Russian Active Measures

The contributions gathered in this fascinating collection, in which scholars from a diverse range of disciplines share their perspectives on Russian covert activities known as Russian active measures, help readers observe the profound influence of Russian covert action on foreign states' policies, cultures, people's mentality, and social institutions, past and present. Disinformation, forgeries, major show trials, cooptation of Western academia, memory, and cyber wars, and changes in national and regional security doctrines of states targeted by Russia constitute an incomplete list of topics discussed in this volume. Most importantly, through a nexus of perspectives and through the prism of new documents discovered in the former KGB archives, the texts highlight the enormous scale and the legacies of Soviet/Russian covert action. Because of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its on-going war in Ukraine's Donbas, Ukraine lately gained international recognition as the epicenter of Russian disinformation campaigns, invigorating popular and scholarly interest in conventional and non-conventional warfare. The studies included in this collection illuminate the objectives and implications of Russia's attempts to ideologically subvert Ukraine as well as other nations. Examining them through historical lenses reveals a cultural clash between Russia and the West in general.

Olga Bertelsen, Ph.D. (University of Nottingham), is a writer in residence at New York University and research fellow of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She held fellowships at the Harriman Institute (Columbia University) and the Munk School of Global Affairs (University of Toronto) and has published monographs on the Ukrainian theater "Berezil" (Smoloskyp, 2016) and Ukraine's House of Writers in the 1930s (Pittsburgh, 2013) as well as translated documents on the persecution of Zionists in Ukraine (On the Jewish Street, 2011). She is currently preparing books for publication on Stalin's terror in Ukraine, post-Soviet imperial consciousness among Russian writers, and the social history of Ukraine's 1932-1933 famine.