By Deimantas Steponavicius
Prelude: The Document That Knew Too Much
In December 2015, Stephen M. Dayspring, a United States Army Chief Warrant Officer studying at the Naval Postgraduate School, submitted a master’s thesis with a disarmingly direct title: Toward a Theory of Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Conduct of War During Peace. I have chosen his thesis because it still is one of the best written on the subject of Russian cognitive warfare by a Western analyst.
The thesis was written in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, at a moment when Western analysts were asking whether Russia had discovered a new and more covert way of making war. Dayspring’s task was to make sense of it.
What makes the document interesting is its seriousness. It does what good strategic analysis is supposed to do. It gathers disparate phenomena, searches for recurring mechanisms, distinguishes instruments and effects, and tries to place Russian conduct inside a model that can be understood, compared and eventually acted upon.
The object is not Russia as a mystery but Russia as an intelligible system, because before an adversary can be countered, it must become recognizable, mustn’t it?
A military practice becomes a concept; a concept becomes a category; several categories begin to resemble one another; resemblance invites explanation; explanation begins to imply continuity. What had been a collection of actions acquires a grammar. What had been separate episodes look like manifestations of a single thing.
Russia that improvises, bargains, miscalculates, copies, borrows, contradicts itself and sometimes simply reacts is difficult to model. Russia with a theory is easier. Russia with a theory can be cited. It has intellectual ancestors. It has doctrinal descendants. It possesses a vocabulary through which its actions become legible. The enemy acquires a library. Once the library exists, the books begin to find one another.
Then, the reflexive control can be placed beside political warfare. Political warfare can be placed beside non-linear warfare. Non-linear warfare can be placed beside active measures, information operations and the manipulation of perception. Later, Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics can enter the room, followed by Vladislav Surkov’s writing on non-linear politics and his fiction under the name Nathan Dubovitsky. From there it is only a short intellectual journey to the contemporary language of Russian cognitive warfare, influence operations and troll farms: different decades, different institutions, different genres, different people, but now apparently members of the same family.
The prose becomes smooth and persuasive. Reflexive control is real. Russian political warfare is real. Information operations are real. Dugin wrote what he wrote. Surkov wrote what he wrote. Russian influence operations have existed and continue to exist. The existence of each object is allowed to lend historical reality to the line connecting them into a trajectory. A resemblance becomes a lineage. A lineage becomes an architecture. An architecture becomes an intention. And intention gives us the enemy.
The said enemy is oddly familiar. He thinks in theories. He has concepts. He reads. He plans. He understands systems. He is like…us. He is almost…the family. As the anecdote goes: “He maybe is a bastard, but he’s our bastard…”
Behind apparently chaotic behaviour there is presumed to be a coherent architecture, and behind the architecture a recognizer: an adversary who understands that information shapes perception, that perception shapes decision, and that decision can be manipulated. This picture makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
But the real question is: who decided that apparently connected things constituted a trajectory at all? And what happens when the trajectory becomes the object meant to be audited?
Human beings recognize minds through resemblance. We infer agency from patterns. We connect events because connection is how events become intelligible. Institutions do the same thing at a larger scale. Intelligence analysis, strategic studies, history and policy all depend upon the ability to transform fragments into patterns. I do it. Without that ability, we have noise. With too much of that ability, we have mythology. The threshold between the two is blurred.
Dayspring’s thesis allows me to watch, in a disciplined piece of strategic analysis, how a transformation unfolds: Russian conduct becomes something that can be theorized, that gives subsequent observers a structure into which new evidence can be placed. It is analysis doing what analysis always has done.
What follows below tries to trace where that structure came from — and to keep one question open all the way to the end, rather than letting it resolve too early: was the line we are about to draw already there?
The Organism (Bekhterev)
Vladimir Bekhterev spent much of his career trying to remove the word “mind” from psychology altogether. Where his contemporaries studied consciousness through introspection, Bekhterev wanted a science built entirely on what could be observed from outside a person — reflex, response, stimulus, the visible arc of behavior with no need to ask what it felt like from within.
