed to make you disconnect from the system and understand it's all bought and paid for.
Forget it.
It's fine.
Move on to your happiness that's beyond that.
Americans can't do that kind of despairing kind of attitude.
They have to be like, oh no, I'm involved, I have power, I'm gonna make things happen.
They have to make you have that feeling of sort of influence.
But I did experience like in Brazil, it was the same thing.
Everybody knows, everybody's corrupt, and so I have to say that these social bonds are more healthy and there's more community.
The black pill builds solidarity.
Yes, and I think it's not just a black pill.
I think that most of the world would think of that as just a realist way of seeing the world.
The Americans are one of the few countries that is in this kind of liberal, I guess like mystical state, where they believe that things should be otherwise, or they're constantly having to tug these two extremes into the same brain just to be able to function.
There's a lot more of that, whereas in Russia, that's long been severed.
Really quick I noticed on CNN last night when the votes were coming in for the Nevada caucuses and shit when they were talking about other candidates they would just like say their name or just be like presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren or presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg or whatever whenever they mentioned Bernie they were like Democrat Socialist Bernie Sanders Good.
What they don't understand, and what Surkov does, is that no one likes the system that they're trying to hold up.
No one fucking likes it.
They don't understand that the average voter doesn't believe in anything they're saying.
Yeah, I think that's a big difference.
And Surkov knew, he knows that that's what people feel inside.
And so does Bernie Sanders.
He knows to play to that card.
Yeah.
Well, but I mean, so does, I mean, the corporate media in terms, in some ways, too.
Like, they know the Russia shit.
No, they don't.
Well, they know the Russia shit plays well with the... But they don't, because if it was designed and controlled and normal, they wouldn't do what Chris Matthews is doing.
These people are actually fucking falling apart.
Like, the Russians do it, and they do it just like they do it, and they're out.
Yeah.
Like, they know what to say.
Chris Matthews is up there because, on some level, he's actually fucking kidding himself.
He thinks he's a good guy who's smart.
Yeah.
Which is amazing to any human being looking at him, because we all see the emperor has no clothes.
And what Sir God is saying is, every citizen in your country right now knows the emperor has no clothes.
If you don't talk on that language, you're going to create essentially what America has created, which is a split state.
The deep state, the reality of how things happen, and the shallow state, what we think is happening.
And that the tension between them will tear apart America is his theory.
All right.
So, after this, the winds pushed the smoke west.
Here's from Adam Curtis in Hypernormalization again.
And then, the same thing seemed to start happening in the West.
By now, it was becoming ever more clear that the system had deep flaws.
Every month, there were new revelations of most of the bank's involvement in global corruption.
Of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations.
Of the secret surveillance of everyone's emails by the National Security Agency.
Yet no-one was prosecuted.
Except for a few people at the lowest levels.
And behind it all, the massive inequality kept on growing.
Yet the structure of power remained the same.
Nothing ever changed.
Because nothing could be allowed to destabilise the system.
But then the shape-shifting began.
So what he's referring to here, of course, is Trumpism.
But we will get back to that later.
First, we need to examine Surkov's fall from grace.
Or so the story goes.
Here's your Gru again.
Surkov was demoted to run Economic Affairs in 2011.
after protests against Putin's third presidency rendered the public relations
stratagems of, quote, managed democracy outdated to be replaced by blunt force
repression. Strangely enough, or true to form, Serkhov called the protesters, quote, among the best people
in Russian society, adding that he himself was, quote, too odious for this
brave new world. In 2013 he resigned from the government under a corruption cloud,
he was later exonerated and went fishing with
But Putin soon brought him back as a special assistant on Ukrainian matters, and his involvement in the annexation of Crimea led to his being named in the U.S.
Magnitsky sanctions list in 2014.
Oliver Carroll also described Surkov's standing for the independent in early 2019.
Mr. Surkov, while still an influential player, is no longer at the heart of the Kremlin policy machine.
