Disinfolklore (6)
Russia's Far Right "Bogey Men" - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation.
What would you do if your manager casually ordered you to check in on a woman who was about to be Cut Into Tiny Pieces (see Disinfolklore (4)?
Would your response change, if you sensed your gullible manager was not thinking straight - that both they and their manager had been trolled by the Russian security service into sending you to the woman’s home? If you suspected you were being involuntarily participated in a Russian Disinfolklore operation, how would you manage the situation? If you recognised that something odd was going on, yet you were not be able to understand what it was, how would you react?
Sometimes I felt myself a bit like the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes faery tale. I could see how Russia was trolling (see Code of Positive Trolls episode linked below) and manipulating my employer, an international organisation entrusted by its fifty-seven member states to establish the facts in relation to reports in Ukraine of breaches of international law. The challenge in such a workplace is how to pragmatically solve the situation without burning bridges (e.g. breaching the chain of command). So we’ll come back to how I resolved that situation in a future episode.
In my case, it was the faint folkloric echoes in the story rationalising the tasking, as relayed by my manager, that initially provoked my hunch that something was Rotten In The State Of Denmark.
The tale my manager relayed hinged on one of Russia’s key Bogey Men (a Ukrainian civil society organisation that resisted Russia’s occupation of Ukraine) acting in strict conformity with the behaviours it always performed in Russian Disinfolklore.
In parsing disinformation by using the Disinfolklore analytical method sometimes you will be able to spot when you are being manipulated when you recognise a Bogey Man character. Perennial Bogey Men characters in Trump or Brexit Disinfolklore are immigrants, woke, trans or female individuals. So sometimes, when you see these archetypes personalised in stories in, say, the Daily Mail, you will understand that you are being subjected to a Disinfolklore operation.
Open the Daily Mail website’s front page on any particular day and scan down. Note how the same Bogey Men appear repeatedly: Trans, Woke, Prince Harry, Unmarred Women, Foreigners, Immigrants, or particular celebrities who have come to signify, in the Daily Mail, some negative cultural phenomenon. Then, if you can face it, the story itself is likely just to prove how justified it is that, say, the half-blood prince Harry should never have married a Black American.
Other times, you won’t be aware of the Bogey Men character, but the way the story is written will immediately communicate to you that this is a Bogey Man who is not to be sympathised with - it will be a specific immigrant who committed a crime. Therefore, so the Disinfolklore will mean to imply, all immigrants are bad. This is where literacy in the Disinfolklore analytical method is particularly useful.
When I arrived in eastern Ukraine in early 2015 I had no idea of any of the Bogey Men characters in Russian Disinfolklore “Polish Mercenaries,” “Ukrainian Punishers,” “Nazis’… But I soon became literate in the meaning in Russian occupier media of these stereotypical characters. The story in which these characters appear - say, the Cut Into Tiny Pieces media stories in Russia occupied Ukraine - is the vector. And as you read through the Disinfolklore episodes you will become aware of these perennial Bogey Men in Russian Disinfolklore. Let them be archetypes for Bogey Men in all forms of Disinfolklore.
In all of these case, there is also the faery tale heroine who, in the case of the Daily Mail, is the Beyond All Reproach. The woman who is married to the son of the kind of England, for example, is an actual princess who can do no wrong. The king of England’s wife, by contrast, used to be the wicked stepmother. But now, through years of manipulative Disinfolklore, she has become an actual queen. So, in Disinfolklore, redemption is possible. But it is very rare.
In Russian Disinfolklore the Right Sector and Azov Battalion were monsters, ogres, giants, trolls and unjust deities. In the human world, Right Sector and Azov Battalion were the first civil society organisations to resist militarily Russia’s occupation of Ukraine from February 2014. Russia and its occupation “authorities” in occupied Ukraine will often be portrayed in such Disinfolklore as a passive, well-meaning, always betrayed by Ukraine and its good intentions simple peasant character.
In the Cut Into Tiny Pieces episode Russia’s intelligence service is portrayed and portraying itself as a mere conduit for information from the simple healer who is being blackmailed by the Bogeyman. These unblemished self-representations can also raise our suspicions that we are being subjected to Disinfolklore. Especially in the light of what we know of Russia’s actually documented transgressions against international law in Ukraine, any piece of Disinfolklore which portrays Russia as an innocent protector or bystander is highly suspicious. A character in Russian Disinfolklore that represents Russia itself is often recognisable by its constant switching between David and Goliath. The Russian dictator Putin’s speeches often contain even within the same sentence this movement between being threatened unjustifiably by the Other and being a nuclear-armed giant who is about to blow up the world.