He called this reflexology, and by the 1920s he had extended it past the individual nervous system into something more ambitious: collective reflexology, the proposal that a crowd, a mob, an institution, a society could be studied by the same logic that governed a single organism’s reflex arcs. A mass of people, in this view, was not a gathering of separate minds deliberating together. It was a kind of organism in its own right, with its own stimuli, its own thresholds, its own predictable responses — a body that could, in principle, be understood well enough to be moved.
Bekhterev died in December 1927, before this project reached anything like maturity. His institute did not survive him in any form he would have recognized; what had been his was absorbed, repackaged, and eventually the specifically Bekhterevian version of the science — a mass psychology built on externally observable reflex rather than internally reported experience — receded from the discipline that inherited its name. This essay has no interest in claiming that the officers who later built Soviet reflexive control doctrine read Bekhterev, cited him, or knew his work at all. That claim would commit the error this essay exists to examine — mistaking resemblance for lineage because resemblance is convenient.
Bekhterev helped to establish an epistemic climate — a set of assumptions about what a mind is and what can be done to it.
Before Bekhterev, and thinkers working the same materialist ground alongside him, treating a population’s behavior as a system of reflex arcs to be stimulated rather than a collection of individual judgments to be persuaded was in a minority. After them, it was simply available — a live ontological possibility, sitting in the intellectual water supply, waiting for anyone with a reason to draw on it. The General Staff officers who would later formalize reflexive control did not need Bekhterev’s name. They only needed to have grown up in a scientific culture where his premise — that the mind, individual or collective, is a system to be stimulated rather than a subject to be understood — was no longer a claim requiring defense. It had already become something closer to common knowledge.
This is the distinction the essay has to hold, because everything that follows depends on it staying precise: an atmospheric inheritance is not a weaker version of a genealogical one, waiting to be upgraded into causation once enough footnotes are found. It is a different kind of claim, and a harder one to be wrong about in either direction — because there is no document that could ever settle it, no citation that would prove or disprove that an idea was in the air. What can be shown is that a possibility existed decades before the doctrine that would use it, that the possibility required a specific and unusual claim about what a mind is, and that the doctrine, when it finally arrived, needed that claim to be thinkable in order to be built at all.
Bekhterev did not hand anyone a weapon. He helped make a certain kind of weapon conceivable, and then he died, and the institute that might have remembered where the idea came from was absorbed into something that no longer needed to ask.
The System (Bogdanov)
Where Bekhterev supplied the premise that a mind could be treated as a mechanism, Alexander Bogdanov supplied a vocabulary for how mechanisms of any kind — biological, social, technical — organize, destabilize, and reorganize themselves.
He called it tektology, a universal science of organization. Bogdanov was proposing that a single set of principles — how elements combine to produce more than their sum, how a system absorbs disturbance, how organization gives way to crisis and crisis gives way to reorganization — governed all three at once, and that the walls separating them were an accident of how knowledge was divided into departments, not a fact about the world.
He died in 1928, from a transfusion experiment performed on himself at the institute he had founded, having spent his final years marginalized from the intellectual authority— politically inconvenient, and denied the institutional standing that might have let tektology become a school rather than a single man’s unfinished project.
Tektology disappeared from institutional view while remaining unchanged, exactly as available to be picked up again as it had been the day Bogdanov set it down.
And it was picked up again — not by name, and not through any traceable act of reading. When Soviet military cyberneticists began, decades later, to treat organization itself as a technical problem — systems with feedback, systems with regulation, systems that could be modeled, disturbed, and steered — they were doing something Bogdanov had already done the conceptual work of making thinkable, in a vocabulary that predates the one they used by forty years, without any of them needing to know his name to inherit his premise. This is the same caution Section I insisted on: to claim direct influence here would be to manufacture the kind of lineage this essay is suspicious of. What can be claimed is that Bogdanov articulated, in isolation and decades ahead of the institutions that would need it, the organizational imaginary — organization as engineerable, as a technical rather than a natural or moral category — that made the General Staff’s later work intelligible to itself. Reflexive control, when it emerges, speaks tektology’s language fluently, without ever having been taught it, because the language had already entered the water Bekhterev had begun to change the temperature of.
