Problems of Post-Communism

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“We Show What Is Concealed”: Russian Soft Power

in Germany

Philip K. Decker

To cite this article: Philip K. Decker (2020): “We Show What Is Concealed”: Russian Soft Power in
Germany, Problems of Post-Communism, DOI: 10.1080/10758216.2020.1753082

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PROBLEMS OF POST-COMMUNISM
https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2020.1753082

“We Show What Is Concealed”: Russian Soft Power in Germany

Philip K. Decker
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT
Using a modified theoretical model derived from the work of Joseph Nye, this paper argues that Russian
media have conducted a soft power campaign in Germany that targets that country’s Russian-speaking
population. Among a portion of the target group, Kremlin-funded outlets have succeeded in encoura-
ging skepticism of German culture and authorities while presenting Russian culture and government as
representative of a superior alternative value system. These conditions have helped generate political
disruption (significant Russian-German support for the right-wing populist party Alternative für
Deutschland) and physical unrest (a protest over the purported rape of a Russian girl by migrants).

Introduction
On January 23, 2016, a misty, overcast day in Berlin with piles
of dirty snow on the ground, nearly one thousand people
congregated in front of the German Federal Chancellery.
YouTube footage of the event, taken with cameras sent by
the Kremlin-funded network RT Deutsch, shows men and
women of all ages, bundled up against the cold. They carried
protest signs in both German and Russian reading “Our
children are in danger,” “Today my child—tomorrow your
child!,” “Children cry in the same language,” “Germany is in
danger,” “Hands off me and my child!,” “We say no to
violence,” and “We have the right to doubt the objectivity of
police.” A microphone had been set up on a platform. In
halting, uncertain German, a man read a prepared speech,
while the man behind him contorted his face to suppress
tears: “Today we stand here together, for protection, for the
future of our children and women. Children have no nation-
ality. Children have a big, pure heart that knows only love and
no hate” (RT Deutsch 2016).
The subject of this protest, one of dozens like it across
Germany, was the allegation that a young daughter of Russian
immigrants, Lisa F., had been raped in Berlin by three Arab
men on the night of January 11. Although a police investiga-
tion determined that no such rape had occurred, Russian
media including Sputnik, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Pervyi
Kanal (Channel One), RT, and Vesti had escalated the story.
According to testimony presented to the U.S. Senate, “Russian
state television had for days whipped itself into a frenzy of
indignation about the supposed failure of German authorities
to pursue the alleged perpetrators,” generating outrage among
the many in Germany’s population of Russian-speakers whose
primary source of information was, and remains, Kremlin-
funded media (Stelzenmüller 2017). A report produced for the
German government in the aftermath of the so-called “Lisa
case” declared, "[t]his event clearly shows the risks posed to
European countries by Russia’s disinformation campaigns—
especially in times of emerging right-wing populist parties
throughout the European Union” (Janda 2016). That analysis
is particularly potent given the appeal of Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) among the Russian-German population.
With the indirect aid of the Russian government’s foreign
media apparatus, AfD has translated disaffection and resent-
ment within the Russian-German community into part of its
strategy for electoral success.
Events such as the Lisa protests, as well as Russian immi-
grant support for AfD, are partially the end-results of
a sophisticated Kremlin propaganda effort resembling the
example laid down by American foreign media during the
Cold War. The mechanisms and outcomes of the Kremlin’s
campaign can be best understood using a framework adapted
from Joseph Nye’s theory of state-driven soft power opera-
tions. According to Nye, soft power is “the ability to get what
you want through attraction rather than coercion or pay-
ments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture,
political ideals, or policies” (2004, x). He goes on to say that
“[i]t is also important to set the agenda and attract others in
world politics, and not only to force them to change by
threatening military force or economic sanctions. This soft
power—getting others to want the outcomes you want—co-
opts people rather than coerces them” (2004, 5). From this
characterization can be distilled a distinct three-stage process
for state soft power operations: first, establishing “agenda-
setting” institutions such as Radio Liberty (RL) or Radio
Moscow; second, “attracting” a target population; and third,
eventually “coopting” that population as it warms to the
culture being exported. Nye’s thesis is built chiefly—though
not exclusively—on the prominent example of the United
States’ Cold War soft power campaign, which helped

CONTACT Philip K. Decker pdeck2@gmail.com Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland.
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 P. K. DECKER
America draw Eastern Europe into its political and cultural
sphere. However, the genesis of Nye’s theory in the activity of
the Cold War United States does not preclude its application
elsewhere; indeed, Nye himself dedicates a discussion to
“Others’ Soft Power,” with the Soviet Union as a prominent
case (2004, 73–98). The abstract nature of the “attract” and
“coopt” blueprint suggests that the theory does not have to be
confined to describing the policy of one country in one
historical period.
Nye’s framework is sound in principle but requires some
refinement. The following study retains the basic structure
posited by Nye but introduces a four-stage model to more
precisely depict the processes in motion.1 After establishing
the requisite agenda-setting broadcasting institutions, a state
must do the following to successfully coopt a segment of
a foreign country’s population:
(1) Identify a receptive target group within the enemy
bloc and tailor content accordingly.
(2) Establish in that target group an overreliance on
“objective” or “independent” foreign news sources
for information while delegitimizing “ideological” or
“biased” domestic news sources.
(3) Engender enthusiasm and trust for the foreign culture
and disdain for the domestic culture.
(4) Generate political destabilization and/or physical
unrest, which can serve multiple possible goals of
the broadcasting country.
Although this study provides a factual account of the
Russian information presence in Germany, it does not
claim to have definitive proof of Russian intentions.
Instead, it hypothesizes about them through abductive rea-
soning applied to observational data. Because of tight
Kremlin control over the Russian government’s document
space, internal files demonstrating strategic choices cannot
be consulted. Accordingly, Western academic and non-
academic literature on Russian interference usually posits
from observation, rather than proves with “smoking gun”
documentation, the existence of a concerted and systematic
Kremlin propaganda campaign (a “reverse-engineering”
approach). This is in contrast to Nye’s arguments about
the nature of U.S. Cold War soft power policy, which are
supported by a corpus of declassified U.S. intelligence com-
munity files confirming a conscious, clearly formulated, and
methodical strategy of coopting Eastern Bloc populations
(e.g. CIA memorandum 1950).2 Nevertheless, the lack of
access to Kremlin files does not disqualify the use of Nye’s
theory, but merely necessitates alternative methods of proof
(observational data). Working within these inherent con-
straints of conducting research about Russian foreign pro-
paganda, this paper uses the best available evidence from
German and Russian politics and media to demonstrate
patterns consistent with the refined version of Nye’s
model. Moreover, although Vladimir Putin and numerous
other Russian officials have repeatedly referenced the con-
cept of soft power and in fact used this term, the study does
not claim that the Russian foreign media apparatus has
applied, followed, or consulted Nye’s specific prescriptions
for state soft power campaigns, even if the observational
data demonstrate deep similarities between the two (for
Putin’s discussions of soft power, see for instance President
of Russia 2014). Instead, the four-stage model is used as
a theoretical framework that attempts to illustrate and
approximate the process of cooptation that has occurred in
Germany, and the argument hypothesizes that this has been
the result of a coherent strategy—influenced by the Soviet
Union’s failure to resist American soft power during the
Cold War—that targets Russophilic groups in the West.
Current Russian behavior resembles Nye’s basic process of
“target, attract, coopt,” and while Nye can prove a conscious
U.S. strategy by reviewing its inputs, this study can only
infer a Russian strategy based on its outputs.
The analysis proceeds in two parts. First, understanding
Russia’s renewed soft power effort requires a preliminary
review of the lessons that country learned from the failure of
the USSR to adequately defend itself from and respond to the
American information campaign of the latter half of the twen-
tieth century. Recognition of the Soviet failure has likely shaped
a contemporary broadcasting apparatus that operates according
to similar, though not identical, logic to the historical American
effort. Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Voice of America (VOA)
succeeded in drawing entire nations into their orbit, as proven
by listenership data and as Czechoslovak, Polish, Hungarian,
Romanian, and Estonian leaders readily attested after 1989
(Urban 1997, 147–148; Felix 2001, xviii–xx; Risso 2013, 145).
Despite heavy investment in foreign information dissemina-
tion, the Soviet Union was unable to replicate this success in
Western countries. Current Kremlin propaganda tends to have
more modest targets: people and groups who are already likely
to be sympathetic to Moscow’s political and cultural worldview.
Second, the case study reconstructs Russia’s campaign in
Germany and its outcomes, showing how this effort has fol-
lowed the four-stage model:
(1) Russian government-controlled media organizations
have identified Germany’s population of Russian-
speakers (referred to in-study as “Russian-Germans”)
as a propaganda target and broadcast tailored content
to this group. This propaganda can be defined as
material (distributed chiefly through social media,
online news sites, and television) that addresses, vali-
dates, and reinforces the socially and politically con-
servative views of the target population. Such content
can include disinformation that promotes falsehoods,
incorrect versions of events, or distortions of the truth.
(2) Analysis of Kremlin media content suggests an effort
to question or discredit the legitimacy of German and
Western news, while putting forward Russian alter-
native news as a viable “truth-telling” replacement.
(3) Analysis of polling, Russian-German local media, and
reporting by German journalists suggests that
Kremlin media have partially succeeded in delegiti-
mizing German culture as a whole in the minds of the
target population, while also generating enthusiasm
for, longing for, and/or belief in the superiority of
Russian culture.

