Rumour and counter-rumors swirling through cyberspace following a vile and bloody atrocity. Riots, mobs, inter-ethnic strife; police vans on fire, on the streets of England of all places, in balmy late July. 

It can only be the Russians, can’t it? 

Such has been the response to this week’s events of a section of the British commentariat, as well the lively community of Russia-watchers and “disinformation specialists” who have sprung up online over the last decade. In fact, both Russian and British observers have developed an uncannily similar knack of blaming one another for outrages and incidents at home, even when they can quite easily be blamed on glaring deficiencies in each nation’s society or government. 

In the roughly twenty-four hours between Monday’s atrocity in Southport and the outbreak of public disorder in the town, there was a wide variety of speculation about the identity, motives and background of the attacker, much of it incorrect. This only seemed to be intensified by the silence of the police on the subject.  

There are far too many communications professionals working in the British government, and it’s inevitable that they’ve become as heavily involved in crisis response as they have in everything else the state does. What started out as a too-clever-by-half strategy to manage public responses in the wake of terrorist attacks has evolved into a reflex to deflect public attention away from the perpetrator and onto the victims following these events. But in the eyes of a substantial proportion of a cynical public, official silence by the authorities on the background of an attacker pushes their suspicion automatically onto one community in particular; wrongly in this case. 

As it turns out, the assailant turned out to have been the child of immigrants from Rwanda (whose population is 80 per cent Christian and only 2 per cent Muslim) born in Wales, but by the time these details trickled out on Tuesday, the initial shock among the immediate community in Southport had hardened into fury, and a mob was beginning to form in the streets. 

It may have been the presence of a potential assailant at a vigil, with a balaclava and armed with a knife, that directed the mob’s fury at the local Mosque. However it doesn’t seem unlikely that it would have gone that way anyway, given the history of such attacks in the UK, and the rumours that had been circulating over the previous twenty fours hours. 

When the violence began, it was a pretty pathetic spectacle of mainly young(ish) men from a distraught and desperate community lashing out at the physical presence of the authorities. The vast majority were clearly unsuitably dressed for such activity, and made no attempt to hide their faces. They threw whatever missiles they could lay their hands on from around their own homes; bottles, bricks and plastic wheelie-bins being the most obvious choices. Many were struck by items hurled by those further back in the crowd.  Strikingly, it resembled the violence in Leeds Harehills a week or so earlier, only in daylight hours; and here the police did not retreat. 

Despite this, there has been a concerted attempt by many commentators to cast the rioters as organised shock-troops of the far-right, inspired by Russian propaganda which aimed to whip up an anti-Muslim frenzy. Not only does this give far too much credit to the organisational capacity of Britain’s extremely small cadre of committed far-right streetfighters, it also gives far too little credit to those groups’ ability to dress, arm and disguise themselves on the rare occasions they actually do anything, not to mention their ability to go toe-to-toe convincingly with riot police (which they’re usually well-practised at from long careers as football hooligans). 

As in other ways though, Britain is starting to look a lot more like most of the rest of the world

In most of the world, a bloodthirsty attack against young children like that in Southport would automatically see a round of communal rioting and violence, even from normally peaceful neighbourhoods. We are largely unused to seeing this in Britain, due to a historical lack of inter-communal tensions, as well as a high degree of trust in the ability of the police and justice system to settle matters without violence. As in other ways though, Britain is starting to look a lot more like most of the rest of the world, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to see such outbursts start to become more routine in the wake of criminal atrocities like this. 

All of this, however, is unsettling for most of Britain’s establishment, and not only among its progressive bits. An external agent fomenting trouble against whom we can rally together would be a handy get-out card, which is where our community of Russia-watchers and online disinformation specialists enters the picture. Kings College London’s Ruth Deyermond swept in to accuse Nigel Farage of spreading Russian disinformation for his (rather mild) questioning of the police response. The Pilecki Institute’s Dr Ian Garner accused Russia of stoking violence in the west using fake news, and used the opportunity to re-post his article in Foreign Policy on the subject.  

Given the fact that Dr Garner explicitly references this, I don’t believe this is a misunderstanding of the objectives of Russia’s information war with its foes; I think it’s a deliberate attempt to recast those objectives for reasons of political expediency.  Russia inherited its external propaganda infrastructure from the Soviet Union, in which it was a well-established and highly prestigious craft — to the point that it enjoyed an almost equal shadow operation in western academia, military and security institutions that studied it.  

Its objectives were well-understood; these were to demoralise and confuse the enemy. It had no concrete political objectives along the way; the point was to force the object to question every piece of information they were presented with as potentially suspect. This was done not so much to undermine the confidence of the enemy’s citizens in their own institutions as to make them question the ability of their fellow citizens to discern truth from falsehood. The Soviets intended an insidious undermining of the body politic, and the digestion from within of the demos on which the West’s democracies were built. It does not need pointing out how having everybody accusing their domestic opponents of spreading Russian disinformation is a successful example of such doctrine in our modern day. 

The Soviets were completely immune to efforts to throw these strategies back at them, just as modern Russia is — the country having gotten by on almost minimal levels of social trust for many centuries, as well as a general scepticism around the concept of objective truth. The Soviets understood well enough that countries like the United States and Britain operated on extraordinarily high levels of social trust that were a strength as well as a vulnerability. But they knew that they didn’t understand the western mind well enough to try to actually influence what people thought about the issues of the day; it was the high social trust itself that they had to attack. Those who studied the Soviets in the West at the time were able to grasp the subtleties of this. They were also sufficiently united that their own political concerns at home didn’t get in the way too much of trying to counter it. 

Today’s Russia watchers have sought to conscript the threat of Russian subterfuge for their own, very obvious domestic political battles

Rather than learn from their cold-war era predecessors, today’s Russia watchers have sought to conscript the threat of Russian subterfuge for their own, very obvious domestic political battles (or those of allied nations). Your correspondent was fortunate enough to have been able to study Russian foreign policy in Russia around twelve years ago, which was approximately the last time it could be done in any degree of freedom (the institution was subsequently shut down in Russia). The international stable was dominated by highly talented Americans who, even back then, were utterly marinated in their country’s political forever-war, and all on the same side. That cohort, completely radicalised by Trump’s first presidency, now dominates the institutional study of Russia in the United States, including in its military. Unfortunately, this partisanship has seeped across the Atlantic, and it does a great disservice to a society that more than ever needs to understand what the Russians are actually up to, especially insofar as it might jeopardise our domestic security. 

So instead, we end up with credentialed specialists on Russia and on disinformation, giving our establishment, and particularly the new Labour government, assurance that Russia is trying to “divide us” and pit “our communities” against one another. It’s a comforting myth when that happens to be the exact opposite of what the establishment claims to stand for itself; it also becomes a handy fish slice to wield against flies in the ointment like Farage or Tommy Robinson. Doubtless it will be wheeled out again, the next time scenes like those we witnessed in Stockport occur, after the next horror in a provincial English town.