The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina - Masha Gessen (The New Yorker)

Photograph by Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina

Whoever killed Dugina likely meant to kill her more famous father, but that reveals little about the motives and identities of the perpetrators.

By Masha Gessen

The New Yorker, August 26, 2022

The murder of Darya Dugina will almost certainly foment further pro-war mobilization in Russia.

 

Darya Dugina, a twenty-nine-year-old Russian television commentator, was laid to rest at an undisclosed location in Moscow on August 23rd. Three days earlier, Dugina had attended a festival called Tradition, a daylong event that, this year, included a lecture by her father, the self-styled political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, on the metaphysical dualism of historical thinking. The gathering concluded with a concert called “The Russian Cosmos.” Afterward, Darya Dugina drove away in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The car exploded, killing her. Aleksandr Dugin was apparently travelling in a different vehicle, and it seems likely that whoever killed Darya had meant to kill her better-known father. There has since been much speculation about the identity and motives of the killers, but little is known for certain. Still, some theories are better than others.

Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society. Dugin came out of the Moscow cultural underground. The son of minor members of the Soviet nomenklatura, he was expelled from college and educated himself by reading banned and restricted literature. When I was researching Dugin’s story for my book “The Future Is History,” an ex-partner of his and the mother of his older child, Evgeniya Debryanskaya, remembered that Dugin, then in his early twenties, procured a copy of Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” on microfilm. He did not, of course, have a microfilm reader at home, so he rigged up a device designed for showing simple children’s reels and projected the book onto his desk. The arrangement was not ideal: it showed a barely visible mirror image of the text. Dugin read Heidegger backward, in the dark, and, according to Debryanskaya, lost some of his eyesight in the process. The symbolic potential of this story is staggering. Its literal meaning is informative: Dugin’s ability to self-educate was limited by censorship, isolation, and ignorance.

Dugin taught himself languages in order to read the thinkers who interested him most. By the late nineteen-eighties, these were apparently mostly far-right, traditionalist, and fascist philosophers. The first book that Dugin translated was by Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher currently popular with a faction of the right wing in the United States. Steve Bannon has deployed Evola’s ideas. To the extent that the Russian political world can be compared to that of the U.S., Bannon can serve as a useful reference: not only are his views related to Dugin’s—and not only are both Dugin and Bannon connected to European neo-Fascist networks—but Bannon’s and Dugin’s relationships to actual political power are complicated in similar ways. There were certainly moments, early in the Trump Presidency, when Bannon’s ideas seemed to exert great influence on U.S. political life. But, in the end, Bannon’s vision of the world—and himself in it—served Donald Trump for a limited time only.

Totalitarian leaders use ideology instrumentally. Contrary to popular perception, totalitarian ideologies are not coherent or consistent; rather, they are opportunistic concoctions of ideas and words that are useful in times of crisis and mobilization. Dugin spent the nineties and much of the early two-thousands getting only incrementally closer to the Russian political establishment—he co-founded a fringe nationalist party, then launched an obscure imperialist movement. But he also got his academic credentials and, for a time, held a chair at Moscow State University. His star seemed to rise in 2014, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Dugin had developed an entire arsenal of language for this occasion. He had called for the creation of a “Russian World,” a geographically non-specific concept that imagined Russia on a civilizational mission rooted in traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion. Annexing eastern Ukraine would have been the first step to building the Russian World. In 2014, the Kremlin, in its pivot from the politics of Soviet nostalgia to the politics of imperial resurgence, started speaking Dugin’s language.

Dugin’s right-hand person, Natalya Makeeva, told me at the time, “Our power is negligible, but our influence is infinite.” (Dugin knew that I was writing about him but refused to speak to me directly—likely because I am queer—so he sent a spokesperson to meet with me on his behalf.) Makeeva’s phrase seemed true at the time: Dugin was still nowhere near the Kremlin or the actual levers of power, but his words were everywhere. Still, influence cannot actually be infinite. In Dugin’s view, Putin didn’t go far enough in Ukraine eight years ago. Dugin railed against what he perceived as the Russian President’s weakness. In this role, Dugin was arguably just as useful to Putin as when he served as a sort of shadow ideologue. All political regimes need their critics to mark the margins, so that the leader can position himself at the imaginary center. Dugin’s imperialist ambitions made Putin look moderate.

Dugin’s daughter, Darya, followed a path similar to her father’s. She studied philosophy, spending a year in France. She wrote her master’s thesis on Plato. She also played in a band, performing in Moscow’s hipster clubs. The name of the band was Dasein May Refuse. (“Dasein” is a Heideggerian term that means a determinate being.) In her twenties, Darya started working more closely with her father, representing both him and his views, and she eventually left the music scene to devote herself fully to political propaganda. She signed her articles “Darya Platonova.”