In folktales, characters are generally stereotypical. They act out ideas. Characters like Right Sector in Russian Disinfolklore are only there to move the plot along. After you have finished the story, you understand everything about the character: they are extremist. Radical. They harm weak women and children. If you meet the character again in another story, they will always perform as expected. Over the course of this series of Disinfolklore we will meet these Russian Disinfolklore Bogey Men (Right Sector, Azov, the West, Nazis, America, Europe, democracy,…) again and again. They always perform the same function: they exist to frighten Ukrainians under Russian occupation into thinking they’re better off submitting to Russian occupation. Their function is to convince Russians that Russia is the only world where proper Russians can exist.
In that day’s Disinfolklore we had the Damsel in Distress - common law wife of the ambulance worker (the good hearted peasant healer). Other such stereotypes appear in other Russian Disinfolklore operations, as they have done in Indo-European folklore and mythology for millennia: The wicked step-mother. The jealous husband. The kindly peasant with a heart of gold who eventually triumphs. The evil king. The oppressed sister or daughter who doesn’t want to marry the prince. The wicked witch. The forest folk…
In Russian Disinfolklore, formulaic individualising details (“under age daughter,” “common law wife,” “ambulance worker”) actually provoke rather than allay the suspicion that here we’re not dealing with real people.
Ukraine, for example, has a certain function in Russian Disinfolklore - Ukraine is the monster that the Russian occupiers will save you from. Ukraine is the external realm that should be avoided by those inside Russia’s inner realm. In Russian Disinfolklore, everything bad that ever existed happens across the Bridge, in non-Russia-occupied Ukraine.
In Nordic Russian troll Putin’s state of the union address in February 2023, the “Kyiv regime” was described as holding ordinary Ukrainians “hostage.” The 73% of Ukrainians who directly elected their president do not exist in Russian Disinfolklore. President Zelenskyy won every single district in Ukraine (bar one) in his election. This is a feat hardly any head of state in world history has achieved.
Yet, in Russia where democracy is evil, they have the chutzpah to call President Zelenskyy illegitimate. Russia’s self-born concept of “Sovereign Democracy” means that Russia gets to define what is and what is not democracy. In a Sovereign Democracy, if an authoritarian is “elected” in a fake election, then they get to brand that “democracy.” Furthermore, in Russia’s Sovereign Democracy the writ of international law does not run. They get to interfere in other sovereign’s actual democracies, while not being subject to the international law that binds all sovereigns.
Russian Disinfolklore turns the human world upside down. It is an Alice Through The Looking-Glass inversion of reality. Ukraine in Russian Disinfolklore is just a character whose purpose is to convince those living under Russian occupation that their unfreedom is better than freedom. Ukraine is Othered into a manipulated puppet of the evil king (the West). Ukraine is, in Russian Disinfolklore, a vehicle for all that is bad in the world. By contrast, Russia is portrayed as being without agency.

Such unrealistic and contrary to lived experience stereotyping runs through Russian Disinfolklore like a fluorescent dye. Those of us who become literate in the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing disinformation, can detect when we’re being trolled, beyond all reasonable doubt, even when we’re unaware of the facts of a specific episode. In the case of the Cut Into Tiny Pieces episode, it was the folkloric echoes and the stereotypical portrayals which convinced me, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I, my manager and my organisation was being trolled. However, recognition is one matter, while working out how to respond is quite another! Seeing Disinfolklore is no guarantee of knowing how to react to it.
So, when you encounter stories, whether from your manager, in the media or from your neighbour who knows someone who knows someone who told them a story about a rich immigrant taking the homes of hard-working locals to them… a tale in which “characters” perform in stereotypical ways, it’s worth while mounting your anti-troll radar system. Incoming.
Then, in 2016, long before I discovered Disinfolklore I only knew about the folklore what we all learn as children - interesting stories that intrigue and have certain characteristics. The stories about poisonous toad stool mushrooms which teach us not to gobble up whatever we find growing in the woods. Russia is obsessed with poisoning its enemies. The Russian occupation’s leader in occupied Luhansk’s parent were poisoned by mushrooms, as a warning to him.
In Salisbury, England Russia botched an assassination of one of its former agents using a radioactive poison.
I had read Oscar Wilde’s iridescent fairy tales - Wilde’s father was a famed collector and publisher of folk-tales in Ireland. My mother had given me a copy of Tolstoy’s village tales when I was a small child. I didn’t expect these faint echoes of entertaining tales told when I was eight-years-old to be of service as an anti-troll radar in a war zone decades later!