Zelinskiy writes from inside a mental universe where information and psychology form the main battlefield and where mass audiences rarely act as autonomous subjects. Treadstone 71 designs training for operators who must function in that same battlespace, yet do so with structured tradecraft, comparative doctrine, and critical thinking baked in. Reading his two books side by side with Treadstone 71’s People & Narrative Intelligence (PEOPINT), cyber-PSYOPS, and strategic analysis programs reveals both a rich threat lens and a set of exploitable weaknesses in Russian-style cognitive doctrine.
Information-Psychological Impact on Mass : Mass Communication, Information, and Propaganda as Channels for Manipulative Methods Targeting the Subconscious and Shaping the Behavior of Individuals and Crowds
Manipulating the Individual and the Masses: Manipulative Technologies of Power in Attacking the Subconscious of Individuals and Crowds
1. Worldview: permanent psychological war vs. structured cognitive operations
Zelinskiy frames modern politics as a continuous informational-psychological war in which media, culture, and technology serve as weapons against the collective psyche. Mass media, propaganda, and entertainment do not simply inform or entertain; they channel manipulative methodologies that attack the subconscious and model the behavior of individuals and crowds.
He characterizes mass consciousness as inherently vulnerable, even “a concentration of stupidity” when individuals gather into crowds. In his view, even intelligent people lose critical capacity inside the mass, becoming suggestible material for manipulation through symbols, archetypes, fear, and desire.
Treadstone 71’s People and Narrative Intelligence program accepts the same basic premise that cognition, not infrastructure alone, defines the decisive terrain. People & Narrative Intelligence focuses explicitly on “the human side of cyber intelligence” and trains analysts to understand how human choices, emotions, and social interactions drive digital risk. The course description stresses that even the strongest technical defenses fail when adversaries trick or influence people, and it positions PEOPINT as “Tier 5 of intelligence competency,” where operators learn to interpret and shape behavior, not just packets or logs.
Zelinskiy therefore offers a raw, often paranoid version of what Treadstone 71 turns into disciplined tradecraft. He assumes an omnipresent psychological war with the West as the aggressor and Russia as the target. Treadstone 71 assumes a contested cognitive environment in which multiple state and non-state actors weaponize narratives and human weaknesses; PEOPINT teaches operators to map those contests without accepting any protagonist’s ideological story as fact.
2. The unconscious, media, and the mass: from Le Bon to PEOPINT modules
Zelinskiy leans heavily on classic crowd psychology and psychoanalysis. He cites Le Bon, Freud, and Zinoviev to argue that the unconscious dominates human behavior and that any information first lodges in the subconscious before it shapes conscious thought and action. He treats television and cinema as especially dangerous because they encode content directly into the subconscious and provoke borderline neurotic dependence in viewers. Long-term exposure to television, in his description, creates addiction and even withdrawal-like symptoms if viewers stop watching.
He extends the same logic to neurolinguistic programming (NLP). Any communication that deliberately plays on representational systems, submodalities, and hypnotic patterns effectively reprograms the subject’s behavior while the subject believes in personal autonomy.
Treadstone 71’s PEOPINT curriculum turns similar concepts into a modular training architecture. The People & Narrative Intelligence course outline includes:
- “Unpacking the Architecture of Influence”
- “The Subversive Architecture of PEOPINT – Playbook Two”
- “Profiling the Unwitting Participant – A Playbook for Understanding Human Vulnerabilities in PEOPINT”
- “Narrative Intelligence (NARINT) – A Playbook for Deconstructing and Countering Influence Narratives”
The course designers treat the unconscious and behavioral bias as operational realities rather than mystical forces. Instead of portraying television or cinema as inherently corrosive, PEOPINT asks analysts to examine concrete influence architectures: who designs content, which narratives repeat, which archetypes recur, and how target audiences respond. Modules on “AI-Driven Social Mapping” and “OSINT Simulators – NARINT” train students to combine psychographic profiling and narrative tracking with open-source collection, rather than rely on sweeping claims about cultural decay.
Zelinskiy treats mass media as monolithic vectors of enemy intent. PEOPINT treats media environments as data-rich ecosystems that reveal adversary doctrine, target vulnerabilities, and unwitting amplification channels. Analysts learn to extract indicators of manipulation, build sentiment monitors, and feed those findings into both defensive counter-messaging and offensive cognitive campaigns.