On February 24th, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dugina was elated. She wrote on her Telegram channel, “Last night I was walking down a deserted Moscow street and saw a Russian flag flying in the distance. Something whispered, ‘The Russians are coming.’ A woman’s intuition is mighty. There is a reason I noticed that quiet and that flag. In my mind I heard the slogan, ‘Empire, be!’ When I woke up, the empire had come into being.”

Most likely, whoever killed her believed her father to be more important—more influential and closer to the Kremlin—than he actually is. Russia immediately accused the Ukrainian government of the murder. But one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisers, Oleksiy Arestovych, who started out as an anti-Western activist, formerly ran in the same circles as Dugin; he even appeared with him at an event seventeen years ago. Arestovych knows that Dugin is no Putin whisperer. Another adviser to Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, denied that official Ukraine had anything to do with the murder. “We are not a criminal state like Russia,” he said. “And we are certainly not a terrorist state.”

A variety of outlets have floated the conspiracy theory that the Russian secret police staged the murder in order to mobilize the Russian population in support of the war. But Dugin is hardly a household name in Russia; the masterminds of the crime would have to be misinformed to believe that his murder, or his daughter’s, would spark widespread outrage. Plus, people who are actual household names in Russia tend to travel with security, which Dugin apparently did not. On the other hand, secret-police agents charged with tracking non-Kremlin-controlled political movements may be susceptible to the hype of those movements. It is possible that certain members of the state security service, the F.S.B., think Dugin is more prominent than he is.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian opposition politician who has been living in Ukraine for the past seven years, claimed that an organization called the National Republican Army carried out the murder. The National Republican Army was effectively unknown before Ponomarev mentioned it on social media. This may mean one of two things: either the National Republican Army is a new group using terrorist tactics, and it killed Dugina to show what it’s capable of; or this is, in effect, a marketing move, a rush to take credit. In either case—whether the National Republican Army is real or fictional—this version is probably inching closer to the truth. Dugina likely died at the hands of non-state actors, probably a newly created group or a newly radicalized person. There is nothing surprising about such a group or individual appearing nearly six months into the war, after tens of thousands of war crimes committed by Russian troops have been documented. To whoever killed Darya Dugina, targeting a propagandist may seem like a pointedly mild response to the deaths of hundreds of children and the erasure of entire cities like Mariupol.

Two days after the car bomb went off, the F.S.B. announced that it had solved the case. The secret police pointed to a Ukrainian military officer, Nataliya Vovk, as the murderer. According to the prosecution’s story, Vovk entered Russia by car—a gray Mini Cooper—with her twelve-year-old daughter, and rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina. She was able to trace her victim’s every move. Once the remotely operated car bomb went off, Vovk, according to the F.S.B., changed the license plates on her car and left the country via the land crossing to Estonia. The F.S.B. has claimed that Vovk is a colonel in the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian Army. The Azov Regiment has disavowed the existence of such an officer, but that’s not the only issue with this story: anyone who has crossed Russian land borders knows that getting in and out in a car is usually a long, involved process. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that a Ukrainian citizen slipped in or out with fake license plates. Also, the F.S.B. has never been known to solve a political murder in a couple of days—or, really, at all.

In the meantime, Putin sent official condolences to Dugina’s parents and awarded Dugina a medal for valor. The official parliamentary newspaper broadcast her funeral live. At one point during the service, Leonid Slutsky, who leads the (misnamed) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called out, “One country, one President, one victory”—an almost exact translation of the German Nazi Party’s slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. The historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizofascism” to describe this sort of rhetoric: people acting like fascists while calling their enemies fascists, as the Russian propaganda machine continues to do with Ukraine. When Aleksandr Dugin spoke at the funeral, he said that his daughter had “fallen at the front, and the front is here. She lived for our victory and died for it—for our Russian victory, our truth.”

The murder of Darya Dugina will almost certainly foment further pro-war mobilization in Russia. Margarita Simonyan, who runs the RT network and often functions as the social-media mouthpiece of the Kremlin, has called for Russia to retaliate by striking the “decision-making centers” in Ukraine—a thinly veiled call for murdering Zelensky. (The Ukrainian President, for his part, warned of a possible escalation of Russian aggression, and government employees were asked to work remotely; on Thursday, Putin ordered the army to recruit a hundred and thirty-seven thousand new troops.) This does not mean that the murder was planned inside Russia, by people who wanted to use it to aid the war effort. We know now that the twentieth-century events that heralded unprecedented terror—the Reichstag fire in Berlin, in 1933, and the murder of Sergei Kirov, in Leningrad, in 1934—were, in fact, carried out by rogue actors. Still, they set in motion the totalitarian machine. Darya Dugina’s murder may serve the same—probably unintended—function, making her father’s influence infinite indeed. ♦

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

• How Ukrainians saved their capital.
• An artist captures the fight for airspace over Kyiv.
• The conflict is a colonial war.
• Is the Russian military a paper tiger?
• The case for placing an immediate energy embargo on Russia.
• Why do so many Russians say they support the war?