He fell out of favor with Vladimir Putin after appearing to side with Dmitry Medvedev in the tempestuous protest years of 2008 to 2012, and was unceremoniously dropped in favor of rival Vyacheslav Volodin.
Since then, Mr. Surkov is believed to have taken charge of the Kremlin's secret campaign in eastern Ukraine, has acted as Russia's point of contact
in the Minsk peace negotiations, and has taken to penning lofty essays about the state of
Russia.
Despite these reports, it's unclear if the reshuffling is just another game of mirrors.
And perhaps we'll never know.
It certainly appears that Surkov was still fucking with people's heads in 2014, when during the Kremlin's Ukraine campaign, he published a short story under his usual pseudonym, Natan Dubovitsky, entitled Without Sky.
Set in the future, during the Fifth World War, the story is told from the point of view of a child whose parents have died in the conflict.
The child's brain has been damaged, causing him to exclusively see and understand things in two dimensions.
Here's from the text.
It was the first non-linear war.
In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was common for just two sides to fight.
Two countries.
Two groups of allies.
Now, four coalitions collided.
Not two against two or three against one.
No, all against all.
And what coalitions?
Not like the ones you had before.
It was rare for whole countries to enter.
A few provinces would join one side, a few others a different one.
One town or generation or gender would join yet another.
Then they could switch sides, sometimes mid-battle.
Their aims were quite different.
To take over a disputed coastal shelf, to forcefully introduce a new religion, raise ratings, try out new lasers, to stop humans being divided into men and women as gender differences undermine the unity of a nation.
Most understood the war to be part of a process, not necessarily its most important part.
So, pretty creepy stuff.
And what of our round-cheeked Vladislav these days?
Is he truly gone?
Well, just recently, in November of 2019, he wrote an article for the Nevasimaya Gazeta.
A lot of it is just your typical nationalist fare, but there are some fascinating passages.
Here is Sirkov gloating about the state of things.
Foreign politicians accuse Russia of interfering in elections and referenda throughout the planet.
But in reality, the situation is even more serious.
Russia interferes with their brains, and they don't know what to do with their own transformed consciousness.
After the disastrous 1990s, once Russia turned away from all borrowed ideologies, it started generating its own ideas and began to counterattack the West.
Since then, European and American experts have been erring in their predictions more and more frequently.
They are surprised and vexed by the paranormal preferences of the electorates.
In confusion, they have sounded the alarm about an outbreak of populism.
They can call it that, if they happen to be at a loss for words.
The 21st century is turning out the way we said it would.
British Brexit, American hashtag great again, The anti-immigrant enclosure of Europe?
These are but the first few items in a long list of commonplace manifestations of de-globalization, re-sovereignization, and nationalism.
When the hegemony of the hegemon was not contested by anyone, the great American dream of world domination was close to being fulfilled, and many people hallucinated the end of history with the final comment of, the people are silent.
In that silence, there came Putin's Munich speech.
At the time it sounded dissenting, but today everything in it seems self-evident.
Nobody's happy with America, including the Americans themselves.
Ah, such a mix of things.
God, what a fucking asshole.
I know, he's a piece of shit.
He's just taking a big gloaty... Exactly, he's just sipping his whiskey, he's like, oh, things a little chaotic for you guys?
What's happening?
As all fascists and authoritarians like him, what he doesn't fully understand is the other flip side of the coin.
For him, populism and nationalism is the only thing he can mention when he talks about these transformations.
But we're seeing that these transformations can also be led by ideas like democratic socialism.
So, we'll fucking see, Mr. Surkov, but holy shit, touche, and I think he just destroyed the entire media class that we're fucking, like, dealing with in this primary melting down on television.
I mean, the guy really has their fucking number, unfortunately.
This next passage is proof that everything leads back to QAnon, even if we try to do an episode that has almost nothing to do with it.
A decent part of Surkov's article is actually dedicated to the Deep State.
The term Deep State signifies a harsh, absolutely non-democratic network organization of real authoritarian structures hidden behind showy democratic institutions.
