The four-story building at 55 Savushkina St. that housed the infamous Russian internet “troll factory” that meddled in America’s 2016 election now appears empty.
The main trolling operation has moved to an impersonal seven-story glass office building in the distant Lakhta business district. I couldn’t enter the building due to tight security. The city’s leading business daily Delovoy Peterburg reported late last year that the operation’s workspace has tripled.
Yet, little known to Americans, this fake news factory was not initially intended to wage information warfare on America.
Instead, its original purpose, starting in 2014, seems to have been to shape the thinking of ordinary Russians by viciously attacking domestic opposition activists and fueling public hostility toward Ukraine -- and the United States.
The domestic propaganda barrage continues out of the troll factory’s new digs. “A tricky mix of normal reporting and hate speech,” one Russian journalist calls it. RBC magazine wrote in March 2017 that this “media factory” now reaches an audience that exceeds 50 million Russians a month.
In May, this “media factory” will launch a new “information agency” called “USA Really. Wake Up Americans.” It has already put out an announcement that it “will focus on promoting information and problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the US political elite.”
Now that its secret internet project has been exposed, the troll factory will apparently focus more on open information warfare. Kremlin propaganda mills masquerading as news agencies will try to insert anti-American propaganda into US -- and Russian -- media.
Since at least 2014, this trolling operation has been posting grotesque fabrications to foster Russian support for the Kremlin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine -- and to whip up hostile feelings toward America. The information operation is funded by a Putin-friendly oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who just also happens to control a mercenary outfit known as Wagner that has contract troops in Ukraine and Syria.
To find out how the trolling worked, I talked to brave Russian journalists and undercover activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Vitaly Bespalov, a 27-year-old freelance journalist with long blond hair and a tattoo of Russian opposition politician Ksenia Sobchak on one arm, came to St. Petersburg in 2014 to try to find work. He answered an ad for a “content manager” at 55 Savushkina St. and was offered a salary about a third higher than a normal starting job in Russia. It was not long after Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and he was told he would be working for a department called Ukraine II.
Bespalov had to pull 20 news stories about Ukraine daily from the internet and rewrite them to fit the Russian propaganda version. Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion were “terrorists” and Russia-backed separatists were “volunteers.”
When a Ukrainian rocket hit an empty school where “volunteers” were hidden, the news was that Ukrainians wanted to kill children. Americans wanted to use the uprising as an excuse to start World War III.
After a few days, Bespalov realized what was going on and decided to “stay and get more information and make it public.” He was later assigned to distribute links to fake news stories to social media groups in different Russian cities. These stories were filled with cliches, such as “(Secretary of State) Clinton wants war with Russia” and nasty claims about President Barack Obama.
“I used to think this work was absolutely stupid work with no results,” Bespalov told me. But later he heard ordinary people using these cliches in their conversation “not just about Ukraine but about the USA.”
The trolling news operation backs Kremlin efforts to convince Russians that the United States wants to destroy their country. Similar messages are delivered by state-controlled TV.
Only a handful of Russian news outlets still cover this story, which can put journalists at severe risk. After Vitaly Bespalov was interviewed by NBC late last year, the main state TV channel attacked him viciously, and his picture appeared on social media with false claims that he was a drug addict.
In the United States, on the other hand, we have plenty of information, overhyped, about Russian trolling. (Russian journalists I met uniformly expressed astonishment at any claims that the troll factory changed the outcome of the 2016 election.)
We know what happened in 2016, and should be fully able to take adequate precautions about any similar efforts. Forewarned about Russian trolling should be forearmed.
Trudy Rubin Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. -- Ed.
