The Search for Russian “Soft Power”

During Khrushchev’s East-West thaw, US President Dwight Eisenhower made a proposal for something unheard of before: an academic exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. The proposal was accepted by the Soviets and started in September 1958. One of the seventeen students sent by the Central Committee was Aleksandr Yakovlev. Yakovlev studied for one academic year at Columbia University. Later he would become Soviet ambassador to Canada and a close friend and source of inspiration of Mikhail Gorbachev, which earned him the nicknames godfather of glasnost and father of perestroika. According to his biographer, Christopher Shulgan,

Eisenhower’s exchange program was certainly not set up to convert young Soviet academics (which, incidentally, would have proved difficult, since most of Yakovlev’s Russian exchange colleagues were KGB spies). However, giving young Russians a rare chance of living in the United States for a year exposed them to the “soft power” of American society. In the modern world you don’t need to live in another country to become attracted by its soft power. Hollywood movies that were watched in the 1950s in the local cinemas of small towns in Africa, Latin America, and Asia did a lot more to propagate the “American way of life”—including its values and aspirations—than any US government–sponsored initiative could have done. The same is true for music and fashion. In a Russian book with the telling title Glyadya na Zapad (Looking West), the authors describe the attraction of Western pop music and fashion for Russian youth. “At the end of the 1990s,” they write, “the West continued to be the most important orientation point in the cultural identification of ‘progressive’ [Russian] youth.”^[2]

What Is Soft Power?

Soft power is not only an important concept, it is also a rather new concept. It was used for the first time by the American political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr., in his book Bound to Lead,^[3] published in 1990. However, it only became a new catchword in the international political discourse after the publication, in 2004, of Nye’s book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.^[4] From that moment, “soft power” began to be used by a broader public. The new concept evoked what Germans call an Aha Erlebnis: it seemed to express exactly the meaning of an existing phenomenon for which one had not yet found an adequate description. Nye’s introduction of the concept “soft power” resembled to some extent Freud’s invention of the word “unconscious” in the nineteenth century. This, too, was a phenomenon many already had felt existed but for which they had not yet found an adequate expression. Why did this new concept of “soft power” find a worldwide reception so quickly? A key may well be found in the subtitle Joseph Nye gave his 2004 book: The Means to Success in World Politics. He presented soft power as a highly valuable and profitable asset for policy makers because of its purported impact on the success or failure of a country’s foreign policy objectives. In the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union, it seemed one of the decisive factors that had contributed to the West’s final prevalence over the Soviet bloc.

The dynamic force of soft power, explained Nye, is attraction. This is, indeed, very different from more classical definitions of power. The sociologist Max Weber, for instance, defined power as “any opportunity to impose one’s own will within a social relationship, even in the face of resistance, no matter what might be the basis of that opportunity.”^[6] For Weber, the essence of power is that one person prevails over the other even in the face of resistance. In a more extreme way, the same is expressed in the definition of power given by Mao Zedong, who said that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The characteristic of soft power is that there exists no resistance needing to be overcome, and certainly no guns have to be used: others adapt to our objectives because they feel sympathetic towards us and have interiorized our objectives as their own. This interiorization is based on the attraction of our political ideals and actual policies. On a lower level, soft power is based on the attraction of a country’s culture, art, language, music, fashion, landscape, or cuisine.

Nye’s concept has been criticized from many sides. David Marquand, for instance, called it “a slippery concept; and in real life the distinction between it and ‘hard power’ is apt to slither into a bog of semantic confusion.”^[7] Marquand added: “Mahatma Gandhi was perhaps the twentieth century’s supreme exemplar of soft power in action, but as he himself acknowledged, his success in using it depended on British willingness to allow him to do so. He would not have got very far if India had been ruled by the Nazis.”^[8] This last observation may be true; however, it does not invalidate the concept. Its essential characteristic remains: that soft power is based on attraction, on exemplarity, on its model function for others, making it a source of inspiration beyond national borders.

Soft Power Is a Variable Currency

Soft power is generally considered a characteristic par excellence of Western societies, especially of the United States. We should not forget, however, that the—now defunct—Soviet Union also had, in its time, its own soft-power sources—a fact of which Nye is aware. “In terms of soft power,” he wrote, “following World War II communist ideology was attractive in Europe because of its resistance to fascism and in the Third World because of its identification with the popular movement toward decolonization.”^[9] Suc-
cesses in space exploration also played a role in boosting Soviet soft power. According to Innokenty Adyasov, a Russian analyst, “Yury Gagarin was the best instrument of Soviet soft power: never, perhaps, in the post-war world was sympathy towards the USSR so great and here also the personality of the earth’s first cosmonaut had an impact.”^[10] This soft-power reservoir, however, was depleted when the Soviet leadership decided in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring and communism as an ideology gradually lost its appeal throughout the world. Soviet soft power reached its nadir in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up and communism lost its status as official state
ideology.

In 2009 Sergey Karaganov, a Russian analyst, wrote that Russia had to use “hard power, including military force, because it lives in a much more dangerous world and has no one to hide behind from it, and because it has little soft power—that is social, cultural, political and economic attractiveness.”^[11] And Konstantin Kosachev, a Russian Duma member, wrote: “We can say that practically the whole post-war period of our relationship with the U.S. and the West . . . took place under the banner of soft power. And clearly we should admit that, apparently, we were not up to the challenge—however, as concerns hard power, the field of hard security [English in the original] we were inferior to no one.”^[12] This assessment is shared by Joseph Nye in The Future of Power. “In terms of soft power,” writes Nye, “despite the attractiveness of traditional Russian culture, Russia has little global presence.”^[13] Russians envied and resented Western soft power while at the same time criticizing it for its supposed hypocrisy. Yury Kaslev, for instance, in a book on the Helsinki process published in 1980, writes:

In the 1970s and 1980s Soviet Russia was clearly on the defensive. However, soft power is not an asset that can be taken for granted. After the subprime crisis in 2008, which was followed by a worldwide financial and economic crisis, Western, and especially US, soft-power attractiveness suffered a severe blow. A Japanese commentator wrote: “The Japanese are less and less attracted by American culture. American soft power seems to have diminished and according to specialists such a phenomenon has never been known before.”^[15] American soft power, he continued, “is diminishing progressively in the archipelago, although for the Japanese the United States represented a dream, with its technology, its democracy, its egalitarian relationships between couples. They were not only attracted by the ‘city on the hill,’ but also by its counter-culture, for instance the protests against the war in Vietnam.”^[16] This sentiment that US soft power has declined in the past decade was also expressed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who said that due to the war in Iraq, “I do think that we have unfortunately delegitimized ourselves.”^[17] He added: “Then, the American dream was widely shared. Today, it isn’t.”^[18]

Similar observations were made in the French daily Le Monde, but this time on the declining soft power of Europe. Under the title “Europe No Longer Makes Asians Dream,”^[19] the story explains that Asian countries—due to the never-ending euro crisis—began to question Europe’s proud soft-power model: European integration. The fact that the EU received the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize probably did little to compensate for this loss of soft power. Even if the combined soft-power potential of the United States and Europe still remains considerable, one has to admit that it is a far cry from its strength at the beginning of the 1990s. In this period the Soviet empire crumbled, the United States organized a broad international coalition under the aegis of the UN against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and in Maastricht the European Community transformed itself into a “European Union”—ready to expand with fourteen new countries and to make an important next step towards integration with the introduction of a single currency. “The end of history,” announced in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama in an article in The National Interest and further elaborated by him in a book in 1992,^[20] was in fact nothing else than a celebration of the West’s soft-power dominance at that specific historical moment. Fukuyama could not imagine that any other political and economic system could, in the future, compete with the West. He was wrong. Now, in the present day, we are witnessing the emergence of competing political models, of which Putinism is a leading example. These models, although superficially resembling the Western model and presenting themselves as democratic market economies, are, in fact, authoritarian semi-state economies. Competition from these alternative models is taking place at a historical moment when the West’s soft-power dominance is no longer self-evident. According to Moisés Naím, “Soft power is, at the very least, a volatile concept, highly vulnerable to short-term twists in world affairs, in an environment where news travels more rapidly than ever.”^[21] We should, indeed, not forget that soft power is a currency that—as any currency—has no constant and stable value but undergoes important variations.