(4) These conditions have contributed to, though not
exclusively caused, destabilizing outcomes in both
German politics and society. In politics, a segment
of the Russian-German population disproportionately
votes for AfD in regional and national elections. In
society at large, Russian media were able to generate
a protest movement among Russian-Germans by pro-
moting false or uncorroborated claims about the rape
of Lisa F. in 2016. The Lisa case illustrates how
a Kremlin media foothold can create ripe conditions
for unrest, to be exploited when an opportunity
arises. In both political and societal terms, Russian
government and media represent for some Russian-
Germans a voice of legitimate external criticism of
German politics and values.
Before proceeding, two preliminary points of clarification are
necessary. First, what characteristics of Kremlin media
inroads in Russian-German news consumption justify the
designation “soft power campaign”? This activity can be so
called because Russian disinformation appears to have goals
beyond simply discrediting mainstream German political cul-
ture within the target population. In addition to questioning
the suitability of German society as a value space in which
Russian-Germans feel welcome, this propaganda actively pro-
motes Russian culture as the home of an alternative, superior
value system to which Russian-Germans can and should feel
allegiance. In this regard, the operations under review meet
Nye’s criteria of an information campaign in which content
promotes the “attractiveness of a country’s culture, political
ideals, or policies.” This “attraction” content coexists with
suggestions that German “culture, political ideals, and poli-
cies” are unattractive. Second, it is frequently difficult to
separate the organic crystallization of political discontent
from the influence of external actors. Russian propaganda
contributes to the breakdown of Russian-German trust in
politics and society, but is far from the only cause.
Therefore, the best description of Kremlin media in this con-
text is that of a multiplying factor exacerbating, exploiting, or
amplifying preexisting social tensions between the Russian-
speaking community and broader German society.
Background
Lessons from the Cold War
Dominic Tierney and Dominic Johnson contend that states
that have experienced recent policy failure are more likely to
adapt than states that have not. This is embodied in the
concept of failure salience, which according to Tierney and
Johnson is “the tendency to remember and learn more from
perceived negative outcomes than from perceived positive
outcomes. […] [D]ecisionmakers are far more likely to draw
analogies to past debacles than they are to triumphs” (2019,
112–113). Failure salience is rooted in the psychological phe-
nomenon known as the negativity bias, which holds that the
human brain fixates much more strongly on humiliations and
dangers than on positive events or outcomes. Tierney and
Johnson state that “[m]ajor policy failures can define
PROBLEMS OF POST-COMMUNISM 3
a historical period,” and cite the examples of a reactionary
Germany after World War I and the anti-war movement in
the United States in response to the flagging military cam-
paign in Vietnam (2019, 113).
In the years following the collapse of communism,
a defining policy failure in Russia was the Soviet Union’s
inability to withstand ideological and cultural pressure from
the United States. Preoccupation with this breakdown of Soviet
defenses was originally the province of nationalist and reac-
tionary communist factions within the emerging Russian party
system in the 1990s, but eventually achieved mainstream atten-
tion as Putin signaled similar views early in his presidency (see
Gevorkyan and Kolesnikov 2000; President of Russia 2001;
RFE/RL 2002).3 Soviet failure was partly due to the inherently
amorphous and unmanageable nature of information osmosis
and partly because the USSR was attempting to play a role that
was beyond its ability to fulfill. Regulating the flow of informa-
tion in closed, large societies across thousands of miles was
logistically daunting, demanded immense investment, and
required constant vigilance for extant and possible cracks in
defenses (Nye 2004, 74). Simo Mikkonen notes that “[i]n 1958,
the [Soviet] Central Committee mentioned that the sum spent
on jamming was greater than the sum spent on domestic and
international broadcasting combined” (2010, 786; see also Ajir
and Vailliant 2018, 72). Compounding the challenge was the
vigor and effectiveness of the United States’ soft power opera-
tion, which has been recognized as the most successful such
campaign ever undertaken. According to Linda Risso, during
the Cold War up to half of all Eastern European adults (and
one third of Soviet city-dwellers) received most of their news
from American and British radio programs (2013, 145). Arch
Puddington describes Radio Free Europe in particular as “argu-
ably the most influential politically oriented international radio
station in history” (2000, ix). Carnes Lord comes to a similar
conclusion: “Studies of American broadcasting into the Soviet
bloc […] confirm that public diplomacy efforts of the United
States and its allies during the Cold War were hugely successful
in creating the favorable conditions that led to the collapse of
the Soviet empire in the late 1980’s” (2009, 67).4 Scholarship
has demonstrated that American broadcasting networks were
able to achieve a depth of penetration and trust in the com-
munist world that the Soviet Union was unable to replicate in
Western societies (Ryback 1990, 85-102; Nelson 1997; Urban
1997; Puddington 2000; Nye 2004; Carnes 2009; Mikkonen
2010; Johnson and Parta 2010; Schlosser 2008, 2011). In the
words of Boris Bruk, “Soviet propagandists were guided by and
tried to utilize the same methods of manipulation (which
worked in their own country with a static social structure) on
the international arena. […] As a result, in many cases propa-
ganda aimed at the countries with open societies had little
effectiveness” (2013, 8).
Not all soft power is created equal. The success of the
U.S. information campaign after World War II can be attrib-
uted to the conscious weaponization of existing cultural pro-
ducts that were being produced independently of the state and
naturally appealed to millions worldwide: jazz, rock and roll,
Hollywood movies, fashion trends, and much more. The
postwar USSR attempted to frame its value system as
a universal one through broadcasters like Radio Moscow
4 P. K. DECKER
and Radio Peace and Progress, as well as international orga-
nizations such as Cominform, the World Peace Council, the
World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of
Democratic Youth, the International Union of Students, and
others. These organizations were premised on ideological and
economic, as opposed to cultural, messaging. The Soviet
Union had audiences across the noncommunist globe—such
as university students and professors, socialist parties in the
West, intellectuals and elite modernizers in the Third World,
guerrilla and anti-imperial movements in South America and
Africa—but the underlying appeal or superiority of Russian
culture was rarely the centerpiece of Soviet foreign propa-
ganda (notable exceptions include the export of ballet and
heavy involvement in international sports). This was the case
even as Eastern Bloc state media castigated Western popular
culture and glorified approved pre-revolutionary Russian wri-
ters and composers. According to Nye, “the Soviet Union
ceded the battle for mass culture, never competing with
American global influence in film, television, or popular
music. […] American music and films leaked into the Soviet
Union with profound effects, but the indigenous Soviet pro-
ducts never found an overseas market […] the Soviet Union
was never a serious competitor with the United States in soft
power during the Cold War” (2004, 74–75). Attempts to
domestically engineer communist-friendly mutations of
American cultural products—such as “Red Western” cowboy
movies and the managed importation of U.S. pop music
through socialist artists like Dean Reed—had some success,
but were unable to surmount the problem, because Eastern
Bloc publics perceived American popular culture as organic,
unforced, and authentic (Ryback 1990, 85–102; Hixson 1998;
Ritter 2013, 125; Allan 2016, 168–188). Sergei Zhuk notes the
1991 analysis of a former KGB officer: “The Soviet Union lost
the Cold War to the United States of America because our
Soviet ideologists failed a competition with the Western and
especially, American popular culture, and especially, with the
movies, television and music from the capitalist West”
(2014, 593).
The Kremlin’s Revised Soft Power Strategy
In order to succeed, any new information war conducted by
the Russian Federation based on the Soviet experience
required a recalibration, though not necessarily a wholesale
overhaul, of methodology. This is not to say that contempor-
ary Russian information campaigns mimic or copy the histor-
ical ones of the United States; rather, the theory of failure
salience suggests that they have probably internalized and
learned from the clear inability of Soviet propaganda tools
to achieve “soft power parity” while drawing upon and updat-
ing those same tools. For instance, a study by Steve Abrams
has shown that the Soviet practice of using “active mea-
sures”—including “covert media placement, forgery, agents
of influence, ‘friendship’ societies, front organizations”—has
been broadly retained in the Kremlin’s current arsenal,
though these tools have been adjusted for dissemination
through the Internet (2016, 18). At the same time, the collapse
of the Soviet Union precipitated a shift in disinformation
targets. In Abrams’s words: “Following the Cold War’s end,
while the use of ‘crude, anti-American disinformation’ waned,
the KGB’s active measures apparatus refocused its efforts,
ratcheting up attacks on a range of new targets” (2016, 14).
Rather than attempting to coopt the populations of entire
countries on a global scale, Putin’s foreign propaganda effort
has traded scope for effectiveness: it targets specific, manage-
able groups that possess either preexisting associations with
Russia, such as Germany’s population of Russian-speakers
(members of the so-called Russkii mir, or “Russian world”),
or identifiable affinity for Putin’s twin messages of cultural
conservativism and condemnation of Western “decadence,”
such as elements of the European far right. This is not simply
an exercise in spreading disinformation or sowing discord
within Europe, although the Russian government has sought
to do this (Ajir and Vailliant 2018). It seems to be, rather,
a revised soft power strategy that has succeeded in attracting
large parts of those political and ethnic subpopulations toward
the Russian Federation, and particularly toward the Putin
government’s traditionalist interpretation of Russian culture
(e.g., opposition to public displays of homosexuality; anti-
Islamic rhetoric; strong Christian faith; glorification of
Russian history).
It has been said that “Russian information warfare is not
consistent and strategic; its fundamental quality is tactical
opportunism” (Cull et al. 2017, 11). Stefan Meister contends
that Russia’s propaganda, created in pursuit of long-term
strategic interests, usually has no ideological preference so
long as the effect is to destabilize the target country’s poli-
tical system; in other words, the current emphasis on right-
wing parties is only a means to that end (Schwartz 2017).
Stefano Braghiroli and Andrey Makarychev have similarly
argued that Russia pursues a pragmatic “trans-ideological”
approach that courts both right- and left-wing populist
groups in order to threaten the center of European politics,
while crafting individualized “ad hoc messages, specifically
developed for each ‘ideological target’” (2016, 215). This
body of thought is often accompanied by the characteriza-
tion of Putin as a leader without true political convictions
beyond securing the indefinite maintenance of power, which
requires undermining the European Union’s (EU) stability
(this has been especially argued in the context of Putin’s
purported fear of the “color revolutions” and their potential
ripple effect in Russian domestic politics; see Horvath 2011).
While scholarship focuses on the interconnected intensifica-
tion of nationalism and foreign information operations in
the 2010s, the roots of Putin’s revanchist conservatism were
apparent long before Russia’s current soft power effort had
fully emerged, as the new president made apparent in
a series of speeches and interviews in the opening months
of his first term (President of Russia, 2000; Ajir and Vailliant
2018, 70).5 Likewise, the Kremlin’s relationship with
European far-right parties did not appear suddenly or erra-
tically, but was carefully cultivated over at least two decades.
Anton Shekhovtsov has documented how, during the 2000s,
the Russian government started shortlisting potential far-
right information targets in Western countries—including
constituencies of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and
France’s National Front (in 2018 renamed National Rally)—
and began supporting pro-Russian journals in foreign

