Podcast | The Bridge at Stanytsia, and the Kindness of the Captor

This week I’ve been doing a lot of work on linguistics, which is amazing. But I’m going to turn back to the first character, really, in this entire story. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m aware that for the first thirty episodes I mentioned this bridge a lot. I’m equally aware that for the past thirty episodes I haven’t mentioned it a lot. And it’s a really important character in the story. The story of Disinfolklore, and the story really of anywhere anyone you know exacts a toll. Whether that is an emotional toll or a literal toll.

We see the structure of the toll troll at the moment in the Strait of Hormuz, in a geographical location. But we also see the structure of the toll in anyone we know who is, basically, a lot of work. Anything you have to do to get through that resistance in order to do your job, or get the cats out, or get the children to school. This is the structure of the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska.

Of course, I didn’t arrive at this understanding straight away. It’s taken me years and years and years. As some of you know, I was a diplomat there, working for the international community, between 2015 and 2018. And the bridge at Stanytsia was a real bridge and a metaphorical bridge. On one side were the Russian occupiers, the bridge trolls. On the other side were the Ukrainian defenders.

So I’ve been doing this series, one of the several series I have ongoing here, which I started a few weeks ago. We’ve gone through three episodes so far, and this is the fourth. It’s called The Bridge at Stanytsia.

The bridge at Stanytsia

Russia’s occupation administration in Luhansk cast itself as a kindly guardian of a broken bridge it had helped break. And that inversion of the bridge troll, the gatekeeper posing as protector, is how a crossing gets used to rewrite who you are when you walk across it.

There is a bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, and for years it was the only legal way to cross the contact line into Luhansk region. A long wooden walkway, part of it blown out, with steps and ramps that pensioners climbed in the heat and the cold to reach the other side. I stood on the bridge. I filed reports from it. So when I tell you what was done with it, I am not reading you a theory. I’m telling you what I watched. And then I’m going to show us the words that were published about it by the occupiers.

The old story comes first. In folklore there is a creature called the bridge troll. It lives under the crossing and it demands a toll. A riddle, a coin, a piece of you, before it will let you pass. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The troll does not build the bridge and it does not own the river. It simply controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place it controls everything. Whoever holds the bridge holds the story of who you are when you cross it. Are you a refugee or a returnee? A citizen or a separatist? You do not get to say. The one at the crossing says it.

And this is the position, for example, both Donald and Netanyahu find themselves in. Donald launched this illegal war against Iran thinking that he was the bridge troll. And now it turns out that the Iranians are much more experienced, with millennia of experience and understanding of this essential structure. The bridge Donald wants to cross at the moment is simple. He just wants the war to be over, because it is an absolute catastrophe, for all the reasons most of us know. I think the figure is something like thirty billion dollars’ worth of American materiel destroyed by Iran in the last two weeks, according to satellite imagery that was released by Iran but taken from China. Because, again, Donald has exacted a toll on Planet Labs. Planet Labs grew out of an entrepreneurship project at my business school in Oxford, around 2010, when someone had the idea of building shoebox satellites. It was incomprehensible a year ago that this satellite imagery would not be available to the world. But it is unavailable to us. We can’t see it. The Chinese have helpfully released it.

And so the toll which Iran is now exacting on Donald, as they escalate with perfect tempo, works like this. They know Donald is desperate to get this war over with. But every time he is ready to pay a price, the toll goes up. And he gets trolled. The arch troll gets trolled into doing another action, bombing somewhere. Yesterday, bombing Iraq with Saudi Arabia. And then the toll goes up. This is an essential archetypal structure in international relations. And it plays out in the micro and the macro.

Here in Stanytsia Luhanska is how that archetype was actually used.

In June 2018 the occupiers’ own news outlet, Luhinfo, ran this story, and I’m quoting it. The Luhansk Folk’s Republic, this is the fake occupation authority, trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, as it did successfully, “urges to restore Stanitsa bridge, as people are dying of heat in queues at the checkpoint.”