How to Measure Soft Power?

One of the problems with Nye’s concept of soft power was that it remained, indeed, a rather vague concept. Jeanne Wilson spoke about “the amorphous nature of soft power as a concept, the absence of a set methodology for measurement, a lack of comparable data, and the inherently subjective nature of constructing indicators.”^[22] What also did not help was that Nye broadened his concept over the years. In his book The Future of Power (2008) he added economic resources and even military power as possible soft-power assets (the latter in the form of offering training facilities and disaster relief). The method most frequently used to measure soft power was through opinion polls. This was how Anholt-GfK Roper, for instance, composed its annual Overall Nation Brands Index. In the index for 2010, the United States ranked number one, followed by Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in second, third, and fourth places, respectively. Russia came in at twenty-first place, just before Luxembourg and China.

A more elaborate and objective method to measure soft power was developed by the London-based Institute for Government. In its 2010 report it weighed a number of objective criteria concerning culture, government, diplomacy, education, and business/innovation.^[23] The outcomes of these objective criteria were complemented by a subjective evaluation by an experts’ panel. In the resulting Soft Power Index Results, twenty-six countries were analyzed. The same four countries came on top as in the Overall Nations Brands Index, but in a different order: France was number one, the United Kingdom second, the United States third, and Germany fourth. Russia came in at the twenty-sixth and last place.^[24] In the 2011 report the method was further fine-tuned and improved. Now the United States came in at number one, followed respectively by the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Russia went down to the twenty-eighth place (of a total of thirty countries).^[25] However, the author of the report warned against too much optimism. He wrote that

“Myagkaya Sila”: The History of the Soft-Power Debate in Russia

In Russia the concept “soft power” attracted only little attention at first. Unlike in China, Nye’s book Bound to Lead, in which the concept made its first appearance, was not translated. According to Jeanne Wilson, “The Eastview Universal Database, the largest repository of journals and newspapers available in the Russian language does not indicate a reference to soft power until 2000.”^[27] In the period 2000–2012, this database listed 334 articles that referred to “soft power” in the text and 32 articles that contained “soft power” in the title.^[28] Neither Putin during his first two presidencies nor Medvedev during his presidency seemed to have used the concept.

Several factors point to why in Russia the debate on “soft power”—in Russian, myagkaya sila—started rather late. First was the fact that a concept such as “soft power” was completely at odds with the Russian tradition and the Russian way of thinking. In tsarist Russia as well as in the Soviet Union, power tended to be unilaterally defined as zhestkaya sila, or “hard power.” The foreign policy of both regimes was characterized by their emphasis on military power while internally the authorities often resorted to brutal violence and police repression. To understand the new concept of “soft power,” a complete reversal of these traditional ways of thinking was necessary.

A second reason for the late reception of the “soft-power” concept was the fact that Russians considered “soft power” a typical American concept. From Russia’s perspective, it looked like a new fad, invented by American political scientists, which had, maybe, relevance for the United States but no direct implications for Russia’s situation. A real interest in the new concept arose only after the “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space: the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine—popular movements which swept away corrupt and undemocratic regimes. At this point, the Kremlin woke up to the new reality that soft power could, eventually, be used as a very effective weapon.

How Did Russia Assess Its Own Soft-Power Potential?

The color revolutions were a watershed moment in the Kremlin’s thinking on soft power. Russian politicians and political analysts suddenly recognized that in the modern, globalized, and interconnected world of the twenty-first century, characterized by a growing role for the internet and social media, soft power had become an important strategic asset. For the Kremlin it was a rude awakening. Observations about the dire state of Russian soft power, made earlier in the West, now also began to surface in the Russian media. Alexander Lukin, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), for instance, wrote:

Lukin’s gloomy but realistic assessment was that Russia’s soft power had “dropped to zero.” While Lukin still stuck to Nye’s definition that soft power is the power of attraction, this was no longer the case for two other Russian authors, Latukhina and Glikin, who defined soft power as

While these authors shared Lukin’s observation that Russian soft power “dropped to zero,” writing that it simply “does not exist,” something else here catches the eye. It is the explicit redefinition of soft power, which is reduced to a simple tool of manipulation in the hands of hostile governments. American NGOs are considered to be “agents of influence” sent abroad by “polit-technologists.” An “agent of influence” is defined by Wikipedia as “an agent of some stature who uses his or her position to influence public opinion or decision making to produce results beneficial to the country whose intelligence service operates the agent.” Soft power here is put into a conspirational context and becomes an instrument in the hands of hostile secret services. Also the use of the word “polit-technologists” is telling. In Putin’s Russia, “polit-technologists” are those experts who, like Vladislav Surkov, the former deputy head of the presidential administration, manipulate the political system, including the elections, in the Kremlin’s favor.

The Triple Reduction: How the “Soft-Power” Concept Was Redefined in Contemporary Russia

This trend of changing the content and meaning of Nye’s soft-power concept has become mainstream in contemporary Russia. The concept underwent, in fact, a triple reduction. The first step was to reduce the broad concept of soft power to one of its constituent parts: public diplomacy. This means that soft power—which in Nye’s definition is a power emanating from both civil society and the state—was reduced to an instrument used by the state to influence foreign governments and manipulate foreign public opinion. The fact that it is a country’s civil society in particular that produces soft power was lost out of sight. By reducing soft power exclusively to a policy of the state, conducted with the aim to enhance its hard power, the focus of soft power also was changed.

This was the second reduction: from a non-zero-sum game, soft power became a zero-sum game with winners and losers. In Nye’s definition, the soft power of one country does not hinder or diminish the soft power of another country. The four countries that are the world’s soft-power champions, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, do not fight a “soft-power war,” nor do they “attack” the soft power of their “rivals” (assuming for a moment that this would be possible). The only way to become number one in the league of “soft-power champions” is to become more attractive. In this beauty contest, you don’t become more beautiful by denigrating or attacking the other participants. You win because you have the best qualifications.

The reduction of soft power to political diplomacy, conducted by the state, led to an additional—third—reduction of Nye’s original concept. Because the Kremlin regarded soft power exclusively as a constituent part of an overall hard-power game, the meaning of soft power became totally inverted, and even illegal activities, such as bribery and espionage abroad, could be presented as useful instruments of a country’s “soft-power arsenal.”