languages, like Italy’s Eurasia: Rivisita di studi geopolitici,
and front organizations posturing as think tanks or centers
of learning, like the Vienna-based Austrian Technologies
GmbH (2018, 164–170, 176). This temperature-taking laid
the groundwork for the robust and much-publicized influ-
ence campaigns of the 2010s. Moreover, while it is true that
Putin’s government has supported radical left-wing groups
in addition to right-wing ones, there is genuine ideological
overlap between the populist, anti-progressive constituen-
cies of Europe and the nationalist dogma of the Russian
Federation (see case study for in-depth analysis; for exam-
ples of Russian connections to left-wing European parties,
including Germany’s Die Linke, see Braghiroli and
Makarychev 2016, 216). The Kremlin’s campaign is not
purely focused on conservative populations, but is unmis-
takably biased toward such groups because they are ideolo-
gically aligned with the Russian government’s traditionalist
rhetoric and policies.
It is important to view this phenomenon as more than just
a malicious attempt to damage European society, as it is some-
times portrayed. Soft power is a non-coercive means of achieving
desired outcomes, including and perhaps especially geopolitical
ones. If the ultimate objective of the Russian regime is to weaken
the EU from within in order to strengthen its own position—as is
alleged by Western intelligence services and EU officials alike—
then tactically speaking this is not so different from the United
States’ Cold War goal of creating rifts within and discrediting the
governments of the Eastern Bloc. As was the case in the past, the
effectiveness of a long-term soft power campaign continues to rest
on a credible presentation of an alternative social system that
stands in contrast to the one under criticism. In the contemporary
Russian context, such a campaign forms part of a larger effort to
promote the concept of “sovereign democracy,” which is
“expressly designed to legitimate […] a newly assertive proclama-
tion of unique Russian values alongside attempts to discredit
Western values and institutions” (March 2012, 402). Content
produced by the Kremlin’s media apparatus appears designed to
attract Russian-Germans, as well as other potentially Russophilic
peoples and political entities, by presenting Russia as
a traditionalist state that opposes the culturally permissive values
of the EU and has the moral authority to question or undermine
reporting in German and Western media (echoing, inversely, the
historical roles of RFE/RL and VOA).
Thematically, Russian propaganda organizations have
identified grievance as a motivating force in European poli-
tics. Among the factors that unify right-wing and Russophile
targets of Russian influence, both within and across countries,
is a shared sense of grievance against mutually intelligible
versions of the Western neoliberal order and a desire to rectify
perceived injustices and punish the perpetrators. The close
political relationship between AfD’s voter base and a large
segment of Germany’s Russian-speaking population is rooted
in the former’s belief that reunification had amounted to
a West German colonization project and the latter’s belief
that Germany’s culture of tolerance leads to discrimination
against Russian-speakers. Themes of resentment color
Russian propaganda; targeted content produced for Russian-
Germans revolves around themes of vengeance and punishing
or fighting back against the “decadent” and “immoral” West
PROBLEMS OF POST-COMMUNISM 5
for attacking Russia and persecuting its diaspora. By targeting
a particularly susceptible demographic with vengeance-
themed anti-Western content, Kremlin-funded news agencies
have been able to create or exacerbate both political destabi-
lization and physical unrest in Germany.
Case Study
Background
The German state does not publish data about ethnicity, and for
this reason it is impossible to ascertain precisely how many
migrants from the former Soviet Union, and Russian-speakers
more generally, live in Germany. The most credible figures have
been produced by researchers at Osnabrück University. In a 2017
report published for the Federal Agency for Civic Education,
Jannis Panagiotidis estimated that at least three million people
from the USSR have migrated to Germany since the 1980s, or just
over 3.5 percent of the country’s population. Of these, 2.3 million
are ethnic German Spätaussiedler and 215,000 are Russian
Jews (Panagiotidis 2017; for migrant data broken down by coun-
try of origin, see Destatis 2017).6 Smaller numbers of other post-
Soviet emigres are also present. Exactly how many within this
community speak Russian is unknown, but Panagiotidis (2017)
suggests that just under 2 million had lived in Russia or another
Soviet republic until at least the age of 10 and presumably received
primary schooling in the language. The number of Russian speak-
ers therefore equals 2 million plus the indeterminate number of
children and grandchildren who may have acquired Russian in
the home or community. Using a sample of 606 respondents (of
whom 95 percent were born outside Germany), an August-
September 2016 poll of Russian-Germans conducted by the
Boris Nemtsov Foundation suggested that 88 percent of respon-
dents speak Russian either at a native or fluent level, while 64 per-
cent speak German at a native or fluent level (Nemtsov
Foundation 2016). In 2017, ethnic German immigrants com-
prised 37 percent of the entire migrant vote in Germany
(Goerres, Spies and Mayer 2017, 1). While some ethnic
Germans had already come to West Germany during the early
Cold War, in the 1980s Helmut Kohl’s government instituted
a controversial “open-door policy” that encouraged mass repatria-
tion over the following decades, although a yearly quota was
imposed beginning in 1993 (Oezcan 2004). Spätaussiedler were
typically put on a fast-track for citizenship rights and offered
integration classes; they are largely bilingual, and many families
speak both German and Russian in the household (Nemtsov
Foundation 2016).
While the term “Russian-Germans” is often used to refer
specifically to Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, for the sake
of brevity this case study uses that phrase to refer to all
Russian-speakers in Germany. Specific subsections within
this group will be indicated when needed. It should also be
noted from the outset that the study only refers to part of the
Russian-German population. Fifteen prominent community
organizations have published an open letter stating: “[There
is a] very one-sided portrayal of ethnic Germans from Russia
as a particularly motivated group of voters. […] We are not
the AfD, not the CDU, and not Putin’s fifth column! We are
individuals like all other citizens of our country!” (Gurkov
6 P. K. DECKER
2017). To avoid mischaracterization, this paper’s analysis tries
to be as objective as possible by referring to the available data,
scholarship, fact-based investigative reporting, and primary
sources. Certainly not all Russian-Germans are supporters of
AfD or Putin’s regime.
Russian-Germans enjoy a large menu of Russian-language
media, both locally produced and broadcast from Russia via
satellite television or the Internet, and are serviced by
a network of newspapers and other print media. Beginning
in the 1990s and early 2000s, print publications included
Evropazentr, Russkij Berlin/Russkaja Germanija, Vostochny
Express, MiR Medien in Russisch, Neue Semljaki,
Kommersant Weekly, and Moskovskii Komsomolets
Germanija (Darieva 2001). Online publications include
Heimat Rodina, which is published in both German and
Russian, and anonymousnews.ru, which is only in German.
More recently, Russian social media apps such as
Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte have become popular sources
of information among members of the
community (Mitrokhin 2017). Satellite television and the
Internet provide access to Russian channels and websites
including Rossiya 1, RIA Novosti, REN-TV, Channel One,
RT and its branches Ruptly and RT Deutsch, and
Sputnik (Meister 2016). On the other hand, Russian-
Germans—who have been described as an “invisible” minor-
ity—are seldom featured in German-language media.
According to University of Bremen researcher and Eurozine
journalist Nikolay Mitrokhin: “Although German TV chan-
nels recognize the presence of other linguistic minorities in
the country, particularly Turkish speakers, they almost
entirely ignore Russophones. There are no Russian modera-
tors or lead actors in serials, and they seldom participate in
talk shows. […] No documentaries are made about the pro-
blems and achievements of Russian speakers” (2017). Atlantic
Expedition analyst Mathias Weber has contended that the
community also holds resentments about the status of
Russians or the Russian government as default villains in
Western cinema (2017).
Prior to 2015, Russian-Germans were a largely apolitical
group. A 2013 analysis conducted by the Federal Office for
Migration and Refugees reported that “[i]n comparison with
other immigrant groups, [Spätaussiedler] most often have
long-term future plans for a life in Germany, are more satis-
fied with their life situation, and are above average in posi-
tively assessing the integration climate” (Worbs et al. 2013, 7–
11). The same report stated that, although such immigrants
“have favorable conditions for political participation in
Germany, since they quickly acquire German citizenship and
thus full participation rights, […] political interest and corre-
sponding activities in Germany are rather small” (Worbs et al.
2013, 7–11). However, some Russian-Germans feel that their
community is ignored, disfavored, or persecuted (Golova
2017). In particular, there is a widespread perception among
Soviet-born peoples of German ethnicity that they are treated
as foreigners by native Germans (despite self-reporting high
levels of integration) (Nemtsov Foundation 2016). The
Facebook page “Russian Germans for the AfD,” which had
about 13,000 followers as of March 2020, posted a German-
language description note on February 25, 2019: “We are
among the much-scolded Russian Germans who came to
Germany decades ago. […] Observed suspiciously by the
local population, we still managed to integrate successfully
here, although not all wounds healed and not all humiliations
are forgotten.” The community as a whole also suffers from
a lack of formal political representation. Until the 2017 elec-
tions, the only Russian-German in the Bundestag was Kazakh-
born deputy Heinrich Zertik, a member of the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), who was dropped from the CDU
list in 2017 (Applebaum et al. 2017, 16). While Russian-
Germans once voted for the CDU in great numbers because
that party had invited them to Germany during the 1980s,
a 2017 study found that younger members of the community
in particular were losing interest in voting for the mainstream
conservative party (Goerres et al. 2017, 20).
Social and potentially racial and homophobic tensions are
also in play. Part of the Russian-German population is known
to be resentful of Middle Eastern and North African migrants,
who are perceived to be a class favored by the German
government at the expense of Russian-speaking immigrants.
The Nemtsov Foundation poll found that 72 percent of
Russian-Germans believed that some terrorists were pretend-
ing to be refugees and a plurality of 43 percent believed that
refugees could never integrate into German society. Forty-
one percent of respondents also deemed having
a homosexual neighbor as “not acceptable” living conditions
(well above the native German average) (Schumacher 2018).
These data correspond to investigative reporting and aca-
demic work about the community describing feelings of dis-
taste for what is perceived as German society’s excessive
culture of tolerance and fear of its consequences (Mitrokhin
2017; Goerres et al. 2017, 17). In one example cited by Ostpol
journalist Moritz Gathmann (2017), a board member of
a Cologne organization of Russian-speaking parents described
widespread community opposition to helping Muslim refu-
gees due to perceived risks for children.
Stage 1: Niche Population Targeting
Stage 1 of the Russian propaganda effort consists of niche
population targeting. The Kremlin has capitalized on the
destabilizing potential of Russian-Germans in two primary
ways: by aiding AfD in appealing to those voters and by
spreading propaganda to the diaspora directly through social
media, television news reporting, and Internet sites, with the
apparent aim of breeding resentment and disaffection and
ultimately mobilizing the population to cause unrest (see
Stage 4).
Aiding AfD
Although AfD does not directly receive funds from Russian
sources (as France’s National Rally has), the party was in
contact with the Russian political establishment during the
2017 election season (Nasr 2017). In February of that year,
AfD leaders Frauke Petry and Julian Flak traveled to Moscow
for consultation with Russian political figures. Present at the
meeting were Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, LDPR