And believe me, it was extremely hot there, many times, all through the summer. I stood there. I patrolled the one and a half kilometre stretch between the government-controlled checkpoints, across through this beautiful forest, on a path where spent munitions were scattered. Mostly older women and children crossed, and had to walk that one and a half kilometres of no person’s land to reach the bridge, and then the other side of the bridge. And the winter is ridiculously cold. This is part of the toll the Russians erect. They’re experts at this. They did it in Moldova. It is the concretisation of their occupation, part of the techniques they take out of a box whenever they occupy a territory. You see it in Georgia, in Abkhazia, as well. When I see photographs of what goes on there, it reminds me so much of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge.

So this is a news article in the Russist propaganda media in June 2018. And they quote their so-called negotiator, this guy who archetyped himself, he looked like Trotsky, I’ve spoken about him before. “We spoke about the two people who have died at the checkpoint outside Stanitsa Luganskaya because of the heat on June 24th, on the Ukrainian side. They are mostly elderly people who cross the contact line to receive pensions.”

Because the Russists paid a tiny allowance to people in occupied Luhansk, and then people would cross the bridge to collect their pensions. Under Western pressure, Ukraine was forced for a long time to pay those pensions. Which in turn enabled the occupation, and encouraged people to stay inside the occupation when really they should have left, however horrific it would have been to leave everything behind them. Because it has only gotten worse.

Two people died in the queue on that date. That part is true, and it is terrible. But look at who is speaking. The administration that fronts the Russist occupation, the side whose forces are dug in at one end of the broken bridge, has stepped forward as the grieving advocate of the people crossing it. It urges restoration of the bridge. It frets about the elderly in the sun. It points across the river, at the Ukrainian side. The troll under the bridge has put on a red cross armband and is weeping for the goats.

That is the bridge troll inverted. And the inversion is the whole trick. The gatekeeper does not stop you with a club. It stops you, and then tells you it is the only one who cares that you were stopped. The toll it collects is not a coin. It is your understanding of who broke the bridge.

Here is a second piece, from two years earlier. March 2016, the Russist outlet Riafan. Headline: “OSCE members headed by Hug fled from the Luhansk Folk’s Republic after receiving complaints.” The monitors, I was one of them, are walking from the occupied side towards the government side, and a civilian appeals to them. This is where the Russians stage events, where they shoot at people and blame the Ukrainians. And to set that up, they get people to speak on camera, in front of people like me. A real grief, someone did die. And again, pointed in exactly one direction, at exactly the moment the monitors are about to cross to where they could see for themselves. Stay on our side of the bridge. Do not cross. In one sense they are saying, don’t leave us, don’t abandon us. But in the other sense they are saying, if you abandon us, the Ukrainians will start shooting. And this did not happen in reality. The gatekeeper does not only control who passes. It tries to control where the witness looks.

This is folklore-shaped storytelling, built on archetypes we already trust, turned to capture us instead of shelter us. And the thing about an archetype is that the same figure can be turned either way. Donald on the bridge is the bridge troll protecting Americans from all the criminals coming from abroad. From another perspective he is the uber bridge troll, until he met his match in the Iranian trolls. A curse on all of their houses. A guardian of a crossing can genuinely protect the people who cross it. Or it can pose as that guardian while it is the one holding the gate. You cannot tell from the costume. The costume is identical. You tell by what it actually does. Who blew up the bridge? The Russians. Who keeps it broken? The Russians. Who profits from the queue? The Russians.

That is why the Luhansk operation worked so well. And I mean worked. It was so complete a piece of stagecraft that for eight years almost nobody reached for the plain word occupation. Look at the outlets’ own language. The occupiers’ press names the occupation almost never. Somewhere between nothing and three in a hundred mentions across the whole period. Even the Ukrainian side climbs only to about a third by 2018. The word for what was happening lagged years behind the thing itself. That is what a good bridge troll buys you. Not the bridge. The name.

Most of us have learnt, for instance, that Russia was occupying most of eastern Europe after Yalta. But still, I have this experience of having to explain it to friends. This was a military occupation, of most of the countries that constituted the Soviet Union too.

And here is what seeing this gives us. The moment we notice that the one expressing the most tender concern for the people in the queue is the one standing at the gate, that is the moment the spell loosens. You get to ask the question the costume was built to stop. Who controls this crossing? What does it do, not what does it say? Ask that on every bridge, real, rhetorical or metaphorical, that you are asked to cross. The troll only collects the toll for as long as we agree to pay in the only currency it accepts, our belief that it is on our side. We can stop paying. We can name the crossing for ourselves.

