By Jabir Deralla
Propaganda has many faces. What most people recognize as propaganda are the loud, rumbling political slogans, the floods of social media posts, and the familiar forums where citizens are showered with relentless messaging and crude manipulation. But that is only one form — the most obvious one — aimed at the masses.
Propaganda also comes in sophisticated packaging, wrapped in whispers and smooth talking. You find it between book covers, in literary endorsements, and in the “philosophical” or “objective” reflections of public intellectuals, academics, civil society leaders, and media professionals. Propaganda networks are full of such figures — well attended and carefully cultivated by the diplomatic underground that the Kremlin has developed for decades.
This is the new slow-burn front of influence — the cultural one.
When Kremlin Narratives Speak with a French Accent
In 2024, French historian and sociologist Emmanuel Todd published La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) — a work that reproduces Kremlin talking points with striking precision under the guise of academic inquiry. Todd argues that the West is undergoing a profound internal crisis marked by industrial stagnation, political dysfunction, and the collapse of social cohesion — a process he interprets as its “defeat.”
The author uses the war in Ukraine as a case study to support his claims, asserting that the West’s actions have led to its own strategic failure. His analysis, wrapped in academic authority and couched in elegant phrasing, mirrors the ideological backbone of Russian disinformation: the supposed moral decay of the West, the false symmetry between democracy and dictatorship, and the portrayal of Russia as a misunderstood civilizational power defending “traditional values.”
Like other Western admirers of Putin — some refined, and others, like Tucker Carlson, hysterical or cowboy-styled — Todd seems fascinated by what he perceives as the Russian leader’s “geopolitical brilliance.” Yet what he interprets as mastery is, in truth, cold-blooded brutality and the calculating criminal mind of a genocidal dictator wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Putin is not a strategist but a tyrant, who has sacrificed more than 1.2 million soldiers in a three-and-a-half-year bloodbath against an entire nation, targeting civilians above all — a war born of his delusional imperial fantasy dubbed as a three-day “special military operation” against Ukraine.
From Moscow to the Balkans: The Journey of a Narrative
In 2025, La Défaite de l’Occident was almost simultaneously introduced to Balkan audiences through translations into local languages in Serbia, Bulgaria, and North Macedonia. The Serbian translation, titled „Пораз Запада“ (Poraz Zapada / The Defeat of the West), was published by Karpos Books (Loznica/Belgrade, 2025), while Bulgaria’s Iztoк-Zapad Publishing House released „Поражението на Запада“ (Porazhenieto na Zapada / The Defeat of the West). North Macedonia’s Ikona Publishing followed with „Пропаста на Западот“ (Propasta na Zapadot / The Collapse of the West).
Though each publisher presents the work as a major intellectual contribution, their promotional narratives converge around identical ideological framing — the “decline of Western civilization” and the “rebirth of Russia.” This synchronicity across the region signals a coordinated diffusion of popaganda narratives serving Moscow’s cultural influence strategy in Southeastern Europe.
In North Macedonia, Ikona’s promotional campaign illustrates how this soft-power front operates. Its sponsored social-media text mirrors key Kremlin talking points: that the West has “lost its humanity,” that Russia is “rising again,” and that the real problem of the modern world is not Russian aggression but “the decadence of its American center.”
When I first read about Todd’s book in 2024, I told myself: This is how a propaganda narrative travels. It begins in Moscow — formulated, tested, and disseminated through state-controlled media and Kremlin-aligned think tanks. Then it finds its intellectual apologists in Western capitals — people who turn political deception into “academic analysis.” Finally, it reaches places like Belgrade, Sofia, or Skopje through local amplifiers, publishers, and media outlets that, whether naively or deliberately, give these narratives a veneer of cultural legitimacy.
This is the long journey of a narrative — from Moscow to Paris to the Balkans — dressed in the language of intellectual curiosity, yet carrying the same old message: the West is collapsing, Russia is rising, and the world must adapt to this “new reality.”
