“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. The beginning of the Cold War coincided with the beginning of the civil rights movement, and the two became intertwined-both in how the Soviets used the racial strife, and how the Cold War propelled the cause of civil rights forward. One of Russia’s best-known television hosts, for instance, is Yelena Khanga, the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, an agronomist from Tuskeegee University who moved with his communist Jewish-American wife to Uzbekistan to develop the cotton industry there. Several hundred answered the call, and though many eventually went back-or died in the Gulag-some of their descendants remain in Russia. ![]() In return, they would help the Soviets build their fledgling cotton industry in Central Asia. In addition to luring thousands of white American workers, it brought over African-American workers and sharecroppers with the promise of the freedom to work and live unburdened by the violent restrictions of Jim Crow. It was the height of the Great Depression, and the Soviet Union was positioning itself not only as a workers’ utopia, but as a racial utopia as well, one where ethnic, national, and religious divisions didn’t exist. The Soviets also exploited the oppression of Southern blacks for their own economic benefit. The plan initially called for recruiting Southern blacks and pushing for “self-determination in the Black Belt.” By 1930, the Comintern had escalated the aims of its covert mission, and decided to work toward establishing a separate black state in the South, which would provide it with a beachhead for spreading the revolution to North America. It was part of a plan put in place in 1928 by the Comintern-the Communist International, whose mission was to spread the communist revolution around the world. The case became a symbol of the injustices of the Jim Crow South, and the young Soviet state milked it for all the propagandistic value it could. In 1932, for instance, Dmitri Moor, the Soviet Union’s most famous propaganda poster artist, created a poster that cried, “Freedom to the prisoners of Scottsboro!” It was a reference to the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, and then repeatedly-wrongly-convicted by all-white Southern juries. Neither is playing on racial tensions inside the United States a new Russian tactic. ![]() Soviet propaganda poster by Dmitri Moor, 1932 “Now, because of the technology, you can jump right in,” Sipher says. The Soviets planted misinformation about the AIDS epidemic as a Pentagon creation, according to Sipher, as well as the very concept of a nuclear winter. “Before, the Soviets would plant information in Indian papers and hope it would get picked up by our papers,” says John Sipher, who ran the CIA’s Russia desk during George W. During the Cold War, the Kremlin similarly sought to plant fake news and foment discontent, but was limited by the low-tech methods available at the time. ![]() “Covert influence campaigns don’t create divisions on the ground, they amplify divisions on the ground,” says Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. They are natural outgrowths of a central component of covert influence campaigns, like the one Russia launched against the United States during the 2016 election: make discord louder divide and conquer. Other ads played on fears of illegal immigrants and Muslims, and groups like Black Lives Matter.Įxcept for the technology used, however, these tactics are not exactly new. Some of the Russian ads placed on Facebook apparently targeted Ferguson and Baltimore, which were rocked by protests after police killings of unarmed black men another showed a black woman firing a rifle. But another consistent theme has been Russian trolls focusing on issues of race. The trolls, according to an interview with the Russian TV network TV Rain, were directed to focus their tweets and comments on socially divisive issues, like guns. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency-a Russian “troll factory”- used social media and Google during the 2016 electoral campaign to deepen political and racial tensions in the United States. According to a spate of recent reports, accounts tied to the St.
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