3) Your Body Belongs to the State

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Warning, the following contains graphic descriptions of violence and sexual assault that may be too intense or triggering to some listeners. Discretion is advised.

He was the son of a high ranking Soviet Army officer and he had an outstanding career with Novesty, which was also up front for the KGB.

Ideological subversion is the slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures actively miriapriatia in the language of the KGB.

Or psychological warfare.

What it basically means is to change the perception of reality. Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him.

Adamir Putin's former chief economic advisor, who had extensive access to.

The Prussian president over the years, goes one on one with our Joe Khalil.

How much of the population actually is exposed to what's really happening in your career?

I would say up to seventy percent of the Russian population have been brainwashed, brainwashed completely.

A few seventy percent, you think it's that high, it would be I would say conservativefest to.

Make Jana Agaalakova was one of the stars of Russia's Channel one.

Even now, when you're watching news in raw shirt, it's like two different planets. In one planet there is ruins and total disaster, death and tragedy. In another world it's Russian militaries that was cheered by local population with flowers, and this is only victories in these two worlds don't mix up. And it's blown my mind how they do it, how they brainwashed their population.

To kill.

Am really sorry, and how the.

Guts knows.

Busus Episode three, chapter six, the selection.

There are not so many schools in Russia. It's like maybe only three. One were put and studied and sunk by the Petersburg another one in Moscow they would call it like former KIGB school FSB was basically like they renamed it. But my school, my academy, would be called the Academy of Military Investigation.

How do you said in Russia, Oh, it's.

Some academia or Probvilinian ministers of Nutrin deal recipe.

What happens once you walk in.

When I saw that huge gray color building, looking like all the Soviet Union buildings, where you cannot say a word, and you understand there is no chance you could leave a free life and have a free word, I just wanted to run away, but I couldn't say no, and I couldn't run away, and I had to go there. And I just kept myself together, and I stayed silent and just walked into that walls.

Lea Rosa Is described ivan her first day of formal military training after her tragic internship. She was just eighteen at the time.

When I saw these thick, gray, cold walls with portraits of that former officers or KGB agents, and I saw that cold faces of all my teachers and my classmates. There were no fun or there were no desire or like ambitions or dreams. There were really cold blooded machines or like zombie people.

That first day at the academy would change the course of Eleah's life. But before we get to that, here's a little bit about the training of new recruits at a Russian military academy.

First, of my whole lifestyle has been changed. I would wake up at four am because at six am you had to have a morning report that would give you a gender schedule, and you have to do marshing. From six am in the morning, we would listen this big words lecture about our country, that we have to protect the country. We have to be real patriot. V fought Nazi. We are the strongest country in the world. We have the strongest nationality. We are the.

Purest.

Nothing can be more powerful than us. You have to do exercises, you have to do jogging, you have to do shooting. They also had to do like cleaning and cooking four hundreds of people, and six pm it's again the report time, and again you have to do marching. And then sometimes homework would be so much so it would take till like two am or like one am. It was really off and it was always cold. I was so tired and exhausted because I slept only four hours.

I ask Leah if she thinks that all the marching, the work, the lack of sleep, or not just about training but also about brainwashing.

Well, yes, of course the whole system is like that, right. It's one of the important technique of manipulation. Where if you want to train someone, you have to exhaust this person with the physical activities so the brain becomes weak. And when the brain becomes weak, there you can plant seats built on patriotic romantic feeling like together we can fight the whole world.

In case patriotism wasn't enough to inspire someone to die for their country, they were also financial incentives.

So for example, if they would say, okay, so there is a war in Chichen, second campaign, So who wants to go there? Because if you go to the war, first of all, you have salary much higher than usual, you have better insurance, better benefits. If you will die, then your family will get so and so much money, which was higher than usual salary. People would risk their life because it was beneficial for their families and they would go to the war.

It's still the same.

As for leaving the military. Once you were there, you had to fulfill your duties.

Once you're there, you cannot go back. You cannot just become civilian and said, Okay, I don't want to work in military anymore. I want just to be a human resource recruiter. You cannot do that. You know that once you're there, you have to be there till the rest of your life.

In this toxic environment, the Leah's classmates competed with each other for favor, sometimes cruelly and savagely.

I try to make friends, but after a few months I understood that wherever I would say to my girlfriends, they would talk to our teachers. So you couldn't even tell anyone's secrets or the way you think or.

The way you feel. I had.

Even my male classmates, they would call me bad names. Some of them try to put me down. You understand that you're there by yourself. You cannot have friends, You cannot rely on anyone. You know that every single one is your enemy. We say, if you live with wolves, you have to become one of wolves.

So with this context, we now returned to Elia's first day at the academy. She was lined up for inspection with the rest of the new students, and that's when it all began.

