Monday, December 3, 2018

meet Putin's discord engineer, Vladislav Surkov

11-7-2014   “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,”
Vladislav Surkov told us by way of introduction.  On this spring day in 2013 he was wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar . “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations and" here he pauses and smiles—“modern art.”  https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/
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4-7-2011     in a television interview on 12 November 2006 the former defence minister Sergei Ivanov claimed that Surkov had served in the counter-intelligence service (GRU). In the late 1990s he studied at the International University in Moscow, where he gained a masters degree in economics.

He was one of the early members of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s team at Bank Menatep, which in 1994 bought a controlling share in the Yukos oil company.  Between 1992 and 1997 Surkov was on the board of directors of Menatep.    https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/richard-sakwa/surkov-dark-prince-of-kremlin
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10-12-2016      Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.  He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics. 

His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.   Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.  He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups.  He even backed 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 fake.  As one journalist put it: "It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused."
www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/12/bbcs_adam_curtis_how_propaganda_turned_russian_politics_into_a_circus.html
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 4-10-2018    In an article for Russia in Global Affairs magazine released on April 9 and titled The Solitude Of A Half-Blood Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov wrote that "Russia's epic journey toward the West" is over, marking an end to its "repeated fruitless attempts to become a part of Western civilization" over four centuries.
  Relations between Moscow and the West are at lows not seen since the Cold War, severely strained by issues including Russia's takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region, its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, its role in Syria’s seven-year conflict, and the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy in Britain last month.
  Surkov, 53, a longtime Putin aide who served as his top domestic-policy strategist for many years and currently works as the presidential adviser on Ukraine, wrote that the 2014 split with the West over Ukraine marked the beginning of a new era in which Russia faces "100 years (200? 300?) of geopolitical solitude.”
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5-17-2018     Under the direction of V. Surkov, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, dominant ideologies and movements were infiltrated with propaganda and misinformation, sewing chaos by exploiting their internal disagreements, rendering them ineffective.  This strategy is exemplified by Surkov funding civic forums and foreign non-governmental organizations while simultaneously providing support and encouragement to Russian nationalists who would accuse NGOs of being “tools of the west.”  By placing itself at the center of all forms of political and ideological discourse the Kremlin effectively owns any narrative an independent movement might try to seize.
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