This mechanism, which in practice exerts its authority through acts of violence, bribery and manipulation, and remains hidden deep beneath the surface of a hypocritical and simple-minded civil society which it manipulates while bribing or repressing all who accuse it.
Having discovered in their midst an unpleasant deep state, Americans were not particularly surprised since they have long suspected that it exists.
If there is a deep net and a dark net, then why not a deep state or even a dark state?
From the depths and darkness of this unexhibited and unadvertised power, there float up shining
mirages of democracy special made for mass consumption that feature the illusion of choice,
the feeling of freedom, delusions of superiority, and so on.
Nobody believes anymore in the good intentions of the public politicians.
They are envied and are therefore considered corrupt, shrewd, or simply scoundrels.
A beneficial system of checks and balances comes about, a dynamic equilibrium of villainy, a balance of avarice, a harmony of swindles.
But if someone forgets that this is a game and starts to behave disharmoniously, the ever-vigilant Deep State hurries to the rescue and an invisible hand drags the apostate down into the murky depths.
There is nothing particularly frightening in this proposed image of Western democracy.
All you have to do is change your perspective a little, and it would no longer seem scary.
But it leaves a sour feeling, and a Western citizen starts to spin his head around in search of other models and other ways of being, and sees Russia.
Our system, as in general everything else that's ours, is no more graceful, but it is more honest.
And although the phrase more honest is not a synonym of better for everyone, honesty does have its charms.
Yeah.
Designed to destroy Travis View.
Yeah.
He wrote this so recently, too.
Just a few months ago.
Yeah, yeah.
From supposedly not having any more power in government, kind of.
Yeah, but interesting that he's coming from this place of like, ha ha ha, look at this ant colony I've created and crushed in the same breath.
Yeah, yeah.
He definitely sees himself as the architect, and he's also doing a bit of a Glenn Greenwald victory.
Knowing, hey, you were fucking right, and you continue to be.
Everything he wrote there.
I don't think he's right about any conclusions or any choices that he makes as a result of some of the stuff that he's observed, but the observations are chillingly correct.
So here, Surkov was basically saying that the Deep State's actions were selling Westerners on Russia's autocratic model, which is more honest, quote unquote, which is incredible.
The idea that the Deep State is acting as a salesperson for the Russian model.
Our state is not split up into deep and external.
It is built as a whole, with all of its parts and its manifestations facing out.
The most brutal constructions of its authoritarian frame are displayed as part of the facade, undisguised by any architectural embellishments.
The bureaucracy, even when it tries to do something on the sly, doesn't try too hard to cover its tracks, as if assuming that everyone understands everything anyway.
So he's basically betting that when faced with the choice between a secretly rigged system and an openly rigged one, people will choose the latter.
And I don't think he's fucking wrong here.
And that's what we saw in the United States, you know?
It's like, oh, listen, we fuck over our citizens, but we're up front about it.
So just be honest!
Yeah, and I think that's what Trump's approach was.
We'll see actually, in the Adam Curtis clip I'm going to be playing, there's a passage where Trump is talking to other members of the Republican Party during like a primary debate, and it is fascinating because it is very literally doing that.
He's taking the deep state and he's pushing it to the surface for everybody to see, and people fucking love it!
God, it's really fascinating.
I was always baffled by how people saw Trump as sort of like a corruption fighter.
Like, he wanted to host G7 at his own property, an international government event at a property that would put money in Trump's pocket.
He was, openly it was for that.
It was like, how are you for this?
But in the context of this, it sort of makes sense, like, well, they always believe that, like, Nancy Pelosi is like that level of corrupt.
But they believe that Nancy Pelosi does it in sort of sly, hidden ways.
Trump is open and sort of flamboyant about it, and they respect that.
They know, yeah, exactly.
You know what you get.
When they look at Nancy Pelosi, they don't feel like they know what they get.
And they're right.
That's the problem.
The problem is that in that instance, the quote-unquote deplorables are 100% correct.
And you're basically telling them your instinct, your basic instinct about the situation.
You're wrong about that.
And it's like they're not.
So, you know, until we find a different talking point with them, we're not going to convince them of anything.