Ukraine: The West Débuts a New Strategy to Confront a Historic “Inflection Point” - Robin Wright (The New Yorker)

Daily Comment

The West Débuts a New Strategy to Confront a Historic “Inflection Point”

In Madrid this week, NATO laid out a bold plan for military expansion in response to Putin’s war. But can its member states overcome political divisions at home?

By Robin Wright

The New Yorker, July 1, 2022

“Putin thought he could break the transatlantic alliance,” Joe Biden said. “He wanted the Finlandization of NATO. He got the NATO-ization of Finland.”Photograph by Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

The last time NATO leaders hashed out a new global strategy, in 2010, the alliance officially embraced Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev, the puppet stand-in for Vladimir Putin, attended the summit, in Lisbon. “The period of distance in our relations and claims against each other is over,” Medvedev declared. The Western powers, in turn, announced “a true strategic partnership” with Russia to create “a common space of peace, stability, and security.” They promised political dialogue as well as practical coöperation on issues ranging from missile defense and counterterrorism to counter-narcotics.

Well, that’s over. At a summit this week in Madrid, the world’s mightiest military alliance grew both mightier and bolder in confronting Russia. NATO vowed to ramp up troop presence and war matériel to secure Europe against future Russian aggression and to aid Ukraine’s campaign, for “as long as it takes,” to win back the territory seized by Putin. The NATOSecretary-General Jens Stoltenberg described the new strategy as the “biggest overhaul of our collective defense deterrence since the end of the Cold War.” It includes a greater U.S. presence in Eastern nations close to Russia, such as Estonia and Romania, and a permanent U.S. deployment in Poland, on NATO’s eastern flank. The U.S. now has more than a hundred thousand military personnel across Europe. “We’re stepping up,” President Joe Biden said.

The new strategy reflects a dramatic shift in the West—from talk of Europe’s economic and security interdependence with Russia, in the post-Cold War era, to open confrontation with Moscow, Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATOwho now heads the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told me. Stoltenberg called the summit “transformational.”

The NATO summit also marks a departure from the policies of Donald Trump, who said he “trusted” Putin, threatened to withdraw from NATO, and left his fellow-leaders shaken at every encounter. NATO’s reach is instead expanding. It had just twelve founding members in 1949. With the invitations extended this week to Sweden and Finland, it will soon include thirty-two countries, and its frontline with Russia will double. “Putin thought he could break the transatlantic alliance,” Biden said at a press conference on Thursday. “He wanted the Finlandization of NATO. He got the NATO-ization of Finland.” The new strategic concept for the first time cites the challenges posed by China and the need to build “resilience” against political meddling, disinformation, energy shortages, and food insecurity. In another first, it pledged to deepen ties with allies in the Indo-Pacific. The leaders of Japan and South Korea met with NATO members, including Biden, on the sidelines in Madrid.

The new strategy is muscular and sweeping in ways that could play out for years, even decades, Doug Lute, a former Ambassador to NATO and retired three-star general, told me. Putin’s war, and NATO’s response, represents a historic “inflection point,” like the fall of the Soviet Union or the 9/11 attacks, he said. The summit, however, did not address how NATO envisions ending the war or what it will do about membership for Ukraine. On Wednesday, the director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, predicted that the war could grind on for an “extended” time. Putin intends to seize most of Ukraine, not just the eastern and southern regions he now controls, she said. In a speech to NATO leaders, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, asked whether his nation had “not paid enough” to join NATO. More than ten thousand Ukrainians—up to two hundred a day—have been killed since Russia launched its invasion, in February. More than five million have fled the country; another seven million have been displaced inside it. More than a hundred billion dollars in civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, with the World Bank projecting that the Ukrainian economy will contract by up to forty-five per cent this year.

“Russia’s tactics are very simple. It destroys everything—houses, shopping malls, schools, hospitals,” Zelensky said. “Next year, the situation may be worse not only for Ukraine but also for several other countries, possibly NATO members, that may be under fire from Russia. Then it will be our common failure.” Under Article 10, NATO membership is open to any “European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” The military alliance, Zelensky pleaded, should “find a place for Ukraine in the common security space.”

For all their collective might, key NATO governments are individually weak, and facing electoral challenges. Biden’s political support has sunk in the run-up to midterm elections. “The domestic foundations of U.S. foreign policy are much more fragile than they once were,” Charles Kupchan noted in Foreign Affairs this week. A survey conducted by IPSOSand NPR near the first anniversary of the January 6th Capitol riot found that seven out of ten Americans—and a majority irrespective of party affiliation, age, gender, or region—believe the United States is at risk of failing altogether. In another poll this week, eighty-five per cent of American adults said the country was headed in the “wrong direction.”