Vladimir Putin’s Concept of “Soft Power”: Hard Power in a Velvet Glove

These three reductions of Nye’s soft-power concept can clearly be observed in the way in which Vladimir Putin describes “soft power” in a manifesto for his third presidency published in the Moskovskie Novosti in February 2012:

Putin spoke here about the soft power of the West and the activities of what he called “pseudo-NGOs” working within Russia and receiving financial support from the West. He could not believe that the activities of these NGOs could be inspired by a genuine desire to promote the cause of democracy, to protect human rights, or to work for an independent judiciary. For him, these NGOs were all “foreign agents.”^[32]

All the elements of the redefined, reduced version of Nye’s soft-power concept are present in Putin’s text. Soft power is defined as “a complex of instruments and methods to achieve foreign policy objectives.” Soft power is conceived, therefore, as an exclusively state affair. Soft power is for him also an integral part of a hard-power game. The message is that Russia should develop its own soft-power arsenal in order to prevail in this zero-sum power game. The weapons in this soft-power game include “the use of information and other means.” For Putin, the former spy master, “information” has a broad meaning, and it includes, undoubtedly, the intelligence of the secret services. This vision is shared by a Russian analyst, who wrote: “Putin emphasizes that his understanding of ‘soft power’ includes, quite precisely, the use of illegal instruments, ‘undercover work’ (rabotu pod prikrytiem).”^[33] On September 3, 2012, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev reiterated in a speech at the Russian Foreign Ministry the need for Russia to further develop its soft-power tools. This “may look to an outside observer like an optimistic signal and a long-awaited change in Russia’s foreign policy,” wrote Dumitru Minzarari. “This benign view, however, could not be more wrong. Rather, the Kremlin is seeking to exploit the Western concept of ‘soft power’ . . . and reframing it as a euphemism for coercive policy and economic arm-
twisting.”^[34]

We find this reframing of the Western “soft-power” concept already in the “Basic Guidelines Concerning the Policy of the Russian Federation in the Sphere of International Cultural-Humanitarian Cooperation,” an official document published in 2010 as a complement to the Foreign Policy Concept of 2008. These “Basic Guidelines” begin with the observation that “culture, in the realization of Russia’s foreign policy strategy, plays a special role.”^[35] “It is increasingly evident,” the text continues, “that the global competition takes on a cultural dimension. Among the fundamental games in the international arena the struggle for cultural influence is becoming more intense.”^[36] Therefore, write the authors, the government should not only “actively support the competitivity of the [different] branches of the national culture” but also take care that an “objective and favorable image of our country” will be formed, that “the number of Russia’s friends grows,” and that “anti-Russian political and ideological attitudes are neutralized.”^[37] According to the guidelines, “Cultural diplomacy becomes [also] increasingly important in efforts with the aim of actively counteracting the propaganda campaign [conducted] under the banner ‘containment’ of Russia.”^[38]

What immediately catches the eye here is the martial, almost warlike terminology that is used. One speaks about a “struggle” that is “becoming more intense,” about “anti-Russian attitudes” that should be “neutralized,” about a Western “propaganda campaign” that should be “counteracted.” Apparently, the authors of this paper have sought their inspiration in Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” rather than in Joseph Nye’s soft-power concept. The authors claim to promote an “objective and favorable image” of Russia. A few lines further, they make this “objective image” more explicit, writing: “Making use of specific forms and methods of influencing public opinion, cultural diplomacy, as no other instrument of ‘soft power,’ convincingly expresses the rebirth of the Russian Federation as a free and democratic society.”^[39] The problem, however, is that neither foreigners, nor many Russians, consider today’s Russian Federation “a free and democratic society.” And only a few will agree with the statement that “Russia’s dynamic cultural life [takes place] in conditions of pluralism and free creativity, pluralism of opinions, and absence of censorship.”^[40]

Putin, however, considers the negative image of Russia in the West not as a consequence of the immanent flaws of the Russian political system but rather as a result of actions of Western governments and the Western media to blacken Russia’s reputation. In a speech to the ambassadors in July 2012, he said that

In the same vein, he stated in his concluding speech at the 2014 Valdai Club conference: “Total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired to portray white as black and black as white.”^[42]

For the Kremlin, the solution seemed simple: Russian state agencies should get the task to debunk Western misinformation and to provide “real,” “truthful” information. Giving truthful information on Russia is certainly desirable. As Greg Simons remarked, “Truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.”^[43] He added: “One of the problems encountered by Russian public diplomacy relates to the credibility, and therefore to the believability of the messenger. This is especially the case if the messenger is tied to the Russian authorities, owing in no small part to the strong anti-democratic reputation that has been gained in the post-Yeltsin era (from the year 2000).”^[44]

Notes

Christopher Shulgan, The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical behind Perestroika (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 291.

Hilari Pilkington, “Pereosmyslenie ‘Zapada’: Stil i Muzyka v Kulturnoy Praktike Rossiyskoy Molodezhi,” in Hilari Pilkington, Elena Omelchenko, Moya Flynn, Uliana Bludina, and Elena Starkova, Glyadya na Zapad: Kulturnaya Globalizatsiya i Rossiyskie Molodezhnye Kultury (Saint Petersburg: Aleteiya, 2004), 186.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

Nye, Soft Power, x. In Bound to Lead, Nye spoke also about “co-optive power”: “Co-optive power is the ability of a nation to structure a situation so that other nations develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with one’s own nation. This type of power tends to arise from resources as cultural and ideological attraction as well as the rules and institutions of international regimes” (191).

Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, Erster Halbband, herausgegeben von Johannes Winckelmann (Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964), 38 (my translation).

David Marquand, The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 154.

Marquand, The End of the West, 155.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 168–169. Cf. Nye, Bound to Lead, 188–189: “In the early postwar period, the Soviet Union profited greatly from such strategic software as Communist ideology, the myth of inevitability, and transnational Communist institutions.”

10.

Innokenty Adyasov, “Vozmozhnaya li rossiyskaya ‘myagkaya sila’?” Regnum (May 7, 2012).

11.

Sergei Karaganov, “Russia in Euro-Atlantic Region,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta (November 24, 2009). English version available at http://karaganov.ru/en/news/98.

12.

Konstantin Kosachev, “‘Myagkaya Sila’ kak faktor sblizheniya?” (May 18, 2012), http://baltija.eu/news/read/24577.

13.

Nye, The Future of Power, 170, 209. In this book Nye introduces the new concept of “smart power,” which combines hard- and soft-power strategies.

14.

Y. B. Kashlev, Razryadka v Evrope: Ot Helsinki k Madridu (Moscow: Politizdat, 1980), 78.

15.

“L’Amérique ne fait plus rêver” (originally published in Tokyo Shimbun), translated in Courrier International no. 1129 (June 21–27, 2012).

16.

“L’Amérique ne fait plus rêver.”

17.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, “U.S. Fate Is in U.S. Hands,” TNI Interview, The National Interest no. 121 (September/October 2012), 12.

18.

Brzezinski, “U.S. Fate Is in U.S. Hands.” 14.

19.

François Bougon, “L’Europe ne fait plus rêver les Asiatiques,” Le Monde (July 1–2, 2012).

20.

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London and New York: Penguin, 1992).

21.

Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 148.

22.

Jeanne L. Wilson, “Soft Power: A Comparison of Discourse and Practice in Russia and China,” Social Science Research Network (August 2012), 3, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2134457.

23.

Jonathan McClory, The New Persuaders: An International Ranking of Soft Power (London: Institute for Government, 2010). The culture subindex includes measures such as the annual number of incoming tourists, the global reach of the country’s language, and Olympic sporting successes. The government subindex gives measures for the quality and effectiveness of the system of governance as well as for individual liberty and political freedom. The diplomatic subindex includes measures for the global perception of a country and its ability to shape a positive national narrative abroad. The education subindex gives measures for a country’s ability to attract foreign students and the quality of its universities. The business/innovation subindex includes figures for openness and innovation, competitiveness, and corruption.

24.

McClory, The New Persuaders, 5.

25.

Jonathan McClory, The New Persuaders II: A 2011 Global Ranking of Soft Power (London: Institute for Government, 2011), 15.

26.

McClory, The New Persuaders II, 20.

27.

Jeanne L. Wilson, “Soft Power,” 5–6.

28.

Jeanne L. Wilson, “Soft Power,” 6.

29.

Alexander Lukin, “From a Post-Soviet to a Russian Foreign Policy,” Russia in Global Affairs, no. 4 (October–December 2008), available at http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/print/number/n_11886.

30.

Kira Latukhina and Maksim Glikin, “Politicheskie Zhivotnye,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 1, 2005).