chairman Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and United Russia deputy and
former Channel One reporter Pyotr Tolstoy. In the election,
AfD fielded six Russian-German candidates for the Bundestag,
the largest such pool in the history of any party in German
politics. Two of these, Anton Friesen and Waldemar Herdt,
were successful and are now that body’s only Russian-
Germans (Applebaum et al. 2017, 16; Wehner 2018).
A months-long Institute for Strategic Dialogue/London
School of Economics (ISD/LSE) analysis of Kremlin-funded
German-language media organizations such as Sputnik
Deutschland and RT-Deutsch found that both “were consis-
tently negative in their coverage of German officials and insti-
tutions; the AfD was the only exception” (Applebaum et al.
2017, 12). A related study of German Twitter accounts con-
ducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that
this praise for AfD has earned those two websites a place within
the regular media diet of committed AfD voters (Fielding-
Smith and Black 2017). Surveying nearly 35,000 tweets origi-
nating from AfD-affiliated accounts, the study assessed just
under 11,000 URLs. RT-Deutsch was found to be in the top
ten most shared news sites, while Sputnik Deutschland was in
the top twenty.
AfD’s association with the Putin government is fueled in
significant part by ideological agreement. As the authors of
the ISD/LSE study put it, AfD candidates’ platforms “often
overlap with the Russian nationalist agenda,” which is why
“[o]f all the political forces in Germany, [AfD] maintains the
strongest links with Russia” (Applebaum et al. 2017, 10).
Echoing Putin’s publicly stated beliefs, notions of Western
betrayal predominate in domestic Russian media, where
NATO is seen to have promised prosperity and stable govern-
ment in the 1990s and, rather than delivering results, pounced
upon a weakened Russia for exploitation and profit, leaving
behind a damaged culture. AfD, whose headquarters and
sturdiest voter base are in the former German Democratic
Republic (GDR), has proven a natural partner in this regard,
for it too has drawn upon feelings of Western treachery in
a German context: specifically, the historical perception
among East Germans that Helmut Kohl had not pursued
reunification as the fusion of two coequal states and the idea
that West Germany had “internally colonized” the former
GDR in the 1990s (Stack 1997; for examples of colonization
narratives in Kremlin-funded media, see Posdnjakow 2018;
Külbel 2019). Petra Köpping, minister of integration for
Saxony and a member of the German Social Democratic
Party (SPD), stated in an October 2018 interview that she
believes “the humiliation of the people in the East has led to
a greater rush to the AfD,” an explanation she prioritizes over
the post-2015 migrant crisis, which acted as a catalyst
(Hildebrandt 2018). When asked if voters in the former
GDR made this choice “out of pure protest,” she replied,
"[e]xactly. People had the feeling that the democratic parties
such as the CDU, SPD or Left had not taken care of their
problems. They then elected the AfD to signal to the parties:
Wake up!” (Hildebrandt 2018). Participants in a multiday
April 2019 conference at eastern Saxony’s Knappenrode
energy museum titled “Eastern Colony? Aspects of
‘Colonization’ in East Germany since 1990” concluded that
“the hardships of the ‘modernization’ of the East remain
PROBLEMS OF POST-COMMUNISM 7
obvious. […] [T]he lack of prospects [has led to] an increased
willingness to choose the AfD” (Stange 2019). Drawing upon
these frustrations, Kremlin-funded media have implied
a sense of kindred spirit between AfD’s bloc of native East
German voters and Russian-speakers who feel as if they have
been abandoned or discriminated against by the German
state.
Targeting of Russian-Germans
Much of the propaganda consumed by Russian-Germans,
particularly on social media networks, specifically invokes
themes of resentment or mistreatment, cultural and political
disaffection, and revenge against Russia’s enemies. The mate-
rial is generally constructed around two intertwined poles: on
the one hand, the greatness of Russia and of its values, and on
the other, a sick and brainwashed West that seeks to destroy
Russia. Investigative reporting for Eurozine conducted by
Mitrokhin has unearthed some of this content in the
German spheres of Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte:
[Topics include] Russian food and drink (a form of patriotic “food
porn”); nostalgia for the USSR; the uniqueness of everything
Russian; the greatness of Russian history or the importance of
Russia’s victory in World War II; patriotism; the power of the
Russian army or of Russians generally; Putin; and the inanity,
ugliness or unacceptability of anything foreign (this is likely to
involve blatant racism, antisemitism and homophobia). Overall,
demotivators [a kind of meme] serve to affirm identity and define
“us” or “our fellow-countrymen” in the face of constant attacks by
“jackasses” from Ukraine, “Gayropa” and the USA. Thousands of
demotivators of this kind are produced on what is clearly
a professional basis. Presumably this is done in “troll factories”
functioning within the framework of the “partnership between
private and state enterprise” that characterizes Putin’s
Russia. (Mitrokhin 2017; for further discussion of troll factories
in Russia, see Abrams 2016, 18–22)
The ISD/LSE study found similar results in the areas of news
and public opinion:
Kremlin-affiliated media in Russia, with a heavy AFD bias, has
a significant reach within Russian-German audiences. In August
[2017], Kremlin-sponsored outlets devoted significant coverage to
topics relating to ideas of a strong Russia and weak Europe, such as
the “Crisis of European Union,” the “Western Plot Against Russia,”
“Russian Patriotism” and “Decadent Western Values.” The topic of
“World War II” was also used to stigmatize the population with the
possibility of a war and Russia’s apparent need to protect itself
against the enemy. (Applebaum et al. 2017, 17)
In testimony on the upcoming German elections delivered to
the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence on June 28,
2017, the Brookings Institution’s Constanze Stelzenmüller
stated that “narratives of Russian disinformation focus on
alleged U.S. and NATO aggression, migrants and refugees,
and radical Islam” (2017).
Meanwhile, the Nemtsov Foundation poll reports that
“Russian TV viewers feel more fear of migrants and refugees,
more worry about terrorism threat.” Those who receive
60 percent or more of their news from Russian as opposed
to German television are 17 percent more likely to believe that
refugees make crime problems worse, 13 percent more likely
to favor closing Germany’s borders, and 10 percent more
likely to believe that refugees have terrorists among them.
8 P. K. DECKER
A former Protestant pastor from Marzahn-Hellersdorf, an
area of eastern Berlin with a heavy Russian-speaking popula-
tion, commented that “[t]here are Germans from Russia who
see themselves as the real Germans. In their eyes, we have
turned away from German virtues. […] The nationalism of
the AfD and Russian nationalism, which is propagated on
Russian state television, are not so dissimilar” (Mai 2016).
The use of jingoistic and anti-Western themes to incite
anger and resentment among the Russian diaspora has been
termed a “Trojan Horse” strategy in the English-speaking
media (Meyer 2017).
Thus, the political beneficiary (AfD) and the target (Russian-
Germans) of the resentment-themed propaganda campaign both
share similar notions of grievance about Western failure. In the
case of native East German AfD voters, anger is directed at the
Western-dominated reunified government’s conduct after 1990;
in the case of Russian-Germans, at their purportedly second-class
status compared to Muslim migrants and homosexuals, due to the
corruption and hypocrisy of “Western values.” These mutual
resentments make Russian-Germans a uniquely good target and
AfD a uniquely good outlet.
Stage 2: Domestic Media Delegitimization and Foreign
Overreliance
After establishing a supply of Kremlin-controlled information
to Russian-Germans, the next phase of the cooptation process
echoes, inversely, the long-term goals of RFE/RL and VOA
during the Cold War: delegitimizing and promoting doubt of
domestic, Western news sources while creating overreliance
on Russian ones.7 Although the Kremlin’s foreign media
produce significantly more disinformation than RFE/RL’s
broadcasting did, it has still tried to achieve the reputation
for external investigation and independent reporting that
American radio enjoyed during the Cold War (Horner
2018). Russia Beyond the Headlines, for example, has been
described by Bruk as “[portraying] itself as a neutral and
reliable source of news regarding Russian events and culture,
[even though] its content mostly reflects or supports the
official agenda of the government” (2013, 13).
Content consumed by Russian-Germans claims that
Western news sources are blinded by progressive ideology,
militarism, and Russophobia and cannot be relied upon for
a fair assessment of world events. A few representative exam-
ples will suffice. A Russian-language RIA Novosti article of
March 25, 2016, titled “Coverage of the Ukrainian Crisis as
the Apotheosis of Western Hysteria,” quotes Russian political
analyst Yuri Svetov, who states: “I was abroad when [Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17] was shot down over Ukraine. And in our
hotel we had newspapers from all over the world. They
actually had identical headlines saying Putin was the culprit.
The same thing could be found on various television channels.
It was like a blueprint. The only channel that had something
else was RT” (Cherednik 2016). Other articles accuse German
news agencies of botching coverage of the Syrian Civil War
and tend to quote Germans who criticize their own media. An
October 6, 2016, piece titled “German Journalist: In the West,
Reports about the War in Syria Are Full of Lies,” with content
taken from an interview on Sputnik Deutsch with Jürgen
Todenhofer, quoted him as saying that “the coverage of the
war that we receive in the West is completely false and one-
sided” (RIA Novosti 2016). Meanwhile, journalistic failures in
Germany, most prominently the December 2018 Der Spiegel
scandal involving discredited journalist Claas Relotius, are
quickly exploited as further evidence of bias. An RT Deutsch
article of March 28, 2019, plainly titled “Criticism of the
German Press Landscape,” stated that “[i]t has been suspected
for years that the German press landscape is not so precise
with the truth. Cases like Claas Relotius seem to confirm
distrust of the press” (Percinic 2019).
The limited polling that is available suggests that the twin
goals of delegitimization and overreliance had been at least
partially achieved by 2016. According to the Nemtsov
Foundation data collected during that year, of the approxi-
mately two-thirds of Russian-Germans who use the Internet
and watch television daily, 37 percent use exclusively Russian-
language websites and 40 percent watch only Russian-
language television; among Russian Jews, 50 percent of all
television content consumed is in Russian. When asked the
question, "[h]ow much do you trust Russian media to portray
politics and current affairs in a truthful way?” 32 percent of
television viewers answered either “trust somewhat” or “trust
completely,” 35 percent answered that they neither trust nor
distrust Russian television, and 22 percent expressed some
amount of distrust (heavy users of Russian media consistently
reported higher levels of trust than lighter users). When asked
the same question with regard to Russian Internet sites,
21 percent expressed trust, 24 percent distrust, and 32 percent
answered neither nor. Responses to the statement “Western
media is more trustworthy than Russian media” yielded the
breakdown: 19 percent agreed, 30 percent disagreed, and
39 percent neither agreed nor disagreed.
These results suggest that Russian media organizations
have gone a significant distance toward accomplishing the
objectives of Stage 2: large majorities of both television view-
ers and Internet users either consider Russian media trust-
worthy or consider German sources of information to be no
more legitimate than Russian counterparts. Nearly 70 percent
of those polled do not consider German media to be more
trustworthy than Russian media, including a substantial num-
ber of bilingual individuals. In the words of Sergej Tschernow,
a Leningrad-born AfD candidate in the 2017 Bundestag elec-
tions for Hannover, Russian media “don’t interpret. They
don’t criticize us. They don’t ask provocative questions to
get something out of us. From our point of view, they are
objectively showing events. So we love them” (Shuster 2017).
Stage 3: German Cultural Delegitimization vs. Russian
Alternative
Mirroring the way that American radio broadcasting during
the Cold War gave glimpses of a dynamic and culturally open
United States that became a symbol of a better life, the
Russian propaganda campaign in Germany has sought to
convince its target populations of a binary narrative: on the
one hand, German society’s moral and cultural failings, and
on the other, the Putin regime’s status as a bastion of
Christian faith, “traditional values,” and opposition to

