Perhaps emboldened by the university’s assent, the embassy responded with a further request. On behalf of the Russian government, it also wished to confer on the university’s chancellor, Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans, “a medal for promoting international cooperation.”

This new offer struck us both as an ingenious ploy to have the university’s most senior figure preside over the unveiling of the bust. The embassy could then inform the foreign affairs ministry in Moscow, and presumably the anonymous philanthropist, that it had pulled off a public relations coup.

The offer of the bust was unremarkable. One of the jobs of an embassy is to build networks of contacts that might prove useful in acquiring and exercising influence in its host country; and one of the assets Russian embassies can draw on is Russian literature — which, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in A Moveable Feast, changes you as you read it.

But the context was important. Relations between Australia and Russia had been tense since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Since then the Russian president had been directing an “insurgency” by alleged separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Australia had responded with economic sanctions.

Australia strengthened the sanctions after the destruction of flight MH17 in July 2014, which it had concluded was Russia’s doing. Prime minister Tony Abbott had consequently expressed an intention to “shirtfront” Putin when he came to Australia for the looming G20 meeting in Brisbane. (Abbott’s verb captured media attention globally and baffled interpreters in both Russia and Australia.)

With its scope for building networks of influence in government and the public service much reduced by Russia’s actions, the embassy naturally focused its efforts on the media, the arts and academia. It seems a fair assumption that Russian embassies in other countries were also seeking to cultivate academic contacts and generate positive publicity for Russia by proffering busts of Pushkin and/or other Russian luminaries to universities, libraries and the like.

The acting dean asked me to draft some remarks for ANU’s chancellor to deliver at the handover ceremony. I had worked for Gareth Evans twice when he was foreign affairs minister: in 1991, as his interpreter on a visit to the Soviet Union in its last months; and later, in 1992–93, in a junior policy-advice role when he and the Keating government responded to the Soviet Union’s dissolution by Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.

This meant I was familiar with Evans’s exacting approach to public speaking, and his views on Russia in general, views influenced by his own circle of well-informed friends in Russia. (In this regard, with the possible exception of Kevin Rudd, Evans is probably unique among Australian politicians.) I drafted the remarks accordingly.

In the event, Evans left my work pretty much intact. But he polished it a little and gave it his own stamp — with, for instance, the following ironic flourish: “I am personally very honoured to receive this commemorative medal for contributions to consolidating international cultural cooperation, though a little embarrassed, because I’m not quite clear what I might have done to deserve it.”

He also strengthened a key paragraph regarding the destruction of flight MH17:

In Australia, the shooting down of MH17 just over four years ago continues to particularly burn in our collective memory. While it seems very likely that the militia member who pressed the button to fire the missile that caused so many Australian and other lives to be tragically lost did not intend to destroy a civilian airliner, unless and until that mistake is frankly acknowledged and redressed it is hard to see how any Australian government can invest our bilateral relationship with more substance.

He later told me that he’d found the ceremony “a very tricky occasion to navigate.”

My only cavil with Evans’s refining of my handiwork was his insertion of the words “the Russian soul” at one point in the speech. I could understand why a consummate diplomat chose to do so, but (as Vladimir Nabokov is said to have quipped) “as if a soul has nationality.” In my view, the expression supports the notion that Russians are somehow emotionally more profound than other peoples.

Exactly that claim was made a year after the ANU ceremony by one Valery Malinovsky, who, his Polish name notwithstanding, was a prominent figure in the pro-Putin claque in Australia. Russians, he said, “have deeper emotions; are more hardworking; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

In the same vein, here is Putin in 2014:

So, what are our particular traits? It seems to me that the Russian person thinks mainly about the highest moral truths. Western values are different, focused on oneself. Personal success is the measure of success in life: the more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us… we are less pragmatic, less calculating than other peoples, we have bigger hearts. Perhaps this reflects the grandeur of our country, its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.

I wasn’t at the ANU ceremony, but was given accounts by some who were. The bust itself, as I later saw, is a hefty bronze affair in the Roman and Russian martial tradition. It looks oddly extravagant in the cramped precinct that contains what remains of the university’s once proud tradition of the study of European languages.

In his own remarks for the occasion, Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov claimed that “international specialists in literature had established that Pushkin is the most universal and greatest poet of all time in any language.”

