In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a man who has worked mostly behind the scenes — Vladislav Surkov. Some of you might not even recognize the name, but he’s the main architect of both the polarizing disinformation program and the annexation system of 🇷🇺. 1/9

Many perceive Surkov as a key figure behind Putin’s power and P. Pomerantsev gave him the nickname “Putin’s Rasputin”. Vladislav was the key figure in putting Kadyrov to his current position (Kadyrov calls him his “sworn brother” and even has a picture of
him on the wall). 2/9

Surkov’s approach to geopolitics comes through theatre — he studied theatre direction for 3 years and he’s an excellent dramaturg. He is also closely related to a movement called “political technology”, which is often referred as “a industry of political manipulation”.

All those fake elections with 99% approval rate originate from this movement and especially Surkov.

For a fantastic summary on political technology, check out this Wilson’s article from 2011:

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

Surkov’s idea was to make the world of politics into an avantgardist theatre.He suggested that Russia would finance fringe, extreme groups both from the far-left and from the far-right, thus provoking polarization and conflicts. He was also behind Putin’s youth movement Nashi.5/9

The goal with this was to destabilize the West so that they’d be stuck on their internal conflicts (BLM is a great example). And then he did something nobody expected — he admitted to all this. Surkov’s goal was to confuse people and make them doubt EVERYTHING. 6/9

Former FSB officer Igor Girkin (the guy who was responsible for the shotdown of MH17, killing 298 people and was the de facto military commander of separatist troops in Donbas) has stated that Surkov played a decisive role in the creation of the fake country of Donbas. 7/9

In Donbas, he acted like any theatre director would: he cast actors, wrote scripts, reviewed people’s “performances” and ran promotions, thus creating false credibility for the Donbas “separatists”, who were actually just Putin’s sock puppets voicing Moscow’s goals. 8/9

We know all this from Vladislav’s e-mails that were leaked back in 2016:

Payback? Russia gets hacked,…

At some point Surkov became a liability, and in 2020 he was removed from his position of advisor. In April 2022 he was put under house arrest for embezzlement.