An exhibition called “The First Tsar. Moscow. Grozny” opened at the Zaryadye Park in Moscow and will run through October 31, 2021. This is the first of ongoing exhibits slated for the museum-like attraction which is referred to as the “Podklet” (Подклет) ‘project’ [1].
Site of the Podklet project, the “Old English Court”
Podklet refers to the stone basement which is present at the museum site and where the rotating exhibits will be housed. Notably the Zaryadye Park location is on the site of the so-called Old English Court where Ivan IV granted a residence to English merchant-diplomats which “became the first official representation of a foreign power in Moscow.” [2]
According to Elena Voitsekhovskaya, head of the scientific and educational projects department of Zaryadye Park: “the Podklet project will become a kind of a catalog of personal informal studies of various historical phenomena, their factology and trace in the mass consciousness. And the premises of the white-stone basement are an intellectual attraction, a cabinet of rarities placed in a multimedia field.” [2]
Zaryadye Park was the first new park in Moscow in 50 years. It opened in 2017 in a ceremony inaugurated by Vladimir Putin [3]. Coinciding with a national security mandate to protect the Russian historical memory, the announcement of the exhibition at Zaryadye also appears amidst a flurry of other semi-official rehabilitations and popularizations of Ivan IV which seem to have been pushed by ideologists close to Putin’s inner circle [4]. Continue reading “Meme-ry Wars and Ivan IV”
Conspiracy theories about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales do not appear to have been previously considered in an ‘information warfare’ context which is attributable to Russia. However, my recent research has uncovered a highly probable scenario of Russian co-optation and development of these conspiracy narratives as part of a strategic information campaign targeting the United Kingdom. Of course, these connections to Russian strategic information are opaque, and laundered through fronts and third parties; but the connections are top-level and obvious.
While this report will suppose that land mines play a role in the motive for disinformation attacks on Diana and her legacy, it asserts that those attacks have come from Russian strategic information interests, rather from any UK or ‘Western interest’.
As tempting as it is to wonder if Russian wetwork may be at play in this story, it is out of the scope of this report which will focus only on provable or highly likely Russian strategic conspiracy narratives and will not seek to dispute any official forensic findings of the accident investigation.
Last photo taken of Diana on the day of her death (August 31, 1997)
I was poking around in the apocalyptic milieu of Eurasianist and Orthodox nationalist conspiracy theory, and came across an interesting name: Maria Vladimirovna Katasonova. She’s been profiled as a Russian nationalist and former Duma candidate who is associated with Kremlin propaganda efforts in the French elections of 2017 and on the Ukrainian war front [1].
Frequently invoking the image of a destroying Orthodox angel in her social media posts, Katasonova was described in 2015 as “low budget purveyor of fear” and “a disciple of [Alexander] Dugin and aide to presidential advisory-board member Yevgeny Fyodorov… Like her dark father who had called for genocide against the Ukrainian “cretins”, Katasonova, dressed like a white angel of death, said Russia would “destroy the whole world” if they lost the war in East Ukraine.” [2]
In this case, Katasonova’s “dark father” referenced in the bio is Alexander Dugin, who wrote: “We should clean up Ukraine from the idiots,”…“The genocide of these cretins is due and inevitable… I can’t believe these are Ukrainians. Ukrainians are wonderful Slavonic people. And this is a race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manholes.” [3]
While the comment here about a ‘dark father’ is rhetorical in relation to philosophical leanings (as Katasonova is not Dugin’s daughter), she operated at times in a network close to Alexander Dugin’s biological daughter (Daria Dugina aka Darya Platonova) and the political operative Andrey Kovalenko [4]. She’s also appeared in media stories close to the daughter of Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov (Elisaveta Peskova)[5].
Given that she seems influential and close to the daughters of other top ‘propagandists’ it stands to wonder, who might be her real father? The answer doesn’t seem clear, but the question is intriguing. Continue reading “Who’s Your Daddy Maria Katasonova?”
Due to it being difficult to find an English translation of Alexander Dugin’s 1997 book “Foundations of Geopolitics” for sale in America, I ran a Russian copy through the same online translation portal which I’d used for Alexander Verkhovsky’s book on “Political Orthodoxy“.
Note, that this the “25th anniversary edition” which has a cover reflecting back on 25 years of the works of men in Russian geopolitics. Otherwise, it is the same as the 1997 edition in content.