In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson’s numbers are tanking. Last month, he barely survived a mutinous no-confidence vote in which forty per cent of his own party voted against him. Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, just announced plans for a referendum on its independence. The week before the NATO summit, France faced political paralysis after the centrist Ensemble coalition of President Emmanuel Macron lost majority control in legislative elections. Support for the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen, who likes Putin and wants to withdraw from NATO’s military command, surged more than tenfold—from eight to a record eight-nine seats. The upset, which created the first minority government in more than three decades, puts the nation at greater risk “in view of the challenges we have to face,” the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, said.

Meanwhile, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who has only held power since December, faces an unprecedented energy crisis, as Russia cuts off the country’s supply of natural gas. (Russia has “weaponized energy” by cinching gas flows to twelve European nations, Frans Timmermans, the European Union climate chief, said last month.) Germany is divided politically, too, over how much weaponry to provide Ukraine.

In Italy, the Five Star Movement—the largest party in the national unity government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi—has split in two over Ukraine. Italy had a long history of warm relations with Russia, but Putin’s war triggered a political crisis in Rome. Draghi supports aid to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, and increasing Italy’s defense budget, while the former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a populist who leads the Five Star Movement and has previously befriended Putin, has opposed all three. Last month, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, a co-founder of Five Star, walked away from it. He led more than sixty lawmakers to form a breakaway party to support Draghi’s policies, despite the escalating hits on Italy’s economy. And most NATO members face spiralling inflation, higher gas prices, and crises over food security and troubled supply lines.

One of the common challenges across NATO is the political drift from its core values, Lute said. NATO stipulates that its purpose is to “guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means.” It’s a commitment to democracy. Seven decades later, member states such as Turkey and Hungary are under the thumb of increasingly autocratic leaders. The internal political divisions there and elsewhere open the way for Russian interference, Lute noted. “Russia doesn’t have to create the fissure. Russia only has to sort of try to enlarge and deepen the fissure.”

Any prospect of NATO fulfilling its new strategy has to begin with political unity at home. “It’s going to be an exceedingly tough challenge to actually do what NATO says it’s going to do, unless we can get past some of these divisions,” Lute said. Daalder countered that NATO’s widening agenda is sustainable because the alliance itself is not a political football in any member state. Even during the Trump years, the House and Senate passed bipartisan legislation to prevent a withdrawal from NATO. But it will take the better part of this decade, he acknowledged, to fulfill all the tangible pledges on defense budgets and troop commitments.

Away from the accelerating political drama back in Washington, the President had a good week overseas. But then he had to come home. ♦

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

• How Ukrainians saved their capital.

• An artist captures the fight for airspace over Kyiv.

• The conflict is a colonial war.

• Is the Russian military a paper tiger?

• The case for placing an immediate energy embargo on Russia.

• Why do so many Russians say they support the war?

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.

Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

More:NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)European UnionRussiaUkraineMilitary InterventionJoe Biden

More on Ukraine

• Cutting Off Russia’s Pipelines
• How the War Remade Washington
• Inside Putin’s Propaganda Machine
• A Captive City in Ukraine

Book review of Richard Cohen: Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past - Louis Menand (The New Yorker)

 Book review of Richard Cohen: 

Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past 

New York, Simon & Schuster, 2022

https://www.amazon.com/Making-History-Storytellers-Shaped-Past/dp/1982195789?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50

The People Who Decide What Becomes History
However fastidious they may be about facts, historians are engaged in storytelling, not science.
By Louis Menand 

The New Yorker, April 11, 2022

<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/18/the-people-who-decide-what-becomes-history-richard-cohen-making-history>

Chronicles of the past reflect the perspectives, agendas, and quirks of their authors.

“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” 

Those are the words of Edward Gibbon, and the book he imagined was, of course, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The passage is from Gibbon’s autobiography, and it has been quoted many times, because it seems to distill the six volumes of Gibbon’s famous book into an image: friars singing in the ruins of the civilization that their religion destroyed. And maybe we can picture, as in a Piranesi etching, the young Englishman (Gibbon was twenty-seven) perched on the steps of the ancient temple, contemplating the story of how Christianity plunged a continent into a thousand years of superstition and fanaticism, and determining to make that story the basis for a work that would become one of the literary monuments of the Enlightenment.

Does it undermine the gravitas of the moment to know that, as Richard Cohen tells us in his supremely entertaining Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past (Simon & Schuster), Gibbon was obese, stood about four feet eight inches tall, and had ginger hair that he wore curled on the side of his head and tied at the back—that he was, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun round with astonishing alacrity”? Does it matter that Gibbon’s contemporaries called him Monsieur Pomme de Terre, that James Boswell described him as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” and that he suffered from, in addition to gout, a distended scrotum caused by a painful swelling in his left testicle, which had to be regularly drained of fluid, sometimes as much as three or four quarts? And that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet?