31.

Vladimir Putin, “Rossiya i menyayushchiysya mir” (Russia and the Changing World), Moskovskie Novosti (February 27, 2012).

32.

It is interesting to compare Putin’s attitude towards foreign-government-funded agencies with that of the Indian leader Nehru. John Kenneth Galbraith, who was US ambassador to India at the beginning of the 1960s, told how Sargent Shriver, the founding head of the US Peace Corps, came to visit Nehru. “I warned him,” wrote Galbraith, “that in the Indian mood of the time, and that of Jawaharlal Nehru in particular, the Peace Corps would be regarded as a rather obvious example of the American search for influence.” Shriver presented to Nehru a project which would “help the most needy of the Indian needy” in Punjab. “When he [Nehru] eventually replied, it was to ask why the enterprise had to be so small, why it had to be limited to only one Indian state. He thought the idea excellent, regretted only the evident limitations.” John Kenneth Galbraith, Name-Dropping: From F.D.R. On (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 123–124.

33.

Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov, “Vladimir Putin i ‘myagkaya sila,’” Svobodnyy Mir (February 27, 2012).

34.

Dumitru Minzarari, “Soft Power with an Iron Fist: Putin Administration to Change the Face of Russia’s Foreign Policy toward Its Neighbors,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 9, no. 163 (September 10, 2012). We should emphasize, however, that this interpretation of soft power is that of the dominant siloviki faction of the political elite. Igor Yurgens, for example, the chairman of the board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, a liberal pro-business think tank, wrote: “Even if we . . . can tell the world about our culture, [and] historical heritage, we will not be attractive in Europe and North America if we have not completed the development of our democratic institutions and structures of civil society. Only these can become true ambassadors of Russian culture in the world.” (Cf. Igor Yurgens, “Zhestkiy vyzov ‘myagkoy sily,’” Rossiyskaya Gazeta (September 16, 2011).)

35.

“Osnovnye napravleniya politiki Rossiyskoy Federatsii v sfere mezhdunarodnogo
kulturno-gumanitarnogo sotrudnichestva” (Moscow, 2010), 1.

36.

“Osnovnye napravleniya,” 2.

37.

“Osnovnye napravleniya,” 3.

38.

“Osnovnye napravleniya,” 3.

39.

“Osnovnye napravleniya,” 3.

40.

“Osnovnye napravleniya,” 4.

41.

“Meeting with the Russian ambassadors and permanent representatives in international organisations,” Official site of the President of Russia (July 9, 2012).

42.

“Vladimir Putin Meets with Members of the Valdai International Discussion Club. Transcript of the Final Plenary Session,” Valdai Discussion Club (October 25, 2014), http://valdaiclub.com/valdai_club/73300/print_edition/.

43.

Greg Simons, “Attempting to Re-Brand the Branded: Russia’s International Image in the 21st Century,” Russian Journal of Communication 4, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2011): 329.

44.

Simons, “Attempting to Re-Brand the Branded.”

The Three Components of the Kremlin’s Soft-Power Offensive

Igor Ivanov, Russia’s former minister of foreign affairs (1998–2004), wrote: “The fundamental question for twenty years to come is whether Russia will learn to use the tools political scientists refer to as ‘soft power.’ Being realistic in assessing the dynamics of global development, we have to admit that Russia’s opportunities of using the traditional foreign policy tools (such as military or economic power) will most likely be shrinking.”^[1] Ivanov called for a “smart foreign policy” in which Russia “diversifies its assets,” combining military and energy tools with “nonmaterial” dimensions. For him, as for the other members of Russia’s foreign policy elite, the new Russian soft-power offensive is conceived as an integral part of a zero-sum hard-power game.

The first component, “mimesis,” refers to the fact that the Kremlin’s actions in the field of soft power have a strong mimetic character. The Russian leadership tries to copy those Western strategies and institutions which it thinks are most effective. In the process of copying, however, it often gives its own initiatives a new twist, as a result of which the Russian clones differ in a fundamental way from their Western models.

The second component, “rollback,” is a logical consequence of the Kremlin’s vision that the soft-power game is an integral part of a zero-sum hard-power game. “Rollback” means curtailing, opposing, and possibly forbidding the activities of Western soft-power institutes inside Russia.

The third component of the Kremlin’s soft-power strategy, “invention,” is its most important part. It is a strategy to invent new soft-power strategies, making ample use of the possibilities offered by the open Western societies. It includes legal as well as illegal activities in order to enhance the Kremlin’s influence abroad and ranges from hiring Western public relations firms to improve its image to setting up spy rings, illegally financing political parties, and directly “buying” people. This “innovative” part of the Kremlin’s soft-power strategy—which is at odds with Western definitions of soft power—is in fact not so innovative because it often makes use of many techniques used in the past by the Soviet KGB. It is the main subject of this book and will be analyzed in detail in the following chapters. In this chapter, however, we look first at the other two components of the Kremlin’s soft-power strategy: mimesis and rollback.

The Kremlin’s Mimetic Soft-Power Instruments: The Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, Rossotrudnichestvo, and Russkiy Mir

From the start, the Kremlin’s new initiatives to enhance its soft power had a strong mimetic character. In Russian publications, the activities of some Western NGOs and public diplomacy agencies, such as the British Council, the German Goethe Institut, the Alliance Française, and USAID (United States Agency for International Development), were presented as shining examples of how to promote the national language, culture, and interests abroad. It led in 2008 to the Kremlin’s establishment of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) with offices in New York and Paris. Apparently, the institute was set up as a Russian equivalent of the American NGO Freedom House. However, according to Andranik Migranian, the director of the New York institute, its goal was not to compete against Freedom House but to help US citizens to understand Russia’s position on human rights and democracy.^[2] Officially, the institute’s task was “to study demo-
cracy and human rights in Europe,” but in practice it defended the Russian version of “managed democracy” and “human rights based on traditional values” (which means that human rights are not universal but have a locally variable application). The Paris office, l’Institut de la Démocratie et de la Coopération (http://www.idc-europe.org/), is headed by Natalya Narochnitskaya, a former Duma member for the ultranationalist Rodina (Fatherland) Party, founded by Dmitry Rogozin. Narochnitskaya shares the paranoid worldview of the Kremlin leaders. On her website (http://narochnitskaia.ru/) she has written that “in all Caucasian wars there are non-Islamic instigators.” One of the speakers invited to her conferences in Paris in 2011 was General Alexander Vladimirov. In 2007 this general spoke about “the inevitability of war between Russia and the United States within 10 to 15 years.”^[3] “The two branches of IDC,” wrote Andrey Makarychev, “are overwhelmingly perceived as propaganda platforms rather than as intellectual think tanks.”^[4]

In Russia there existed already an organization, called Roszarubezhtsentr (Russian Foreign Center), which was a government agency for friendship and cultural relations with foreign countries. It was subordinate to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and dated back to 1925, early in the Soviet era. A press release, published in 2005 by the Foreign Ministry on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the organization, praised its many achievements. “World-famous local and foreign scientists, writers, painters, composers, and artists,” said the release, “laid the foundation for the organization’s high prestige in the world by their participation in the development of ‘people’s diplomacy.’”^[5] The names of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Yury Gagarin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Shaw, and Herbert Wells were mentioned. Its objectives included strengthening the Russian language and culture abroad, as well as “providing informational support for Russian foreign and domestic policies, and helping to shape in the world community a positive image of contemporary Russia.” Recently, the organization also began to play a role in “assisting the development of compatriots’ all-round relations with their historic homeland and engaging with
Russian-speaking diasporas abroad.” Roszarubezhtsentr had offices in sixty-five countries as well as “Russian Culture and Science Centers” in thirty-nine countries. It seemed to be one of the most successful Russian soft-power organizations.

