Lukes Publishes Journal Article on Russian Information Warfare
Igor Lukes, Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent article on the book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and how Russia Helped Donald Trump Win by Luke Harding.
The article, entitled “Russian Information Warfare and the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016: Reflections on Luke Harding’s Book Collusion,” was published in the Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies.
From the text of the article:
The 2016 presidential election in the United States shocked not only the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton, but also the victorious Donald Trump, and America’s NATO allies and partners. The election also surprised the Kremlin. At midnight on 8 November 2016, Election Day, the semi-official Izvestia announced with a resigned tone that Hillary Clinton had won. The outcome, the paper asserted, was preordained, as the whole campaign was skewed in her favor; Trump’s candidacy was tolerated merely to create the illusion of democracy. Of course, this view had to be revised as soon as the news of Trump’s triumph reached Moscow. It was greeted with unadulterated joy: the Duma deputies stood up and applauded. Dmitry Peskov, the Russian presidential spokesman, evaluated Trump’s first speech as president-elect in glowing terms. He thought that Trump’s and Putin’s views were “absolutely, phenomenally in line.” Boris Chernyshev, a Duma deputy leader, celebrated the outcome with champagne and a short statement containing a curiously chosen pronoun: “Yes, we did!” Margarita Simon’yan, editor-in-chief of the RT News channel, tweeted that she planned to drive around Moscow with a U.S. flag attached to her car. When a friendly TV journalist asked Peskov whether it was true that Vladimir Putin and his entourage celebrated Trump’s victory, he answered with surprising openness. The party in the Kremlin, he laughed, had lasted for three days. “They ripped their accordions”, he added with a smirk.
Igor Lukes writes primarily about Central Europe. His publications deal with the interwar period, the Cold War, and contemporary developments in East Central Europe and Russia. His work has won the support of various other institutions, including Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the Woodrow Wilson Center, IREX, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997 Lukes won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University.