Cohen thinks that it should matter, that we cannot read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire properly unless we know the person who wrote it, scrotal affliction and all. Gibbon would not, in theory, at any rate, have disagreed. “Every man of genius who writes history,” he maintained, “infuses into it, perhaps unconsciously, the character of his own spirit. His characters . . . seem to have only one manner of thinking and feeling, and that is the manner of the author.” When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller.

Making History is a survey—a monster survey—of historians from Herodotus (the father of lies, in Plutarch’s description) to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. Cohen’s coverage is epic. He writes about ancient historians, Islamic historians, Black historians, and women historians, from the first-century Chinese historian Ban Zhao to the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. He discusses Japanese and Soviet revisionists who erased purged officials and wartime atrocities from their nations’ authorized histories, and analyzes visual works like the Bayeux Tapestry, which he calls “the best record of its time, pictorial or otherwise,” and Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields. (“In effect,” he concludes, “they were frauds.”)

He covers academic historians, including Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century founder of scientific history; the Annales school, in France; and the British rivals Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. P. Taylor. He considers authors of historical fiction, including Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Dickens, Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, and Hilary Mantel. He writes about journalists; television documentarians (he thinks Ken Burns’s “most effective documentaries rank with many of the best works of written history from the last fifty years”); and popular historians, like Winston Churchill, whose history of the Second World War made him millions, even though it was researched and partially written by persons other than Winston Churchill.

Cohen is English, and was the director of two London publishing houses, biographical facts that, to apply his own test, might account for (a) his willingness to treat journalism, historical fiction, and television documentaries on a par with the work of professional scholars, since, as a publisher, he is interested in work that has an audience and an influence, and (b) the Anglocentrism of his choices. American readers may feel that writers from the United Kingdom are overrepresented, although that list does include historians whose careers were spent largely in American universities, such as Simon Schama, Tony Judt, and Niall Ferguson. But Making History is a book, not an encyclopedia, and whatever Cohen writes about he writes about with brio. As the song goes, “If you want any more, you can sing it yourself.”

A very good thing about Making History is that, despite the book’s premise, it is not reductive or debunking. Except when Cohen is discussing writers like the nationalist revisionists, whose bias is blatant and who aim to deceive, and some Islamic historians, who he thinks are dogmatic and intolerant, he tries to present a balanced case and allow readers to make their own judgments. The message is not “They’re all untrustworthy.” It’s that bias in history-making is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it.

One area where Cohen may not have achieved an ideal degree of detachment is Marxism, which he handles with bristly animosity and whose principles he misrepresents by confusing Marxism with Stalinism. He accuses Marx of failing to foresee the rise of fascism and the welfare state, which is ridiculous. Who did foresee those things in 1848?

There is a cost to this animus, since Marxist thought played a big role in the work of twentieth-century historians, particularly in the United Kingdom. Still, even here, Cohen tries to be catholic. He plainly feels affection for the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who joined the Communist Party in 1936 (bad enough) and remained a member for fifty-five years (surreal).

Making History is a loaf with plenty of raisins. We learn (or I learned, anyway) that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook, that Napoleon was about average in height, that Ken Burns is a descendant of the poet Robert Burns, and that when the Marxist critic György Lukács was arrested following the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution and was asked if he was carrying a weapon, he handed over his pen. (That anecdote is a little neat. I had to take it with a grain of salt—but I took it.)

He is not sloppy, exactly, but he can be a bit breezy. Cornel West was not the director of the African and African American Studies program at Harvard, and Jill Lepore does not come from “a privileged family.” And there are (inevitably) assertions one could quarrel with. Cohen thinks, for example, that “oral history is no more prone to making things up or changing the past to suit the present than is written history.” This has not been my experience. You always have to fact-check what people say, not because they lie deliberately (although Andy Warhol lied in pretty much every interview he ever gave) but simply because we don’t remember things accurately. It’s like when you’re searching for a picture in your photo library: “I was sure it was in 2008 that we visited the Grand Canyon!” But it was in 2009. Mistaken recollections of this sort are common in oral histories and interviews because people generally have no stake in getting dates right. Historians do, though.

Cohen likes journalistic histories, books written by reporters who were witnesses to some of the events they describe. (One omission here is William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which, with its Gibbonesque title, won a National Book Award and sold a million hardcover copies.) He thinks that journalists, if they aspire to be objective, can get “pretty close to the truth.” But, he adds, “what one needs is time to judge that truth in the cold cast of thought.”