Islamism, political correctness, family disintegration, and tol-
erance of homosexuality. Although public attitudes toward
Russia tend to be more conciliatory in Germany than in
other NATO states, Ipsos polling has shown that in ideologi-
cal terms the broader German public rejects by a 3-to-1
margin Putin’s claims as a “defender of Christendom and
traditional European values” (Center for Insights in Survey
Research 2017). In the Russian-German community, there is
more receptiveness to this interpretation of Putin’s presi-
dency. While the question has not been asked directly in the
existing polling, other data as well as the widespread presence
of pro-Putin and anti-Western material in the local Russian-
German press suggest that at least part of the community buys
into those theses. According to the Nemtsov poll, 52 percent
of Russian-Germans believe that the West is unjustly preju-
diced toward Russia (while 15 percent do not), 44 percent
believe that Putin’s Russia is a “source of international poli-
tical stability” (while 15 percent do not), and 37 percent
believe that “Russia should do more to protect ethnic
Russians living abroad” (while 22 percent do not). In
a study of migrant voting patterns during the 2017 election,
Achim Goerres, Dennis Spies, and Sabrina Mayer interviewed
a randomized sample of about 500 Russian-German voters.
Seventy-one percent of those born in Russia expressed sup-
port for Putin’s annexation of Crimea (versus only 30 percent
of those born in Ukraine), and 60 percent of Soviet-born
voters supported the annexation overall (Goerres, Spies and
Mayer 2018, 11).
The local Russian-German media are replete with
a combination of scathing criticism of German society and
pro-Putin views that are probably even more intense than
those held by the community at large. According to Nikolai
Klimeniouk, “Xenophobic motifs in the [local] media aimed
at the Russian-speaking minority in Germany are very pro-
nounced, even dominant. The leitmotif of the media […] is
usually migration; it is generally presented as the most urgent
problem in Germany. Even relatively moderate newspapers
are spreading a picture [of] alienation and Islamization, refu-
gee catastrophe” (2018). Klimeniouk describes an issue of
Russkaja Germanija (sold as Russkij Berlin in the Berlin
area), picked at random, from the week of June 12, 2017:
“[of] the ten cover stories […] five were devoted to Islamist
terror” (2018). The weekly newspaper Moskovskii
Komsomolets Germanija (MK-Germanija), a German edition
of the Moscow tabloid of the same name, features especially
extreme paranoia about the “Islamization” of the West. The
issue for the week of March 17, 2016, ran an article called
“Germans Teach Migrants ‘Tolerant’ Sex” that includes
a doctored image of a billboard in Finland showing three
brown-skinned men raping a blonde woman with the words
(written in English) “RAPE – RAPE – RAPE – You can do it
in Finland – Refugees can do anything! – Contact the Finnish
embassy now – You will not be punished!”; an advertisement
for AfD is beside the article stating “Red Card for Merkel!
Asylum Requires Borders!”8 Opinion columns in Russian-
German media have expressed disappointment in the discre-
pancy between the Germany that was promised and Germany
as it is. For instance, a July 8, 2017, online piece in the
publication Heimat Rodina states: “One wonders why
PROBLEMS OF POST-COMMUNISM 9
traditional values gave way to the cosmopolitan urge, but at
the same time fundamental Islamism is tolerated on account
of political correctness! The FRG [Federal Republic of
Germany] was a disappointment for Russian-Germans in
this regard. It was not the Germany that grandfather and
father told stories of in Kazakhstan, the Urals, or in Siberia”
(Krause 2017).
Meanwhile, expressions of support for the Putin regime
and its policies are common: Russkaja Germanija presents this
praise in more subdued form, while tabloid papers like MK-
Germanija engage in what Klimeniouk calls open “Putin-
worship” (2018). In the former, an August 18, 2016, edition
ran an article titled “Vladimir Putin Has His Own Picture of
the World” that heavily implies the leader’s resolve, vision,
originality, and independence from the influence of others:
“Vladimir Putin […] is a person who lives by his own logic,
which can be contrasted, for instance, with the logic of
German politicians.” A much more explicit edition of MK-
Germanija for the week of August 8, 2016, included an article
that praises the “thousand times correct” Putin for rejecting
a “unipolar world” and featured photographs of a bare-
chested Putin holding a large fish and another comparing
his appearance to that of Harrison Ford, with the caption
“Vladimir ‘Indiana Jones’ Putin.” On the online German-
language news site anonymousnews.ru, an article of July 2,
2017, was titled “Putin on Europe: Gender Mania and
Migration Mean National Death—Do You Not Understand
That?” (anonymousnews.ru 2017b). An earlier article of May 5
was headlined “Vladimir Putin Tough: Russia Imposes Flight
Ban for US Jets over Syria” and opens with the line “Russia is
kicking the war-hungry Americans neatly in the ass!” (anon-
ymousnews.ru 2017a).
A feedback loop has emerged between the Kremlin’s tar-
geted propaganda and the local Russian-German press such
that the editorial decisions in the two overlapping media
spheres produce highly similar content. The reliably binary
nature of the local press’s political content—depicting
European weakness on the one hand and Russian strength,
independence, and traditionalism on the other—indicates
that, for a segment of Russian-German writers and readers,
the Kremlin’s information war has successfully delegitimized
German political and social culture and in its place has put
forth the Putin regime as a defender of traditional values,
national identity, and “sane” social policy.
Stage 4: Political Destabilization and Unrest
The fourth and final phase of a targeted soft power campaign
becomes possible when a sufficiently large group of people
routinely trusts foreign over domestic media and considers
the broadcaster’s culture to be in some way superior to the
one they live in. During this last phase—which, once achieved
during the Cold War, continued indefinitely until regime
change occurred—the target population is encouraged to
express dissatisfaction in two distinct ways: in political
terms, by voting (if possible) for political parties favored by
the propagandists, and unrest, which entails gathering in large
groups to protest conditions in public.9 The propaganda effort
in Germany has been able to mobilize the Russian-speaking
10 P. K. DECKER
population to produce both of these outcomes and has done
