Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz and Ekaterina Kamenskaya took part in the 25th Aleksanteri Conference, ‘Mapping Security in Eastern and Central Europe and Eurasia’, held in Helsinki on 21–23 October 2026 (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/aleksanteri-institute/research/aleksanteri-conference-2026).
Their panel, ‘Security, Democracy and Truth: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the “Disinformation Threat”’, was chaired by Weizhou Wang, with Alexandr Voronovici as discussant. It included the following papers:
Stephen Hutchings
What do we mean by Russian 'appropriation' of populist disinformation narratives and how does it work? A MAGA-land case study
Challenging accounts presenting Russian versions of Deep State MAGA conspiracies as a cynically appropriated populist disinformation narrative, this paper proposes that such formulations distort Russian propaganda’s complex engagement with conspiracism, including a significant domestic manifestation. First offering a short genealogy demonstrating how Deep State conspiracy theories mutate in meaning as they cross historical and linguacultural boundaries, it argues that conspiracy narratives receive disinformation status via reciprocal, mutually absorbing allegations. Deep State conspiracism reflects the belief that Russiagate was a false liberal conspiracy theory, with both the theory and its newly confirmed disinformation tag evidencing Cold War sediments. In turn, that tag bolstered its transcultural mobility and populist potency, including within Russia, where prominent public figures have posited a potentially malign, Russian Deep State. At the same time, the conspiracy’s status as ‘Kremlin disinformation’ in counter-disinformation frameworks boosts its role within Russia’s official anti-Western propaganda strategies. Linear stories of deceitful ‘appropriations’ of conspiracism thus flatten Kremlin propaganda’s complex and combustible internal relationship to populism, reinforcing its capacity to exploit disinformation discourse’s recursive logic.
Vera Tolz
“Viral” Before the Internet: Home-Grown and Foreign AIDS Disinformation in the Late Cold War Global Media Sphere
This paper offers a historically grounded case study of AIDS-related conspiracy theories in the late Cold War. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of 1980s Western Anglophone media, it shows that narratives about the origins of HIV/AIDS, including the laboratory-origin theory, were co-produced by Soviet state-sponsored campaigns and staunchly anti-communist Western actors not through any coordination, but through the independent circulation of mutually reinforcing claims. The counter-disinformation policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments, which judged claims by their source rather than their substance, allowed these narratives to spread far more widely than has been acknowledged, and often amplified rather than suppressed them. The case complicates assumptions about the novelty of digital-age disinformation and exposes the limits of a national security framework, tying ‘disinformation’ to foreign state actors, that still shapes democratic responses today.
Ekaterina Kamenskaya
Counteroffensive against Communism: Western Approaches to Soviet Propaganda during the Cold War
This paper analyses Western theoretical and practical approaches to Soviet propaganda from the 1950s to the early 1970s, considering Cold War information confrontation as a dialogical process. Drawing on academic works, government documents and the US mass press, it examines how, in characterising Soviet propaganda, Western academics, propaganda practitioners, journalists and politicians simultaneously constructed an image of their own political communication and developed approaches to combating Soviet propaganda. It highlights the main distinctions they drew between Western and Eastern political communication and propaganda and examines debates over terms such as counterpropaganda and disinformation. Finally, the paper shows how these theoretical approaches were put into practice by Radio Liberty, a US-sponsored radio station broadcasting to the USSR.