Russia's attempt to install a president in Bucharest is a small part of the scenario prepared for Romania. In the long term, Moscow aims to culturally "reprogram" Romanians - through disinformation - so that they abandon the West and choose the "Russian world".
The operation of hybrid warfare Romania has been going through has entered its acute stage for some time. Russia's attempt to install a president in Bucharest is only a small part of the scenario prepared for Romania quite some time before. Although in many respects it is easy to recognize a certain historical pattern, there are nonetheless a number of signs that tell us that we are in a new phase, which will be radically different from all the others, in terms of the efforts put by Moscow and, above all, in terms of the effects it is aiming to achieve. No, history will not become useless for understanding what the Kremlin wants from us, for many of its constants remain valid, but it will be increasingly difficult to understand what it wants to achieve, if we do not take changes into account.
Russians’ historical perception: Romanians, an ignorant people, pushed by the West towards Russophobia
Although we have been facing each other for several hundred years, and have even had diplomatic relations for almost a century and a half, Romanians and Russians do not know each other. Many mutual perceptions are based on stereotypes, usually negative ones, and the few moments of political rapprochement between the two peoples have been seriously undermined by mutual distrust, contempt and hostility. The explanations for such a state of affairs are many and well-known. The military occupations, the eternal imperial agenda, the fear of the West and above all the Romanians' desire for modernization and emancipation have meant that from the mid-19th century to the present day, a stable state of cold war has been established between the two peoples. The Crimean War (1853-1856) and especially the Peace of Paris formalized the civilizational divorce between Romanians and Russians. Despite Russia’s efforts to win, in extremis, the hearts and minds of the Romanians by agreeing to the Union of the Principalities, that was the moment when the two peoples' visions of development became incompatible in the long term. Having tried for three decades to turn the Principalities into a barrier to the revolutionary epidemic coming from the West, as the historian Viktor Taki rightly states, quoting General Kiseleff and after him almost all the great Soviet historians of the Balkans, Russia received in return for its efforts the exact opposite of what it had intended. "Turning in on itself", as Chancellor Gorchakov hypocritically wrote after the loss of the Crimean War, meant for Russia not only a series of new conquests in the North Caucasus and Central Asia, but also a real civilizational introspection.
Anxious to rid Russia of its "love for Europe" and to return it to the vein they considered to be its original source, Slavophiles such as Aleksei Homiakov, Mikhail Pogodin, Ivan Aksakov, Vladimir Cerkasski or Constantin Leontiev, but also others less known, turned the idea of (de)westernizing Russia into a political obsession. Shaped during that period, the way in which Romanians were perceived in Russia was characterized by their refusal to behave politically in accordance with what the Slavophiles considered to be defining for them, namely their belonging to Orthodoxy and the post-Byzantine world. Instead of entering into imperial communion with Russia, under the exclusive influence of the French, the Slavophiles claimed, Romanians developed an unmotivated Russophobia, which only testified to the collective moral precariousness of this people and not to their truly Western vocation. Hostilized by the Romanians’ imported Rusophobia, but genuinely blaming the French for perverting an ignorant people, the Russians continued to consider the people of the principalities as simple savages, once good, now led into a deadly error by the spiritual "beads" of those who had come to colonize their minds and souls.
For the Russians, everything that the Romanians accomplished politically in the era of national awakening was due not so much to their own will as to the skill of the great ventriloquists from the West, who animated the poor puppets with lost souls. The further the Romanians moved away from Holy Russia, the greater the Russians' contempt for their rulers, and the hatred for those who manipulated them from far-off Europe knew no bounds. The Russo-Romanian alliance during the last Russo-Turkish War, which Romanians call the War of Independence, or that during the First World War failed to significantly dampen mutual perceptions. Moreover, the two peoples emerged from both events carrying with them an even heavier ballast of mistrust.
Romania has become a strategic priority for Russia
Although permanently reclaiming the imperial and Soviet past, Putin's foreign policy represents a break with the past, not so much in vision as in action. Unlike all his predecessors, who usually always tried to tread on firm ground, rarely taking major risks and only under the pressure of circumstances, Putin is above all an adventurer, almost a dreamer.
The political imaginary, personal ego and stereotypes have played a far more important role in foreign policy decisions in recent years than Russia's famous policy planning and its supposed fascination with the chess game. The political and military successes in Georgia and Syria have bolstered the regime’s confidence, fed its appetite for risk and the taste for large gestures with devastating effects. On top of that, anemic Western reactions to classic and hybrid Russian attacks, as well as the intensely fueled conviction that Ukrainians cannot govern themselves, made Putin's decision to attack Ukraine rather logical.
