Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Other Western approaches

  The Ketchum project was not the only ‘propaganda tool’ employed by the Kremlin at this time. Russia Today (later rebranded RT) was set up at the end of 2005 as a 24-hour satellite television station, aiming to give a ‘Russian take’ on world events and to inform worldwide audiences about Russian politics and life. With a budget of $60 million in its first year, it employed Russians with first-class English and also foreign nationals as presenters, and looked as professional as many of its competitors in the global television market. Unlike rivals such as BBC World News, CNN or newcomers like France-24, however, it did not set out to be a dispassionate news source, covering stories on their merits. RT’s mission is to explain Russia to the world, so there is an emphasis on domestic political stories and little attempt to provide comprehensive coverage from other countries. The method used is much less crude than its Soviet precursors, which painted a black-and-white picture of a West riven by class struggle and poverty, contrasted with a Soviet Union free of problems. RT – understanding that viewers also have other sources of information – does not shrink from covering opposition activities and even criticism of Russian policies. It thereby manages to create an illusion of plurality in the Russian media which in fact belies the truth: RT is the exception in Russia’s television system, because it is aimed at a foreign audience. It showed its true colours and purpose during the 2008 war with Georgia, when all pretence at balance was dropped and Russia Today became a full-blooded propagandist for the Kremlin.

  The station was founded by a state-owned news agency, RIA Novosti, which grew out of the Soviet-era Novosti Press Agency (APN) and like it combines two separate roles: firstly, it is a news-gathering organisation which provides news reports primarily to foreign audiences (APN’s network of foreign correspondents also included a large number of undercover KGB spies); secondly, its foreign bureaus serve as hubs for the propagation of Russian government information. The latter function overlapped greatly with the role Ketchum and GPlus were expected to play, and this led to a certain amount of friction. I got the impression that RIA Novosti was none too happy about its role as official Kremlin propagandist being usurped by foreigners. Occasionally GPlus, for example, would be asked to set up a press briefing with the Russian envoy to Brussels, Yevgeny Chizhov, only to find that the ambassador was already working with RIA Novosti on the same project – except that RIA, with its enormous resources, was doing it in style, with a video link to Moscow.

  RIA Novosti was the prime mover behind another image-making innovation – the Valdai International Discussion Club which began its work in Putin’s second term. The Valdai Club brings together about 50 foreign ‘Russia watchers’ (mainly journalists and academics) each September for ten days of debates with Russian specialists, combined with sightseeing (every year a more exotic location) and meetings with top Kremlin officials (every year a better, more senior crop). The first session, in 2004, was at Lake Valdai, north of Moscow, from which the Club derived its name, and the surprise guest of honour was President Putin himself – fuming in the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy – who was willing to spend several hours with the group, letting off steam and answering their questions. Since then the itinerary has included trips to Kazan, Chechnya, Siberia and St Petersburg, and featured lavish lunches with Putin and Medvedev (separately) at their dachas outside Moscow or in Sochi. In 2009 Medvedev apparently decided that Valdai was too closely associated with Putin; he held his own event for foreign experts, the ‘Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum’, instead.

  Valdai was a brand-new way of influencing outsiders – much more subtle than giving an interview on CNN or the BBC, or trying to steer Moscow correspondents towards giving more favourable coverage. This was soft propaganda – quite a risk, since hosting 50 foreigners in five-star hotels for ten days is not cheap and certainly not guaranteed to change perceptions overnight. The idea was that the guests – experienced Kremlin-watchers who write in academic journals, advise governments, and appear as pundits in the media – would become better disposed towards Putin if they were given the opportunity to meet him over a long lunch and spend a week or so debating issues with friendly Russian experts and officials.

  Critics in the Moscow intelligentsia are utterly dismissive of the project, claiming that the majority of participants are ‘useful idiots’ who have the wool pulled over their eyes and go home parroting the propaganda that’s served up to them with the lobster terrine and fine wines.

  Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment, for example, says the Kremlin uses Valdai to ‘co-opt’ and manipulate Western commentators: ‘Foreign guests come to the Valdai meetings to absorb the opinions of Russia’s leaders and then transmit them to the rest of the world.’ 6 I would agree entirely that this is what the Kremlin wants to happen. Otherwise they would not spend so much time and money on it. But having attended three Valdai conferences, I think she overestimates the effect. Maybe some participants become less critical – and it is certainly true that almost everyone, Valdai member or not, tends to be mesmerised by personal contact with Vladimir Putin (Margaret Thatcher used to have a similar effect, even on her critics). But the coverage that spills out from these weeks is not all sycophantic. Ariel Cohen of the conservative Heritage Foundation and the experienced Marshal Goldman are hardly Kremlin stooges.