So that is the bridge.

The kindness of the captor

This little story is about the kindness of the captor. It reads the merciful sovereign archetype through a plain test. Protection can shelter you or capture you. And you tell which by what it does to your freedom, not by how kind it sounds.

Here is a sentence from a man who, by his own account, wanted only the best for the people of Luhansk. December 2017, the occupiers’ own news service, lug.info. The head of the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, Pasechnik, is at the Alchevsk steelworks, restarting a blast furnace that had stood cold for most of the year. He congratulates everyone, and he says the main task of him and his entire team is “to raise the well-being.”

Raise the well-being. It is the kindest line you can imagine. A leader who feeds you, who lights the furnace, who wants your children warm. That is exactly what a good sovereign sounds like. And that is the problem we are going to sit with today. Mercy is not the tell. Mercy is genuine, and it is common, and we should not become the kind of person who flinches at kindness. The trouble is that the very same act, protection, can shelter a woman or it can capture her. And you cannot tell which by how kind it sounds. You tell by what it does.

So let us hold Pasechnik’s furnace next to a second item. May 2018, a Ukrainian outlet asks who will treat the schoolchildren being taught to shoot at a military range in the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. The report, sourced to the occupiers’ own military commissar, says 150 pupils of the tenth and eleventh grades, fifteen and sixteen years old, were taken to a firing range and put through initial military training. One hundred and fifty children, learning to shoot.

And I went to some of these places. When the part north of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge was de-occupied in July 2014, after MH17 and the sanctions, the Russians had to withdraw. They just didn’t have enough soldiers. They left this vast swathe of Luhansk unoccupied. And a Russian colleague brought me once to one of these children’s camps. I’ve been thinking about it this week because of the troll going around from Balitsky, which ABC covered in America.

So, the same word. Protection. He raises the well-being. He also puts children on the range. The furnace and the rifle are the same governance, wearing the same kind face. The protector who shelters your town is preparing to spend its sons.

And this is why the word never came. Across those years, the people running the occupation almost never called it an occupation. Their outlets reach for the word almost never at all. That is the lag of the whole story in the archive, and the merciful sovereign is a large part of why. A power that lights furnaces, runs victory parades, pins medals on its men and sends sick children to hospitals does not look like an occupation.

So we need a test that mercy cannot fool. And it is not, is this kind? It is, after the kindness, is she freer or more bound? Can she decline it? Can she leave? Can she vote it out next year? Did the child come home, or go in deeper? Run it. The furnace warms the town. She cannot leave. The training warms no one. It sends her son towards a line he did not choose. Protection she cannot decline, cannot walk away from, cannot vote against, is not shelter. It is a wall with a warm side.

And to be fair to the test, watch it clear a real protector. January 2016, the Ukrainian TV channel 112. An advisor to the Security Service of Ukraine says they are ready to release all detainees.

And this is what I will leave us with on this front. No credentials are required. When a power is kind to you, do not argue with the kindness. Let it be kind. Just ask the one question the costume cannot answer. Am I freer now, or further in? Can I say no to this? Could I leave? You do not need to be an analyst to ask it. You only need to remember that protection is judged by what it does to your freedom, not by how it sounds. Keep that question in your pocket, and hand it to the next person who tells you they only want the best for you.

Back to Outflank Dugin

So, back to Outflank Dugin. We’re close to the end of the first chapter.

Let’s look again at the Cheburashka artefact. A small, big-eared puppet is a demon of the moon. A children’s character has a true name in invented pseudo-Hebrew. A puppet who could not be more obviously a child’s friend has no parents and no nationality. He is, and the sentence is verbatim from Dugin, “a rootless cosmopolitan.” He might be Jewish, though. He is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. Those are the words of Dugin. Cheburashka is sent to destroy the Russian archetype.

The thing that is happening here is not the writing of a philosopher. It is something much older. It is the Russist apparatus, through one of its named senior operators, doing what the apparatus has always done. Taking a tender object of childhood affection and recoding it, in its audience’s mind, as a hidden enemy.