Nevertheless, on September 6, 2008, a new organization, called Rossotrudnichestvo (Russian Cooperation Agency), was founded by a decree of President Medvedev. The new organization inherited the cultural centers from its predecessor, received additional funding, and got more autonomy from the Foreign Ministry. The reason was that the Kremlin had discovered that USAID, the foreign aid agency of the American government, was much more effective in increasing goodwill abroad than its Russian equivalent. USAID, which was created in 1961 by executive order of President John F. Kennedy, claims on its website that “the United States has a long history of extending a helping hand to people overseas struggling to make a better life.”^[6] USAID’s website further states that

It is, indeed, an impressive US “soft-power” toolkit. As USAID’s name already indicates, the organization was much more focused on providing direct, bilateral aid to foreign countries, working not only with governments but also with NGOs. The activities of the existing Russian Cultural Centers seemed in comparison to be too “elitist cultural” and too “top-down,” as one can conclude from the impressive list of famous names mentioned in the Foreign Ministry’s press release.

The Kremlin’s purpose of founding the new organization Rossotrudnichestvo was not so much cultural as geopolitical. It was set up “to centralise activities undertaken with a view to maintaining Russian influence in the CIS area.”^[8] Its official name, “Federal Agency for the CIS, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation,” indicates that its
primary focus was the former Soviet space and the Russian-speaking minorities living there. The agency remained subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and would operate abroad through delegations organized within diplomatic posts. Starting in January 2009, these delegations employed about six hundred staff members.^[9] In the next three years, Rossotrudnichestvo grew exponentially—also outside the CIS—and was represented in Russian diplomatic missions in seventy-four countries, where it had established eighty-three subdivisions, including fifty-eight Russian centers for culture and science.^[10]

On June 28, 2012, its newly appointed director, Konstantin Kosachev, revealed in a speech before the Federation Council his ambitious plans for the future. “My agency,” he told the deputies, “operates Russian culture and science centres in 74 countries. By January [2013], the number is expected to rise to 83, and by 2018, to 104.”^[11] Kosachev, who had just returned from Bethlehem, where President Putin had opened a new Russian culture and science center, explained: “The Palestinian Autonomy is home to tens of thousands of ethnic Russians and Russian expats. The Russian Centre should be of help to them and also to Russia, as it continues to seek a stronger geopolitical clout in their area.”^[12] The goals of Rossotrudnichestvo were never more clearly expressed: spreading Russian culture and science was not the ultimate goal; what mattered was to give Russia and the Russian state “a stronger geopolitical clout.” This stronger geopolitical clout was especially sought after in the former Soviet space where the Kremlin introduced new integration projects, latterly in the form of a megaproject called “Eurasian Union,” targeting the Russian minorities in the former Soviet states as possible allies. On this matter, Kosachev said in an interview: “We have missed many opportunities. We could by now have been at a much higher level of reintegration of this post-Soviet space—please don’t confuse it with a reconstruction of the Soviet Union. But what has been done abusively, remained in the past. We will learn from these mistakes and move forward. Thank god, the project of the Eurasian Union is now well elaborated and is moving forward with seven-mile strides.”^[13]

Similar geopolitical aims in the Kremlin’s new soft-power strategy were assigned to another new institute, the Russkiy Mir Foundation. Vyacheslav Nikonov, its director, did not make a secret of the mimetic character of this organization. “We are far, far from what the Americans are doing,” he said. “We are students, freshmen.”^[14] Like Rossotrudnichestvo, Russkiy Mir’s main focus is on the countries of the former USSR. Georgi Bovt, editor in chief of the Russkiy Mir Journal, writes:

Russian analysts often fall back on conspiracy theory to explain the reduced influence of the Russian language in the former Soviet space, the Baltic states in particular. However, this loss of influence is mainly a result of two factors: emigration^[16] and cultural adaptation of Russian and Russian-
speaking minorities. However, the activities of Russkiy Mir in the former Soviet space are not restricted to in itself praiseworthy efforts to promote the Russian language and culture abroad. These activities are often politically motivated, transforming Russian “compatriots” abroad into a virtual fifth column. Estonian analyst Juhan Kivirähk writes:

Russkiy Mir’s main focus is the former Soviet space. However, this does not mean that it restricts its activities to this part of the world. On the contrary, the organization considers “the Russian World” as a global community that includes ethnic Russians as well as Russian speakers and Orthodox believers, wherever they live. Russkiy Mir, therefore, works hand in hand with Rossotrudnichestvo in setting up Russian centers in universities abroad, an initiative which met with great success in recent years. Russian centers have been set up in many Western universities, such as in Leiden and Groningen in the Netherlands and in Durham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow in the United Kingdom.^[18] On June 28, 2012, Russkiy Mir’s director, Vyacheslav Nikonov, even received in Edinburgh an honorary doctorate.^[19] This happened shortly after Russkiy Mir realized one of its greatest successes in Britain: the opening, on February 27, 2012, of a Russian center at St. Anthony’s College of the revered Oxford University.^[20] Other centers were opened on June 15, 2012, at the Minho University in the Portuguese city of Braga^[21] and, on June 21, 2012, at the University of Kars in Eastern Anatolia in Turkey.^[22] In each case, the Russkiy Mir Foundation provided books, disks, learning materials, and personnel. Despite a prima facie resemblance of this Russian cultural diplomacy with the work of the British Council, the Alliance Française, and the United States Information Agency’s library program, there is, however, one great difference: neither the British Council, which operates in more than one hundred countries, nor any of the other Western institutes have established bases on university campuses. The Russian approach seems, therefore, to be inspired by the Chinese model. In 2004 China started setting up “Confucius Institutes” at foreign universities. There are now seventy of these institutes in the United States, fourteen in France, eleven in Germany, thirteen in Britain, and still others in Eastern Europe and Asia.^[23] In the United States, the work of these institutes has led to critical comments. Arthur Waldron, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, says:

According to another critic, Teufel Dryer, who teaches Chinese government and foreign policy at the University of Miami, there were strings attached to the Chinese largesse. “You’re told not to discuss the Dalai Lama—or to invite the Dalai Lama to campus. Tibet, Taiwan, China’s military buildup, factional fights inside the Chinese leadership—these are all off limits.”^[25] These considerations led the University of Pennsylvania’s East Asian Studies faculty to oppose unanimously an initiative to open a Confucius Institute. Similar concerns are certainly justified with regard to the opening of Russian centers, supervised by the Kremlin, at Western university campuses.

Other Mimetic Structures: The Russian International Affairs Council and the Gorchakov Foundation

Apart from the IDC, Rossotrudnichestvo, and Russkiy Mir, two other public diplomacy initiatives should be mentioned here: the Russian International Affairs Council, and the Gorchakov Foundation. The Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) is modeled after the US Washington-based think tank Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS). In it government representatives, foreign policy experts, and representatives of business and civil society work together on foreign policy issues. The RIAC was founded by a decree by President Medvedev of February 2, 2010, with the mission “to facilitate the prospering of Russia through integration in the global world.”^[26] Its board of trustees includes political heavyweights, such as former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko, and Sberbank chairman German Gref. President of the presidium is former foreign minister Igor Ivanov. As of November 2013, the RIAC had 110 members. The RIAC organizes many seminars on international policy issues. Events in 2012 included subjects such as “Russia’s Interests in the Arctic”; “Central Asia after the Withdrawal of Coalition Forces from Afghanistan”; “Public Diplomacy as an Instrument of Russia’s Foreign Policy”; and “Russia and Arab Spring Countries: Opportunities for Soft Power and Traditional Cooperation Vehicles.” An English-language website opened in March 2012.