3. Manipulative micro-tradecraft vs. cyber cognitive warfighter skills
“Manipulirovanie lichnost’iu i massami” drills from the macro level down into specific techniques that authorities and elites use to attack the subconscious. Zelinskiy defines manipulation as one individual influencing another so that the latter executes the will of the former while believing in personal autonomy. He insists that every psyche remains vulnerable to external influence and that any communication already contains an element of manipulation because communicators always seek some result.
Within that frame, he catalogues techniques that map directly onto modern social engineering and cyber-PSYOPS:
- Persistent reframing that distorts a target’s words and forces them to defend positions they never took.
- Induced guilt or fear to bypass rational evaluation and compel compliance.
- Overloading with information or rapid topic changes to prevent critical processing.
- Authority posturing that leverages expert or institutional status to short-circuit skepticism.
Treadstone 71’s “Psychological Operations – Cyber Cognitive Warfighter – A NATO View” course occupies almost the same tactical tier. The course description presents cyber psyops as the application of psychological tactics in the digital realm to influence individuals, groups, or nations. Broader Cyber Cognitive Warfighter content (as surfaced in the course catalog) emphasizes persona construction, behavioral profiling, deception planning, and “dirty tricks” of influence operations.
PEOPINT’s role sits one tier above. Analysts who complete People & Narrative Intelligence training learn to recognize manipulation techniques in online interactions, phishing attempts, and social media campaigns and to design response playbooks that halt the escalation of influence. The curriculum explicitly includes modules on “Understanding the Unwitting Participant in PEOPINT,” “The Imperative for a Multi-Layered Defensive Architecture Against PEOPINT,” and “Understanding and Countering Narratives – An Introduction to NARINT.”
Zelinskiy describes how NLP, hypnotic suggestion, and nonverbal cues shaped events such as the “orange revolution” in Ukraine. Cyber cognitive warfighter training can turn those claims into casework: students reconstruct the narrative and psychological levers he alleges, then compare them with open-source data on those events, identify exaggerations and biases, and derive a realistic pattern of how color-revolution narratives actually spread. That approach preserves valuable insights into manipulative technique while filtering out ideological distortion.
4. Unwitting participants and “agents of chaos”
Both Zelinskiy and Treadstone 71 assign a central role to unwitting participants, but they handle that role in fundamentally different ways.
Zelinskiy argues that ordinary citizens, intellectuals, journalists, and consumers of television or internet content unwittingly carry out the will of external manipulators. Long-term television watchers, in his analysis, move into a dependency that resembles neurosis; television coding then models their behavior and turns them into predictable subjects. NLP-based political tactics allegedly program entire populations during revolutionary moments while activists and voters consider themselves free.
People & Narrative Intelligence uses almost the same language, but with different intent. The featured courses page for Treadstone 71 describes “People and Narrative Intelligence in Cognitive Warfare” as a course that explains how “ordinary people unknowingly become agents of chaos” when state actors manipulate and weaponize civilians in psychological and narrative warfare. The course does not treat those civilians as inherently suspect; instead, it treats them as critical terrain for both adversaries and defenders.
The internal PEOPINT syllabus reinforces that orientation. Modules such as “Profiling the Unwitting Participant – A Playbook for Understanding Human Vulnerabilities in PEOPINT” and “The Unknowing Instrument” focus on systematic analysis of vulnerability archetypes and real-world scenarios of embedded subversion. Students examine doctrinal material, including Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and DPRK PEOPINT, and then run simulations that involve OSINT-based social mapping, sentiment monitoring, and narrative response.
Zelinskiy warns about unwitting participants as a pathway to total ideological control. Treadstone 71 trains analysts to treat unwitting participants as a measurable, modelable component of the cognitive environment. PEOPINT operators use tools such as sentiment monitors, AI-driven social mapping, and OSINT simulators to detect when ordinary users start to echo state-crafted narratives in patterns that suggest coordinated influence instead of organic discourse.
5. Russian doctrine as data: STEMPLES Plus and Russian PEOPINT
Zelinskiy’s books sit comfortably inside a broader Russian discourse on information security and psychological warfare. He cites works on an “information security doctrine,” mass media in the “second republic,” and Russian psychoanalytic analyses of manipulative techniques. He portrays Western mass media, advertising, and political technologies as hostile systems that seek to dismantle Russian culture, family structure, and political sovereignty.
