'Engineering Human Souls': How Russia’s Disinformation Machine Has Evolved

Leaked documents show the Kremlin’s influence machine now combines paid influencers, fake citizens and “cognitive strikes” to inflame tensions and shape European politics. PLUS TICKETS FOR 23 JUNE

Tickets are now on sale for a rehearsed reading of scenes from Trojan Horses: Brexit, Trump, Russia and the First Great Information War with Joanna Scanlan and Hardeep Matharu, and directed by Steve Unwin. Some more exciting cast announcements very soon…

Meanwhile, the latest leaks from the Kremlin’s disinformation apparatus show how the information warfare depicted in my epic poem has evolved, not just through trolls, bots and paid influencers, but through what the files describe as coordinated “cognitive strikes.”

These files were published by VSquare point to the Kremlin-linked Social Design Agency, run by Ilya Gambashidze, as part of a professionalised system of political warfare.

Gambashidze attended at least 20 meetings with the Russian presidential administration between April 2022 and April 2023, including meetings with Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s chief of staff and the presidential administration’s point man on influence operations after the departure of the main figure in Trojan Horses, Putin’s ‘grey cardinal’ and master of hyper-reality and non-linear warfare, Vladislav Surkov.

Kiriyenko has steered Kremlin spending towards paid influencers, including the Tenet scheme, which US prosecutors say was funded via RT and channelled nearly $10 million to online personalities to amplify pro-Kremlin narratives.

In the first four months of 2024, the SDA’s bot army generated 33.9 million comments and nearly 40,000 content units, including 4,641 videos and 2,516 memes and graphics. The leaked documents include country-level quotas set per platform and per narrative cycle.

The documents also provide instructions on how to concoct invented citizens with tailored biographies, demographics and grievances: a 38-year-old German woman worried about inflation; a patriotic French voter angry about migration; a Slovak sceptic questioning support for Ukraine. These personas were designed to appear credible within specific national conversations.

The objectives were explicitly electoral. One internal document set a key performance indicator for Germany: success would be achieved if the AfD polled at 20%; a parallel paper set 20% for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. T

The methods go beyond comment farming. The leaked files describe what the operation itself calls “cognitive strikes” — campaigns of vandalism, false-flag messaging and staged provocations designed to inflame social tensions, discredit governments and dominate the news cycle.

Among the examples uncovered by OCCRP is the Paris “Operation Pig’s Head,” in which severed pig heads were left outside mosques and marked with “Macron” in an apparent effort to incite unrest and intolerance. Other files detail the “Green Synagogues” operation, pro-Armenian sticker campaigns and planned false-flag vandalism across Europe.

The SDA also fabricated official documents, forged Ukrainian government quotes and planted disinformation stories designed to be picked up by credulous Western outlets. In a September 2023 protocol, Sofia Zakharova, a staffer in Putin’s presidential administration, said: “Our new team fabricated a story about child abductions. The Americans seriously published it. That’s a success.”

Though it had a budget of $50m, and employed at its height around 1000 graduates paid around 60,000 rubles a year if they had English language skills, the original Internet Research Agency campaigns of 2014 to 2016 relied largely on fake pages, meme amplification and obvious provocation.

The newer operations are more adaptive: rather than building entirely fake political ecosystems, they infiltrate and amplify existing anxieties, movements and fractures within Western societies.

During the Cold War, Soviet “active measures” used forged documents, front organisations and planted stories; digital platforms have industrialised those methods by allowing millions of interactions to be manufactured and algorithmically amplified.

Recent research also suggests that online hate can accelerate radicalisation far faster than previously thought: a Guardian data investigation found that networked groups and influencer-driven content can push users toward extremist views over a matter of weeks rather than years.

The crucial point is that platforms themselves are now part of the battlespace. State-directed information operations, political technologists skilled in emotional manipulation, and algorithmic systems optimised for engagement combine to create recursive systems of amplification capable of reshaping political reality itself.

None of these elements alone is sufficient. Together, they can manufacture artificial consensus and synthetic publics in which authentic citizens struggle to distinguish genuine democratic debate from orchestrated emotional theatre.

The Kremlin did not invent this system. Silicon Valley built much of the architecture for commercial purposes. As Trojan Horses reveals, authoritarian states recognised the political potential early and adapted those commercial tools for influence operations, often with the support of Silicon Valley ‘broligarchs’.

The industrial age turned us into workers.
Machine-driven robots day in and day out,
Then, with the crisis of overproduction,
Capitalism survived by turning workers
Into consumers, but was still not satisfied.
So it came to its own final solution,
Turn the consumer into the product itself.
Because when the product is free, you are
The product. Capital automates our reality.
It’s invisible. In the air. In the cloud.
Like the water we swim in. Until we
See through the code. Then we can rewrite it.
Then we can become, as Stalin foretold,
The brilliant engineers of human souls.

— Konstantin Rykov, in Trojan Horses