All of us we had to be outside, and I remember there was one of the most powerful teacher at that time, with the highest rank, and he particularly looked at every single girl there. And I was the only one who was eighteen years old. At the girls the la starting from twenty to twenty three, twenty five thirty.

Even this high ranking commander, a Russian colonel, began whispering to a female officer and motioning to Aliyah.

But I understood the talk about me because they looked at me and they discussed something I didn't know.

Is it like bad or good? I didn't know anything.

And then they also looked at some other girls.

Soon after, Aliyah was pulled aside and told that she'd been selected to participate in a special program. This, of course, was not an optional program.

I will be studying additional subjects together with other four girls every day after our main program.

This additional coursework, as I'm sure you figured out, would train Aliyah in the art of seduction, the exchange of sexuality for secrets or lives. But what does it take for a woman raised conservatively with no dating experience to be willing to let this date use your body like this? It would take a lot more fear and a lot more brainwashing. Chapter seven, The Sacrifice.

There are lots of things that are involved in persuasion every day. But when things become very stressful, and when the stimuli are controlled and there are very few other stimuli, other than what the perpetrator is trying to impose on you, and when you are sleep deprived, these are settings that make people very malleable, and you can see this in many of the brainwashing events in twentieth century.

This is doctor Joel Dimsdale, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Diego and the author of the book Dark Persuasion, A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media. I tell doctor Dimsdale, what you just heard about Aliah's training regimen at the military academy meant to do this and sort of getting the party line fed to her every waking moment. Is that a form of what you're talking about.

So when she has been isolated from her family and friends and only exposed to people who are constantly HARKing on this one view of what the world is like and what her task is, this begins to be a setup for coercive persuasion, even if it's against her best interest. Everything goes back to Pavlov at the.

Doctor Dimsdale says, the modern history of brainwashing back to Russia, specifically the fact that the work of doctor Ivan Pavlov was taking place at the same time as the Russian Revolution.

The odd thing in history is that, by virtue of his prominence, Lenin visited Pavlov and spent hours talking with Pavlov, asking him could Pavlov help Lenin remake the people of the Soviet Union so that they would be better communists. So the Soviets were always interested in behavior change, in trying to be as scientific as possible about it, and Pavlov was a perfect vehicle for exploring that.

I asked doctor Dimsdale about the science of this behavioral change. What are the conditions that make this possible, not just for Aleah, but for anyone who's being reprogrammed to lay down their lives and their ethics for their country.

If you had a checklist of how do you persuade people so that you can guarantee behaviors that there would be resistance to otherwise, that checklist would include number one. Isolate them away from contrary influences. Number two. Put them under a lot of stress. Number three. Deprive them of sleep so they're not thinking clearly. Number four, involve them in a group that hammers home certain messages repeatedly.

We now know the steps that lead to brainwashing or course of persuasion, as doctor Ginsdale prefers to put it, but brainwashing for what Let's move forward to Russia in the twenty first century.

War was central to the Putin regime.

This is Ian Garner, a Russian historian and author of the book z Generation Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist youth.

Right. We've seen that from the very first action Putin takes when he's in power, and where we start to see a real change is in what children are taught in the school. Children learn war poems, children start to dress up in military uniforms, so they start to be taught that war is a good thing. War is something we need to grow our society and become better people. Joining the army, becoming a part of this military machine in Russia is just a hugely respectable path.

The propaganda that helps make this possible, Garner says, is history lessons, revised history lessons, just like the ones that Leah received during her training.

This is not going to be lessons about real history. This is going to be the Russian version of history in which Russia is surrounded by enemies who are looking to destroy it, and Russia has saved the world, and you're going to be a hero if you sacrifice yourself just like those folks Stalingrads eighty years ago.

Stalingrad, as he may recall, is the deadly World War two battle that Leah's grandfather served in, and the monument there with his name on it is practically a shrine for Leah's family.

There is this phrase by Siedel's up and Russian thank you granddad for bringing us victory. And what they're talking about is World War two. And all of this comes down the myth of the Second World War as the moment when a generation of grandfathers sacrificed themselves to save the world and to save Russia, to save humanity from the Nazi threat. Thus we respect them. It's a kind of ancestor worship. The sacrifice is coded that the sacrifice, the death, has to happen. It's a bit like the

Russia's President Vladimir Putin is in Volga Grat formerly known as Stalingrad, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad. He later spoke at an event where he criticized Germany for helping to arm Ukraine. He said, Russia is once again threatened by Germany. This is his latest attempt to compare Russia's war against Ukraine to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Russian news, Russian education, and especially Russian social media, Gardner explains, have turned into an actual indoctrination program, teaching not just a warlike way of thinking, but actual military skills to the youth.

Because they're so desperately rushed to get them to the front. It is giving that training to children today and they will be ready tomorrow.

To fund And at what age does that training start?

Six years old?