This assertion recalls a memorable passage in the unpublished memoirs of Andrzej Walicki, an authority on the history of Russian thought, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz, and for some years a professor at ANU. Walicki relates how, as a student at the University of Warsaw in 1951, he attended a series of lectures given by a visiting Soviet professor, one Fyodor Zhurko, who had set himself the task of demonstrating the impregnability of four postulates: that Pushkin was the world’s greatest poet; Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist; Alexander Ostrovsky the world’s greatest playwright; and Vissarion Belinsky the world’s greatest literary critic.

At his first lecture Zhurko encountered unexpected resistance: most of the students knew that to engage in debate on this level was pointless, but one Tadzio, from a rural village, asked how it could be that Pushkin “ranked above such poets as Byron.” Somewhat flustered, Zhurko responded that he did not know foreign languages and had not read Byron, but Pushkin’s pre-eminence had been “proven by Soviet science.”

This response prompted Tadzio to retort that he “also does not know foreign languages” (Walicki writes that “the comic effect was unintentional”) but he did know Pushkin’s work, and in his view “Mickiewicz was no less of a poet.” Zhurko retorted that Polish literature undoubtedly was great, indeed possibly the third greatest after Russian and Ukrainian, but that Pushkin’s standing as the greatest poet of all time in any language was for Soviet science “axiomatic.”

Following this exchange, as Walicki relates, Zhurko said to his Polish hosts that he had no wish to proceed with the following lectures in the series, as “у вас национализм очень сильно развитый” (“nationalism is very deeply entrenched here”).

An inscription beneath the bust given to ANU records that it was donated not by a philanthropist but by the “International Charity Fund ‘Dialogue of Cultures — United World.’” A little research reveals that the partners of the “charity fund” include Russia’s foreign affairs and culture ministries. These ties suggest that, while purporting to be some manner of non-government organisation, the outfit is in fact an agency of the Russian state. The following excerpts, with their idiosyncratic English, are from a mission statement on the organisation’s website.

Since its establishment in 2005, «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» Fund has implemented more than 450 projects in different countries. The Fund works closely with international organizations, state authorities of the Russian Federation and Russian non-governmental organizations, educational institutions in the field of international cooperation, culture and education.

Each culture — a combination of unique traditions, customs and holidays, this age-old wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, this galaxy of outstanding writers, artists, musicians and scientists, this particular philosophy, vision and thinking — it’s what makes the beauty of the world around them depth and complexity, then, of which each of us draws inspiration daily. To preserve and develop national culture — the noble task of mankind.

Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» retains and promotes the historical uniqueness of ethnic groups living in the modern world and to create a tool for cultural rapprochement of peoples, through the creation of worldwide sites for a living dialogue of cultures.

More exploration of the website reveals that in 2007 in Brisbane the fund established a monument to one K.E. Tsiolkovskiy, described by the site as “a Russian provincial teacher and scholar, founder of Soviet cosmonautics, who paved the way into space for all the mankind… The scientist was born in Russia, but his discoveries belong to the entire world.”

The website also reports that donated busts of Pushkin have been placed in Ulaanbaatar, Dhaka and Montevideo; and that the Mongolian bust was handed over in 2015 by the then minister counsellor of the Russian embassy, Igor Arzhaev. Arzhaev is currently Russia’s consul general in Sydney, and Russian-language publications in Australia suggest he devotes much time to liaising with those diaspora members in Sydney who support the current Russian leadership’s policies. Prominent among these is the self-styled “Aussie Cossack,” Simeon Boikov, with whom Arzhaev is pictured below in Russian diplomatic uniform.

More important, the fund’s website reveals ties between the fund and prominent members of Putin’s close entourage, including Sergei Naryshkin, a member of the National Security Council and head of SVR, Russia’s foreign espionage service, and Sergei Glaz’ev, “Advisor to the President for Eurasian Cooperation.” Glaz’ev, who is among the most energetic proponents of the forcible reabsorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire, also has ties to the Australian Citizens Party via the LaRouche movement, a longstanding far-right American activist group.

