Jan 11, 2026 10:50 PM
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2026/01/vladi...ropaganda/
EXCERPTS: Few people take the pseudoscientific statements made by Putin and his entourage seriously. In Russia itself, they are often the subject of satire. In the West, they are perceived as deliberate disinformation that should be exposed and dismissed. However, there is reason to believe that Putin’s statements are not just disinformation or yet another delusion but part of his worldview, which allows us to better understand why Putin makes certain decisions.
I was born in Belarus, a small, authoritarian country near Russia. This offers a unique vantage point for examining Putin’s views. On the one hand, I grew up in a Russian-speaking media environment. On the other, I am not part of the Russian political arena, which allows me to analyse his views without the inherent bias – whether affection or animosity – that a Russian author might have
[...] The very idea of a biological threat from the West was expressed in Russia even before the war – for example, the Russian media accused Covid-19 of having Western origins...
[...] In 2017, Putin first expressed concern that foreign countries were collecting genetic material from Russian citizens, for some unstated reason. The topic was immediately picked up by pro-Kremlin media and commentators on the internet, and turned into the idea of a weapon capable of attacking people based on their genetic code and selectively destroying Russians....
[...] Like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Putin is also a climate-change denier. However, Putin’s position on this issue is much more complex, and it is precisely the nuances of his beliefs on this issue that shed light on why Putin needs pseudoscience...
[...] Why does Putin back up his idea of confrontation with the West not only with ideology, but also with pseudoscience? ... Putin’s pseudoscience is not an aberration, but a way of understanding the world in which science becomes yet another field of geopolitical confrontation. ... Putin’s childhood and youth coincided with the Cold War, whose influence was much stronger in the USSR than in the West. ... In the Soviet Union, it effectively justified the regime’s existence. Shortages of goods, repression, lack of freedom – all this was explained by the external threat from global capital, from which the working class had to be protected.
[...] In the United States, Sartre’s work was widely published and discussed, despite the fact that he was a staunch socialist. In the USSR, Sartre was viewed with suspicion, because he was not socialist enough. ... Soviet citizens lived in a state of constant threat, and pseudoscience is good at framing suspicion with solid scientific terminology.
[...] If a scientist tries to discover “hidden patterns” in random data, he can be accused of apophenia. If a secret service agent fails to discover a conspiracy in random data, he will be accused of working for the enemy.
All this shapes conspiratorial thinking simply because the sphere of state security is one in which conspiracies really do happen all the time. And this type of thinking is the perfect breeding ground for pseudoscientific ideas.
[...] The best teachers worked in the Soviet education system. There was one drawback to Soviet education: you couldn’t question what the teacher said. Critical thinking was actively discouraged in school and, to be honest, was not very useful in everyday life.
Total state control had a peculiar positive side: if a Soviet citizen read a popular science article in a magazine, they could be completely sure that the article was written by a professional scientist and checked by a scientific editor. As a result, after the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet media was filled with psychics... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Few people take the pseudoscientific statements made by Putin and his entourage seriously. In Russia itself, they are often the subject of satire. In the West, they are perceived as deliberate disinformation that should be exposed and dismissed. However, there is reason to believe that Putin’s statements are not just disinformation or yet another delusion but part of his worldview, which allows us to better understand why Putin makes certain decisions.
I was born in Belarus, a small, authoritarian country near Russia. This offers a unique vantage point for examining Putin’s views. On the one hand, I grew up in a Russian-speaking media environment. On the other, I am not part of the Russian political arena, which allows me to analyse his views without the inherent bias – whether affection or animosity – that a Russian author might have
[...] The very idea of a biological threat from the West was expressed in Russia even before the war – for example, the Russian media accused Covid-19 of having Western origins...
[...] In 2017, Putin first expressed concern that foreign countries were collecting genetic material from Russian citizens, for some unstated reason. The topic was immediately picked up by pro-Kremlin media and commentators on the internet, and turned into the idea of a weapon capable of attacking people based on their genetic code and selectively destroying Russians....
[...] Like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Putin is also a climate-change denier. However, Putin’s position on this issue is much more complex, and it is precisely the nuances of his beliefs on this issue that shed light on why Putin needs pseudoscience...
[...] Why does Putin back up his idea of confrontation with the West not only with ideology, but also with pseudoscience? ... Putin’s pseudoscience is not an aberration, but a way of understanding the world in which science becomes yet another field of geopolitical confrontation. ... Putin’s childhood and youth coincided with the Cold War, whose influence was much stronger in the USSR than in the West. ... In the Soviet Union, it effectively justified the regime’s existence. Shortages of goods, repression, lack of freedom – all this was explained by the external threat from global capital, from which the working class had to be protected.
[...] In the United States, Sartre’s work was widely published and discussed, despite the fact that he was a staunch socialist. In the USSR, Sartre was viewed with suspicion, because he was not socialist enough. ... Soviet citizens lived in a state of constant threat, and pseudoscience is good at framing suspicion with solid scientific terminology.
[...] If a scientist tries to discover “hidden patterns” in random data, he can be accused of apophenia. If a secret service agent fails to discover a conspiracy in random data, he will be accused of working for the enemy.
All this shapes conspiratorial thinking simply because the sphere of state security is one in which conspiracies really do happen all the time. And this type of thinking is the perfect breeding ground for pseudoscientific ideas.
[...] The best teachers worked in the Soviet education system. There was one drawback to Soviet education: you couldn’t question what the teacher said. Critical thinking was actively discouraged in school and, to be honest, was not very useful in everyday life.
Total state control had a peculiar positive side: if a Soviet citizen read a popular science article in a magazine, they could be completely sure that the article was written by a professional scientist and checked by a scientific editor. As a result, after the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet media was filled with psychics... (MORE - missing details)