The word cosmopolitan in Soviet political writing does not mean what it means in English. Anna from Odesa has written about this as well. Cosmopolitan is the code word Stalin’s apparatus used in its rootless cosmopolitan campaign of 1949 to 1953, the campaign that arrested and executed Jewish writers, doctors, intellectuals and party members across the Soviet Union, under the pretext that they were cosmopolitans, loyal not to the Russian motherland but to Jewish or Western or deracinated interests. And when I write that russophobia has its origins in antisemitism, this is yet another example of how anyone they want to other becomes branded, archetyped, as Jewish or Western or against them. The word is not innocent. It has had its head turned in Russian political language since the late 1940s. Anyone who uses cosmopolitan of a children’s puppet in 2026 knows what it means. The phrase Dugin uses, Cheburashka “might be Jewish, though,” finishes the sentence the word cosmopolitan began, just in case you didn’t get it. Then the demon naming finishes the paragraph. Then the moon finishes the whole.

The moon. And here I will start the technical work that the rest of the book elaborates, how we will outflank.

The moon is not a random target. I’ll explain why properly in chapter four. For now I’ll only say this. There is a deep grammar at the bottom of the Indo-European languages, the family that contains English, Welsh, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, Russian, Ukrainian and seven other living branches. And one of the rules of that grammar concerns the moon. The moon, in the deep grammar, is the foundation metaphor of the mind. The Indo-European cognitive vocabulary, mind, meaning, manner, an old word for power, human, monarch, mandate, mantra, money, moon itself, all reach back to one ancestral root. The root that meant moon in the language spoken on the Ukrainian steppe roughly six thousand years ago. The Indo-European speaking world has, since then, treated the moon as the master metaphor for the medium that transmits meaning. The meaning of one word shines through another word, like light shines through the moon. As our minds shine through our bodies, so the moon shines through the sun’s light. I’m asking you to take on credit, for one chapter, the assertion that the moon is the foundational metaphor of the Indo-European cognitive substrate. Chapter four does the work.

For now, register what it means about the artefact I read you. The apparatus’s senior operator chose, of all loci, the moon. He did not invent a demon of the rock. He did not invent a demon of the wheat field. He did not invent a demon of the iron ploughshare. He invented a demon of the moon. He chose the foundation. He chose the deepest possible substrate to try to hack. And that is the proof. The very fact that the apparatus’s manufactured philosopher reaches for the moon, of all things, to legitimate a fake demonology of a children’s cartoon character is itself evidence, at the level of the apparatus’s own selection behaviour, that the moon is what my framework says it is. The foundation of the mind. The hack reveals the cryptotype it tries to hack. Hackers select targets that matter. Dugin chose the moon. That choice gives the game away.

I call this principle, with a deliberate echo of the medieval mystics, as well as of the phenomenon in data analytics that powers artificial neural networks today, reversion to the mean. The reversion to the moon-based metaphor. It is my arch play on words, referencing that phenomenon of data analytics where mean itself emanates from the moon-metaphor semantic signalling system too. The apparatus reverts to the moon foundation whenever it needs depth.

The phenomenon is not new. It is what every prior fake and real religious doctrine production in the Indo-European adjacent cultural space has done. From Akhenaten’s brief solar monotheism in fourteenth century BCE Egypt, to Ahriman in the fifth century BCE Iranian Avestan reform. From the Druj, the Lie, carved in stone in the sixth century BCE Persian rock relief at Behistun, which I’ve spoken about before, to the Inquisition’s witch trials in seventeenth century Catalonia. The technique is the same. The locus is the same. The moon is the place the apparatus reaches when it wants the patina of ancient ground.

And I’ll just mention, en passant, as I have before, that Yermak’s medium’s call sign on Telegram was Luna. And we all saw that thing a few weeks ago, where the fake Russist security services operative releasing the video called himself Lunan. It wasn’t his real name. He chose this name. What I’m talking about here gives us lenses to decode what we are seeing in our information space, and to make decisions about how we react to it. Because this tell, this use of the moon as the substrate, will come up again and again. And when it reaches for the moon to justify terrible things, you know what you are looking at.

