The theoretical power of a good conspiracy

By Edward Lucas

Date: 16/03/06

Slobodan Milosevic was murdered, and if the autopsy doesn't prove it, that's just because his assassins were so clever. Conspiracy theories and the post-Communist world are made for each other: there's the ideal combination of big-time geopolitics, a surplus of spooks, and a generation that grew up in the powerlessness and paranoia engendered by totalitarian rule.

In the Communist era, conspiracy theories often made more sense than anything else. "Eto nie sluchaino" (It's not coincidental) was a favourite Kremlinologists' phrase when trying to create a pattern out of a strange nuance in a book review, a non-appearance at a funeral and a rapid promotion. And the collapse of Communism was so sudden and dramatic that it sometimes seemed too perfect to have been staged. During the Czechoslovak revolution of 1989, there were plenty of strange events: a student supposedly murdered by the police, outraging the public mood, who turned out never to have existed? Just mistaken reporting. The top KGB general having dinner in Prague that night? Just a coincidence. The burly, Czech-speaking American who forcefully and expertly organised the first Civic Forum press conference, and then disappeared? Just a well-wisher.

Some people thought that Gorbachev and the West must have jointly cooked up the revolutions to get rid of the old guard in Eastern Europe. Others thought it was a sinister ploy. Endel Lippmaa, the brilliant Estonian physicist, was not alone in thinking that Russia was playing a fiendish trick on the West. The former empire would not just be rescued financially; it would also become a Trojan horse with which the Kremlin would gain power and information inside the enemy camp. In my gloomier moments, I wonder if he had a point.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that though they are occasionally provable (if everyone involved 'fesses up) they are not falsifiable. They stretch elastically over every new fact and development. Difficult evidence is dismissed as a clever plant, proving the cleverness of the conspiracy and to be believed only by the naive.

One ingenious theory I came across recently in Prague is that Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, is actually Russian. I don't often feel sorry for the arrogant, bombastic Klaus, but I felt a real twinge of sympathy for him over this. How could he prove that he's not Russian, any more than he can prove conclusively that he's not an elephant?

Conspiracy theorists are great generalisers: if today's western spooks are sometimes caught (mis) using Russian NGOs, that means every such organisation is suspect. If Russian spooks are sometimes caught making mischief in the former captive nations, that means every setback there can be attributed to their bribery, bullying and blackmail.

Although this stuff is all quite amusing, it hurts democracy by corroding two essential parts of the public mood: trust and self-reliance. If you believe that everything you read in the paper has been planted there by spooks (or Jews, or freemasons), and that your country's officials or politicians are just puppets, it produces a kind of bitter, cynical apathy. Soon nothing is coincidental and everything is part of a huge plan. You can't even trust your friends, so open another bottle and concentrate on the purely private pleasures of life.

And the danger with that kind of mood is that it makes things easy for powerful, unscrupulous people and organisations to get their own way. Dictators love it when people believe in conspiracy theories: it makes them easy to manipulate. Democrats are right to worry. An open society has no place for conspiracies.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Comment feature on the effect of conspiracy theories in Central and Eastern Europe.