The Cultural Battlefield
Successful propaganda operations combine the instant production and dissemination of disinformation with the long game of silently transforming societal narratives — in bookstores, lecture halls, film festivals, and academic debates. There, it becomes a battle for meaning: for how societies interpret truth, justice, and power.
The Kremlin understands this all too well. While its armies commit atrocities in Ukraine, its cultural emissaries rewrite the moral map of the world, using the language of philosophy, sociology, and “civilizational analysis” to justify aggression, deny genocide, and erode the moral foundations of democracy.
The roots of this phenomenon lie not in the Balkans, nor in the West, but in Moscow — within the century-long machinery of influence engineered by the NKVD and KGB, later refined by the FSB and GRU. Over generations, the Kremlin built an international network of sympathizers, opportunists, and intellectuals willing to translate imperial propaganda into the language of philosophy, culture, and critique.
These narratives, initially forged in Soviet ideological laboratories, later found hospitable terrain in Western democracies — open societies that cherish free expression but often underestimate the sophistication of hybrid warfare. There, select academics, writers, and commentators — from “anti-globalists” to self-styled “realists” — became mirrors and multipliers of Kremlin talking points, presenting manipulation as analysis and authoritarian nostalgia as realism.
Once dressed in Western intellectual respectability, these narratives are re-exported to the peripheries, where they find renewed life — particularly in the Balkans and other post-communist societies whose democratic institutions and collective memories remain vulnerable to ideological infiltration and sociopolitical engineering.
In Pursuit of Familiar Patterns
Across the region — in Serbia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and beyond — Moscow’s talking points are repackaged through publishing houses, “academic” debates, podcasts, and media outlets — often including national public broadcasters and mainstream media — that blend ideological bias with a veneer of intellectual curiosity.
In Serbia, where Russian media such as Sputnik Srbija and RT Balkan operate openly, narratives of “Western decay” and “Russian revival” are echoed by sympathetic editors, writers, and church-linked cultural circles. In Bulgaria, similar arguments about the “moral collapse” of the West resurface through nationalist publishers and media with a long history of Russophile sentiment. And in North Macedonia, publishers, academics, and opinion makers embrace this same cultural current — polished, persuasive, and deeply manipulative normalization of Russian narratives, directly translated from Belgrade.
Once societies that feared and hated the tanks at the borders of socialist countries that defied Stalin’s USSR now succumb to a different kind of invasion — by narratives.
This blending of cultural prestige and propaganda is what makes the “slow-burn” approach particularly dangerous. Unlike crude disinformation campaigns that can be easily exposed, these operations build credibility, intimacy, and trust over time. They reshape the intellectual climate and prepare the ground for future political manipulation — turning book launches, essays, and lectures into subtle instruments of ideological influence.
Propaganda Kills
Books can inspire revolutions — or rationalize crimes. What we are witnessing today is not merely a war over territory, but a war over narratives, memory, and values. The real danger is in what is subtly implied: that truth is relative, democracy obsolete, and power the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.
I neither need nor want to speculate about the motives of these apologists with their prestigious titles and vast audiences. It makes no difference whether they believe what they write, whether they are manipulated into oblivion — useful idiots, as the KGB once called them — or whether they are simply paid to perform. The fact remains: they are wrong. Dangerously wrong. Their compliance with Putin’s bloodthirsty delusions costs lives.
Propaganda kills. Whether it comes wrapped in vulgar slogans or velvet gloves — it kills. Period.
Recognizing this new front of influence — and exposing its agents, formats, and amplifiers — is not censorship. Far from it. It is defense, based on fundamental human rights and freedoms that are under attack.
Recognizing this new front of influence — and exposing its agents, formats, and amplifiers — is not censorship. Far from it. It is defense — the defense of democracy, and of the fundamental human rights and freedoms now under attack.
About the Author: Jabir Deralla is an award-winning journalist, analyst, and human rights advocate focusing on democracy, disinformation, and hybrid warfare in the Balkans and Europe. Among his works are the book “Ukraine – Years of Heroism” and the co-authored the “Defending Democracy and Human Rights.”
This article includes research and analytical assistance from AI tools (including ChatGPT by OpenAI). All interpretations, conclusions, and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.