And so Putler made his speech this week, and he’s going back a couple of centuries. When I talk about outflanking Dugin, not rebutting, what I mean is this. Let’s not enter into discussing what happened in 1733 or 1833, or Stalin this and Stalin that. It is all just nonsense. You outflank them. And because of the degree of complexity of the nonsense they spew, from Putler down to Dugin, down to what they teach in Russian schools, and Will gave a good discourse on that this week, you really have to go quite far. That’s where I go. Six thousand years ago, to the village of Mykolaivka on the banks of the Dnipro, where that Nature paper last year by Nikitin determined that all the living Indo-European languages emanate from there and from around it. So if we’re going to outflank Dugin or Putler, then let’s start with the real word for the moon.

The wise counsellor

I want to turn now to the Dugin-as-archetype observation I made last week. The archetype the Russist apparatus has cast Dugin into is the wise counsellor, the figure who stands at the elbow of the monarch and tells him what to do. In the Indo-European inheritance he goes back at least as far as Merlin to Arthur, Aristotle to Alexander, Chanakya to Chandragupta Maurya, Nathan to David, and the Brahmin court priests to the Vedic kings. The role is honoured. The image is silver-bearded. The associated vocabulary is wisdom, depth, tradition, mystery, ancient knowledge.

That archetype is the role Dugin has been cast in by his apparatus. The casting was not subtle. From the late 1990s, when Foundations of Geopolitics was distributed inside the Russian Academy of the General Staff, his apparatus began establishing the image. Orthodox priestly robes for ceremonial appearances. A studied manner of speaking, with theatrical pauses. A vocabulary that reached at every opportunity for the deepest available references. Heidegger, Schmitt, Guénon, Evola, Plato, the Vedas, Sufi texts, the Orthodox liturgy. A theatre of Tradition, capital T, deliberately invoking the right-wing Italian and French esoteric currents he had read while resident in western Europe in the 1990s.

The Western press, when he was introduced to it, treated this casting as if it were real. Profiles in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere, from the late 2010s forward, described him as Putin’s Rasputin, Putin’s brain, Russia’s most influential thinker, the philosopher of the Kremlin. All archetypes. Tucker Carlson, sitting opposite him in Moscow in February 2024, introduced him as the most famous political philosopher in Russia. Each of these framings is the apparatus’s own marketing copy, lifted into Western respectability discourse by Western interviewers who did not, evidently, pause to ask whether they were reading the costume rather than the man.

The casting director’s masterstroke was the family business construction. The senior philosopher-operator does not stand alone. His daughter, Darya Dugina, was raised inside the Russist apparatus from the start, trained as an English speaker, deployed as a co-presenter on Russist state television. In the early months of the full-scale invasion she was sent on apparatus tours of Mariupol where, in a boat off the fallen city, where the state she was defending had just murdered up to one hundred thousand native residents, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, she delivered to camera the Ukrainians-bombed-themselves line, which I’ll dissect in chapter three. She presented Russist state messaging, this actor, speaking fluent English to international audiences like us, while her father provided the metaphysical depth on the home channels. They were not two operators of the same apparatus by accident. They were one household operation, with two specialised members carrying complementary apparatus content. The English-language audience encountered a young, articulate, beautiful philosophy graduate daughter, whose existence alongside her wise, bearded father established the franchise as something more than a single man’s project. The Russist apparatus, when it captures a philosopher, captures the family line.

Her death, en route from a literary festival outside Moscow in August 2022, then permitted the apparatus to install the next image layer around the surviving father. The bereaved philosopher. The targeted intellectual. The martyr-adjacent figure whose tragic personal loss was somehow taken as evidence of his philosophical importance. Tucker Carlson reached for the line directly in his promotional copy. The Ukrainian government, he alleged, murdered his daughter. The casting director, which is to say the apparatus, had built him a halo.

What matters about all of this is that the philosopher framing is a production. It has a casting director. It has a costume. It has a backstory. It has a daughter who served as a supporting character. It has a sanctioning state and an interviewing state. It has, in Carlson’s promotional copy and in dozens of similar Western pieces over twenty years, a marketing strategy. None of these elements is evidence that the man at the centre is a philosopher. All of them are evidence that the apparatus around him is in the business of manufacturing the appearance of a philosopher.