Treadstone 71’s “Russian STEMPLES Plus, Hofstede Principles, and Indicators of Change” course offers a structured method for turning such doctrinal writings into strategic intelligence. STEMPLES Plus extends traditional strategic analysis into Social, Technical, Economic, Military, Political, Legal, Education, Security, Demographics, Religion, and Psychological dimensions. The Russian-focused course applies that framework specifically to Russia’s capacity for offensive cyber operations and highlights how indicators of change in these domains may signal shifts in Russian APT targeting and functionality.
Analysts who integrate Zelinskiy into a STEMPLES Plus assessment can treat his texts as:
- Social and psychological indicators of elite Russian perceptions about Western media and civil society.
- Political signals about how Russian thinkers justify tighter control over NGOs, media, and the internet.
- Ideological artifacts that shape Russian PEOPINT doctrine, which PEOPINT Module “Russian PEOPINT” then uses as comparative material.
PEOPINT training explicitly includes a lecture track covering Russian PEOPINT doctrine, placed alongside Chinese, DPRK, and Iranian PEOPINT. Zelinskiy functions as one of the sources that define Russian cognitive threat modeling: his belief in mass stupidity, subconscious coding, and omnipresent Western subversion guides both defensive and offensive planning. Treadstone 71 students learn to extract that belief system, map it into STEMPLES dimensions, and anticipate how it will shape Russian behavior in cyber and information operations.
6. Critical thinking and analytic discipline: where Treadstone 71 diverges
Zelinskiy offers detailed descriptions of manipulative methods and insightful linkage between unconscious processes and mass behavior. He also exhibits strong confirmation bias and ideological asymmetry. Western actors always appear as manipulative aggressors; Soviet and Russian actors appear largely as defenders or at worst reluctant participants. He rarely tests his claims against empirical data, and he treats correlation between media exposure and social decay as evidence of direct causation.
Treadstone 71’s strategic analysis programs address exactly those weaknesses. The “Strategic Intelligence Analysis – Estimative and Warning Intelligence” course devotes weeks to critical thinking, cognitive bias, and structured analytic techniques such as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. Analysts learn to challenge initial assumptions, build explicit hypotheses, test them against multiple sources, and present estimative judgments rather than ideological certainties.
People & Narrative Intelligence inherits that analytic discipline. PEOPINT modules include “Interpreting Doctrinal Guides for PEOPINT Analysis,” “Comparative PEOPINT Doctrine,” and “PEOPINT Doctrine and Cognitive Warfare: Methods, Vulnerabilities, and Defenses.” Students learn not only what Russian doctrinal texts say but also how to read them against the grain:
- Which fears and grievances shape the author’s narrative?
- Which audiences does the author seek to mobilize or reassure?
- Where do observable events contradict the doctrinal story?
Strategic intelligence and PEOPINT training together encourage analysts to treat Zelinskiy’s books as artifacts, not oracles. Operators can mine them for psychological patterns, rhetorical strategies, and tactical techniques while preserving skepticism about their broader claims. That stance directly aligns with Treadstone 71’s value proposition: immersive programs that blend expert instruction with AI modules and structured tradecraft, rather than ideological catechisms.
7. Program design: inserting Zelinskiy into Treadstone 71-style training
Unified officer–operator development requires exposure to adversary doctrine in its own words. Zelinskiy’s books fit naturally into several parts of a Treadstone 71 ecosystem.
The Unified Officer–Operator Cohort – Cyber Cognitive Warfare program embodies that fusion in a 13-week in-person format that treats cyber intelligence, counterintelligence, and cognitive warfare as a single, integrated tradecraft track. The cohort design places candidates in a continuous training environment where they cycle through live collection planning, structured analysis, narrative mapping, red/blue influence simulations, and counterintelligence scenarios. The program does not separate “analyst” from “operator”; it expects one person to understand doctrine, build estimates, craft narratives, run personas, engage targets, and then perform damage assessment on cognitive effects. That unified model stands in sharp contrast to Zelinskiy’s implied split between ideological writers and invisible practitioners. A Treadstone 71 cohort graduate can read his books as doctrinal artifacts, extract the operational logic behind them, and then test that logic in live exercises that simulate Russian-style cognitive operations against Western civil society, all within a controlled training environment.
In People & Narrative Intelligence, instructors can use “Informatsionno-psikhologicheskoe vozdeistvie na massovoe soznanie” as a primary case in “Case Studies in Embedded Subversion – Interpreting Doctrinal Guides for PEOPINT Analysis.” Students can annotate his claims about Western media, identify recurring archetypes and themes, and then map how those elements appear in Russian state messaging today.
