Why Putin is lying to everyone and everyone is lying to Putin — what we can learn from the Mitrokhin Archive

It looks clear that Putin invaded Ukraine based on very poor intelligence about the situation in Ukraine, and equally poor reports about the quality of his army. He thought Ukraine would welcome his troops as liberators, and he could rely on the strength and skill of his military. A great line I heard recently is that ‘Putin was told he had a large, modern army, but the part that was large was not modern, and the part that was modern was not large.’

How is it possible that this ex-KGB officer and master strategist could be so badly informed? While events shed some light on this, and more insight is coming through Western intelligence, Russia’s history also helps explain this. In particular, one of the most fascinating sources on Russia and the KGB, the Mitrokhin Archive, gives a valuable insight into the world Putin comes from and lives in now.

Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist in the Soviet Union. As the KGB archives began to be destroyed to cover up the crimes of previous Soviet administrations, he started to copy the most interesting files in tiny handwriting on scraps of paper he smuggled out in his shoes. He typed up his notes and buried them under his house in the country. In 1992, he travelled to the newly independent Latvia and approached the British Embassy with some samples. The British agreed to get him, his family, and the chests of documents out of Russia.

If you were around in the late ’90s and early noughties, you may remember a slew of news stories revealing previously unknown KGB spies in the West. All of this was Mitrokhin. As the archives were analysed, Soviet Russia’s secrets were spilled. Getting the archive to the UK is considered by many to be the greatest intelligence coup of the last century. The papers were released to researchers in 2014.

The archives provide a unique insight into the mentality of the Soviet Union. They recount stories of war heroes and successful spies being shot in the back of the head in the cellars of the Lubyanka because they strayed from the official narrative, either by communicating truth to power, or just by having done innocent things that later contradicted whatever the latest state lie was. The lies, corruption, stupidity, and waste of good lives struck Mitrokhin and influenced his decision to record it all for posterity.

A key takeaway from Mitrokhin is that Soviet Russia excelled at gathering intelligence but failed to analyse it well. The Soviet ideology provided it with eager spies abroad who believed in Communism, but the culture of lies and propaganda, and the way the Soviets twisted reality to fit their narrative, meant that intelligence was always viewed through the lens of ideology. If the analysis of the intelligence did not fit the official party line, the analysis was changed or ignored.

Ever since Stalin, Russia has been a country in which truth and lies coexist in one reality. Social histories of the Soviet Union show how Russians learned to live in a world of lies, where reality did not match the way life was described. For example, the official party line would be that there was plenty of food, yet people were dying of starvation. Both realities existed, and people somehow found a way to live within them both at the same time. You could not deny the lies and could not point out the reality, so both sat alongside each other.

In Soviet Russia, in particular under Stalin, the world had to fit the leader’s world-view. As reality rarely conformed to this, information and intelligence were bent to fit the prevailing ideas.

During the Soviet era, spies who provided true intelligence that was contrary to the leadership’s expectations were generally executed as failures or foreign agents. By contrast, because the West had no ideological orthodoxy to cloud their analysis, what intelligence they could gather was generally analysed dispassionately and shared up the chain without fear of anger or retribution.

The dynamic described in the Mitrokhin archive is what we may be seeing now in Putin’s Russia. In the case of the invasion of Ukraine, it looks very much like Putin has suffered from the same problem as his Soviet predecessors. He is being told what people think he wants to hear, rather than what he needs to hear and intelligence is being twisted to fit the narrative.

The other related dynamic similar to the Soviet era is that Putin has gradually taken over and dominated the information space in Russia. By shutting down any independent sources of information, and taking control of the remaining media he can control how Russian people see the world. The danger of creating such an artificial reality is that it begins to reflect back at you.

Putin has withdrawn from the world around him, isolated in his high castle and surrounded by sycophants. This has been made worse by Covid. Putin is at the mercy of a small court of people for information. As they are increasingly also trapped in an information bubble of their own creation, the whole Russian leadership appears to have got stuck in a feedback loop. As the media landscape closes in on itself, the people around Putin only hear their own propaganda echoed back at themselves. It is a perfect hall of mirrors, with Putin saying how he wants the world to look, and that false reality being reflected back to him by sycophants keen to impress him and a media devoid of truth.

This creates a dynamic in which nobody is willing to share information with him that is contrary to his world view, because they will just be sacked, imprisoned, or killed. That fear passes down the chain of command to the bottom. Nobody wants to be told something that would upset Putin, so information from the bottom — where reality is happening, for example in the battlefield — cannot flow back up to the top, where the decisions are being made.

To add to his weaknesses, dictatorships are also prone to corruption. When independent law is replaced by bribery and corruption people steal whatever they can, and cover the trail all the way up the chain. In the Russian military, it seems that the non-commissioned officers are notoriously underpaid and corrupt. They control money flowing down the chain of command, so can steal funds intended to be used to buy equipment. This would be covered up by them and by their officers so the real state of the army becomes obscured by the fog of corruption.

It appears Putin believed that his military was in far better shape than it was because nobody would dare report up the chain that it was riddled with corruption for fear that they would take the blame. We saw recently in Afghanistan how this can impact on military strength. Senior officials were claiming funds for soldiers and equipment that didn’t exist so they could pocket the money. This created a totally unrealistic assessment of the Afghan army’s strength and readiness, which became evident when the Taliban invaded and the Afghan army melted away.

Putin will have seen the Taliban sweep to power as NATO left Afghanistan, and may have concluded that the West had lost its strength and would not challenge Russia as they swept into Ukraine. But Putin and his court would have failed to see that the reason the Taliban overran the local army so easily is because of the same weaknesses that exist with the Russian army. It is likely that the Taliban succeeded because the Afghan army was weak and corrupt like the Russian army, not because Western forces were weak.

Consequently, Putin may well have ended up believing that Ukraine was being run by drug-addicted Nazis, and the people would welcome his troops with flowers and praise. This was a myth he propagated as propaganda, but which was then fed back to him by his intelligence officers and advisors, keen to appear on message.

Another way the lying caught up with him is that it seems clear Russian soldiers, in particular conscripts, were lied to that they were just going on exercises on the border, so they did not properly prepare for war, continuing to cut corners and steal money instead of maintaining equipment. They now find themselves in a war they had not expected, lied to by their commanders, ill-equipped, and with plummeting morale.

As a result, Putin sent an ill-prepared army into a war about which the intelligence was wrong, and nobody dared tell him. Now the war is failing, people are too afraid to tell him the truth about that too.

Putin exists in a very small bubble. He receives printed briefings from people keen to retain their jobs and heads. He insists on absolute power, so very few people will dare to disagree with him. Even when things are going wrong, most people will shy away from telling him, out of sheer terror, or out of loyalty. This is why dictatorships always end in failure.

The Mitrokhin Archive shows both the world that Putin came from, and the weaknesses he has created as he evolved into an absolute dictator. These weaknesses have remained embedded in the infrastructure of power in Russia.

Like the Wizard of Oz appearing from behind his screen, Putin has shown the world that he is not a mastermind, and his army is not a big and modern. He will never recover from that. He has fallen into the trap of every dictator, ruling by fear and force has insulated him from truth, and from reality.