Alexandr Nevzorov: Russia always plays the role of the beaten and exposed

Last week Britain, Netherlands and the United States accused Russian military intelligence GRU of involvement in the series of cyber attacks across the world. The British government said the GRU was behind «reckless and indiscriminate» cyber attacks carried out on orders from the Kremlin. Journalist and columnist Alexander Nevzorov writes his commentary on this news in his new column for the Business Courier.

Let’s put morality aside, it’s a preposterous and artificial term. We perfectly understand that the whole world is imbued and laced with mutual peeping, wire-tapping, spying and infiltration of systems of any level. And it’s a normal, natural state because everyone has their own strict interests. I suspect that members of NATO aren’t very benevolent towards each other when it comes to spying. Conglomerates – for example, car and fragrance companies – must be spying on each other and infiltrate each other’s computer systems.

When we talk about events like these, we should remember the principle of ancient Sparta, according to which it wasn’t the thief who was considered guilty, but the one who was caught stealing.

When the same country regularly gets caught doing something,  it’s not about spying or cyber-attacks, it’s about Saltykov-Shchedrin – a phenomenal triumph of stupidity and unprofessionalism even in such a supposedly natural thing for Russians as spying. When we talk about poor poisoners, hackers or those who are responsible for ensuring the safety of the leaders of gangs called DPR and LPR, what we’re really discussing isn’t the spying, but the size and smell of the bubbles coming from the pond after someone had farted into it.

As is known, our GRU officers have an incredible talent for encryption. All information on all departments of GRU can be obtained from the traffic police’s database because all GRU workers like riding in cars. When I was a member of the State Duma, I also was on the Security Committee and oversaw the Foreign Intelligence Service. And there was talk of creating a small centralized database that can’t be accessed by the traffic police with the names of «illegals», the names that definitely shouldn’t go public. Traffic police officers are merry people, they love worldly pleasures and when they get their paws on the secret data, they do with it what any normal person would – sell it. Nobody has still come up with a framework that would entirely isolate the GRU, the SVR and other services from society-wide legal systems. That’s why any GRU officer can be easily traced. This problem was solved in the US and the majority of European countries – even in Italy. But not in Russia.

Besides, many people are enthralled to the stereotypes about spies coming from the James Bond films. In reality, such spies have never existed. The real guys are simple-minded, deadly boring, and chubby, like beer, to burp, to watch football. When we talk about any military people, including GRU officers, we must understand that there’s no intellectual complexity there, there are just habits imprinted on their brains, complete informational promiscuity, a mess in the head, predilection for primitive pleasures and the most uncomplicated view of this world. And the job of a spy itself doesn’t have any important effect on this.

Similarly, we can often see people with a brilliant knowledge in physics, chemistry and mathematics who turn out to be religious, although their knowledge is supposed to guard them against such primitive ideas. But it didn’t.

When I’m told about Russian hackers, I imagine someone sitting and hitting his keyboard with a bust. And considering how big these services’ budget is, and the fact that the whole country works for them, we can imagine the number of busts every second pounding on those keyboards. And sometimes they actually end up with some sort of interference, but they get immediately caught and we see someone’s red ear again.

One can’t help, but feel sorry for poor Russia, because it always plays the role of the beaten, exposed, with a red ear, just pulled by humanity. And it again points its dirty finger at those who were pulling her ears and calls them bastards, fools and provocateurs. And there’s something very touching about this.