so by inflaming righteous anger and advocating retribution. In
the buildup to the 2017 election, Russian propaganda char-
acterized voting for AfD as a form of protest against multi-
culturalism and discrimination against Russian-speakers and
played a role in generating community turnout for the party.
In terms of fomenting unrest, Russian media capitalized on an
event that occurred in January 2016 to generate street protests
across Germany. Although the event—the purported rape of
a thirteen-year-old Russian-German girl by Muslim migrants
—was ultimately proven to have never occurred, Russian news
agencies used the incident as proof of the German govern-
ment’s moral bankruptcy, its disregard of and cruelty toward
Russians, and of the need for the Russian-German community
to protect its young women from predators supposedly
favored by the state.
Electoral Results: Voting to Punish and Destabilize System
Benefiting from Russian-speakers’ lack of political representation
and feelings of cultural alienation, AfD has been able to coopt
part of that community into its voter base. Especially after 2015,
AfD began to campaign heavily in Russian-speaking districts and
was the only party to pay significant attention to that group
during the 2017 election cycle. The party’s message emphasized
the notion that the ruling CDU did not care about Russians and
instead favored Muslim migrants, who were depicted as unruly
and law-breaking (Mitrokhin 2017). A few examples of targeted
campaigning: In Berlin residential neighborhoods, AfD pro-
duced pamphlets, flyers, and posters printed specifically in
Russian, while in Magdeburg, a prominent AfD campaigner
convened a so-called “Russia conference […] at which speakers
warned of a coming ‘Islamic invasion’ and praised Vladimir
Putin” (Mai 2016). AfD-affiliated media in Germany including
Zuerst!, Compact Magazine (which employs Russian-German
journalists such as Katrin Ziske), Epoch Times, and particularly
Junge Freiheit systematically support Kremlin positions, includ-
ing the annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern
Ukraine (Applebaum et al. 2017, 11, 19). In September 2017,
AfD ran a Russian-language, front-page advertisement in the
newspaper Telegraf Nordrhein-Westfalen on behalf of Evgeny
Schmidt, one of its Russian-German Bundestag candidates:
“Stopping migrant chaos; securing the safety of our citizens;
achieving decent pensions; upholding the traditional family;
preserving Christian traditions; restoring good-neighborly rela-
tions with Russia.” In the words of Alexander Reiser, head of
a Russian-German advocacy organization: “The AfD really
looked after the Russian Germans like no other party”
(Shuster 2017).
AfD’s gamble for Russian-German votes proved an
unequivocal success, especially considering that as late as
2013 voting patterns of districts with heavy Russian-German
populations tended to favor mainstream or left-leaning par-
ties. In Marzahn-Hellersdorf, just 4.9 percent of 2013 voters
had selected AfD, a number that quadrupled in 2017. While
the party’s best results are concentrated in the territory of the
former GDR, it has been able to make gains among Russian-
speakers throughout the country. According to an analysis by
Klimeniouk, in the 2016 Baden-Württemberg elections, AfD
won 43 and 50 percent of the vote in the Russian districts of
Pforzheim and Wertheim am Main, respectively (Mitrokhin
2017). Nationwide, AfD spokespeople have estimated that
Russian-Germans comprise approximately one third of the
party’s entire voter share (though data were not produced to
substantiate this claim, which may be inflated) (Shuster 2017).
The 2018 study by Goerres, Spies, and Mayer determined that
15 percent of Russian-Germans had voted for AfD, though
the authors acknowledge that this is a conservative estimate
and that fear of stigma may have led to underreporting (the
“shy Tory” effect). Turkish voters, the other migrant group
surveyed in the study, yielded 0 percent support for AfD. Of
Russian-German AfD voters, one third had not participated in
the 2013 election, another third had voted for CDU, and one
quarter had voted for SPD, suggesting an increase in political
engagement and that the mainstream left and right had both
bled support. Only 7 percent of Russian-German AfD voters
in 2017 had voted for the party in 2013. Moreover, Russian-
German support exceeded the national AfD total of 12.6 per-
cent even though that group’s turnout rate of 58 percent was
lower than the non-migrant German rate of 76.2 percent.
Perhaps most notably, the authors state that “[i]ndividuals
who felt discriminated against were more likely to participate
in the election than those who did not feel discriminated
against” (Goerres et al. 2018, 5). In a post-election interview,
analyst Tatiana Golova submitted the following interpretation:
The attraction of AfD, for its part, lies in disenchantment: “we
returned to our homeland and found it completely different.”
Russian Germans discovered that Germans didn’t actually see
them as fellow Germans. They felt discriminated [sic], even as
they underwent a process of assimilation that led them to a variety
of political positions. […] [Ethnic Germans] are particularly sen-
sitive on this point: “we waited so long and then these refugees
turned up and they let them in straight away—why was it all so
unfair?” (Golova 2017)
A separate community focus group convened by Goerres,
Spies, and Mayer in the leadup to the general election
reflected that assessment of the migrant crisis. An older man
in his 60s stated, "[w]e had huge problems entering the
country. And other people have it really easy. They are simply
waved through” (Goerres, et al. 2017, 17). Immigration was
a salient election issue for the community—especially among
ethnic Germans who submitted a protest vote due to percep-
tions that Muslim migrants enjoyed favored status that the
former had been denied.
Lisa Case
On the night of January 11, 2016, a thirteen-year-old girl
living in Berlin’s Marzahn-Hellersdorf district abruptly disap-
peared. Lisa, the daughter of Russian immigrants of German
ethnicity and a dual citizen, had been walking home from
school but did not arrive, which prompted her parents to call
the police and to put up missing posters around the
neighborhood (Windisch 2016). Thirty hours later, Lisa was
found standing on a street asking passersby to help her return
to her parents. When she came home, she told her family that
she had been kidnapped by three Arab men who repeatedly
raped her. A subsequent police investigation established that
she had been neither abducted nor raped but had gone to the
apartment of an older Turkish man with whom she had