And this is the central claim of the chapter, and indeed of the book. The wise counsellor archetype is being manufactured in real time, by a state-deployed apparatus, around an actor who is playing a role to the apparatus’s specification. That is my opinion. I’m entitled to it. My opinion is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. The role exists because the apparatus needs it. The apparatus needs it because some thinking head needs to appear attached to the Russist apparatus’s serial enterprises, so that those enterprises do not look like the brutal, acquisitive violence they actually are. The role’s content is incidental. A children’s puppet demonology is fine. A pseudo-Hebrew etymology is fine. Lenin’s body removed from the mausoleum and replaced with a sarcophagus for the still-living president, surrounded by the flags of conquered European states, is fine. What matters is that the actor keeps producing the appearance of philosophical depth, while the apparatus keeps doing what the apparatus does. Murder. Genocide.

The wise counsellor production is not assembled from nothing. The Russist state apparatus draws, for its metaphysical alibi, on a specific twentieth century intellectual lineage that the Western reader is rarely shown. There is the Russian cosmism tradition of Nikolai Fyodorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Alexander Bogdanov. There is the noosphere doctrine of Vladimir Vernadsky, the Ukrainian-born geochemist whose vocabulary the apparatus has gradually annexed across the past half century. And most directly there is the painter-mystic Nikolai Roerich’s tripartite pneumatic, psychic, hylic hierarchy of human types, a Theosophy-derived schema in which a spiritual elite is licensed to direct the lives of the less awakened masses. Theosophy was invented by Helena Blavatsky, who was born in Dnipro. I have visited her house in Dnipro. And again, I remind you, this is about outflanking these people and their nonsense. The Dugin-Surkov apparatus did not invent the substrate it operates from. It appropriated a hundred-year-old Ukrainian and Russian mystical infrastructure of pneumatic elite metaphysics, and grafted onto it the security services apparatus that produces twenty-first century deployments. The wise counsellor archetype is being installed inside a building that was already standing.

And for those who read the Veronika story, the medium with the Luna Telegram handle who was directing and advising Yermak, this will all seem very, very familiar. One of her posts published this week concerned Fedorov. She advised Yermak, this was all over the question of who should succeed, to go to our friend, I think she referred to President Zelensky, and suggest that Fedorov would make a great successor, or words to that effect. Basically, to manipulate President Zelensky into not appointing Fedorov. Of course, the whole thing backfired when Fedorov was appointed defence minister. And so again I see the footprint of an operation where everything they touch goes wrong.

The reader who wants to see where the apparatus’s metaphysical confidence comes from should read Roerich, though I wouldn’t advise it, Vernadsky, the cosmists, or the Dnipro-born Ukrainian Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. And don’t get me wrong. She was pretty amazing. She saw many things which we still haven’t quite sorted out, and I don’t downplay her or what she achieved at all. However, she did make up a lot of stuff about Tibetan Buddhism. She didn’t have access to what we have access to today. And she made up a lot of stuff about the Egyptians. The reader who has these books will recognise, in every Dugin output, the lineage the output is drawing on.

Don’t rebut. Outflank.

So what I’m asking us to do is to stop refuting him. We don’t need to write an essay explaining that Cheburashka is not actually a Hebrew-named moon demon. The artefact rebuts itself. The point of the artefact, for the purposes of this book, is to establish the apparatus’s nature beyond any need for further argument. After chapter one, you will not see the philosopher frame the same way again.

What I’m asking us to do instead is to start noticing where else the apparatus shows up. The Russist apparatus’s outputs are not limited to Dugin. They appear in the writings about archetypes of Surkov, the ex-deputy prime minister of Russia, which I’ll analyse in chapter ten. They appear in the slogans of European populist movements that have absorbed and re-exported the fourth political theory framework. The Alternative für Deutschland leader Alice Weidel’s don’t-poke-the-bear deployment reads as if it had originated in the same source as Dugina’s Mariupol speech. Which of course it had, structurally, if not by traceable transmission. They appear in the speeches of the Russist Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, in the editorial line of Russist Today, in the briefings of the Russist foreign ministry, in the daily output of half a dozen named Telegram channels, and in the comment-thread persona fleets that argue every Western news article into the ground.

