Masha Karp on 'The System of Organised Lying'

An extract from Masha Karp's upcoming book, 'Orwell and Russia' due to be published by Bloomsbury Academic

This excerpt is from Masha Karp's upcoming book, Orwell and Russia, due to be published by Bloomsbury Academic. Here, Masha explores how Orwell’s understanding of ‘organised lying’ applies to the war Russia is waging in Ukraine.

Masha Karp is a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in relations between Russia and the West. She is a translator of Animal Farm into Russian (first published in 2001) and the author of the award winning first Russian biography of George Orwell (St Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2017). She is a trustee of The Orwell Society and Editor of the Orwell Society Journal.

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We do not plan to attack other countries, we did not attack Ukraine either.

Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, 10 March 2022

Totalitarianism demands … a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.¹

Orwell, 1946.

There is no denying that ‘truth is the first casualty of any war’ but for Orwell there was a huge difference between the usual exaggerations and distortions warring sides use during an armed conflict and “the system of organised lying” about which he wrote in 1946:

The organised lying practised by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.²

The organised lying had been a prominent feature of Putin’s state long before the current war. The original denial of Russian troops’ presence in Crimea during the 2014 referendum, when media spoke of “little green men” and Putin claimed that a military uniform resembling a Russian military uniform could be easily bought in a shop, was replaced a month later with the assertion that the Russian army had been in Crimea to ensure the smooth running of the referendum and a year later with the full admission that Russia in 2014 had decided to incorporate Crimea into the Russian Federation and had sent its army there for this purpose.

Orwell describes a similar kind of lying, also within a very short period of time, but on a much smaller, domestic issue: when Winston Smith hears about the “demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week” he is amazed, as it was only yesterday that “it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. … Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?”³ With Putin’s propaganda it is not even so much about memory, but about a new kind of cynical impudence, which seems to mock the very notion of truth and celebrate its own impunity.

A deliberate campaign of disinformation about Malaysian Airline Flight MH17, which was shot down by the Russians over Eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people on board, proffered, among others, the following improbable versions:

• “MH-17 was shot down by a Ukrainian jet.”

• “It was blown up by a missile intended for the Russian President’s plane.”

• “It was already full of dead bodies and crashed deliberately.”

• “ It was shot down by a BUK missile but not one of Russia’s.”

Recent Russian fabrications about the massacre in Bucha, discovered when Russian troops left this suburb of Kiev on 1 April, were even wilder. About a thousand bodies of civilians, including thirty-one children, were found in the streets: some with their hands bound behind their backs, some mutilated and burnt, and the Russian side claimed that “Ukrainian forces placed dead people in the town in a ‘staged provocation’ after Russian forces had already withdrawn”. There was, however, no doubt that the position of the corpses in the satellite photos taken in mid-March exactly matched ‘those from smartphone pictures published in early April’ – proof obtained thanks to the revolutionary role of new technology in investigating war crimes.

There is of course nothing new about these blatant and absurd lies, which are easily exposed. Yet Putin’s system of organised lying resorts to them again and again, as it always tries to achieve numerous objectives.

Ben Emmerson QC, the distinguished lawyer who represented Marina Litvinenko at the public hearing on her husband’s assassination in London and is therefore well-versed in the deceptions of official Russia, once suggested replacing the usual legal term “plausible deniability”, with the one coined specially for Putin’s regime: ‘‘implausible deniability”, which would mean that the regime simply ‘can’t be bothered to make up believable lies’.

By doing this the Russian leadership expresses its contempt for the West and its institutions and hints – to its supporters – that it was indeed behind the acts of which it was accused but that it could easily fool its accusers. This approach somehow gave Putin’s admirers at home a peculiar sense of superiority over the West. One could hear this new cynicism during the interview with the Russian military intelligence agents, Petrov and Bashirov, suspected by Britain of carrying out an assassination attempt against Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018, when they talked about coming to Salisbury as tourists to see its cathedral spire. The Russian flag that subsequently appeared on the scaffolding near Salisbury Cathedral was a similar type of joke, mocking any concern about the possible – and actual, as in the case of Dawn Sturgess – loss of human life.

But there is also another, even more sinister reason for producing these lies and especially for giving several alternative explanations of one incident. The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent 17 years in Russian prisons and psychiatric hospitals, identified it as a special feature of the KGB methods, aimed at creating in their targets a feeling of uncertainty, of the unreliability of any information.⁴ It is this uncertainty that makes people exclaim helplessly: “We will never know the truth!” And this is exactly what the totalitarian regime wants them to accept, as O’Brien tells Winston:

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.⁵

It is not known how many people in Russia “see reality by looking through the eyes” of propaganda and support Putin’s war. How can any polls be conducted – or believed – if any condemnation of what the Russian army is doing in Ukraine can be treated as ‘discrediting Russian armed forces’ and punished with 10-15 years imprisonment? About half of those approached by journalists or sociologists refuse to reply, which, some researchers suspect, might mean that their position is different from the official. And yet journalists and scholars manage to obtain anonymous replies and publish short video-clips or longer analytical articles on websites administered from outside Russia.

The formulas that the majority of respondents come up with mostly reveal their terribly distorted minds, some features of which were described by Orwell. What distorts their views is primarily fear, the wish to conform and also the wish to minimize personal responsibility. It was obvious not only in the ubiquitous responses:  “the people in charge are no fools” and “we can’t do anything, can we?”, but also in the efforts of people to convince themselves that it is absolutely impossible to know who is right: “I don’t think that we can know the truth right now. Someday, we will find out what is really going on… The truth, the deep reasons, if you don’t want to delve into the history, if you’re not doing politics — we can’t see it.”⁶ 

Social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova includes these frequently used cliches in a special category, which includes: “The whole truth is not known to anybody”, “Only time will tell who was right”, and “History will put it into perspective”. This is, Arkhipova explains, another achievement of Russian state propaganda. It quickly learnt to use the word “fake” to denote “any information which is different from the official” and people either trust the government and believe that the Bucha massacre is a fake or give up in despair and abandon any attempts to understand what is going on. This withdrawal from judgement also fully satisfies the propagandists, so, the scholar says, “it is a ‘win-win’ situation’ for the Russian government”.

1. Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature”, The Complete Works of George Orwell, XX vols, edited by Peter Davison,( London: Secker & Warburg, 1998). XVII, 374.

2. Ibid., 373.

3. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1987), 50.

4. Vladimir Bukovsky. Interview to the author, December 2006.

5. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 197.

6. Shura Burtin, “Feeling around for something human  Why do Russians support the war against Ukraine?” Translated by Bela Shayevich and Anne O. Fisher. Medusa, 3 May 2022 https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/05/03/feeling-around-for-something-human