Authors: Angus Roxburgh
The very fact that the FSB had a unit known as URPO, whose operatives specialised in unlawful killings, speaks volumes about Russia today. The unit may have been disbanded by Putin, but it would
be naïve to think that the FSB has suddenly become a club of amiable Clouseaus. Or that the fair trial and the jury have replaced the revolver and the phial of polonium.
9
A Western PR machine
Two thousand and six should have been a landmark year in Russia’s post-communist history, and in President Putin’s campaign to bring his country back to prominence
as a respected and valued player on the world stage. Russia had become a member of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations in 1997, and this year, for the first time, it was its turn to
chair it – a chance to shape the global agenda and to impress with a flawless summit in July, to be hosted by Putin in his home town, St Petersburg.
As we have seen, however, the year began with Russia cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine – hardly the image it was looking for. In the preceding months Putin had already unnerved the West
with a series of moves aimed at tightening his own grip on power and stifling the opposition, including his curbs on NGOs and the unleashing of the youth group Nashi to cow both political opponents
and uppity foreign ambassadors.
Already there were calls from conservative quarters to expel Russia from the G8, or at the very least for President Bush to boycott the St Petersburg summit.
In the gloomy corridors of the presidential administration, hidden behind the dark-red walls of the Kremlin, they came up with a novel idea: Russia needed to project its image better. They
needed a Western public-relations company to help them. There was no tender.
1
Personal contacts led them to a leading New York PR firm, Ketchum, and a
European partner, GPlus, based in Brussels. The most senior executives from the two companies flew into Moscow and made a joint pitch to Putin’s press secretary Alexei Gromov, and his deputy
Dmitry Peskov. (The two men divided the role of spokesman between them: Gromov was in overall charge, but the fluent English-speaker Peskov dealt almost exclusively with the foreign press.)
It was at this point that the directors of GPlus – former journalist colleagues of mine – asked me to join their team as chief Russia consultant. Much of this chapter is based on my
experiences there.
We saw our main task as Kremlin advisers as a rather simple one: to teach the Russians about how the Western media operate and try to persuade them to adopt the best practices of government
press relations. We were advisers, not spokespeople. But whereas the Westerners who advised Boris Yeltsin’s government on economics in the 1990s were beating on an open door, advising
Putin’s team on such an ‘ideological’ subject as media relations was never going to be so easy. Peskov did, in fact, show great interest in studying Western practices, but after
some initial success we watched our ‘client’ drifting back into their old ways. As the Politkovskaya murder was followed by the Litvinenko murder, and then by the Russian invasion of
Georgia, I began to wonder whether the very reason the Kremlin had decided to take on a Western PR agency was because they knew in advance that their image was about to nosedive.
They were prepared to pay big money to try to burnish that image. Ketchum declarations filed with the US Department of Justice show that the Russians paid, in the early years, almost $1 million
a month.
2
(A separate Ketchum contract with Gazprom – in deep trouble over its ‘gas wars’ with Ukraine – cost about the same). The
financial arrangements were not directly with the Kremlin, but with a Russian bank, thus avoiding the need to be approved in the state budget.
3
The whole
idea was criticised by some Russian media, which wondered why the Kremlin needed a Western (as opposed to a Russian) PR agency, and why it was not put out to tender as a state contract.
4
The biggest problem Ketchum faced was that the Russians had little clue about how the Western media function. Based on their experience of the domestic media, they were genuinely convinced that
we could
pay for
better coverage – that a positive op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
, for example, had a certain price. They believed that journalists write what their newspaper
proprietors (or governments) order them to write, and wanted to ‘punish’ correspondents who wrote critically about them by refusing to invite them to press events (thereby, in fact,
forfeiting the chance to influence them). They subjected the
Guardian
’s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding (and his family) to constant harassment, apparently because of an interview
his paper published with Boris Berezovsky in which he called for Putin to be overthrown – even though Harding had nothing to do with the conduct or content of the interview.