And once you have read the Cheburashka artefact and registered what it actually says, you will start seeing the others. The apparatus’s signature is not subtle. The phrase don’t poke the bear is the apparatus’s signature. The phrase legitimate Russian interests is the apparatus’s signature. The phrase one cannot reduce a complex situation to good and evil is the apparatus’s signature. Multipolarity is the apparatus’s signature. Civilisational sovereignty is the apparatus’s signature. Traditional values is the apparatus’s signature. You will start, slowly, to find the apparatus. The apparatus is more present in Western intellectual life than we had previously noticed. This is not a paranoid conclusion. It is an empirical observation. The apparatus has been working at the Western intellectual stack for at least twenty years, and has in places succeeded. This book’s task is to give us the equipment for noticing the signature when it appears, the manner in the mean, and for what to do when it does.

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I’m not going to argue with Dugin. The book is not going to argue with anyone who repeats the apparatus’s signatures. It is not going to set out a polite both-sides account of Eurasianism, as if Eurasianism deserved an even-handed treatment. The point of don’t rebut is don’t rebut. We will not rebut. We will outflank. And it is not going to be neutral. I’ll not pretend in this book to be neutral about whether the Eurasianism doctrine is an imperial fiction. It is an imperial fiction. The Central Asian scholars whose work I draw on say so plainly, from inside the region the apparatus pretends to speak for. The Marat and Arystanbek text from Kazakhstan that I lean on for that chapter is published by Cambridge University Press. Cambridge is not, generally, where one looks for the firebrand position. The firebrand position, in this case, is the position of the responsible scholarship.

Saviour Trita and Dragon-serpent Vritra

And the book is not going to refer to the apparatus’s spokespeople by their full diplomatic-register names every time. Druidey Don, Duncey Putin, Sorcerer Dugin, Chief Sorcerer Putin, Chef Saucerer Prigozhin, Maid Maryon Simonyan, the bridge troll, the wise counsellor, the philosopher. These are the working monikers I have used in my Decoding Trolls writing across some 67,500 original posts since February 2022, and they will recur here. They are not childish. They are mana-stripping, and that is the technical term I’ll explain in chapter three. For now: when you remove a public figure’s gravitas vocabulary and substitute a comic working name, you remove the figure’s symbolic energy. You strip them of mana. You make the apparatus harder to deploy through them. This is part of the outflanking method, applied at the level of vocabulary. We see it when people archetype Donald as a clown. We see Iran doing it to Donald, to great effect.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not on the side of Iran in this, the mad mullahs. A plague on all their houses, on MAGA and Donald and on Iran. This is a classic tragedy, foreseen and inevitable. Inevitable because of Donald’s personality and the wiliness of the Iranians. Foreseen because of understanding that psychology, understanding the bridge troll, understanding how easy it is to provoke Donald. And understanding that Iran’s strategic objective is not only to concretise its alliance with China and bring China into the Middle East, but to destroy American power in a way that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were not able to do. Knowing these things, this is the absolute catastrophe we are living through at the moment. But let’s focus on outflanking Dugin, and those around him, and those in our lives who deserve to be outflanked rather than rebutted.

Where I write this from

And I’m not going to be impersonal. I’ll tell us what I know from where I know it. I worked on that bridge, in the grey zone. I left Ukraine before the full-scale invasion because I had read the situation, it turned out, correctly. My father read it correctly too, and advised me in early December 2021 that the invasion was going to happen. He had no access to secret sources. He read the tea leaves and parsed the data. And I judged that the evacuation in the aftermath of a full-scale invasion would be a disaster. So it proved, for the OSCE. I worked from the OSCE office in Dnipro from 2018 to 2022, covering Zaporizhzhia and the surrounding oblasts, watching the Russian imperial apparatus being assembled.

I’m now in the information space what I would call a pseudo-combatant. And I take that word literally enough to register that someday my work might be noticed. I tell you all of this so that you will know I’m writing from a position of personal stake, not from a position of intellectual entertainment. The discipline matters because I have lived inside the rooms the apparatus operates in. And the disciplines of the framework, the Code of Positive Trolls, the symmetric ethical instrument I’ll introduce in chapter three and explore in chapter twelve, are not academic instruments. They are the disciplines I’ve used to keep my own mind from being captured in the same rooms.

This book is, in a real sense, the manual I wish I had been given when I crossed the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska in 2015 and started reading what the apparatus was pouring out of occupied Luhansk every day.

So I’ll leave it at that for this week.

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