What a peek inside a ‘troll factory’ reveals about Putin’s Russia

A Russian website has just revealed some of the inner workings of a “troll factory” run by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and tasked with spreading disinformation and propaganda online. 

Three revelations stand out.

First, a former factory employee claimed that Russian depictions of supposed Ukrainian war crimes were staged fakes: “Most of the people who were portrayed in such stories as ‘victims’ of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were stand-ins, hired individuals,” he said. (All translations are mine.) “These characters repeated pre-memorized lines to themselves, trying to ‘squeeze out a tear.’ They were also instructed off-camera by the operator to speak ‘slower’ or to ‘repeat this moment again.’”

Students of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia won’t be surprised by this statement — though some naive Russian apologists who still believe that Ukrainian neo-Nazis are on the rampage might. Russian efforts at disinformation go back a long way and became standard operating procedure for the various versions of the Soviet/Russian secret police.

Prigozhin’s manipulation of the media — obviously approved by Vladimir Putin — is thus nothing new. The willingness of “useful idiots” in both the West and the Global South to believe such propaganda is also nothing new. One can but glumly conclude that facts have only a marginal influence on people’s worldviews — though that, too, is nothing new.

Second, and no less disturbing, Russians appear to see no difference between trolling and actual journalism, as the following statement suggests: “The head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Union of Journalists of Russia, Dmitry Sherikh, volunteered to help the employees of the ‘troll factory’ with finding work: ‘The UJR will, if possible, contact the heads of other media outlets to help their dismissed colleagues find employment, as well as provide other information support.’”

Propagandists and liars are not “colleagues” and should have no place in normal journalism, which attempts to report on genuine news. Not so, evidently, in Putin’s Russia, where George Orwell’s nightmarish vision in “1984” has taken root and the distinction between truthfulness and mendacity has broken down. It will take years for Russians to learn of the difference, even if Putin departs this world tomorrow.

Third, and possibly most disturbing, most of the trolls appear to have been regular folk and not wild-eyed Putin supporters. Apparently, the atmosphere in the troll factories was “nerve-wracking,” with “terrible ideological pressure” that made the office resemble a “military enterprise.”

Despite the seemingly intolerable working conditions and the requirement that the trolls lie, “the majority of people” in the factories were without ideological leanings and uninterested in politics. Here’s the kicker: the trolls were “often” people who “supported the opposition or opposed the war in Ukraine.”

Unsurprisingly, “people were just producing texts” — that is, they knew full well that they were lying. But they were happy to sacrifice whatever ethical norms they might have had to make a quick buck. Shed a tear when you read that the collapse of Prigozhin’s troll factories has “become a disaster for many, because they need to look for a new job, to worry.”

As these worried trolls look for new jobs, ordinary Russians should consider just what their own inability to tell the truth from lies, as well as their blissful indifference to that inability, says about them and their political culture. They should also consider just how long the line of defendants at the International Criminal Court will have to be for their culture to be redeemed.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”