Middle man: Igor Arzhaev (third from right), Russia’s consul general in Sydney, with “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov (in green). Facebook

The tale of the ANU bust contains a dual irony. If any Australian politicians deserve formal recognition for their promotion of international cooperation, surely none is more worthy than Gareth Evans, for none has done more in support of the ideal of a “rules-based order.” Conversely, no one, not even Donald Trump, has been more conspicuous than Vladimir Putin in their efforts to undermine such a mechanism to manage the inevitable conflicts between nation-states and great powers.

But there’s a third irony, more piquant and profound. It’s hard to think of a state that has killed or been complicit in the deaths of more of its poets than Russia. An incomplete but well-verified list compiled by literary scholar Vera Sokolinskaya contains the names of hundreds of Russian writers, journalists and artists executed, imprisoned or forced into exile by Russia’s rulers.

For various reasons, Pushkin is on the list. From the age of twenty he was internally exiled several times for his verses; in 1826 Tsar Nikolai I appointed himself Pushkin’s censor (though in practice the role was carried out by the chief of the tsar’s secret police); and in 1829 his request to travel abroad was denied.

But two other decisions by Tsar Nikolai combined to prove fatal for Pushkin. In 1831 the poet married Natalya Goncharova, a legendary beauty and thereafter an adornment at court. Two years later Nikolai appointed Pushkin to the humiliatingly lowly position of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), which effectively entailed only one duty: his, and Natalya’s, regular appearances at court balls.

Probably sensing danger from would-be seducers among his wife’s jostling admirers, burdened heavily by debts and unable to afford life in St Petersburg, Pushkin sought royal permission to retire to his modest country estate — and was denied. In 1835 a young French officer of the Russian Horse Guards began provocatively wooing Natalya; by January 1837, according to the mores of the time and place, Pushkin felt compelled to provoke a duel. He was wounded fatally and died in extreme pain thirty-six hours later.

Had it not been for the tsar’s whims, Pushkin would probably have lived well beyond his thirty-seven years. (Pushkin’s final years and fate are an epic tragedy: see, among various accounts, Elaine Feinstein’s judicious biography.) Today, though, this victim of Russian autocracy is presented as a demigod whose writings prove the innate superiority of what Putin and his supporters claim is “Russian civilisation.” •

The post Weaponising Pushkin appeared first on Inside Story.

They also wore orange-and-black ribbons arranged in a neat bow pinned to their chests. This arrangement, known as a George’s Ribbon, was originally an insignia of the Russian imperial military, the orange symbolising fire and the black gunpowder. But since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 it has become a badge of devotion to Russia and fealty to its president. According to Moscow-based journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan — courageous and expert commentators on sometimes-delicate security issues — it is “an ominous and aggressive political symbol” of an “anti-Western, pro-Kremlin agenda.”

The mysterious men at the 9 May celebrations claim to be the descendants of Siberian Cossacks who settled in Australia mainly from around 1920 until the 1950s. Because the anniversary has become the most important date on the official Russian calendar — a day on which, they believe, wearing the ribbon should be compulsory — they attend the celebrations to monitor whether community members are displaying the symbol and, what’s more, displaying it correctly. They are prefects of patriotism, monitoring Russian expatriates’ loyalty to Mother Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Behind the activities of these men is the long, complex history of the Cossacks. Even the origin of the name — kazak in Russian, qazaq in Turkic languages — is disputed, but most historians say it’s Turkic, that it meant “free wanderer or exile,” and that by the fifteenth century it denoted the ethnically motley inhabitants, often Tatar and Slav, of self-governing fortified settlements along the lower Dnieper and Don rivers.

By the sixteenth century the Cossacks had evolved from brigandage into an effective light-cavalry-for-hire. Through agreements with successive tsars they were integrated into the Russian imperial army, with particular responsibility for protecting the empire’s southern borders. They were prominent in what Russian official histories call the “opening up” of Siberia.

Gradually the Cossacks took on another function, too, as a paramilitary police used to suppress dissent and internal unrest. By the nineteenth century they were both a border force and a national guard, with a reputation for brutal indiscipline in carrying out their gendarme function. As a New York Times writer puts it, “Before the Revolution, they had become infamous as the nail in the czarist boot, putting down peasant and worker uprisings and leading pogroms against the Jews and other minorities.”

Cossack historians might reject that charge, but there can be little doubt that the Cossacks took part in the pogroms against the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and those in the period 1903–06. In the early twentieth century, the Cossack motto, “For the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland,” was adopted by the anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People, which created armed squads (known as “black hundreds”) to carry out pogroms and assassinate those it identified as socialists or other brands of traitor.