Александр Дугин – Основы геополитики – Геополитическое будущее России – 25-летие издания – Обложка книги (Alexander Dugin – Foundations of Geopolitics – The Geopolitical Future of Russia – 25th Anniversary Edition – Book Cover)
Similarly to posting Verkhovsky’s book in English, my goal in posting Dugin is to promote greater understanding of the culture of Russian nationalism (especially Orthodox nationalism), and how that nationalism apparently informs the strategic culture of Russia. Followingly, it supports my thesis that the disinformation and ‘information warfare’ produced by that strategic culture is characterized by nationalistic features. (See published works 1, 2, 3, and recent cited post 4)
I can tell the translation is far from perfect, but if you’re looking to add it to your library, it will work with search indexing and appears to be basically readable. You can cross reference the appended Russian original from p. 453 of the PDF with any broken portion of the translation, since the page numbers are consistent between the documents.
My analyses frequently come down to the examination of how Russian Orthodox nationalism is a major factor in Russian information warfare ideology. Alexander Verkhovsky is a Russian author on Russian Orthodox nationalist ideas who has been influential on my research and perspectives. I think he gets close to the cultural core of Russian information warfare in his research – although his focus is on political extremism, not information warfare or disinformation. His work does frequently however include the analysis of conspiracy theories.
Using online translation tools, I made an unauthorized English translation of his book: “Political Orthodoxy” which I hope will be useful for non-Russian speaking disinformation researchers (like myself) looking into figures like Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev), Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Dugin, etc.
While working on a criminology and forensic science-oriented investigation into the seven tragic marriages of Tsar Ivan IV of Russia (aka Ivan Vasilyevich, Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible, etc.), I specifically began to note that there was a strong dimension of “information warfare” in the Russian narratives surrounding Russia’s first tsar. Enough so, that it deserved its own paper.
Over the past week, I’ve been delving into homicide investigation textbooks and scholarly papers in order to better understand the circumstances which might support a belief that a crime scene has been staged. That is, the verbal, behavioral, and physical evidentiary circumstances by which a criminal offender attempts to mislead and misdirect the investigators from the most plausible suspect. While intentional staging may be present in any kind of crime (from property crime to accusations of physical assault), I’ve been interested in the sort where a murder might be made to look like it wasn’t one.
According to crime scene staging researchers, staging is a common offender behavior. Frequently murders might be covered up through arson, made to look like suicides, sexual homicides, or accidental deaths. Another common kind of staging is that related to a “game playing” suicide which is made to look like a murder. The usual perpetrator of a staged homicide scene is a white male with an intimate history with the victim.
According to textbook homicide investigation procedure, in order to rule out staging, it is absolutely important as a death investigator to approach every equivocal death case as a potential homicide until it can be reasonably be proven not to be one. It is important to work up a victimology on all decedents in order to understand potential offender motivations. It is important to evaluate all coincidences and categorically rule them out as artifacts of intentional offender behavior. In equivocal death cases, only when questions like this have been answered can questions of crime scene staging be put to rest.
In relation to this blog, I found it interesting that an understanding of “weaponized suicide” conspiracy narratives and the responsible “offender behavior” (loosely the serial disinformation efforts of Russia and its proxies) can be enhanced by an understanding of these concepts.
A friend visited the other day and suggested we watch the 2008 HBO documentary ‘Cat Dancers’. The film is about the eponymous dance troupe which used big cats like tigers and leopards in their act, and was ended abruptly after two deadly freak accidents. My friend wanted me to watch it because he thought I would find the main character’s flamboyance humorous. In the end, that wasn’t the case so much as that I came away with an unshakable, almost obsessive perception of (at least negligent) homicide.Very few on the internet seem to see it the same way as I do, with the exception of a comment here and there.
It makes me wonder if because of the similar features in themes of death, sex, and documentary techniques – my brain has contorted Cat Dancers into a ‘Forensic Files’ episode, where the husband is almost always guilty, and an assignment of culpability is to be expected.
In order to understand the issue better, I found myself watching the documentary ‘Human Harvest’ (2013) online recently which focuses on claims and statistical evidence that China has killed tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners and used the organs in a lucrative international organ transplantation scheme; effectively profiting from the eradication of political dissidents opposed to the Communist Party in China.
While on the surface, the idea of a government wholesale slaughter and sale of organs has the ring of a conspiracy theory, the film does provide a persuasive argument to support its claims.
In general, I was emotionally moved by the film as I watched it, and at times experienced significant anger and sadness about the suppression of spirituality as portrayed (including the associated repression of Muslim Uighurs and the film’s direct association of the Falun Gong situation with Nazi anti-Semitic atrocities). However, at other times (such as the recorded calls to Chinese medical centers), I felt I was being hoaxed to be honest. When Dana Rohrabacher came on screen as the US government champion for the Falun Gong in the concluding segments of the film, I had a bit of an “aha!” moment.