  Meeting officials is always better than not meeting them, and most of the Valdai participants are experienced enough to be able to separate the propaganda from the truth. By and large those who arrive well disposed leave well disposed, and those who arrive believing Putin is crooked and undemocratic rarely change their minds. Most journalists and scholars would welcome the opportunity to meet so many government officials in any country; it does not mean you automatically accept their views, far less ‘transmit’ them. Spending several hours listening to Putin, for example, does not necessarily make one fall in love with him, because one has a chance to scrutinise his mannerisms and obsessions, even at times his anger, and for a democrat the experience is far from comforting. My criticism of the participants is not that they fall for the propaganda, but that few of them – perhaps being too much in awe of him – take this unique opportunity to argue with Putin: it’s a case of asking a (usually soft) question, and patiently listening to the interminable answer – and never daring to follow up or interrupt, or tell him why he is wrong. Too many of the questions – even from the ‘nasty’ crowd – come larded with flattery and compliments. I know privately from Dmitry Peskov that Putin himself (who quite clearly enjoys an argument) despairs at the lack of combative questioning.

  Putin also appears to doubt the efficacy of the Valdai effort. At his fourth meeting with the group, in 2007, he kicked off with a rather caustic comment that underlined his apparent belief that the Western media follow some kind of ‘instructions’: ‘In recent years I’ve become convinced that the media in Europe and North America are very disciplined. I don’t see any obvious results from our meetings in your publications, though I’m sure that you personally are getting to understand our country better. We’d be glad if you would transmit something of what you learn to your readers and viewers, to combat the strong stereotypes that exist in the West.’

  Much more pernicious than the Valdai Club (at least in intent, if not in reality) is the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation – yet another innovation of the second Putin term. With offices in New York and Paris, it is the ultimate Soviet-style revival in today’s Russia: a think-tank that aims to prove that human rights and democracy are trampled on in the West rather than in Russia. According to its mission statement, the Institute hopes to ‘improve the reputation of Russia in the US’ and to provide ‘analysis’ of US democracy. Its New York office is run by Andranik Migranian, an Armenian by birth but a fierce supporter of Russia’s alleged right to interfere in neighbouring states; its Paris office is run by Natalia Narochnitskaya, a Russian nationalist and apologist for Slobodan Milosevic. Having given them both media training befo
re they were deployed to the front, I could say with some confidence that the West had little to fear from their mission to undermine faith in Western democracy, but I was sure they would both enjoy their sinecures in America and France.

  Munich

  In February 2007 I was asked by the Kremlin to travel to Germany, where President Putin was due to make a speech at the prestigious Munich Security Conference, held each year in the Bavarian capital. His press team was anticipating a strong reaction and wanted some help in arranging interviews for Dmitry Peskov afterwards. As usual, we were not given any details about the content of the speech, but Peskov and his deputy, Alex Smirnov, were excited: ‘This will be very tough!’ they said. ‘We’ll want to speak to journalists to make sure they’ve understood.’ They needn’t have worried: it was the bluntest, most powerful speech of Putin’s career.

  The Bayerischer Hof hotel was ringed with security officers and teeming with senior world figures – not only dozens of defence ministers and generals but parliamentarians, politicians and eminent journalists. None of them was expecting the tongue-lashing Putin was about to deliver. Early in 2007, according to those in the know, the Russian president had finally lost patience with the Americans. ‘Dostali!’ he told his aides: ‘I’ve had enough!’ The immediate cause of frustration was Washington’s decision to push ahead with its plans for a national anti-missile defence system based in Europe. It had just begun talks with Poland about the possibility of basing ten interceptor missiles on its territory, and with the Czech Republic about building a state-of-the-art missile-tracking radar station there. Early in his presidency Putin had reluctantly acquiesced in Bush’s decision to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, but he had no intention of being so lame when it came to the new defensive system that the Americans wanted to deploy. Russia was convinced that this could neutralise its own nuclear deterrent.

  Putin strode into the conference hall armed with more than just the usual grievance cards. He began with a jocular warning to his audience:

  This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. The format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference. And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech Mr Teltschik [the chairman] will not turn on the red light over there.

  The audience was already bristling, as Putin launched a blistering attack on what he described as the USA’s attempt to rule the world as its ‘sole master’:

  Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state – of course, first and foremost the United States – has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who can be happy about this?