The Gorchakov Foundation, another initiative of President Medvedev, opened in the same year (2010). It is named after Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, who was foreign minister from 1856 to 1882 and is considered the architect of Russia’s comeback as a major European power after the defeat in the Crimean War. Gorchakov is apparently considered a model to be emulated. The goal of the foundation is to support public diplomacy. On its website, the foundation’s director, Leonid Drachevsky, writes in his welcome declaration that “in international life so-called ‘soft power’ has begun to play a more important role,” and he welcomes the fact that Russian NGOs “begin to play an important role in the realization of [Russia’s] foreign policy strategy.”^[27] The Gorchakov Foundation, he continues, has been set up “to strengthen the international activity of Russian NGOs.” He emphasizes, not without pride, that “in contemporary Russia our Foundation is the first and only government-civil society partnership in the sphere of foreign policy,” and expects that “with shared efforts we can reach a synergetic effect.”^[28]

Against the background of the Russian tradition with its strong state and its relatively weak civil society, a Western observer may ask whether Russian NGOs are really “helped” by this initiative or whether it may rather enable the state to control and monitor NGOs that deploy activities which have an impact on Russian foreign policy. The massive presence of the state becomes clear from the important personal overlap and cross memberships among the different soft-power agencies. For instance, Igor Ivanov, president of the RIAC, together with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, are members of the administration of the Gorchakov Foundation. The Gorchakov Foundation’s “Expert’s Council” has only one member, Igor Ivanov. In his turn, Leonid Drachevsky, the director of the Gorchakov Foundation, is a member of the board of trustees of RIAC. Konstantin Kosachev, the director of Rossotrudnichestvo, is also a member of this board.

“RollBack”: The Assault on the Russian NGOs

The second component of the Kremlin’s soft-power offensive, we mentioned, was a “rollback” strategy directed at curtailing the influence of not only Western NGOs within Russia but also Russian NGOs that are partially funded by Western sources. Although this strategy was not new, it moved up a gear in the summer of 2012—immediately after Putin’s re-election. Russian authorities established a precedent in December 2007, when they ordered the regional offices of the British Council to be closed. The official reason was that the British Council was alleged to have violated Russian tax regulations—a classic pretext the Russian authorities use when they wanted to harass an institution. The action followed Britain’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats in connection with the murder of the dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London.^[29] At that time this—temporary—measure could be considered a simple “tit-for-tat” action. In 2012, this was no longer the case. A frontal attack began on Russian NGOs that received funding from Western sources. Both houses of parliament adopted a law in the first weeks of July 2012, signed by President Putin on July 21, that forced NGOs receiving funding from abroad and engaging in “political activity” to register with the Justice Ministry as an inostrannyy agent (foreign agent). The new law was preceded by attacks by Vladimir Putin on the work of NGOs in his February article in Moskovskie Novosti and in a speech in December 2011 in which he attacked “so-called grant recipients,” adding, “Judas is not the most respected biblical figure among our people,”^[30] apparently having in his sights the
election-monitoring organization Golos, which had denounced irregularities in the December 2011 Duma elections.

The label “foreign agent” was meant to discredit these organizations in the eyes of the population, demonizing their members as local representatives of foreign powers, if not treating them as outright traitors. The bill would make it obligatory for foreign-funded NGOs involved in political activities to add to all publications and websites the label “foreign agent.” About one thousand NGOs were targeted by the law.^[31] The head of the well-known human rights organization “Moscow Helsinki Group,” the eighty-four-year-old Lyudmila Alekseeva, did not hide her rage. She said her organization would not register. “If they want, let them close us,” she said. “That will mean that the whole world will know that they closed the MHG [Moscow Helsinki Group] that has existed for thirty-six years and survived the Soviet regime.”^[32] A similar reaction came from the human rights defender Oleg Orlov, head of the organization Memorial. “We will never declare ourselves ‘foreign agents,’” he said.^[33] Orlov announced that he would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The threat, however, was real. Annual audits were announced, as well as unannounced checks for the use of “extremist speech” in published materials. Those found guilty could face fines up to one million rubles ($30,000). According to a Justice Ministry spokesman, under the new law, NGOs that failed to comply with the new requirements would be suspended for a maximum of six months; if they failed to comply again, the organization could face prosecution. The same spokesman warned that if an NGO is suspended for noncompliance of the law, it will be prohibited “from holding mass rallies and public events, [as well as] using bank accounts except for routine payments.”^[34]

The new law on “foreign agents” led to another rollback move when, in September 2012, the Russian government ordered the US development agency USAID to leave the country by October 1. USAID had been present in Russia for twenty years. It not only funded the Moscow Helsinki Group, Memorial, and the election watchdog Golos, but also engaged in charity, offering aid to children’s homes and disabled children. According to Victoria Nuland, the spokesperson for the US Department of State, even “United Russia,” the official Kremlin party, received USAID grants for years.^[35] USAID spent nearly $3 billion in Russia on aid and democracy programs over the past twenty years.^[36] Another victim of the Kremlin’s rollback strategy was UNICEF, which was expelled at the end of 2012. Many foreign donors, including the International Red Cross, World Wildlife Fund, and the Ford Foundation, had already lost their tax exempt status in 2008.^[37] On June 6, 2013, the vote monitoring agency Golos was dissolved. It had improperly failed to register as a foreign agent. Its director fled the country.^[38]

Putin’s government, however, not only wanted to harass critical NGOs and take their funding away, it especially wanted to criminalize their activities. This was put into effect by the adoption by the Duma, on October 23, 2012, of amendments to articles 275 and 276 of the criminal code. These amendments introduced a much broader definition of “treason.” Treason was no longer limited to illegally handing over secret information to foreign governments; it now also included “providing assistance in the form of information, funds and consultation to Western and international organizations.” These “Western and international organizations” also meant Western NGOs. The amendment was proposed by the FSB, the Russian secret service. In his presentation of the draft bill before the State Duma, Yuriy Gorbunov, deputy director of the FSB, declared that an amendment to the criminal code was

Also the definition of “security” was broadened in the amended article. Where the old article only mentioned “external security,” the new article 275 spoke about “activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional order, sovereignty, territorial and state integrity.”^[40] The Russian SOVA Center commented: “Criminalization of any given ‘act directed against the constitutional order,’ presents a very serious danger, as such acts could on a whim be made to include virtually any form of political or social activism. What is ‘state integrity’ is left to the imagination, as is how it differs from territorial integrity.”^[41] This opinion was shared by Rachel Denber, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, who wrote:

For Denber it was clear. “I can’t help,” she wrote, “but hear the faint but creepy echo of the old article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, which was commonly used against dissidents. Article 58 made offering assistance to the ‘international bourgeoisie’ . . . a treasonous offense.”^[43] In the week after the adoption of the amendments, the head of the European diplomacy, Catherine Ashton, also expressed her deep concern.^[44]

This rollback strategy of Western soft power can sometimes take unexpected and even ridiculous forms. When, in the summer of 2014, Russia was hit by Western economic sanctions after its aggression in Ukraine, the Kremlin retaliated by shutting down the McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow’s Pushkin Square for “sanitary reasons.” Masha Gessen pointed out that the Kremlin’s action was meant less as an economic reprisal than as an attack on a symbol of US soft power. McDonald’s, she wrote, “was a unique place in several ways: It was a public space where ordinary people could have a private conversation while eating food they could afford, sold to them by a polite staff.”^[45] The American fast-food restaurant promised its Russian clients “a public sphere, which had not and could not have existed in a totalitarian society.” Therefore, she concluded, “the Russian government is shutting down a symbol [of American soft power], not a business.”^[46]