Between them, Bekhterev and Bogdanov do not hand the twentieth century two premises that a doctrine would eventually need in order to exist — that a mind, singular or collective, is a mechanism rather than a subject, and that mechanisms of every kind, including minds, obey a common science of organization that can be learned and used. Neither man built the thing that came after. Both made it thinkable.
Next comes the place where what was merely thinkable becomes operational — where the premise and the vocabulary stop circulating in the water and start showing up on staff college syllabi, with budget lines and ranks attached.
The Loop (Messner, Panarin, Rastorguev)
Everything so far has taken place in the register of possibility — a premise circulating, a vocabulary waiting to be needed. Reflexive control, as it developed within the Soviet General Staff Academy from the 1960s onward is a doctrine with an author, a syllabus, a chain of command, and eventually a declassified literature — the deliberate structuring of information reaching an adversary so that the adversary’s own rational decision-making apparatus, working correctly and in good faith, arrives at the conclusion its opponent wanted it to reach.
This is similar to a wager on game theory: model the enemy’s decision process precisely enough, and you no longer need to lie to him. You only need to feed the model what it will process into the answer you require.
The feedback loop that Bekhterev’s premise made thinkable and Bogdanov’s vocabulary made systematic is finally weaponized — installed in an actual institution, taught to actual officers, applied against actual adversaries.
Three figures anchor this section, and the essay owes them a different kind of attention than it owed Bekhterev and Bogdanov. These men are not distant premises whose influence must be handled as elective affinity rather than citation. They held ranks. They wrote for institutional audiences with institutional purposes. Their names belong on syllabi rather than in genealogies assembled after the fact.
Yevgeny Messner, a White Army officer who spent his postwar decades in emigration, coined the term myatezhevoyna — a war of subversion, better rendered as rebellion-war than the softer “rebellious war” sometimes used in translation — arguing across his émigré writings that the wars of the future would abandon the seizure of territory as their primary object and aim instead at the collapse of an enemy population’s will and social coherence from within. Messner wrote in obscurity, published by small émigré presses, read by a diaspora with dwindling institutional reach.
What matters is his post-Soviet recovery — the fact that officers and theorists inside Russia, decades later, went looking for him, found him, and resurrected him, treating a marginal émigré’s forecast as a usable ancestor once the doctrine he had anticipated needed one. That recovery is a small instance of the same mechanism: an idea’s standing tracks not its content but the moment an institution develops a use for it.
Igor Panarin, trained inside Soviet and then Russian security services before becoming an academic, gave the doctrine its clearest post-Soviet formalization: information-psychological war, in which psychological destruction — the collapse of an adversary’s confidence, cohesion, and capacity for coordinated judgment — precedes and enables physical action rather than merely accompanying it. Where reflexive control’s classical formulation concerned itself with a specific adversary decision at a specific moment, Panarin’s doctrine widens the aperture to a population’s entire cognitive terrain, treated as a battlespace.
Sergei Rastorguev completes the loop by bringing Bogdanov’s inheritance back to the surface explicitly. Rastorguev’s work applies systems analysis directly to mass populations — modeling a public’s cognitive infrastructure the way an engineer models a physical system’s tolerances, identifying where it can absorb disturbance and where it will fracture, and asking how such a system might be protected as readily as it might be attacked.
Of the three, Rastorguev is the one whose method would be legible to Bogdanov without translation. Tektology asked how any organized complex withstands or succumbs to disturbance. Rastorguev asks the same question about the informational coherence of a nation, in something close to tektology’s own terms.
Between Messner’s exile, Panarin’s formal doctrine, and Rastorguev’s systems analysis, reflexive control stops being a philosophical possibility and becomes a functioning institution: taught, budgeted, and applied.
The Grimoire (Dugin)
Section III established what a doctrine actually looks like — ranks, offices, monographs filed rather than published. Section IV marks the point where that register breaks.