Given their devotion to the Romanov dynasty, most Cossacks sided with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian civil war of 1918–21; many then fled into exile, with some from Siberia finding refuge in China and eventually Australia. As a particular target of Stalin’s ruthless collectivisation campaign, those who remained were almost obliterated, and they continued to be suppressed throughout the Soviet period.

But in a remarkable revival, they re-emerged in post-Soviet Russia as a repository of militarist and ultranationalist values, with close ties to the Kremlin-dominated Russian Orthodox Church. Under Putin they have flourished, and he has eulogised them for their “well-known tradition of patriotism… so very important for the formation of Russian statehood in the minds of our people.”

The Russian government now funds Cossack cultural centres and martial arts and firearms clubs. And, under a law Putin signed in 2005, the Cossacks have been reincorporated into the state’s security and military structures.

Until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, all Soviet leaders saw the large Russian/Soviet diaspora in two contradictory ways: as a potential source of opposition and as an asset to be mobilised, together with non-Russian sympathisers, in undermining any state perceived to be an adversary. Primary responsibility for neutralising members of the former (in some cases by assassination) and identifying and exploiting the latter group lay with the KGB, under that or its earlier names.

In Australia, the best-known instances were Moscow’s marshalling, and in some cases recruitment, of members of the Communist Party of Australia and Russian émigrés, some working in sensitive positions in the Australian Public Service. The effects of that policy were felt in Australian politics until recently, and may still colour perceptions of Russia.

As the Soviet Union began to falter in the late 1980s and Soviet-backed communist parties in the West shrank, the policy of recruiting émigrés and fellow travellers fell into abeyance.

Wearing the George’s Ribbon, Russian president Vladimir Putin (centre) watches this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow. Sergei Guneyev/Host Photo Agency via AP

During the nine chaotic years of Boris Yeltsin’s rule, after the rout of the KGB-initiated-and-led coup to overthrow Gorbachev in 1991, the Russian intelligence services manoeuvred to adapt and survive. The KGB was divided into the FSB (the domestic secret police) and the SVR (the Russian foreign intelligence service) but was not reformed. Now, after two decades with one of their own as Russia’s ruler, they are probably better resourced and, in the FSB’s case at least, more independently powerful than ever before.

Under Putin, efforts to tap the Russian diaspora as an asset have been refined and strengthened. In October 2001, while still consolidating his power, Putin set out a concept of the diaspora as an attribute of a strong Russian state, proclaiming the notion of russkij mir, or the Russian World. (Mir is a capacious word meaning “world,” “community” or “peace,” depending on the context.) No matter where they may live, said Putin, all Russians and all those claiming Russian heritage would henceforth be seen not as “émigrés” but as “compatriots,” a global tribe dispersed but united by a commitment to the Fatherland.

Russkij Mir is also the title of one of a phalanx of new state agencies and “foundations” Putin has charged with creating this cohesion and maximising Russia’s global influence. Russia is not alone in this, of course: China, for instance, has a virtually identical policy of moulding and mobilising patriotic feeling in its diaspora, the implementation of which is coordinated by the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. The Russkij Mir Foundation also recalls the Overseas Compatriots Central Committee established by the Japanese in 1940.

The foundation was formally established in 2007. In 2009 its regional director for the Asia-Pacific approached a number of leading Australian universities, including Queensland, Sydney and the ANU, offering to fund “centres of Russian language and culture.” The offers were declined, partly because the Russians insisted on the right to appoint the centres’ directors.

More recently, the policy of marshalling the diaspora has also been underpinned by the Law on State Policy towards Compatriots Abroad, key provisions of which were reflected in recent amendments to the Russian constitution. The law defines anyone anywhere “who speaks Russian and identifies with/observes the [values of the] associated culture” as a “compatriot,” whose rights, as they are defined by the Russian state, the Russian state undertakes to protect.

As it happens, the Russkij Mir Foundation — which, like China’s Confucius Institutes, claims to focus solely on propagating culture and language — is headed by a prominent member of the State Duma, the parliament endowed with Putinist characteristics. That Duma deputy, Vyacheslav Nikonov, happens to be the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, of the notorious Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Molotov played a key role in the fate of Labor Party leader H.V. “Bert” Evatt, the most prominent casualty of the Petrov affair, the case that shone a spotlight on Russian recruitment of émigrés and supporters in Australia.