  The United States was guilty of ‘ideological stereotypes’ and ‘double standards.’ He accused the Americans of lecturing Russia about democracy, while invading other countries, flouting international law and causing an arms race. He suggested that the US, instead of destroying missiles intended for elimination under a recent arms treaty, might ‘hide them in a warehouse for a rainy day’. Referring to President Bush’s missile defence plans, Putin condemned the ‘militarisation of outer space’, and proposed a treaty to outlaw such weapons. The expansion of NATO, he said, was a ‘provocation’:

  We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?

  Putin warned that a new iron curtain was descending across Europe – and his words seemed to ring with hurt, as he pointed out that Russia too – just like the East Europeans – had abandoned communism but was not getting any credit for it:

  The stones and concrete blocks of the Berlin Wall have long been distributed as souvenirs. But we should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic choice – one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia – a choice in favour of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere partnership with all the members of the big European family. And now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us – these walls may be virtual but they are nevertheless dividing, ones that cut through our continent.

  Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was sitting in the front row, scribbling on a piece of paper throughout the speech. Afterwards, his aides, Dan Fata and Eric Edelman, rushed to ask him whether they could help him rewrite the speech he was due to give the next morning, in view of what they had just heard. Gates pulled out the paper he had been writing on and said: ‘Well, tell me what you think about this?’

  Fata and Edelman listened, looked at each other, and said, ‘Sir, that’s fantastic!’

  ‘Well, it’s not my first rodeo,’ responded their boss.7 Indeed, Robert Gates had many years of experience, not unlike Putin’s, having joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1966, rising to become its director under President George H.W. Bush. He referred to this when he rose to make a conciliatory response to Putin at the Munich Security Conference the next morning.

  ‘Many of you have backgrounds in diplomacy or politics,’ he said. ‘I have, like your second speaker yesterday, a starkly different background – a career in the spy business. And, I guess, old spies have a habit of blunt speaking. However, I have been to re-education camp, spending four and half years as a university president and dealing with faculty. And, as more than a few university presidents have learned in recent years, when it comes to faculty it is either “be nice” or “be gone.” The real world we inhabit is different and a much more complex world than that of 20 or 30 years ago. We all face many common problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with other countries, including Russia. One Cold War was quite enough.’

  The analyst Dmitry Trenin described Putin’s Munich speech as the start of a new phase in his thinking. If phase one was ‘rapprochement with Europe and the US’, and phase two (following the Iraq war) was ‘non-alignment, but reluctance to confront the West’, then phase three, after Munich, was one of ‘coerced partnership’. Trenin wrote: ‘Putin laid out conditions under which he expected to coerce America and Europe into partnership with Russia: accept us as we are, treat us as equals, and establish cooperation based on mutual interests.’ 8 In the end, Trenin wrote, the ‘coerced partnership’ never took place, because in 2008 and early 2009 Russia began moving towards increased isolation from its would-be partners.

  But during 2007, in the months following the Munich speech, President Putin did make one last attempt to reach an accommodation with the Americans over missile defence. Perhaps he hoped that the speech would shock them into cooperation. The two sides would come tantalisingly close to an agreement, and when the attempt failed, this time it would be as much the Americans’ fault as Putin’s.

  The threat from Iran … or Russia

  From the start of his presidency, George W. Bush had insisted that the planne
d national missile defence (NMD) system was intended to protect the United States from attack by ‘rogue states’ such as Iran and North Korea. Even if they did not have the capability yet, they appeared to be building medium and long-range systems that might one day reach America. The trajectory of Iranian missiles, it was argued, would pass over Eastern Europe, and so the European element of the NMD system would require a radar facility in the Czech Republic (to track missiles in the early stage of their flight) and interceptor missiles in Poland (to shoot them down).

  ‘From the very outset,’ Putin’s foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko recalls, ‘these plans were unacceptable to us.’9 The Russians rejected the idea on several grounds: Iran did not yet have the long-range missiles against which the NMD system was aimed and would not have them for many years; even if they did, Poland and the Czech Republic were not the best places to intercept them; and, crucially, the Czech radar would be able to spy on Russian facilities, while the Polish missiles would undermine Russia’s own nuclear deterrent.

  Until now, Russia had criticised the plans but offered no constructive alternative. But in June 2007 Putin came to a G8 summit in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm with plans of his own. Apart from the main summit business Putin had a bilateral meeting with President Bush, for which he had prepared so thoroughly that it took the American by surprise. In the week before, he consulted military experts, and the night before, in his room, Putin sketched out maps of missile trajectories and other data. Now he placed them in front of Bush and expounded in great detail why the American plans were all wrong. According to an aide who was present, Putin ‘delivered a real thesis’, explaining where the radars needed to be, why Bush was being misled by his advisers about Iran and North Korea, and why Russia felt threatened.10