18 April, 09:48
In early 2025, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) published a programmatic article accusing Western democracies—particularly the UK and France—of enabling a resurgence of fascism in Europe.
While its substantive claims are historically inaccurate and ideologically unhinged, what merits analytical attention is the stylistic and rhetorical architecture of the text.
This report examines the SVR’s communique not as a geopolitical analysis, but as a cultural and psychological artifact—a window into the discursive machinery of an authoritarian state caught in the paradoxes of its imperial nostalgia, informational self-isolation, and institutional decay. The SVR’s style is not merely outdated; it is a deliberate regression into Cold War-era propaganda tropes, symptomatic of a broader ideological fossilization within the Russian intelligence apparatus.
The Return of the “Big Style”: Language as Ideological Relic
A close linguistic reading of the SVR’s document reveals a rhetorical style that had its heyday in the 1960s–70s Soviet press: formulaic condemnations, moral dichotomies, and overwrought metaphors. The text relies on phrases such as:
“ideological aggression of the West,”
“attempts to rehabilitate Nazism,”
“historical revanchism spearheaded by Anglo-Saxon elites.”
These expressions are not incidental. They represent memorized hate-lexicons preserved from the Cold War period and now reactivated in response to Russia’s contemporary strategic failures. Rather than advancing persuasive geopolitical narratives, the SVR employs language as an instrument of ideological ritualism, aimed not at international audiences but at reinforcing internal loyalty structures within Russia’s security elite.
This discursive regression is not a result of intellectual inertia alone. It signals a deeper institutional self-mythologization, wherein language serves to maintain coherence in an otherwise disoriented regime.
Revisionist Amnesia: History Reconstructed by Omission
Among the most striking features of the SVR document is its selective historical memory. While accusing the UK and France of “enabling fascism,” the text omits any mention of:
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939),
Soviet-German joint military parades in Brest,
The partitioning of Poland by the USSR and Nazi Germany,
The Soviet invasion of Finland,
And the Katyń Massacre of Polish officers.
This historical sanitization is not merely negligent—it is instrumental. It reflects a post-truth approach to history, where inconvenient facts are systematically excluded to construct a moral narrative that frames Russia as the perennial anti-fascist actor, regardless of its documented alliances with totalitarian regimes.
The implications are significant: by displacing historical culpability, the Russian state attempts to monopolize moral capital, legitimizing current authoritarianism as a form of historical continuity with anti-fascist resistance.
Why London and Paris? Geopolitical Neuroses and the Myth of Western Subversion
One of the text’s more peculiar characteristics is its disproportionate emphasis on the UK and France. This focus is neither random nor tactical—it is psychological.
The British Archetype: Enemy and Role Model
British intelligence has long occupied a special place in the Kremlin’s strategic imagination. Since the early 20th century, the UK has been seen as both a subversive threat and a professional benchmark. British intelligence is the only Western service historically accused of attempting to overthrow a Russian regime (post-1917).
This mix of paranoia and admiration became institutionalized in Soviet—and later Russian—security culture. The 1968 Soviet film Dead Season, which dramatizes a Soviet intelligence officer’s mission against Western agents, became a cult classic within the KGB. Vladimir Putin himself cited it as a formative influence.
Yet the film was essentially a Soviet mimicry of British spy cinema, revealing a cultural dependency masked as opposition—a phenomenon that continues in Russia’s dual obsession with and demonization of MI6.
France: The Sanctuary of Defectors
France’s appearance in the SVR text is more contemporary. Since 2022, French intelligence has been seen in Moscow as the lead Western actor facilitating defections of Russian military and intelligence personnel.
Notably:
In July 2023, France’s National Court for Asylum (CNDA) granted political asylum to Russian military deserters.
In October 2024, a group of former Russian soldiers arrived in France from Kazakhstan without passports or documentation. They were granted entry and the right to apply for protection—an unprecedented move for a European democracy.
This act, while humanitarian in nature, was interpreted in Moscow as an existential provocation. In the logic of Russian security elites, defection is not a personal act of conscience but an act of treason orchestrated by foreign intelligence.
Language as Systemic Indicator: A Dysfunctional Semiotic Economy
The SVR’s textual output is not merely an ideological tool—it is a diagnostic artifact. Its style, omissions, and fixations reflect a broader epistemic collapse within the Russian state:
The absence of strategic nuance,
The recycling of obsolete tropes,
The performative invocation of historical trauma,
…all signal an informational autoimmunity in which the state increasingly speaks only to itself, through itself, for the preservation of itself.
This phenomenon resembles what Hannah Arendt termed “organized lying”—not the intentional distortion of facts, but the creation of a coherent alternative reality through linguistic saturation.
From Intelligence to Liturgy
The SVR document analyzed herein is less a piece of intelligence than it is a liturgical text. It affirms myths, excommunicates adversaries, and invokes symbolic grievances to sustain a narrative framework disconnected from strategic realities.
From a policy perspective, this poses challenges for Western governments seeking to interpret Russian messaging as rational or interest-driven. Increasingly, the Kremlin’s communicative outputs—particularly from its intelligence agencies—reveal a rhetorical solipsism: one that prioritizes internal coherence over external credibility.
Rather than decoding these texts for actionable insights, analysts should read them as autopsy reports on a state discourse that has lost its functional relationship to truth, deterrence, or persuasion.
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