So this is my favorite line.
And I wanted to close our reading of Sirkov out with this one.
There is no deep state in Russia.
All of it is on display, but there is a deep nation.
Means nothing.
And this is what fascists do, by the way.
They create the whole and describe it to you perfectly, and then they fill it with garbage that should instantly be fucking discounted a hundred percent.
Yeah.
What's that even mean?
It's a deep nation?
Nothing.
It's just nationalism.
It's just the idea.
First of all, the idea of a nation is, I mean, if you're looking at it on an intellectual level, there's a million debates about it, but it is essentially a phantom.
It doesn't exist.
I mean, I think he's just saying that the corruption of the deep state is permeated throughout the oligarchy.
And that's sort of like a sort of like built into it thing.
I mean, all of the gears are exposed and you see it.
There's just nothing you can do about it.
So try.
And then he goes on to make like an argument around the nation and how it like it.
He tries to basically treat it as if it's part of E equals MC squared and it's like deforming space and time.
I mean, honestly, a lot of the arguments in this thing, like I said, are boilerplate fascist garbage.
They're not smart or interesting, but his ability to figure out the problem that he then exploited to kind of build power for himself and Putin, that is something that we need to look at because he has an insight there.
And then we can completely discount all his solutions and try to take him out of power, of course, because he's a fascist.
Yeah.
And an evil man.
So what of Surkov's legacy in the West?
Well, here is Adam Curtis one last time.
The campaign that Donald Trump ran was unlike anything before in politics.
Nothing was fixed.
What he said, who he attacked, and how he attacked them was constantly changing and shifting.
Trump attacked his Republican rivals as being all part of a broken and corrupt system.
A politics where everyone could be bought.
Using words that could have come from the Occupy Movement.
You've also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi.
You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business related favours.
And you said recently, quote, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.
You better believe it.
So what specifically did they do?
If I ask them, if I need them... You know, most of the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand.
A lot of money.
I will tell you that our system is broken.
I give to many people.
Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman.
I give to everybody.
When they call, I give.
And you know what?
When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.
And that's a broken system.
But at the same time, Trump used the language of the extreme racist right in America.
Connecting with people's darkest fears, pushing them and bringing those fears out into the open.
Many of the facts that Trump asserted were also completely untrue.
But Trump didn't care.
He and his audience knew that much of what he said bore little relationship to reality.
Thank you very much.
This meant that Trump defeated journalism, because the journalists' central belief was that their job was to expose lies and assert the truth.
With Trump, this became irrelevant.
I love Adam Curtis.
He really taps into a visceral existential dread in a way that almost no one else can.
I highly recommend his movies.
They're available online, I believe, for free.
We'll put a link at the end of the episode here to this movie, and then you can follow that through to find his other documentaries if you want to watch them.
Highly recommend it, because he made this one before Trump was elected, and it is like the key to everything, just as I think looking at Serkov is also very, very important if you want to understand this information in the modern age.
How are you feeling, boys?
Feeling good?
No, no, no, not good.
You brought us a very brainy, depressing episode.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel, hmm, I feel hot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tingling.
Uncomfortable.
You found a new intellectual god.
You now understand that the entire intellectual dark web has a daddy.
Yeah, what's the name of his books and websites?
Dude, honestly, 2020 is the year that Sirkoff becomes a YouTuber.
It's gonna rule.
He's gonna tell us exactly how he's manipulating everything behind the scenes.
And it also turns out he's, like, incredible at Fortnite.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
Trump or death, that's what this is all about.
That's going to be the code moving forward to the election.
Okay?
I'm going to end almost every segment with the same thing.
Your choice is Trump or death.
Immigration?
You want control over immigration?
You vote for President Trump.
You want more terrorists coming into the United States of America?
You vote against him.
It's really that simple.
This is not about policy.
This is not about party.
This is literally about survival.
And the only one that's going to help us survive is President Trump being re-elected.
Who knows what happens after that in 2024.
We'll get to that, cross that bridge when we get there.
But we've got to make sure that we get President Trump re-elected.