Which brings us back to Australia, and the ribbon-monitoring Cossacks. In a New Year’s Eve address at the end of 2018, the then Russian ambassador, Grigory Logvinov, made a passionate appeal to the Russian diaspora in Australia:

Never before in its recent history… has Russia been subjected to such a coordinated, aggressive campaign of vilification, abuse and slander… on various anti-Russian themes, be it the MH17 disaster, the so-called Skripal affair or the use of chemicals [weapons] in Syria… We in the embassy would be most grateful for any support, moral and political, that our compatriots can give, within, of course, the bounds permitted under Australian legislation.

One group among Logvinov’s audience needed no urging: a self-proclaimed stanitsa (garrison) of “Siberian Cossacks” in Australia calling themselves “the Embassy to Australia of the Zabaikal’sk Cossack Host” (zabaikal’sk signifies a region in Siberia to the east of Lake Baikal, as seen from European Russia).

These Australians claim to be the descendants of Cossacks and the repository of their traditions. They first made their presence felt in 2014, the year of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the uprising by Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine, among whom Russia-based Cossacks were conspicuous. Citing no source for the figure, a Russian website asserts that 10,000 Australians have Cossack forebears.

Bedecked in locally tailored Cossack dress uniforms, Australia’s newly minted Cossacks began to mount demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne in support of the so-called “Democratic Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk” — that is, the territory of Ukraine still held by Russian-led and -equipped proxy forces.

A leader, Semyon Boikov (also known as Simeon Boikov), had emerged, and was titled Ataman. (The word means “chieftain,” and is a cognate of “ottoman,” reflecting the strong Turkic gene in the Cossacks’ evolution.) A Russian website supplies the following information about him:

Ataman Boikov was born in 1990. The fifth generation of an original migrant family, he relates that his father is a Russian Orthodox priest, whose family succeeded in preserving the Russian language and raised its children to love Russia. “We never felt ourselves to be Australian, we were aliens there. I consider myself to be a Russian.” A period of study in the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, which he undertook in 2008, was decisive in his identification [with Russia]. “One may say that while I was studying there I was, well, we must not say recruited, right? Basically, I fell under the influence of rightly thinking pro-Russian elements. They began to fashion a pro-Russian adult from a young Australian [citizen].”

He credits his transformation in particular to Father Tikhon Shevkunov: “this is a most influential person — in the church, in the state and in society. He has always supported strongly any activity connected with reuniting [Orthodox] churches outside Russia with the Moscow Patriarchate, and in general with reuniting Russian emigrants, the diaspora, with Russia.”

The Sretensky Monastery, which is close by the headquarters of the KGB in central Moscow, is reported to have close ties to the KGB’s successors, the FSB and the SVR. Father Shevkunov, now an archimandrite, is sometimes called “Putin’s spiritual adviser.”

Here is Boikov as reported by the Russian digital journal Vzglyad under the headline “Cossacks in Australia Speak of Supporting Russia in a ‘Hostile’ Country”:

“I consider myself a proponent of a strong Russian state. We’ll always support the policies of the [Russian] state, we respect very much our Commander-in-Chief, Putin. And we have a unique capacity to support Russia from within a hostile state. Even the FSB or a battalion of the Russian SAS can’t achieve that, because unlike them we are citizens of this state.” The group that Boikov leads claims to have about 150 members. Although the group is registered as “historical-cultural association,” its members appear to be militarised: they wear uniforms with epaulets and badges of rank, and carry out Cossack military drills. But according to Boikov, they see their main task as carrying out so-called people’s diplomacy… “We organise demonstrations in support of the return of Crimea [to Russia], in support of our army in Syria, in support of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.” The Ataman adds that while they cannot go into battle with sabres, Russian long rifles and Maxim machine guns, as their grandfathers did, they can prosecute another form of war — an information war.

