Today, information warfare has become perhaps the most important means of the West's struggle with Russia. This is not a new method, it was effectively used by our neighbors more than four centuries ago, creating a repulsive image of the Muscovite that is beneficial to them.
Barbarian country
The initiator of information wars against Russia can be considered the Polish historian Maciej Miechowski, who in his treatise "On the Two Sarmatias" (1517), using a fair amount of imagination, described the lands of Muscovy, discovered, in his words, "by the troops of the Polish king and now known to the whole world." In his work, Mekhovsky deliberately created the image of Russia as a "hostile barbarian state", which the Poles intend to domesticate.
However, an extensive information campaign against our country began from the moment the Moscow state entered the Livonian War in 1558, when Western printing houses began to circulate leaflets about the atrocities of the Russian troops, reinforcing the text with appropriate pictures:
“Very vile, terrible, hitherto unheard of, true new news, what atrocities the Muscovites are committing with captive Christians from Livonia, men and women, virgins and children, and what harm they do to them every day in their country. Along the way, it is shown what is the great danger and need of the Livonian people. To all Christians, in warning and improvement of their sinful life, it was written from Livonia and published. Nuremberg 1561 , - reported in one of the leaflets.
The Austrian historian Andreas Kappeler discovered in the archives 62 "flying leaves" of different content, dating back to the Livonian War. Tsar Ivan IV, like the entire Russian society, is presented in a very negative light - they are barbarians who pose a threat to enlightened Europe. As Kappeler established, such information products were printed in the field army printing houses run by the Polish nobleman Lapczynski.
The villainous king
In anti-Moscow brochures, Ivan the Terrible was especially hit. The Russian tsar in them was portrayed as a drunkard, debaucher, despot and murderer. The liberation of Livonia there was compared to the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian captivity, and Ivan Vasilyevich himself appeared in the form of a vengeful pharaoh, sometimes he was compared with the warlike Nebuchadnezzar or the cruel Herod. The word tyrant in the West has come to be associated exclusively with the rule of Ivan the Terrible.
The Elector of Saxon August I, whose information about Russia deserved trust in the West, compared the danger posed by Ivan the Terrible with the threat of a Turkish invasion of Europe. In his essays, he drew unambiguous parallels between the Ottoman Port and Muscovite Rus. In the illustrations accompanying the texts of the Elector, Grozny was portrayed in the dress of the Turkish Sultan, surrounded by several dozen concubines, moreover, it was emphasized that as soon as one of them bored him, he killed her.
As you know, in 1569 Ivan the Terrible organized a military campaign against Veliky Novgorod to pacify the rebellious townspeople. The West did not fail to seize the opportunity to
once again make the Russian Tsar a tyrant. In particular, the English diplomat Jerome Horsey in his "Notes on Russia" indicates that the guardsmen massacred up to 700 thousand Novgorodians, despite the fact that no more than 400 thousand inhabitants lived in Novgorod at that time. In the synodiks, only 2800 dead are said, most of whom, most likely, became victims of the plague epidemic raging in Novgorod.
Among the accusations based only on rumors and stories that do not inspire confidence in persons, there is a full of conjectures about the death of the tsar's eldest son, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, and the mysterious death of St. Philip of Moscow. These and many other popular judgments have long caused a cautious attitude among specialists, but, unfortunately, thanks to information propaganda, they have spread widely in the public consciousness.
It is curious that in the instructions to foreign ambassadors who arrived in the Moscow state, the Russian tsar was described in a completely different way - as an extremely clever and sagacious politician. Terrible in them is a convinced teetotaler who categorically cannot stand drunkards. It was noted that the tsar even banned the drinking of alcoholic beverages in Moscow, making room for fans of parties outside the capital.
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Eliminate a competitor
During the time of Ivan the Terrible, we can find the first surviving plans for the subordination of Russia to the West. So in 1578, with the filing of the adventurer Heinrich Staden, who served with Ivan the Terrible, a project of transforming Russia into a province of the Holy Roman Empire emerged among the Alsatian aristocrats. They tried to involve the Duke of Prussia, the Polish and Swedish king in the project. The ideas of seizing Muscovy were also visited by the English captain Thomas Chamberlain, which he shared with his king James I.
The ways of implementing this program were very different. For example, Staden proposed to eradicate Orthodoxy in Muscovy, and in a peaceful way. “German stone churches should be built all over the country, and Muscovites should be allowed to build wooden ones. They will soon rot and only Germanic stone ones will remain in Russia. So the change of religion will happen painlessly and naturally for Muscovites,”writes the adventurer.
The intensification of information wars during the reign of Ivan the Terrible is not accidental. It was under Ivan IV that the borders of the Russian state were actively expanded, and the Russian army, which defeated the Crimean, Kazan and Astrakhan khanates, became one of the most combat-ready forces in Europe. The West saw Russia's growing power as a dangerous political rival who had to be eliminated in any way possible.
Everything is relative
The information attack on Ivan the Terrible, of course, was not without reason. The second half of the reign of Ivan IV was overshadowed by numerous repressions and executions, in which the sovereign saw an attempt to prevent the imminent, in his opinion, treason. Among the consequences of this terror were the large number of innocent victims. For example, nothing can justify the murder of Abbot Korniliy in the Pskov-Caves monastery, committed personally by Ivan the Terrible.
However, the cruel deeds of Grozny were in many respects consonant with that terrible time. The Russian tsar is a meek child in comparison with his contemporaries - Henry VIII, Mary the Bloody, Philip II, Duke Alba, Catherine de Medici and Charles IX.
So, at the height of the oprichnina, the European Inquisition condemned to death all inhabitants of the Netherlands as heretics. Despite the fact that this plan could not be implemented, Philip II killed about 20 thousand people in Haarlem alone, throughout Holland the number of victims exceeded 100 thousand.
In just a few years of the Peasant War in Germany under Charles V, 150 thousand people were killed, and at least 70 thousand people became victims of the reign of the English king Henry VIII. During the infamous St. Bartholomew's Night, hosted by Catherine de Medici and Charles IX, as a result of the bloody massacre, up to 30 thousand French Huguenots died.
Completely not in the spirit of the tyrant-tsar, Ivan the Terrible grieved about “what happened to the French king in his kingdom, several thousand beaten up to mere babies, and about the peasant sovereign begging for sorrow that the inhumanity of the French king over a small people caused blood I have spilled a little crazy."
And what happened in Russia at that time? According to the calculations of Professor Ruslan Skrynnikov, about 4 thousand people became victims of the repressions of Ivan the Terrible. The total number of those executed, including criminals, is much higher, but even it cannot be compared with the scale of political and social cataclysms in modern Grozny Europe and Asia, the victims of which number in the hundreds of thousands.
Nevertheless, Europe in the second half of the 16th century needed an image of a hostile, aggressive and repulsive Russia. Partly and then, to divert attention from the atrocities happening in the "civilized" European countries. Considering that the discrediting of Russia in various written sources continued later, the West satisfied the first experience of the information war.