Alexander Dugin is not a staff officer. He has never held a Ministry of Defense budget line, never authored a classified monograph, never been, by any evidence available to open-source research, an architect of Kremlin policy in the sense his Western readership routinely assumes.
He is a philosopher, and what he offers is not doctrine but metaphysics: neo-Eurasianism, a civilizational cosmology in which Russia stands as the heartland of a Eurasian bloc locked in permanent, near-theological opposition to an Atlanticist West, with cognitive and informational conflict recast as one front in a struggle that is, in Dugin’s own telling, closer to eschatology than to strategy.
Foundations of Geopolitics, his best-known work, has become a fixture of Western threat literature — routinely cited as though it were a blueprint, quoted in think-tank reports and congressional testimony as evidence of a coherent Kremlin worldview with Dugin as its author.
However, there is no reliable evidence that the book functions, or ever functioned, as an operational document inside Russian military or political decision-making. It has always been a conjecture we made.
Dugin has occupied a marginal, fluctuating position relative to actual power for most of his career, embraced and distanced by the Kremlin in turns that track domestic political convenience more than any settled ideological alliance.
And yet the citation habit persists, because it serves a need that has nothing to do with Dugin’s actual influence and everything to do with the needs of the reader doing the citing.
A Western analytic tradition is steeped in the assumption that great powers act on doctrines they sincerely hold. It finds something deeply satisfying in a figure like Dugin: a fluent, prolific, quotable philosopher-mystic who can be translated, excerpted, and handed to a reader as proof that behind the messy, opportunistic, frequently contradictory conduct of the Russian state there is a coherent theology, written down, available in English, footnoted and quotable.
He supplies what Messner, Panarin, and Rastorguev cannot: the appearance of an intellectual architecture legible on its own terms, requiring no translation of bureaucratic behavior into belief, because Dugin has already done that translation in the analyst’s own preferred genre. Treating this metaphysics as an operational blueprint is not a minor overreading.
It is a failure of recognition — measuring a genuinely foreign kind of intellectual object against the West’s own inherited assumption that major powers act on doctrines their leadership believes, and finding the confirmation that assumption required.
Dugin is useful to this essay for the same reason he is dangerous to cite as evidence: he is proof that a lineage can be constructed in good faith, from real documents, and still misrepresent the thing it claims to explain, because the act of assembling a philosopher-king out of a marginal writer’s collected works is a choice made by the assembler, and it answers a need the assembler brought to the material rather than one the material supplied.
The Pseudonym (Surkov / Dubovitsky)
Vladislav Surkov’s career resists the register of the previous two sections almost by design. He was not a philosopher constructing a cosmology from a study, and he was not a staff officer executing a doctrine from an office with a budget line.
For much of two decades, as a senior Kremlin official and later as an advisor overseeing policy toward Ukraine, he practiced something closer to authorship applied directly to political reality: funding and, by multiple credible accounts, simultaneously covertly supporting opposition movements and nationalist movements that opposed each other, cultivating “sovereign democracy” as a phrase elastic enough to justify whatever the moment required, managing conflict less by resolving it than by keeping every faction slightly off balance and mutually suspicious.
Peter Pomerantsev’s account of this period gave it a phrase that has outlasted the specific events it described: a politics in which nothing is true and everything is possible, where the point is not to win an argument but to render the ground on which arguments are won or lost permanently unstable.
In 2014, under the pseudonym Nathan Dubovitsky, Surkov published a short story titled “Without Sky” in a magazine associated with a state-linked youth organization.
The story is narrated by a brain-damaged child, born in a border village that lost its literal sky when rival wartime coalitions chose the airspace above it as a battlefield; the child sees only in two dimensions, and the village’s people must travel elsewhere to watch the moon and the birds, because there is no sky left where they live. It is a strange, spare piece of writing, ambiguous enough that readers have taken it as elegy, as satire, and as something closer to doctrine dressed as fiction — and it does not resolve which of these it is.
What matters for this essay is the act of publication. A senior Kremlin official, writing under a transparent pseudonym that fooled no one publishing a short story about the collapse of a society that no longer trusts the difference between the war it is fighting and the war it is being told it is fighting.