Wow, it's interesting again because her trains are from her dad at I think age six or seven.

Yeah, So her experience then was exceptional and unusual. But now that experience is being not just institutionalized and formalized by this state, it's also being held up as the ideal of what a young child can be.

Chapter eight, Death of a Patriot. We return now to Eliah's first day at the military academy. Selected out of the lineup along with four other women, she was told she'd been chosen to participate in a special, top secret program to serve her country. A few hours later, the top commander at the academy, the colonel who'd chosen her from the lineup, called her into his office.

After a few hours, I was called to my teacher office.

So I came there and he closed the door.

And I did respect him a lot, because he was much older than me that time. He was forty eight and I was eighteen, and I was very innocent, as I said, like I never kissed any man.

As a Leah tells the story, you may hear some laughter here and there, but note that there's nothing funny about this. There are topics that bring up so much trauma and are so uncomfortable to discuss that sometimes we laugh in order to avoid the deep pain that these events bring up. In an often cited research paper, if I didn't laugh, I'd cry, doctor Kathleen Hand further explains that quote laughter creates a sense of relief, usually from

And I looked at him and I asked him like hello, like you know, like, yes, sir, you were calling for me, so I'm here. And he was wearing his uniform, bit medals and everything, looking so sophisticated and so powerful like my dad when he was wearing uniform who was respected that. He asked me, like, what do you really expect from this education? And I said, well, you know my story. You know whose daughter am I and I am here to follow my dad's path and I'm ready to study

That part, so I was.

I didn't know what to do, and he came so close that I couldn't really just stand up and leave. I just had like one thing in my head that wait a minute, he knows that who is my dad, and yet he just asked me to suck his cock, Like, how is that possible? I thought that the name of my dad will protect me from this kind of stuff, and he kind of like he almost like he read my mind, and he said, yes, I know who is your father, and you know that I have much higher

And he opened his.

Zip and he took his spinnis off just in front of my mouth, and he said, like, suck it.

What are you waiting for.

At the moment, I were thinking, all right, so I cannot do anything bad to him right now. I cannot bite it right even though I'm on greenside from this man for doing this to me right now, to disrespect my father, who disrespect my principles, my beliefs, in my country, in my people, who came here to basically sacrifice my life, not for sucking his cock, but for protecting people and doing really good for this country. But I told myself, you know what, I'll make sure that one day he

You know, like that.

Feeling when you know you like your dreams and everything is just like everything's just gone in one second. And then I said to myself, okay, so so now what I obviously couldn't tell anyone about this act because I mean, come on, who am I supposed to tell it to, like to move to my dad?

Oh you know that, Like, I mean, I know my dad.

He would go crazy and then it would be all I don't know, like he might he would might kill him and then go to jail or like it would be such a drama. So I know my dad, and I was like, no, this is definitely I cannot tell him.

So who do I say?

So this colonial teacher, he is the highest level. So whom do I go? There is no one to go to, there is no one to complain to, Like whom do I go to?

Police?

I mean he is like this is the power. I mean, whom do I go? Whom do I say?

And it's already was the second time when I was actually abused in the military by the people who supports to be like, you know, to stand for justice. How I mean, like all my romantic feelings, all my dreams, all my you know, like these words by my dad telling me from early age that I should be the one who protect people and love my my my country, love love government, you know, love police, and love military.

How is that possible? I mean how.

In the days that Eliah learned that her special training was about learning the art of sex fionage, she also learned that the exploitation of the academy would continue indefinitely, and that the male officers expected the female seduction students to have sex with them for what they claimed was training and desensitization purposes. So Eliah thought, if these techniques work on enemies of the state, then perhaps they will also work on the state as well.

And that moment I created a plan. I thought, what if I will seduce this colonel. What if I will seduce him the way that he would fall in love and then he can do what I want him to do, and he will protect me from things which I don't want to do, like, for example, sleeping with all of those teachers. So that if I would manipulate him the way he would feel that I'm his girl and nobody is allowed to touch me, then it will help me to go through that education.

You know what I'm saying.

I thought it's better I would have sex only with one teacher rather than.

With all of them.

And he had the strongest position among all of them, so for me, it was easier to become his lover rather than just being a whore for everyone.

And that's when, with nowhere else to turn, Aliah took justice into her own hands.

And I'll be fucking so good. I'll learn so much. I'll make sure that I'll become the best. It's funny how these seation techniques work, because eventually he've told me that he wants to do worse his wife in order to marry me.

Leah's story continues in episode four, where she takes us inside the classroom to experience Russian seductions by training. The episode is available now. Keep listening for free on Apple Podcasts. For full credits, check out our show notes. If you or a loved one are a survivor of sexual assault, you can visit rain dot org that's r AI n N dot org, or call one eight hundred sixty five six four six seven three for free confidential twenty four to seven support