Cold, dark, drowning in vodka, and ruled by the KGB. That’s how the West sees Russia. President Vladimir Putin has officially declared that his country has an image problem, and the Kremlin has launched a public relations campaign before it hosts next year’s G-8 summit. Too bad Moscow is more eager to impress foreigners than its own people.
It’s no secret that Moscow has an image problem. When Russian President Vladimir Putin makes headlines, it’s usually for jailing a businessman or cracking down on dissent. A 2003 poll commissioned by Putin’s government revealed the depth of the problem. The survey asked Americans to name the top 10 things they associated with Russia. The top four were communism, the KGB, snow, and the mafia. The sole positive association—Russian art and culture—came in dead last. A poll conducted in August on foreigners’ awareness of Russian brands did even worse. The only “brands” foreigners could think of were Kalashnikov rifles and Molotov cocktails.
The Kremlin is convinced the culprits responsible for this distorted view of their country are people like me—foreign correspondents based in Moscow. Putin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky said in 2001 that “Russia’s outward image is ... gloomier and uniformly darker compared with reality. To a great extent, Russia’s image in the world is created by foreign journalists who work in our country.” Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says: “There’s an incredible hostility to Moscow-based journalists [among Kremlin advisors and senior bureaucrats]. They believe Moscow correspondents have become captive to the Moscow liberal intelligentsia.”
In this narrative, the Western media are excessively influenced by anti-Kremlin oligarchs, such as Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring Western public relations and lobbying firms. When former Kremlin Chief of Staff Aleksandr Voloshin was told of the Western media’s negative reaction to Khodorkovsky’s arrest, he is reported to have said “When Yukos’ money dries up, so will these reports.”
Whether the Western media bias is real or not, the Russian government certainly thinks it is, and it has launched a PR campaign to improve its image in the eyes of the world. Why does this response come now, at a time when Russia needs the West less than at any time in the past 20 years? One can only assume that the campaign is in preparation for the G-8 summit in Russia next year, when, in McFaul’s words, “7,000 foreign journalists will descend on St. Petersburg looking for something to write about.” Although oil-rich Russia may not need the West’s financial assistance anymore, Putin and his team still have an overriding desire to see Russia accepted at the top table of global affairs.
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In late 2003, the Kremlin decided to make the state news agency, Novosti, its main instrument for image improvement. It booted upstairs the agency’s previous chairman, and hired in his place Svetlana Mironyuk—a former senior public relations advisor to Gusinsky, one of the most PR-savvy of the old generation of Russian business tycoons. Mironyuk had great success selling Gusinsky to Western investors, partly by teaming up with Western PR firms. Mironyuk was given a large budget (the exact amount is undisclosed) and told to do for Russia what she had done for Gusinsky.
The Kremlin and Novosti are bypassing the pesky Moscow-based journalists with a two-pronged strategy. Soon, the news network will go global with its own recently launched English-language TV channel, Russia Today. With a staff of 300 journalists, including around 70 imported from abroad, the channel will offer “global news from a Russian perspective.” In addition, Novosti has hired some notably Kremlin-friendly foreign journalists to work for its own newswire service. It has even launched its own English-language magazine, Russia Profile, written by an in-house staff.
On a second front, Moscow last year inaugurated the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual meeting for foreign experts and foreign journalists invited to Russia on the Kremlin’s dime. Invitees meet and mingle with senior figures from the Russian political scene. They are even treated to a one-on-one session with President Putin himself, which lasted more than three hours last year and nearly as long this year. Moscow-based journalists are pointedly not on the invite list.
The success of these ventures in altering Russia’s image has so far been mixed. Russia Today is still waiting for licenses to broadcast globally, so it’s too early to make a definitive judgment of its quality or success. But already, it has become something of a joke among Moscow correspondents (to whom the channel is, after all, a recrimination). The Kremlin has spent $30 million setting it up and has attracted foreign journalists to Moscow with salaries starting at $60,000 a year. But the imported journalists are, in many cases, fresh out of journalism school, know not a word of Russian, and lack basic knowledge of Russian politics or history. For many of them, the experience is a bit of a laugh, a gap year at the Kremlin’s expense. There is already some tension between them and the Russian employees, who know 10 times as much about Russia, and are paid salaries half as big.