5
At the height of the Litvinenko affair, three members of the BBC’s Russian team in Moscow were attacked in the street. All this was hardly likely to incline the
journalistic community towards the kind of positive coverage the Kremlin craved. They would constantly demand that Ketchum ‘use our technologies’ to improve coverage. I had no idea what
they meant. The technology we wanted them to use was a West Wing-style press room, every morning at ten o’clock. But it never happened.
In briefing-paper after briefing-paper we hammered away at our basic theme – open up to the press. Mix with journalists, take them for lunches, schmooze, give them titbits off the record,
and gradually win them over. Speak to them, explain yourselves, and they will begin to trust you. Give interviews and get on air, because if you don’t your opponents will, and they will set
the agenda. It worked for a while. Peskov held a few dinners for Moscow correspondents in fancy restaurants (rather more formal than the kind of thing we really had in mind), and that went down
well. They instituted ‘Tuesday briefings’ with selected ministers. The Moscow press corps was delighted. But after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, Peskov became too worried: he knew
that whatever the formal topic of a briefing, journalists would end up asking about human rights and democracy. Safer not to meet them.
Much of Ketchum’s work involved the kind of things that most governments get done internally, by their embassies and foreign ministry – in whom the Kremlin evidently had little
faith. We organised press conferences for government ministers when they travelled abroad, and provided briefing papers for them with the questions they were likely to be asked (and sometimes with
the answers we thought they ought to give – though they rarely used them). We drafted articles for ministers (and even the president) which were generally redrafted out of all recognition in
Moscow and became so unreadable that they were difficult to place in any newspaper. Part of the mystery of this aspect of the work was that Peskov would ask us to draft an article for, say, the
energy minister, or the foreign minister, but give us no guidance whatsoever as to what they wished to say. He would usually reply, if asked: ‘Just put in what you think he should say.’
So we would draft articles –and speeches – blind. And then they would be completely rewritten. Foreign minister Lavrov, in particular, (rightly) had no interest in having his articles
drafted by ignorant foreigners.
Every day Ketchum provided the Kremlin with three press reviews, compiled in Japan, Europe and the United States, which gave a comprehensive – perhaps rather too detailed – picture
of coverage of Russia around the globe. The reviews often came to well over a hundred pages, with summaries and full texts of any article that mentioned the word Russia, but with little analysis.
During the period of the first contract, for the G8 year, Ketchum employed an outside agency to colour-code every article in the press, with red, yellow or green, to indicate negative, neutral or
positive stories, so that by the end of the G8 year this could be plotted on a graph to demonstrate that there were more greens and fewer reds. This is a common PR technique which unfortunately did
not transport well to the nuanced world of Kremlin politics. Often the colours seemed to be picked at random, and bore little relation to the content – even sports news or a weather report
could turn up with a red or green button. (This ‘service’ was eventually dropped, after it was realised it was useless.)
The Kremlin received regular ‘road-maps’ – ‘big picture’ PR strategies for the coming three months / six months / year, wrapped in management-speak about
‘leveraging opportunities going forward’, ‘deliverables’ and ‘reaching out to stakeholders’. In practice much of the work boiled down to the more mundane
business of helping with ministerial visits, organising press conferences and briefing on key developments in the West.
As a newcomer to the PR world I was amused by the nebulous concepts of ‘influencer’ relations and ‘third-party outreach’ – cultivating contacts with experts and
‘thought leaders’ who had an interest in Russia. Ketchum was meticulous in reporting any contact, such as having lunch with someone from a think-tank or attending a lecture, which would
all end up in the record of completed tasks sent each month to Moscow. And if one of those influencers produced a positive line in some article, this could then be quoted in a report-back as a
‘success’. I remember one report of Ketchum’s achievements included a quotation from the Canadian prime minister, saying, ‘I think Russia’s made an enormous amount of
progress in recent years.’ It was not clear whether the Kremlin really believed that we contributed to that.