previously been in an unlawful sexual relationship (the
German age of consent is 14 years). She did not have inter-
course at any time during the thirty hours of her absence. Lisa
subsequently admitted to police that she had invented the
story: she had been struggling academically, heard that her
parents would be informed by the school, and did not want to
face them (Wehmeyer, Rossberg and Jendro 2016). Although
no individuals of her initial description were ever found, the
Turkish man (a German citizen) was sentenced to nearly two
years in prison for statutory rape and the production of child
pornography. A second man, a Turkish citizen, had also had
intercourse with Lisa, but charges against him were dropped
after police were unable to prove that he had known she was
underage.
Rumors that a Russian girl had been raped by migrants
immediately propagated throughout Marzahn-Hellersdorf by
way of social media, then to the rest of Germany and to
Russia. On the night of Lisa’s disappearance, locals photo-
graphed the missing person notices and posted the images to
Facebook, where they were swiftly reshared within the com-
munity and to friends and relatives in Russia (Berliner Zeitung
2017). Soon after Lisa came home, social media users passed
around reports of a rape with headlines such as “13-year-old
raped for 30 hours by migrants” and “13-year-old raped—
politics and media silent” (Berliner Zeitung 2017). On
January 14, a group of five men shouting in Russian attacked
a migrant camp across the street from the school where Lisa
studied (Berliner Zeitung 2017). The next day, Lisa admitted
that she had not been raped, but her parents did not believe her
and came to the conclusion that she had been pressured by
police into recanting her original claims (Berliner Zeitung
2017). On January 16, a woman claiming to be Lisa’s aunt
appeared at a rally of the ultranationalist National Democratic
Party of Germany near a shopping center in Marzahn and
stated that the police and media were covering up the story.
A camera team working for Channel One was present at the
rally and interviewed the woman and several others. The same
evening, Channel One ran a story on Russian television featur-
ing Berlin correspondent Ivan Blagoy which repeated claims
that Lisa had been raped by three Middle Eastern
men (McGuinness 2016). The story was quickly reshared across
social media and by January 27 it had been viewed a million
times on Facebook alone. Soon after the story aired, German
human rights activist and lawyer Martin Luithle reported
Blagoy to the Berlin prosecutor’s office for incitement of ethnic
hatred (Kosyakov 2016). Luithle justified his decision in an
interview with RFE/RL: “What [the Russian journalist] is say-
ing is that the state doesn’t work anymore, the police don’t
work anymore. […] He tells the Russian-speaking people of
Germany: ‘Help yourself, the police can’t protect you anymore.’
This is a super-dangerous thing” (Shamanska 2016).
The messages of a corrupt police force and the need for
a community response rapidly propagated across Kremlin-
funded networks. On January 17, Sputnik Deutschland picked
up the story with the headline: “Berlin: Minors Raped, Police
Inactive.” The article read: “A minor girl was raped in Berlin,
allegedly by a group of immigrant men. Citizens speak of
impunity. […] It is not an isolated case. The police deny
both the rape and the kidnapping. […] The women are
PROBLEMS OF POST-COMMUNISM 11
particularly scared. They now want to accompany their chil-
dren to school and then pick them up. […] Lisa’s relatives say
that the police do not want to look for the criminals” (Sputnik
Deutschland 2016). It went on to quote several members of
the Marzahn Russian-German community, including one
man who said “They rape girls, kids. If so, we will respond
to violence with force. There is no other way” (Sputnik
Deutschland 2016). As rumors spread, Russian news agencies
published ever more exaggerated reports of the event. On the
same day, the website of Vesti published an article titled “In
Berlin, Six Migrants Raped a Girl from Russia for 30 Hours,”
which read: “[Lisa] said that at least five young people of Arab
origin had grabbed her, dragged her into a car and blind-
folded her. And then they brought her to an empty apartment,
where there was only one bed, and raped her for 30 hours.
Then, half-dead, she was thrown out in one of the Berlin
districts. This is not yet confirmed. The police are silent […]
the victim’s uncle said that the police did not respond to the
incident properly and the media was their only hope” (Vesti
2016). On January 18, the Berlin police announced in
a Facebook post that “there was neither kidnapping nor
rape,” though the case was not declared closed. On the
same day, Komsomolskaya Pravda interviewed Heinrich
Groth, chairman of the Berlin-based International
Convention of Russian-Germans, who rejected official con-
clusions outright: “All this is really true, and the police are
making stupid and absurd attempts to hush up the situation.
[…] They intimidated the girl and her parents. And there is
complete silence in the [mainstream German] media. There’s
just a wall. Look at this strong political correctness! Therefore,
we took a different path—social networks, e-mails. […] Lisa is
badly injured and is in a state of half-shock. And no one is
even looking for the criminals” (Chinkova 2016).
Especially among heavy consumers of Kremlin media, the
belief that German authorities were lying about Lisa’s rape and
that law enforcement could not be relied upon to secure justice
for her family had already been established within a week of
January 11. Exacerbating the issue was the fact that, by chance,
Lisa’s disappearance had coincided with a national scandal
relating to an incidence of mass sexual assault throughout
Germany on New Year’s Eve in which most perpetrators
were in fact people of North African origin. On January 19,
Russian media reported that a protest would soon be held in
front of the chancellor’s office in Berlin, and on January 23, 700
Russian-Germans gathered there (Hudnikova 2016). On the
same day, RT Deutsch published footage of the event on
YouTube, with a description containing the same sentence
that accompanies all of the agency’s videos: “RT Deutsch
accepts the challenge of shaking up the established German
media landscape and questioning established opinions with
alternative reporting. We show and write what is otherwise
concealed or cut away” (RT Deutsch 2016). Meanwhile, public
demonstrations formed elsewhere in the country. It is esti-
mated that at least ten thousand people participated in more
than twenty protests across Germany. In the Baden-
Württemberg town of Villingen-Schwenningen, police
described a crowd of at least 1,300 people (Nechepurenko
and Smale 2016). Hundreds gathered in Schweinfurt,
Ellwangen, Nuremberg, and Augsburg, while groups of varying
12 P. K. DECKER
sizes appeared in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Lahr, Rastatt, Ansbach,
and Neustadt. Two hundred and fifty demonstrators in
Bielefeld brought German-language signs stating “Together
against chaos” and “We trust in the media increasingly less.”
The organizer of the rally, Valentin Janke, stated in an inter-
view that “It is not just about Lisa. In general, we want order
and safety to be restored in Germany. We are not against
refugees, but against criminals. We demand protection and
safety for our women and children” (Gunkel and Sternberg
2016). In Pforzheim-Haidach, where more than half the popu-
lation of about 8,500 consists of Russian-Germans, local leaders
convinced nearly a thousand residents to attend a protest rally.
Haidach had previously been considered a quiet, unremarkable,
