Edited by: Kate RyabchiyEditor’s Note
Soviets frequently used conspiracy theories to justify their confrontation with the West during the Cold War. The Russian anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova asserts that the conspiracy thinking can be already branded as Putin’s regime’s new ideology. She also claims that the Russian war in Ukraine is “the first war in modern times that began for purely conspiratorial reasons.”
During the Cold War, the Soviets frequently used conspiracy theories to justify their confrontation with the West.
The Russian anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova asserts that the Putin regime is now doing the same thing with such intensity that it is entirely appropriate to say that “conspiracy thinking is already its new ideology.”
According to the anthropologist who runs the (Un)entertaining anthropology Telegram channel, Russian leaders with roots in the Soviet past find conspiracy theories helpful when no one believes the official ideology, as was true then, or when there is no apparent ideology, as is the case now.
Arkhipova claims that contemporary Russian propaganda about American bio-laboratories in the former Soviet republics tends to forget that Moscow launched 13 mass disinformation campaigns about such labs during the Soviet era. Such talk disappeared in the 1990s, with only 31 articles making similar assertions in 1995. This year, there have been 92,000 so far.
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