One undoubted success was the introduction of ‘tele-briefings’, where journalists could call in to participate in a news conference with Peskov or a government minister. The Russians
found these more agreeable than face-to-face meetings, and finally acquired a way to interpret their actions to the press.
Over the three years working with him I got to know Dmitry Peskov fairly well. Tall, smartly dressed and in his early 40s, he has a charming, easy-going style, and speaks excellent English (and
also Turkish, having worked for many years in the embassy in Ankara). He was spotted by President Yeltsin during a trip to Turkey in 1999 and brought back to work in the presidential
administration. When Putin came to power he became head of the Kremlin’s press relations office and deputy spokesman to the president. Ever since then he has been a priceless asset, almost
the only person in Russia with the ability, the authority and the willingness to give on-the-record interviews to the foreign press. As a result he was in huge demand. My colleagues in the BBC
Moscow bureau, who had an insatiable demand for talking heads, used to plead with me: ‘Please get them to provide other spokespeople. Dmitry’s great, but he just doesn’t have the
time …’ But other than a few ministers, no one else in Russia was willing to give interviews to the Western press. No wonder they found it so hard to get their message across.
I gave Dmitry media training to help him feel more comfortable in front of the television camera. It was an opportunity not just to draw his attention to his voice or mannerisms, but also to
subject him to the toughest possible questions, and train him in the art of expressing a few essential ideas succinctly and coherently. Many interviewees who have not studied how a Western news
bulletin works tend to ramble on interminably, never getting to the point.
During a G8 summit in Germany in 2007, Peskov approached me with a special task – to rewrite and spice up a speech President Putin was to make in Guatemala City in support of
Russia’s bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The bid was successful – for which I naturally take the entire credit! (In truth, most of my suggestions were not accepted!) When
Dmitry Medvedev became president in 2008 I gave advice about videos and podcasts, and saw at least some of my ideas incarnated in his innovative video-blogs.
Dmitry’s boss, Alexei Gromov, was one of the most important men in the Kremlin during Putin’s presidency. He was described to me as ‘the only person who could walk into
Putin’s office without an appointment’. He saw him every day and was a constant sounding board for policy ideas. He also exercised tight control over the Russian media. I was once
drinking tea in his office when the head of Russian state television walked in. Gromov introduced me briefly to him, then waved him through to his back office, asking him to pour himself a drink
and wait. This was the regular weekly pep-talk, where Gromov talked through the agenda for the coming period and made sure coverage would be ‘correct’.
Like Peskov, Gromov started out in the diplomatic service, posted to Prague and Bratislava, and was brought back to head Yeltsin’s press service in 1996. He has a penchant for patterned
cardigans and smokes Marlboros through long cigarette-holders. As Putin’s press secretary he dealt exclusively with the Russian media, leaving the foreign press to Dmitry Peskov. During one
meeting with Gromov I raised one of my perennial themes: the West regarded Russia as reverting more and more to Soviet ways of thinking and behaviour, and in order to combat this it was necessary
not only to stop
acting
like the Soviets (by banning opposition demonstrations, for example) but also to forcefully repudiate the Soviet past in speeches and in documentaries that could be
shown on state television. Gromov’s reply was revealing. He conceded that this would have a positive effect on the West’s attitudes, but, he said, ‘we have to think about domestic
public opinion, which generally is positive about the Soviet Union. We have to think about political stability inside the country first and foremost.’ I found it depressing that he simply
accepted that many Russians, especially older ones, were nostalgic about the past, and that challenging this view could lead to ‘instability’. With his influence over the state media,
he could have launched a campaign to
change
perceptions of the past. After all, this had been done under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and attitudes had changed. Now the government, by its
inaction, was allowing Stalinism and communism to enjoy a revival. Worse than that – as we shall see in a later chapter – school textbooks were being rewritten to play down
Stalin’s crimes.