Boikov seems to have been a key figure in securing funding from Russia for the publication of the “garrison’s” own monthly newspaper, Russkij Rubezh (Russian Frontier), twenty-six issues of which appeared from early 2015 to mid 2017, initially with a print run of 2000 later increased to 5000. The masthead carried the traditional Cossack motto and war cry: “For the (Russian Orthodox) Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland.” The paper’s title suggests that its owners and editors see Russia’s frontier as running through Australia, which recalls the bon mot from Russian history that only a border with Russian soldiers on both sides of it is genuinely secure. The notion is also consistent with the Cossacks’ traditional role of protecting Russia’s borders.

Russkij Rubezh’s editorials, and its reports reprinted from ultranationalist Russian sources, reflected the group’s identification with the militarist-imperialist and authoritarian ethos of tsarist — and now Putin’s — Russia. Its members declared their support for the Russian campaign in eastern Ukraine, adopted the flag of the separatist entities as one of their own banners, and implied that some of their number fought there with the proxy forces. The paper branded as traitors any Australians of Russian origin who did not share its views. It routinely retailed luridly xenophobic and homophobic views and — in the edition of December 2015, for instance — anti-Semitic sentiments.

Russkij Rubezh ceased publication without explanation in June 2017, suggesting that the source of its funding had dried up. Three years on, in mid May this year, it reappeared, with a print run of 5000, a supplement in English and much wider circulation to all state capitals. Clearly, a new source of funding had been found, perhaps by Boikov during a visit to Moscow late last year.

“[We] remind all our compatriots in Australia who are enemies of Russia that our newspaper is back on the battle line,” said the May editorial. “Take responsibility for your words and actions lest you find yourselves exposed as the subjects of our publications.”

As before, the paper identifies its chief sponsor as the Institute of North Asia and Eurasian Integrational Processes, about which the internet reveals little other than an address in Chita, a city in the Zabaikal’sk region of Siberia. But the paper appears to owe its reanimation to Konstantin Malofeev, a figure conspicuous in Russia as “the Orthodox oligarch” — or to those he works for, or with.

Together with his ties to the nomenklatura of the Russian Orthodox Church, Malofeev is well known for his ultranationalism, championing of “traditional values” and propagation of conspiracy theories. Among the latter are his assertions that Bill Gates and “Western intelligence agencies” are the source of Covid-19, and that Gates plans to “enchip” the entire Russian population. The sources of Malofeev’s apparent wealth are mysterious.

Malofeev is best known for the role he played in the insurgency in eastern Ukraine. In April 2014, Igor Girkin, the former head of security for one of his “private equity” firms, Marshall Capital Partners Ltd, crossed from Russia into Ukraine with about fifty fighters to lead the first armed assault on a Ukrainian-government entity. Girkin eventually took command of the “People’s Army of the Republic of Donetsk” and then became its “minister of defence.”

Girkin served with the FSB from 1998 to 2005 and has since been identified by the European Union as an officer of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, or GRU. He’s better known by his nom de guerre, Strelkov — meaning “the rifleman” or “the shooter.” (Readers of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago may recall the ruthless Bolshevik commander “Strelnikov.”)

“By mid-2014,” reports the investigative website Bellingcat, “a clear pattern had emerged: the Kremlin used Malofeev as the initiator and proxy funder of active measures — including military operations — in Ukraine, providing deniability to Russia in case the operation failed.” In this way, Malofeev and his employees share responsibility for the deaths of thirty-eight Australians and 260 other passengers and crew on Flight MH17 in July 2014. Since 2014, he has been sanctioned by the European Union “for the destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine.”

Malofeev also claims to be the founder of the Society of the Double-headed Eagle for the Propagation of Russian Historical Enlightenment, which takes its name from the imperial eagle of the tsarist coat of arms, restored by Putin as Russia’s. The society heads a revised list of partners published by Russkij Rubezh; as its name suggests, its declared goal is to “enlighten all compatriots” by inculcating the correct view of history in the minds of all inhabitants of the Russian World.

This impulse to control not just what people do but also what they think has a robust tradition in Russia, stretching back at least to Peter the Great and reaching an apogee under Lenin and Stalin. Putin himself is a product of the training, practice and ethos of the KGB, the successor to the Cheka, the Soviet agency Lenin set up to impose and maintain this pervasive control.

Putin’s former culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, has written that “if a state’s elite does not strive to mould the consciousness of its citizens… their minds will either be a vacuum or polluted by foreign garbage.” Much preoccupied with controlling the past so as to mould the present, Putin recently arranged for the goal defined by Medinsky to be enshrined in the Russian constitution.