Invention: New Tools for the Kremlin’s
Soft-Power Offensive

We have, so far, spoken about two of the three components of the Kremlin’s new “soft-power” strategy: mimesis and rollback. Both are characterized by different timetables. The mimesis started in 2008 with the foundation of Russian GONGOs (government-organized nongovernmental organizations), such as the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, Russkiy Mir, and Rossotrudnichestvo. The rollback was given a powerful push after Putin’s return to the Kremlin in May 2012, when the government started a massive crackdown on the activities of Western and Russian NGOs. The third component of the Kremlin’s new soft-power strategy, invention, which will be analyzed in the following chapters, started earlier. Its beginnings can be traced back to the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004. It was during the second presidency of Vladimir Putin (2004–2008) that the Kremlin began to implement a “grand strategy,” designed to build, to reinforce, and to activate all possible soft-power sources that the Russian state had at its disposal (without, at that time, using the concept “soft power”). This “soft-power offensive” was not a hotchpotch of isolated, individual measures but, on the contrary, a large-scale, centrally led and coordinated effort by the Russian state with the aim of creating the maximum possible impact. All available assets that could possibly play a role in this strategy have been assembled and brought together. Helped by its huge oil profits, the Kremlin has invested billions of dollars in this unprecedented “soft-power offensive.” A small part of this offensive consisted of an effort to build authentic soft power.^[47] The main part, however, consisted of building hard soft power. In the following chapters we will explore how this offensive was organized: how Western PR firms were hired to improve Russia’s image, how influence was bought in the Western media, how Russia set up its own media facilities, including a multilingual international cable television network, how Kremlin “trolls” began to flood the internet, how rings of “sleeper” spies were installed in Western cities to infiltrate leading Western political circles, and how political parties and politicians were financed in an effort to influence the policies of Western governments. Normally, in the Western sense, most of these activities do not qualify as “soft power.” However, in the Russian context, soft power is considered to be a manipulatable asset, which is an integral part of a zero-sum hard-power game, a strategy in which the Kremlin not only buys influence but also uses other vectors for its soft-power projection. One of these vectors is the activation of the Russian diaspora abroad—not only in the CIS, but also in the West, where this strategy is facilitated by the fact that post-Communist Russia has access not only to the recently established diaspora but also to old émigré communities of White Russians who immigrated to the West after the Bolshevik Revolution. A second, important vector is, as we will see, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is closely related to the Kremlin and the FSB, the follow-up organization to the KGB. The Kremlin actively supports claims by the Russian Orthodox Church for the restitution of church properties in the West. More important, however, is that the Kremlin—together with the patriarchate—has initiated plans to give the Orthodox Church a global reach, making the church the vector of a new Russian messianism, which replaces the obsolete communist messianism. This new Orthodox messianism offers a strongly conservative and antidemocratic worldview which directly challenges the liberal values of the West. It is deeply anti-Western and critical of Western democratic standards and universal human rights. Universal human rights are attacked in international forums, such as the UN, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe.

Notes

Igor Ivanov, “What Diplomacy Does Russia Need in the 21st Century?” Russia in Global Affairs (December 29, 2011).

Cf. Andis Kudors, “‘Russian World’—Russia’s Soft Power Approach to Compatriots Policy,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 81 (June 16, 2010), 3.

Cf. Theo Sommer, “Moscow Is Elbowing into Its Place in the Sun,” The Atlantic Times (August 2007).

Andrey Makarychev, “Hard Questions about Soft Power: A Normative Outlook at Russia’s Foreign Policy,” DGAPanalyse kompakt, no. 10 (October 2011), Deutsche Gesellschaft für auswärtige Politik, Berlin, 3.

“Press release—80th Anniversary Celebrations of Roszarubezhtsentr,” Official Site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (October 19, 2005).

“Who We Are,” USAID, http://www.usaid.gov/.

“Who We Are.”

“The Kremlin Reinforces Russia’s Soft Power in the CIS,” Centre for Eastern Studies, Warsaw (September 17, 2008).

Andrey Kazantsev, “‘Rossotrudnichestvo’ vo glave s Kosachevym budet rabotat na razvitie dobrososedstva,” MGIMO (March 19, 2012).

10.

Kazantsev, “Rossotrudnichestvo.”

11.

“Head of Rossotrudnichestvo Konstantin Kosachev speaks to the State Duma on Diaspora Issues,” Fond Russkiy Mir (June 28, 2012).

12.

“Head of Rossotrudnichestvo Konstantin Kosachev speaks to the State Duma.”

13.

“Konstantin Kosachev: Reputatsiya Rossiya za rubezhom otkrovenno zanizhena,” Fond Russkiy Mir (April 9, 2012).

14.

Quoted in Peter Finn, “Russia Pumps Tens of Millions into Burnishing Image Abroad,” The Washington Post (March 6, 2008).

15.

Georgi Bovt, “Soft Power of the Russian Word,” Russian International Affairs Council (October 2, 2013).

16.

Between 1989 and 2011, the percentage of Russians in Lithuania went from 9.4 to 5.4 percent; in Latvia, from 34 to 26.9 percent; and in Estonia, from 30.3 to 25.5 percent. (Cf. Vadim Smirnov, “Russia’s ‘Soft Power’ in the Baltic,” Russian International Affairs Council (May 4, 2012).)

17.

Juhan Kivirähk, “How to Address the ‘Humanitarian Dimension’ of Russian Foreign Policy?” Diplomaatia, no. 90, International Centre for Defence Studies, Tallinn (February 3, 2010).

18.

Cf. “Alexei Gromyko Discusses Opening of Russian Centers with Representatives of UK Universities,” Russian Centre in Scotland “Haven” (November 16, 2009).

19.

“Vyacheslav Nikonov Receives Honorary Doctorate from University of Edinburgh,” Fond Russkiy Mir (June 28, 2012).

20.

“Russkiy Mir Program Officially Inaugurated at University of Oxford,” Fond Russkiy Mir (February 27, 2012).

21.

“Nadejda Machado: The Russkiy Mir Cabinet Will Help Promote the Russian Language and Culture among the Portuguese,” Fond Russkiy Mir (June 18, 2012).

22.

“Russkiy Mir Cabinet Opens at Kafkas University in Kars, Turkey,” Fond Russkiy Mir (June 29, 2012).

23.

Cf. D. D. Guttenplan, “Critics Worry over Chinese Largess in U.S.,” International Herald Tribune (March 5, 2012).

24.

Guttenplan, “Critics Worry over Chinese Largess in U.S.”

25.

Guttenplan, “Critics Worry over Chinese Largess in U.S.”

26.

“What Is RIAC? General Information,” RIAC, retrieved November 8, 2013, http://russiancouncil.ru/en/about-us/what_is_riac/.

27.

L. V. Drachevsky, “Obrashchenie Ispolnitelnogo direktora fonda,” Gorchakov Foundation, retrieved November 8, 2013, http://gorchakovfund.ru/about.

28.

Drachevsky, “Obrashchenie Ispolnitelnogo direktora fonda.”

29.

Cf. Luke Harding, “Russia Orders British Council to Be Shut Down,” The Guardian (December 13, 2007).

30.

Ellen Barry, “Foreign-Funded Nonprofits in Russia Face New Hurdle,” The New York Times (July 2, 2012).

31.

Miriam Elder, “Russia Plans to Register ‘Foreign Agent’ NGOs,” The Guardian (July 2, 2012).

32.

“Alekseeva: MKhG ne budet registrirovatsya kak inosstrannyy agent,” Grani.Ru (July 2, 2012).

33.

“Oleg Orlov: ‘My nikogda ne obyavim sebya inostrannymi agentami,’” Novaya Gazeta (October 8, 2012).

34.

“Russian NGOs Threaten to Boycott Foreign Agent Law,” RT (July 25, 2012).

35.

Jadwiga Rogoża, “Russia Expels USAID,” Centre for Eastern Studies (September 26, 2012).