The pseudonym is not a disguise in any functional sense. Everyone who needed to know that Dubovitsky was Surkov knew it. What the pseudonym performs, rather than conceals, is the argument the doctrine associated with Surkov’s name has always made: that the boundary between the author of a policy and the author of a story, between the real actor and the constructed persona, between the battlefield and the account given of the battlefield, is the kind of linear, stable boundary that a non-linear politics claims to have dissolved.
He is not smuggling doctrine past a censor. He is demonstrating the doctrine, in the one medium where demonstration and argument are, by design, no longer distinguishable.
This is the point at which this essay’s own method has to be named rather than left for a reader to notice unassisted, because the resemblance is real and should not be waved away.
In earlier essays of this project I have used fictional episodes (albeit really based on my life)—like, for example, a walk along a breakwater, a compass that never settles, the lighthouse, the pearl diver at the bottom of the sea— to make an argument that narrative alone could not complete.
Surkov, as Dubovitsky, used fiction to make an argument too. Of course I am tempted to say that the two uses are opposites: mine is confessional, lived experience, offered to a reader as an admission of not-knowing, anchored to a specific body in a specific place, inviting the reader to trust the trembling of the needle as it refuses to settle. Surkov/Dubovitsky’s is strategic, offered to a reader as a tool for dissolving the reader’s confidence that any needle could be trusted at all.
Of course I want that distinction to be true. But I have no instrument that could confirm, from outside my own authorship, that my fiction preserves a stable ground more securely than Surkov’s fiction succeeds in removing one — I have only my own account of my own intentions. And that, traditionally, is the least verifiable evidence available to anyone, about anything, including this.
By the same token, the story cannot be safely cited as evidence of the doctrine it is so often taken to illustrate.
The moment “Without Sky” is quoted in a Western analysis as a window into Kremlin thinking, the analysis has already accepted a frame the story itself declines to confirm: that there is a real Surkov standing behind the invented Dubovitsky, a real policy standing behind the fictional text, a real Russia standing behind the skyless village — waiting to be read off the page by anyone patient enough to look.
That frame may be correct. It may also be exactly what the pseudonym was built to produce in anyone determined enough to go looking for the man behind it.
The Recognition Problem
Read back across the five sections just completed, and the shape of what has been built becomes hard to miss.
A materialist premise from a discredited reflexologist.
An organizational science from a suppressed systems theorist.
A formalized doctrine from staff officers with ranks and budget lines.
A metaphysics from a marginal philosopher elevated by the very readership that needed him elevated.
A politics of engineered instability from a man who published his own theory as fiction under a name that fooled no one.
Laid end to end, in order, under section headings, with transitions built to carry the reader smoothly from one figure to the next — Bekhterev to Bogdanov, Bogdanov to the General Staff, the General Staff to Dugin, Dugin to Surkov — this essay has done what the prelude warned against.
It has taken five men, working in different decades, different institutions, different genres, answerable to no shared plan and in several cases unaware of one another’s existence, and it has given them a lineage.
It has given the reader exactly what Western analysis of Russian strategy has always been hungry for: an enemy who thinks, who reads, who has a library and a history, a coherent architecture behind conduct that would otherwise look improvised, contradictory, and reactive.
This is the moment the prelude’s question comes due.
Who decides that apparently connected things constitute a trajectory at all? The answer, arrived after the trajectory has already been built, is this:
I did. And you followed.
Every transition sentence above was a decision, made by an author who needed one section to lead into the next, who needed Bekhterev to matter for Bogdanov to matter, who needed the staff officers to feel institutionally solid so that Dugin’s philosophical looseness would land as a contrast rather than an unrelated fact.
None of the individual claims in those sections is false. The falseness, if any, was never available to be caught sentence by sentence. It could only live in the seams — in the fact that a lineage was assembled by someone whose training, culture, and professional habits require a lineage before an adversary can be considered understood.