In narrative intelligence (NARINT) modules, instructors can lift specific passages on television, cinema, and NLP-based influence and turn them into red-team scripts. One team plays “Zelinskiy’s operators,” crafting campaigns that assume mass stupidity, deep subconscious malleability, and monolithic Western conspiracy. Another team counters using NARINT techniques: alternative framing, inoculation narratives, pre-bunking, and targeted media literacy.
Cyber Cognitive Warfighter courses can adapt his micro-level manipulation lists into realistic social-engineering content for phishing simulations, deepfake call scenarios, and disinformation campaigns. Operators learn how those tactics actually function when coded into emails, chatbots, or avatar-based outreach, and defenders practice detection and response under pressure.
Russian STEMPLES Plus and PEOPINT doctrine modules can treat Zelinskiy as one node in a broader network of Russian cognitive warfare thinkers. Students apply STEMPLES Plus to his material, classify his concerns under Social, Political, Legal, and Psychological categories, and then connect those indicators to Russian cyber behavior and information operations.
Strategic Intelligence Analysis provides the overarching method. Students conduct an ACH exercise where one hypothesis reflects Zelinskiy’s worldview (“Western media conduct a unified campaign to destroy Russian culture”), while alternative hypotheses reflect more complex realities (“multiple actors pursue overlapping and conflicting influence campaigns”). Analysts weigh evidence, test for deception, and write estimative products, thereby transforming raw doctrine into assessed intelligence.
8. Synthesis: from Russian alarm to mature PEOPINT doctrine
Zelinskiy, writing from a 2008 Russian vantage point, senses many elements that modern cognitive warfare and PEOPINT frameworks now formalize:
- Information channels as weapons.
- The unconscious and emotional triggers as primary levers.
- Ordinary people as unwitting vectors of influence.
- Entertainment, advertising, and political messaging as integrated systems.
He wraps those insights inside a rigid ideological story and a deep suspicion of mass society. Treadstone 71’s training programs take the useful core and discard the rest. People & Narrative Intelligence, Russian STEMPLES Plus, Cyber Psyops, and Strategic Intelligence Analysis together offer a disciplined way to analyze, simulate, and counter cognitive warfare without surrendering to the fatalism or paranoia that saturate his books.
An officer–operator educated in that ecosystem can read Zelinskiy as both warning and opportunity. The warning highlights how a major state actor imagines the cognitive battlefield and justifies its own controls. The opportunity lies in the gaps: simplifications, biases, and blind spots that a sophisticated PEOPINT practitioner can exploit in narrative space, turning an adversary’s doctrinal certainties into strategic vulnerabilities.
References (APA style)
Zelinskii, S. A. (2008). Informatsionno-psikhologicheskoe vozdeistvie na massovoe soznanie: Sredstva massovoi kommunikatsii, informatsii i propagandy kak provodnik manipuliativnykh metodik vozdeistviia na podsoznanie i modelirovaniia postupkov individa i mass [Information-psychological impact on mass consciousness]. Skifiia.
Zelinskii, S. A. (2008). Manipulirovanie lichnost’iu i massami: Manipuliativnye tekhnologii vlasti pri atake na podsoznanie individa i mass [Manipulation of the individual and the masses: Manipulative technologies of power in attacking the subconscious of the individual and masses]. Skifiia.
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (2025). People and narrative intelligence analyst: Discover People & Narrative Intelligence – The new cyber intelligence training – Tier 5 of intelligence competency. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/cyberintel5webbundle
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). Featured courses: People and narrative intelligence in cognitive warfare. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/featured
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). Strategic intelligence analysis – Estimative and warning intelligence. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/strategicintelligence
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). STEMPLES Plus – Indicators of change – Hofstede principles. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/stemplesplus
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). Russian STEMPLES Plus, Hofstede principles, and indicators of change. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/rustemples
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). Psychological operations – Cyber cognitive warfighter – A NATO view. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/cyberpsyops
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). Free – Cyber intelligence course overview with a cyber counterintel sneak preview. Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence Training Center. https://www.cyberinteltrainingcenter.com/p/free-cyberintelligence
Treadstone 71 Cyber Intelligence. (n.d.). Unified officer–operator cohort – Cyber cognitive warfare . Treadstone 71. https://www.treadstone71.com/training/unified-officer-operator-cohort-cyber-cognitive-warfare