This is the traditional “first draft of history” definition of journalism, and part of the belief that our understanding of the past improves with time. I wonder if this is really true, though. Maybe we’re just smoothing the rough edges, losing some bits of what actually happened in order to get the story the way we want it. As history’s first responders, journalists may be more reliable because they are not usually working under the spell of a theory (though Shirer had one). They are describing what happened. Like any other historian, they are trying to produce a coherent narrative, but they don’t need to subsume every fact under a thesis. They also have a better sense of something that no subsequent student of the past can really know and that gets harder and harder to reconstruct: what it felt like.

It’s striking how often this concept—“what it felt like”—turns up in “Making History” as the true goal of historical reconstruction. “The historian will tell you what happened,” E. L. Doctorow said. “The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” Cohen quotes Hilary Mantel: “If we want added value—to imagine not just how the past was, but what it felt like, from the inside—we pick up a novel.”

We expect novelists to make this claim. They can describe what is going on in characters’ heads and what characters are feeling, which historians mostly cannot, or should not, do. But historians want to capture what it felt like, too. For what they are doing is not all that different from what novelists are doing: they are trying to bring a vanished world to life on the page. Novelists are allowed to invent, and historians have to work with verifiable facts. They can’t make stuff up; that’s the one rule of the game. But they want to give readers a sense of what it was like to be alive at a certain time and place. That sense is not a fact, but it is what gives the facts meaning.

This is what G. R. Elton, the historian of Tudor England, seems to have meant when he described history as “imagination, controlled by learning and scholarship, learning and scholarship rendered meaningful by imagination.” A German term for this (which Cohen misattributes to Ranke) is Einfühlungsvermögen, which Cohen defines as “the capacity for adapting the spirit of the age whose history one is writing and of entering into the very being of historical personages, no matter how remote.” A simpler translation would be “empathy.” It’s in short supply today. We live in a judgy age, and judgments are quick. But what would it mean to empathize with a slave trader? Is understanding a form of excusing?

History writing is based on the faith that events, despite appearances, don’t happen higgledy-piggledy—that although individuals can act irrationally, change can be explained rationally. As Cohen says, Gibbon thought that, as philosophy was the search for first principles, history was the search for the principle of movement. Many Western historians, even “scientific” historians, like Ranke, assumed that the past has a providential design. Ranke spoke of “the hand of God” behind historical events.

Marxist historians, like Hobsbawm, believe in a law of historical development. Some writers of history, such as those in the Annales school, think that political events do happen pretty much higgledy-piggledy (which is why they are notoriously difficult to predict, although commentators somehow make a living doing just that), but that there are regularities beneath the surface chaos—cycles, rhythms, the longue durée.

Still, history is not a science. Essentially, as A. J. P. Taylor said, it is “simply a form of story-telling.” It’s storytelling with facts. And the facts do not speak for themselves, and they are not just there for the taking. They are, as the English historian E. H. Carr put it, “like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.”

It’s interpretation all the way down. The lesson to be drawn from this, I think, is that the historian should never rule anything out. Everything, from the ownership of the means of production to the color that people painted their toenails, is potentially relevant to our ability to make sense of the past. The Annales historians called this approach “total history.” But, even in total history, you catch some fish and let the others go. You try to get the facts you want.

And what do historians want the facts for? The implicit answer of Cohen’s book is that there are a thousand purposes—to indoctrinate, to entertain, to warn, to justify, to condemn. But the purpose is chosen because it matters personally to the historian, and it is, almost always, because it matters to the historian that the history that is produced matters to us. As Cohen says, it is a great irony of writing about the past that “any author is the prisoner of their character and circumstances yet often they are the making of him.”

What history never does is provide an impersonal and objective account of past events. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once put it (dismissively), all history is “history-for.” What did Gibbon write the Decline and Fall for? Cohen says it was to warn eighteenth-century Britain of mistakes that might threaten its empire, to prevent it from suffering the fate of Rome. In other words, Gibbon thought his story could be useful. He therefore needed to portray Roman civilization in ways that Britons could identify with, and Christianity in ways that suited the anticlerical prejudices of the Age of Reason. And what about the poor fellow’s body and its sad infirmities? Cohen thinks (as Woolf did) that his unattractiveness provided Gibbon with an impenetrable cloak of irony. He learned to keep his emotional expectations in check, and this made him a cool analyst of religious zeal.

Lévi-Strauss maintained that history in modern societies is like myth in pre-modern cultures. It’s the way we explain ourselves to ourselves. The decision about what we want that explanation to look like can begin with the simple act of picking the date we want the story to start. Is it 1603 or 1619? We choose one of those years, and events line up accordingly. People complain that this makes history ideological. But what else could it be? “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is ideological through and through. No one thinks it’s not history. Certainly Gibbon never doubted it. “Shall I be accused of vanity,” he wrote in his will, “if I add that a monument is superfluous?” 