But the Ukrainian resistance and the support Kyiv has received from the West have led to some reversals in the way those who now lead Russia perceive the world. Clearly, the Russian goal of creating a belt of instability around the country, but especially in the West, made up of fragile states, has remained unchanged. What has changed is how the Kremlin wants to achieve this goal. Until now, including in the Soviet period, although Romania has been a permanent source of discomfort for Russia, it has not been the subject of a distinct Russian policy direction. At all stages of history, Russian policy towards Romanians has been subsumed under objectives considered strategic. Therefore, when Moscow has been preoccupied with Romania, it has invariably done so by pursuing effects in the directions it considered truly important. Whether we are referring to the Balkan, Ukrainian, Hungarian or "socialist camp" directions, Romania and Romanians have been a concern for the Kremlin only as intermediate step towards a truly important goal.
But now Romania is in the unenviable position of becoming a foreign policy priority for Russia, as Poland and Finland have always been. The Kremlin now realizes that Romania has the potential to significantly influence the geopolitical course of a group of countries and has become central to Putin's strategy to strangle Ukraine.
Russia wants to draw Romania into its sphere of influence by culturally "reprogramming" Romanians
The Kremlin has realized that the most important weapon of the hybrid war it is waging, the lie, can not only destabilize and paralyze societies, but it can also shape and educate them. The greater the collective disdain of some societies for formal instruction, the more entrenched the belief of individuals that there is no causality between success and effort, the more permeable such societies are to the formative impact of Kremlin propaganda. The cultural, sociological and mental effects that the emergence of such a large Romanian diaspora has had on Romanians have been well understood in the Russian laboratories of conflict manufacturing. Just as in the case of the Russians in the "near neighborhood" or those in the West, to whom it feeds their frustrations, hostility and alienation, on which the "russkii mir" is actually built, the Kremlin has understood that an anti-Romania can be built in the diaspora. An anti-democratic, anti-Western and anti-capitalist anti-Romania, through which Romania can be connected to the political vibrations of the 'Russian world'.
In a sort of revenge over the centuries, Putin's propaganda apparatus is today attempting a step-by-step cultural reprogramming of Romanians, likely to ensure the premises of a lasting Russian presence in Romania. It is a reprogramming that changes the natural order of things, which the occupying communist regime has maintained, and which first attacks the deep layers of society and not the elites. If the French gave Romanian politics an anti-Russian tinge by spiritually colonizing the elites, Russian historians believe, the Kremlin now wants to reverse the historical process, with the help of educating a large part of the Romanian diaspora in the West through disinformation. If the huge Russian apparatus of mass disinformation is good for anything, it is the recipe by which the personal and group frustrations of the uprooted are transformed into extreme political attitudes. While Russia or Putin may not be mentioned in such discourse, it invariably serves the interests of the Kremlin.
The intense cultivation of the obsession that Romania is on the wrong track, that it is in an insolvable contradiction with itself, are nothing but "arguments" to undermine Romanians' trust in democracy. In a kind of exhibition, disguised as political reflection, many Romanians educated through disinformation project their own marginality onto the whole country. Wanting a revolution for themselves that will divert them from the orbit of failure through maladjustment, they are trying to produce such a revolution in Romania. A revolution that would reopen the way home for them, but where they would be welcomed as liberators, saviors and above all as the future elite.
The strategy is based not only on a refined cultural analysis of Romanians, but also on a good knowledge of the legal mechanisms that govern Romania. This explains the slightly failed success of the Kremlin's raid in Romania, which started by aggregating a virtual pseudo-revolutionary movement in the diaspora, then transferred to Romania with help from within.
The umbilical cord between the "russkii mir" and Romania has thus been created, despite the language barrier and historical patterns, and it will continue to feed those who have "awakened in their conscience" as a result of being fed the toxic mixture of anger and absurdities. Cultural shaping through misinformation cannot be countered by education or arguments, because one of its effects is precisely to close the channels of connection with everything that contradicts the inoculated perceptions and images. This is precisely why the Romanian authorities must start from the assumption that, if Putin survives the war in Ukraine, he will have to face the Romanian version of the 'Russian world' in the medium term at least. And this is where from most of the answers that Romania can give to this challenge emerge. The priority is not to bridge the precipice between the two Romanias, as they are irreconcilable in the short term, but to consolidate the democratic and modern one. Only in this way will the number of victims of education through disinformation will get smaller and smaller, the political pressure it exerts will be weaker and weaker, and this will close some of the routes through which Russia is injecting its influence. As for the others....