and orderly part of the city (Handelsblatt 2019).
The Lisa scandal reached maximum publicity when
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made public com-
ments about the story. On January 26, he declared at
a Moscow press availability: “We wish Germany success in
dealing with the enormous problems caused by migrants.
I hope these issues do not get swept under the rug, repeating
the situation when a Russian girl’s disappearance in Germany
was hushed up for a long time for some reason. Now, at least,
we are communicating with her lawyer, who is working with
her family and with the Russian Embassy. It is clear that Lisa
did not exactly decide voluntarily to disappear for 30 hours.
Truth and justice must prevail here” (Ministry of Foreign
Affairs 2016). Lavrov’s comment provided credibility for the
protesters and invoked the scandal’s subtext: that Germany
was weak-willed and tolerant of migrant criminals while
Russia’s government would seek justice for the victim.
Moreover, Lavrov acted in parallel with Russian news agencies
by presenting himself as an external truth-seeker, uncovering
what the German government had sought to cover up.
Although sporadic protests continued until March, the move-
ment lost momentum in February and Kremlin-funded networks
eventually moved on to other topics. However, the implications of
the crisis were not lost upon the German government. Berlin
accused Moscow of running a disinformation campaign and
launched an investigation. According to a postmortem working
paper written for the Federal Academy for Security Policy, both
Lisa’s admission that the story was fabricated and a public
announcement by the Berlin police had virtually no impact on
the story’s staying power in Russian media networks: “Despite the
fact that the Berlin state police published a complete denial of the
story, most Russian government-controlled media that featured
the issue did not correct it or remove it from their websites”
(Janda 2016). The Lisa case has, accordingly, heightened aware-
ness in Germany of the impact Russian foreign media have had on
German public life.
Conclusion
The goal of this study has been to document the mechanisms,
content, and results of one branch of the Russian Federation’s
foreign media campaign under Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin
has been able to create foreign media dependence among
a segment of the Russian-German community; delegitimize
German government policy and that country’s “culture of
tolerance” while promoting Putin as a defender of
conservatism and “traditional values”; and ultimately aid the
emergence of a destabilizing populist political party and
mobilize thousands of Russian-Germans to protest in cities
across the country. It has done so largely through Russian-
language Internet and television networks that provide an
alternative universe of news to a significant portion of this
population. While Kremlin media do not have outsized influ-
ence among all members of the Russian-German community,
there is enough trust of these outlets to create potentialities
for manipulation and mobilization under favorable circum-
stances. The events of the Lisa case especially illustrate the
degree to which overreliance on Kremlin media can dovetail
with preexisting concerns and tensions about German migra-
tion policy to produce political disruption.
The four-stage theoretical model of soft power operations
aims to demonstrate the means by which Russian media have
exploited these dissatisfactions within the Russian-German
community, and created or exacerbated destabilizing out-
comes in German politics through the manipulation of this
group. Crucial to these outcomes is the credible presentation
of a Russian government-endorsed alternative value system,
the contrast with which amplifies the deficiencies of German
society from the perspective of Kremlin media consumers.
The model does not claim to definitively prove the existence
of a premeditated strategy, but rather demonstrates its like-
lihood by structuring and assessing the process of cooptation
that has occurred. Further research is encouraged on similar
efforts in other countries, particularly those highlighted by
scholars of far-right politics, such as Austria, Italy, and
France.
Notes
1. The refined model omits the establishment of agenda-setting
institutions (“Stage 0”) in order to keep the focus of analysis on
the case study. It is assumed that the Russian government intends
RT and similar agencies to function as institutions of this nature.
2. In that year, the CIA described recently-founded Radio Free
Europe’s purpose as "[k]eeping alive the hope of liberation in
the [Soviet] satellite states...[and] [d]eveloping an atmosphere
favorable to the growth of resistance movements, for ultimate
exploitation in war, or, at a propitious moment, in peace time.”
3. Symbols of Soviet information war failure, such as Radio Liberty,
were recurring targets of criticism in the 1990s and early 2000s.
On this, Radio Liberty reported on October 4, 2002: “nationalists,
Communists, and other reactionary elements have regularly called
for an end to RFE/RL’s activities in Russia.” Putin himself has
harshly criticized Radio Liberty as president, accusing the broad-
caster of intruding in sensitive Russian affairs such as the then-
ongoing war in Chechnya.
4. The role of RFE/RL in precipitating the fall of communism should
not be exaggerated, however. American cultural propaganda
usually exacerbated, rather than caused, political and social ten-
sions within the Eastern Bloc.
5. Putin’s first address to the Federal Assembly (July 8, 2000) is a
good example of an early expression of conservative nationalism
in post-Soviet Russia.
6. The term Aussiedler translates to “emigrant” or “expatriate” and
specifically connotes ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe.
Spätaussiedler (“repatriates”) refers to those who have returned
to Germany. Such people are also designated Russlanddeutsche
(“Russian Germans”). Not all immigrants from Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union are called Spätaussiedler. Ethnic
Russians in Germany are known simply as Russen (“Russians”)

while other Russian-speakers are referred to by their countries
of origin or lumped together as Russischsprachige
Bevölkerungsgruppen in Deutschland (“Russian-speaking popula-
tion groups in Germany”).
7. During the Cold War, the content-creation process in American
broadcasting agencies pursued a goal of building a so-called
“atmosphere of objectivity” (Schlosser 2011) that increased per-
ceived trustworthiness of American news among Eastern Bloc
listeners. Tactics included allowing measured praise of communist
states and occasional critiques of Western governments and socie-
ties in order for content to appear independent of U.S. govern-
ment control.
8. “Red card” is a reference to a penalty in soccer (European
football).
9. Regarding the former, exact parallels to the Cold War cannot be
drawn due to differences in political system. Unable to convince
voters to choose anti-establishment parties in free elections, orga-
nizations like Radio Free Europe instead focused their energy
toward aiding the formation of quasi-opposition parties such as
Solidarity.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the following people for reading and commenting
on this paper: Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College; Dominic Tierney,
Swarthmore College; John Mueller, The Ohio State University; Robert
Freedman, Johns Hopkins University; Alessandro Iandolo, St.
Catherine’s College, University of Oxford; and anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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