The Threat of Russian Cyberattacks Looms Large (A outra grande paranoia: a guerra cibernética) - Sue Halpern

A outra grande paranoia: a guerra cibernética. Acredito que tanto a Rússia quanto a China adorariam ganhar uma guerra cibernética contra os EUA. Só não o fazem porque, como nos tempos da MAD nuclear, a retaliação seria maciça e destrutiva.

The Threat of Russian Cyberattacks Looms Large

So far, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not involved the sort of devastating cyberattacks that many anticipated. But it’s not clear why, or whether that pattern will hold.

By Sue Halpern

The New Yorker, March 22, 2022

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The  New  Yorker

Fifteen days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Senator Angus King, of Maine, asked the director of the National Security Agency, General Paul Nakasone—who is also the commander of the United States Cyber Command—a question that was on the minds of many observers of the conflict: Why hadn’t the Russians launched a concerted cyberattack on the country? Russia, after all, is home to both sophisticated state-sanctioned hackers in its military and intelligence services and to cybercriminal gangs, loosely affiliated with the government, that have been active in Ukraine in the past. Just before Christmas of 2015, for instance, hackers believed to be Russian sabotaged parts of the power grid in western Ukraine, leaving people in the cold and the dark. Though the outage lasted only a few hours, the operating systems of the three regional power-distribution companies that had been affected remained compromised long after the lights were back on. Two years later, in June of 2017, attackers struck Ukraine again, shutting down government offices, banks, ports, and the postal service. The malware used in the attack, which the Ukrainian security service attributed to Russia, then spread from the computers of companies based in Ukraine to those of their affiliates around the world, causing damage reported to have cost ten billion dollars. Just last year, according to Microsoft’s 2021 Digital Defense Report, which tracks cyber threats against nation-states, Ukraine was second only to the U.S. in the number of cyberattacks it had experienced over the past year. Given this history, it stood to reason that future Russian incursions in Ukraine would likely involve cyber weapons. “Much can still occur,” Nakasone said. “We will be very, very vigilant to see what occurs there.” Still, the fact that devastating attacks haven’t occurred so far has raised doubts in some quarters about the viability and efficacy of using malicious software as a weapon of war.

There are many theories floating around as to why the Russians didn’t go all-out and take down Ukraine’s cellular networks, electric grid, municipal water supplies, and other crucial utilities, either in the run-up to war or in its first days. It may be that the Kremlin, high on its own propaganda, believed that the Russian army would conquer Ukraine in record time and install a puppet government that would need to have those services intact. When that didn’t happen and the Russians began bombing cities, it made cyber weapons that could turn off the lights, say, largely beside the point: a bomb dropped on a power plant is a definitive way to destroy it, with little chance that it will come back online. “If you’re already at a stage in a conflict where you’re willing to drop bombs, you’re going to drop bombs,” Jacquelyn Schneider, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who is a former Air Force intelligence analyst, told me. In other words, bombs are blunter, more peremptory instruments.

But it also may be that Russia never had the capabilities that its adversaries ascribed to it in the first place: unlike conventional weapons, which can be counted, cyber weapons are invisible until they are deployed, making it impossible for outsiders to assess the size and power of a nation’s cyber arsenal. Or it may be that the Russian generals prosecuting the war were skeptical of relying on weapons composed of zeros and ones. Or that the Russians tried to replicate their earlier attacks but that Ukraine’s digital defenses, which are much stronger now, successfully fended them off. Cyber weapons, which exploit software vulnerabilities, can take years to develop and may be held in reserve for months or years. If those vulnerabilities are patched in the meantime, the weapons become useless. After the 2017 cyberattack, Ukraine, with help from its allies, fortified its computer networks. It received ten million dollars from the U.S. State Department in 2018 to secure critical infrastructure, with an additional eight million dollars in 2020 and a pledge for thirty million more, as well as cyber assistance from the U.S. Army and from NATO. Days before the invasion, Ukraine also requested and received help from the European Union’s Cyber Rapid Response Team.

The private sector is also pitching in. Within hours of the invasion, Christopher Ahlberg, the C.E.O. of Recorded Future, a Somerville, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity company, sent out an e-mail with the subject line “We Stand With Ukraine,” promising Ukrainians his firm’s “full resources, capabilities, and intelligence to support them in their fight against Russia.” (When I spoke with Ahlberg a few days later, he told me that Recorded Future is “helping out with pertinent intelligence and providing its intelligence platform to a series of actors in and around the conflict,” adding that he could not be more specific because “there are many eyes on targets in and outside of Ukraine.”) Among other organizations that have stepped in is Bitdefender, a global cybersecurity company based in Romania, which has teamed up with the country’s National Cyber Security Directorate to provide support and intelligence to Ukraine. And Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice-president in charge of customer security and trust, told me in an e-mail that his company’s Threat Intelligence Center has “developed and shared tools to help Ukraine be more resistant to the specific attacks we have observed,” and that this work was continuing “around the clock.”

