Mr. Andrei Soldatov has something to sell, an ‘analyst’ who shares the prejudices of The Financial Times editors, his ‘expertise’ on Russian skullduggery: ‘The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries’. The hyperbolic title alone evokes a kind of muted awe! Destined for the Best-Seller’s List?

Not much in this essay  except a ‘history made to measure’ of the ‘the second Chechen war’ and Putin as its inept orchestrator, as a kind of telling behavioral paradigm ?  The New Cold War , cultivated by the political alliance between the New Democrats and the porcine Spartans, the bellicose Neo-Conservatives, and their concerted propaganda campaign, waged over time, comes to fruition via the ‘investigation’ by FBI hack Mueller: a melodrama conceived with the 21 inch black and white screen of 1952 American in mind , starring ‘The Thirteen’ of  ‘a St Petersburg-based “troll farm” ‘. And now a word from our sponsor!

The ‘as if’ of this essay, by Mr. Andrei Soldatov, is that somehow Putin The Terrible has won some kind of victory in a Propaganda War between the US and Russia. Both Mueller and Soldatov would have produced a more adroit kind of propaganda,  had they both consulted Edward L. Bernays’ 1928 classic monograph called Propaganda.

Political Realist

https://www.ft.com/content/8fe0148c-14af-11e8-9e9c-25c814761640