Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  Showing initiative

  The spate of murders, which would continue over the coming years, destroyed Putin’s attempts to portray his country as a free and modern democracy. Dozens of journalists were murdered in Vladimir Putin’s two terms as president. Not all the cases were politically motivated, and few of the victims had the stature of Anna Politkovskaya. But hardly any of the murders have been solved, giving the impression that journalists can be killed with impunity in Russia, especially if they have angered the authorities. The journalist Politkovskaya and the political exile Litvinenko had both earned themselves enemies in high places. They were extremely hostile to the Putin regime – indeed both wrote in rather similar terms, accusing the FSB of terrible subversive acts that allegedly sacrificed hundreds of innocent lives in order to shore up the regime.

  In his investigation of the Litvinenko affair, Martin Sixsmith concludes that Putin himself did not order the killing, but that he can be implicated in the affair ‘because he created the atmosphere and conditions in which the killing could take place, in which an enterprising group of current or former FSB men read the signals from the Kremlin and embarked on their own initiative.’12 I think the same can be said about the Politkovskaya murder. In both cases, it is likely that the assassins did not receive, or even require, a direct order, nor did they need permission to kill, because they knew that ‘taking out’ an ‘enemy of the state’ had the tacit approval of the authorities. They may have been acting on their own initiative, for revenge or to ‘please’ their masters. Either way, they knew they would not be punished.

  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

  MEDIA, MISSILES, MEDVEDEV

  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.

  Over the years I tried to be as candid as possible in my advice, even if it went beyond the normal bounds of ‘public-relations advice’. This was a period when the authorities began to break up demonstrations staged by a new opposition coalition known as The Other Russia, led by the chess champion Garry Kasparov. I explained to my Kremlin colleagues that no amount of PR would lessen the damage done by a photograph of riot police beating up old ladies. But of course my comments were misdirected. I have little doubt that Dmitry Peskov agreed with me wholeheartedly: but it was not his job to change the police tactics.

  I was once asked to comment on an article drafted in Russian for President Medvedev, with a view to having it published in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine. This was in 2008, following the war against Georgia. The article was so badly written (as though at least three people with divergent views had contributed to it) that I sent back an excoriating review, suggesting th
at unless they wanted their president to be seen as a crazy schizophrenic they should tear the article up. The eyebrows of my professional PR colleagues shot up, concerned about upsetting their employers. But Peskov thanked me for my advice.

  However much Peskov came to trust my judgement, I came to realise that it made little difference. The Kremlin wanted us to help distribute the message, not change it. They did not entrust us with anything at all in advance. We would ask for advance copies (or at least extracts) of important speeches, for example, so that we could prime the early morning news bulletins, whet the appetite for more, and ensure maximum effect by the end of the day. This is standard practice in Western government press offices. But the Kremlin did not trust its media advisers. We received the texts of Putin’s speeches at the same time as the journalists. As for the public-relations efforts that received attention in the West – Putin’s macho photo-shoots, for example – they had nothing to do with us. We always learned about them after the event.

  Ketchum won a prestigious public relations award for its efforts in 2007, but I know the Kremlin wanted its PR consultants to be ‘pushier’ – not just arranging press conferences and interviews, or providing them with briefing materials and analytical papers, but actually trying to manipulate journalists into painting a more positive picture of Russia. I remember a conversation with Peskov’s deputy in which he criticised us for failing to follow up an interview given by a government minister to ensure that the journalist wrote it up in ‘the right way’. Newspapers would describe us as spin-doctors, endeavouring to play down Putin’s human rights record – and, indeed, perhaps that is what the Kremlin wished for. But in fact, Ketchum’s principal role was to inform the Kremlin about how they were being perceived, and to encourage them to take the initiative to change things. What really needed changing, of course, was the message, not the way it was conveyed – but that was a political challenge far beyond Ketchum’s remit.