That was among more than 200 amendments voted on in Russia’s recent constitutional plebiscite, which ran from 25 June to 1 July. According to official figures, the amendments were endorsed by 78 per cent of the 69 per cent of eligible voters who participated. In an apparent misstep in orchestrating the result, though, or perhaps a display of arrogance, copies of the revised constitution were on sale in Moscow bookstores well in advance of the voting period. A group of well-known Russian political scientists who analysed the figures concluded that 37 per cent of the votes were falsified and that the real turnout figure was about 43 per cent, of which 65 per cent voted for the amendments.

Reportedly at the urging of the Russian Orthodox Church, the amendments also include an article pledging homage to the “ancestors who bequeathed to us their ideals and belief in God.” Yet Article 14, the foundational Chapter 1 of the 1993 constitution, defines Russia as a secular state and says that “no religion may be established as official or obligatory.” Another amendment describes marriage as a “union of a man and a woman,” thereby confirming traditional values and effectively outlawing same-sex marriage. And another pledges to protect historical truth and forbid “belittling the people’s heroic protection of the Fatherland” — that is, querying Putin’s increasingly mendacious version of the history of the second world war.

The State Duma also received a redraft of the existing federal law “On Education,” in which greater emphasis is placed on “the imperative of instilling patriotic sentiment in schoolchildren.” All of the goals defined by these amendments are pervasive themes in the re-emerged Russkij Rubezh.

According to Russian journalists who have investigated Konstantin Malofeev’s activities and links, he is close to Putin confidante Archimandrite Shevkunov, the “Father Tikhon” identified by “Ataman” Boikov as his primary mentor. Ostensibly serving under Malofeev in the Double-headed Eagle society is its executive director, Leonid Reshetnikov, a lieutenant-general in the SVR. Reshetnikov’s official biography, reprinted by Russkij Rubezh, has him “working in espionage abroad from 1976 to 2009.” From 2009 till 2017 he was director of the Centre for Analytical Research, a secretive unit in the Russian presidential administration credited by Reuters and the BBC with a significant role in the successful Russian campaign to influence the US presidential elections in 2016.

Officially, General Reshetnikov has retired from active service, but, as Putin famously said, there is no such thing as a former KGB officer. (On retirement, FSB and SVR officers are considered to be members of a “reserve” from which they can be recalled to active service at any time.) In Moscow, the Double-headed Eagle society is registered at an address shared with the Centre for Analytical Research. It seems most unlikely that a lieutenant-general of the SVR would take his orders from private citizen Malofeev.

To conduct the society’s campaign to ensure that all Russians in Australia, and their children, hold the correct views and beliefs, Reshetnikov has appointed Valery Malinovsky, a “young [Russian] entrepreneur going places,” as its Australian chief representative, with Boikov as his deputy. A letter of their appointment, published in Russkij Rubezh, charges them with “preserving the cultural identity and a correct historical memory of our compatriots.”

In an interview to introduce Malinovsky to its readers, Russkij Rubezh asked him what he sought to achieve. He replied that the society he heads “unites people of integrity, Russian patriots, who wish to change the situation in their homeland and perceptions of Russia beyond its borders for the better.” Asked how Russians differed from Australians, Malinovsky replied that Russians “have deeper emotions; are more hard-working; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

Elsewhere in the same edition, the work of the Double-headed Eagle society is presented thus:

Russian history is one of the most slandered and traduced phenomena in human history. The task of recreating a genuine, multi-hued-and-faceted, objective reality of Russia in history is akin to a restoration: slowly, layer by layer, the accretions of recent periods must be peeled away to reveal the original image of Russia in all its pristine beauty.

To sum up, then, we have a group of Australians of Russian heritage, the Australian Cossack Garrisons, who are funded by a “Russian Orthodox oligarch” (or perhaps by anonymous state functionaries who channel money to him). They have a patron who was complicit in the destruction of MH17, who claims that Bill Gates and “Western intelligence services” created Covid-19, and who is supervised by a former senior officer of the SVR and therefore effectively incorporated into Russia’s security and military structures. And they themselves are dedicated to policing devotion to the Fatherland among Russians in the “hostile country” in which they apparently prefer to live. •

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