Video From The New Yorker

When the Giant Cruise Ships Came to Town

Cyber weapons are stealthy, cheap to develop—especially compared with conventional weapons—and can be launched anonymously. This offers regimes that use them plausible deniability, and makes retaliation, at best, problematic. In some situations, that may make cyber “the perfect weapon,” as David Sanger of the Times has written, but right now the Russians appear to be spending a lot of time defending their own networks, which may be taking resources away from a cyber offensive. On February 24th, the day of the invasion, the hacker collective Anonymous declared that it “was officially in cyber war” against Russia, and has since claimed to have conducted surreptitious attacks on the Russian Ministry of Defense, its Federal Security Service, and Russian state television. Ukraine’s state-sanctioned volunteer “I.T. Army” has also been levelling countless distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against Russian businesses and government Web sites, overwhelming them with traffic in order to make them inaccessible. A weekly analysis of cyber activities from the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine issued on March 19th noted that Russian propaganda “had shifted the focus of its attention from attacks against Ukraine to attacks against Russian information infrastructure.”

But that same report made clear something that has largely been lost in the musings about Russia’s failure—so far—to use cyber weapons to crippling effect in the war: Ukraine has actually been under a constant barrage of cyberattacks that began before the invasion. Since February 15th, Ukraine has experienced more than three thousand DDoS attacks, including two hundred and seventy-five in a single day. Tom Burt told me that, as early as January, his team discovered wiper malware—malicious software that erases the targeted computer’s hard drive—on Ukrainian government networks, and shortly before the invasion they detected new wiper attacks against both the government and the private sector. He also said that “there have been dozens of espionage attacks on high-value targets.” Just last week, Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team detected new malware, distributed through phishing campaigns, against state bodies, most likely from a hacking group with ties to Russian intelligence. Perhaps most crucial, on the morning of the invasion, hackers jammed the satellite signal that delivered broadband satellite Internet services to much of Ukraine and other parts of Europe and, through a malicious software update, disabled Internet modems used to communicate with the satellite, taking out ten thousand terminals around Europe. The service has not been fully restored. Viasat, the company whose satellite was targeted, provides Internet service to the Ukrainian army and a number of Western militaries. (The company said that the attack did not affect the U.S. military, which relies on Viasat for some of its battle-management systems.) The source of the attack is not yet known.

In retrospect, it seems possible that the attack on Viasat was actually Russia’s opening gambit—a cyberattack intended to compromise Ukraine’s command-and-control systems—but was only marginally successful. Then, while the world was waiting for Russia to turn off the lights in Ukraine, the Kremlin was, instead, engaging in more targeted and strategic attacks. Still, Russia might do something more comprehensive and destructive going forward. A cyber weapon can only be launched once; it is possible that the Kremlin is holding its most powerful malware in reserve. As Burt told me, although Russia’s cyber activity has not caused mass destruction, “it does not in any way reduce the risk that more aggressive and destructive attacks could be deployed in the future inside or outside Ukraine.”

There is also no guarantee that, just because they haven’t done so yet, the Russians won’t retaliate against the U.S. and its allies for supporting Ukraine. On March 17th, the F.B.I. and CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, warned that they were “aware of possible threats to U.S. and international satellite communication (SATCOM) networks,” and they urged network providers and customers to harden their defenses. On Monday, President Biden reinforced this message. “I have previously warned about the potential that Russia could conduct malicious cyber activity against the U.S., including as a response to the unprecedented economic costs we’ve imposed on Russia alongside our allies and partners. It’s part of Russia’s playbook,” he said. “Today, my Administration is reiterating those warnings based on evolving intelligence that the Russian Government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks.” CISA has been exhorting American entities to put their “shields up” to deter attackers, and earlier this month Congress finally overcame private-sector resistance and approved legislation that requires critical infrastructure companies to report cyber intrusions within seventy-two hours of an attack and twenty-four hours after paying a ransom. The new requirements will give CISAa better understanding of how our adversaries are targeting entities such as pipelines, dams, and the electric grid, and allow the agency to warn other entities of ongoing threats.

It is too early to know, yet, the true role that cyber weapons are playing in this particular conflict—or will play in those to come. Indeed, the only thing we know for sure is that the Internet is its own battlefield, and we’re all on it.

More on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

• How significant is Russia’s partial ban from SWIFT?

• Why sanctions often fail.

• Can Russia’s conduct in Syria and Libya predict what’s in store for Ukraine?

• Searching for a lost son in Ukraine.

• An ad-hoc network is helping Ukrainians flee—and fight—the Russian invasion.

• What does Putin’s nuclear sabre rattling mean?

• Putin’s historic miscalculation may make him a war criminal.

• What can Biden do to stop Putin?

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.

Sue Halpern is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of, most recently, the novel “Summer Hours at the Robbers Library.”