There is a further possibility: the construction of a coherent Russian cognitive-warfare tradition, stretching in an unbroken intellectual line from a reflexologist’s death in 1927 to a pseudonymous short story in 2014, may itself be one of the most successful products of the encounter between Russian conduct and Western analysis — not because any Russian institution manufactured the genealogy, but because an adversary does not have to write every interpretation of itself in order to benefit from the conditions under which those interpretations get written.
The vulnerability was the need for sophistication to arrive already wearing a form Western analysis knows how to read: a doctrine, a school, a founding text, a library.
This should not be allowed to stand as the essay’s conclusion, and it needs to be stopped from becoming one in the same paragraph it is offered:
“The Russians convinced us they had a sophisticated cognitive-warfare tradition” is a cleaner, more elegant, more citable claim than “reflex materialism and systems theory happened to be in the air, and several unconnected institutions independently found uses for pieces of it.”
It has a villain. It has a reveal. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of coherent, satisfying architecture this whole essay has spent warning a reader against accepting uncritically — now offered as the essay’s own hard-won insight, and no less seductive for having survived the same scrutiny that discredited the simpler version.
A reader who finishes this essay believing they have finally uncovered the true architecture — Bekhterev to Bogdanov to reflexive control to Dugin to Surkov to Western self-deception — has fallen into the trap.
They have been caught by another version of it, assembled, this time, by someone who knew enough to make the seams less visible- me.
None of this should be read as a claim that Russian information warfare is not real, that reflexive control is not a functioning doctrine, that Panarin and Rastorguev did not write what they wrote, or that the documented, sustained pattern of Russian influence operations over the past two decades is somehow a Western hallucination.
Because it is not.
Each object examined in this essay exists. Each object examined was authored by the person credited with authoring it, and each object examined has had real effects in the world.
What remains genuinely uncertain, and what this essay is not equipped to resolve, is only the connective tissue — whether the line running through these five names is a discovery or a construction, and whether, after five sections spent trying to hold that distinction open, I have actually preserved the uncertainty or merely became better at making the construction look like a discovery.
There is no framework offered here to settle this, and none should be expected. What remains is the discipline of returning to the question rather than resolving it — not once, but each time a new pattern presents itself already dressed in coherence, already offering the relief of an enemy who makes sense.
That return does not conclude in relief. It is not meant to.
Coda: The Archive
There was a reading room in Eastern Europe where the card catalogues had not yet been fully retired, where a researcher could still ask at the desk for a physical drawer rather than a database query, and pull it out to find slips of paper filed by a cataloguer who is by now, most likely, retired or dead, working from rules established before either of us had been born.
I went looking there for material on Soviet-era military-scientific writing on information and reflex and found what any archive of that period contained: incomplete runs, gaps where a volume was never acquired or was acquired and never returned, samizdat copies of things that should not officially have existed sitting a few drawers away from official monographs that no longer quite said what their authors meant by them.
Somewhere in a catalogue of a library with a more contemporary acquisitions policy, indexing political writing and literary fiction side by side rather than in separate wings — Surkov and Dubovitsky appear as two separate entries. No one was hoodwinked. The cataloguer who filed them almost certainly knew that the two names belonged to one man. But a catalogue must file what is in front of it, and in front of it was a work of political memoir under one name and a work of short fiction under another, and the system had no field for these two entries to co-exist. So it filed them separately, correctly, by its own rules, and produced an answer that was accurate in every particular and wrong about the one thing that mattered.
The archivist was not naive. The archive was not lying. The classification system was doing exactly what classification systems were built to do. And because the system was working correctly, by its own lights, that its answer could not be trusted to have captured the relation between the two entries rather than merely their separateness.
…I stood in front of that drawer for longer than the material in it warranted, turning over the question this essay failed to close: whether the connections I have drawn between a dead reflexologist, a suppressed systems theorist, three staff officers, a marginal philosopher, and a man who published his own doctrine as a story under a pseudonym, are a lineage I found or a lineage I needed — and whether I have gained anything at all beyond a more practiced way of asking it.
The catalogue has returned an answer.
I am no longer certain whose question it was.
© Deimantas Steponavicius 2026
Everywhere
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