36.

Robert Orttung, “Kremlin Nationalism versus Russia’s NGOs,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 138 (November 8, 2013), 9.

37.

Orttung, “Kremlin Nationalism versus Russia’s NGOs,” 9.

38.

Orttung, “Kremlin Nationalism versus Russia’s NGOs,” 10.

39.

“FSB predlagaet uzhestochit zakon o ‘Gosudarstvennoy izmene,’” Politikus.ru (September 21, 2012).

40.

Cf. “Duma Adopts Expansion of Criminal Code Articles on Treason, Espionage at First Reading,” SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (September 28, 2012).

41.

“Duma Adopts Expansion of Criminal Code Articles.”

42.

Rachel Denber, “The Kremlin May Call It Treason,” The Huffington Post (September 28, 2012).

43.

Denber, “The Kremlin May Call It Treason.”

44.

“Sovet Federatsii Rossii odobril zakon o gosudarstvennoy izmene,” Golos Ameriki (October 31, 2012).

45.

Masha Gessen, “The Other Big Mac Index—Russia Goes to War with McDonald’s, Soviet Style,” The New York Times (August 28, 2014), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/opinion/masha-gessen-russia-goes-to-war-with-mcdonalds-soviet-style.html?_r=0.

46.

Gessen, “The Other Big Mac Index.”

47.

As, for instance, plans to promote the Russian language in the CIS or to have five Russian universities in the world’s top hundred by 2020—which will require a huge effort given the fact that in the QS World University Ranking 2012, only one Russian university had a place in the top 200 (the Lomonosov Moscow State University, at place 116). (Cf. “Rossiya nuzhna ‘myagkaya sila,’” Narodnaya Gazeta (September 6, 2012).) In a critical article, Irina Dezhina expresses her doubts about these plans in the light of the Kremlin’s attacks on the autonomy of Russian scientists. “Creating a positive image of science is problematic,” she writes. “The whole world has been watching the battle between the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Education and Science for a long time, and this does not add respect for the country as a whole.” (Cf. Irina Dezhina, “The Russian Science as a Factor of Soft Power,” Russian International Affairs Council (June 21, 2012).

“Reputation Laundering”

Mimesis and rollback are only two of the three strategies used by the Kremlin to foster Russian soft power. Of particular interest is a third strategy developed by the Kremlin: innovation. This innovation strategy has been made possible by the end of communism, the reintegration of Russia into the capitalist world economy, and its claim to be a genuine, Western-style democracy. While the Western world was a closed territory for inhabitants of the former Soviet Union, this changed after 1991. The Russian government got access to Western political fora, such as the G7 (which became the G8), Russian firms became active actors and investors on Western markets, Russian oligarchs bought expensive mansions in London or Paris and sent their children to elite Western schools, and Russian citizens traveled freely all around Europe. This opened up many new opportunities for a Kremlin-
inspired soft-power strategy. Not only could the post-communist regime reconnect with the heirs of the White Russians who had fled after the Bolshevik Revolution and with communities of Orthodox believers in Western countries, it also had access equally to the services of Western companies that before 1991 would have refused to work for the Kremlin. This was the case, in particular, of Western PR and lobbying firms. Using PR firms was in itself not new. Already in the 1930s “in the United States, Hitler and Goebbels hired public relations firms in an attempt to secure favorable press coverage of the regime.”^[1] However, it was something completely new for post-Soviet Russia.

Hiring Western Lobbying Firms: The Cases of Kissinger Associates and Ketchum

According to Thomas Hammes, lobbying is not a neutral activity. He calls it an integral part of “fourth generation warfare”: an indirect strategy to reach one’s goal, which is often used by liberation movements. “A prudent planner,” wrote Hammes, “will assume that parliaments and congresses of democratic nations will be natural targets. . . . Just as clearly, non-governmental groups—churches, business groups, and even lobbying firms—can be major players in shaping national policies. President Dos Santos of Angola actually hired a U.S. lobbying firm to prevent Jonas Savimbi of Unita from meeting the president of the United States.”^[2] In Soviet times, it would have been unthinkable that the Kremlin would—or could—hire Western lobbying firms to promote its interests. This is no longer the case. In the “normalized” post-Soviet world, the Kremlin gained access to the most prestigious lobbying and communication firms. It was also able and ready to pay the often expensive bills. These firms are highly interesting, not only because they possess the necessary know-how, but also—and maybe even more so—because they often employ former politicians, ambassadors, and other highly placed officials, who have direct personal access to government circles. Former politicians can fulfill political missions and at the same time serve the interests of their clients. Some years ago Zbigniew Brzezinski was already warning:

Since he wrote these words, Brzezinski’s prediction seems to have been fully materialized. “Moscow has already enlisted extremely influential lobbyists,” writes Gregory Feifer, “including former Secretaries of State Henry Kis-
singer and James Baker, who has worked as a consultant for Gazprom and Russia’s pipeline monopoly Transneft.”^[4] The case of Henry Kissinger is particularly interesting. Kissinger, a former secretary of state, has become a prominent lobbyist. He heads Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm he founded in 1982. Kissinger is an ideal lobbyist for the Kremlin because he abstains from asking annoying questions about democracy and human rights. On China, for instance, he writes: “Western concepts of human rights and individual liberties may not be directly translatable . . . to a civilization for millennia ordered around different concepts.”^[5] This value relativism is highly appreciated by the Kremlin, which since Putin’s rise to power has shown no special interest in promoting human rights. In 2007—one year before the Russian invasion of Georgia—Kissinger formed with former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov a Russian-US working group to improve relations. This private-public initiative got the green light from the Kremlin and the Bush administration.^[6] The frequency of Kremlin-sponsored efforts to hire Western communication firms only increased after Obama started his “reset” policy. Andrei Piontkovsky, a Kremlin critic and director of the Moscow-based think tank Strategic Studies Center, comments:

The “private” Kissinger-Primakov working group was established in July 2007, when it gathered for a whole day behind closed doors in Putin’s presidential residence near Moscow. There was no doubt who was the initiator. “Addressing the panel’s first meeting,” one could read in a press release, “Putin thanked its participants for their quick response to the idea to set up such a high-level group, first aired during his April meeting with Kissinger and Primakov.”^[8] Apart from Kissinger, the American group consisted of former secretary of state George Schulz, former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, former senator Sam Nunn, Chevron CEO David O’Reilly, and
Thomas Graham, head of the Russian department of Kissinger Associates.

In the beginning of the 1990s, between Putin and Kissinger there developed a strange kind of mutual understanding after Kissinger visited Saint Petersburg. In this period, Kissinger came to Saint Petersburg to participate in the Kissinger-Sobchak Commission, set up to attract foreign investment. “Once I met him at the airport,” one can read in Putin’s autobiographical book, First Person, “we got into the car and went to the residence. On the way, he asked me where I was from and what I was doing. He was an inquisitive old fellow.”^[9] Kissinger was, indeed, so inquisitive that after some questioning, he found out that Putin had worked for the KGB. Kissinger then said, reassuringly, “All decent people got their start in intelligence. I did, too.”^[10] Putin continued:

In that car in Saint Petersburg we could witness the meeting of two minds: on the one hand, the KGB agent who regretted the loss of empire and would make it his life’s vocation to repair “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and on the other hand, the former secretary of state to Richard Nixon, who, as an admirer of Metternich, seemed to prefer the stability of a repressive and totalitarian empire to a rapid decolonization and democratic change.^[12] The mutual admiration between Putin and Kissinger was still intact in February 2012, when Putin, in an article in the Moskovskie Novosti, wrote: “Not long ago I spoke with H. Kissinger. We meet him regularly. And I share completely this great professional’s thesis that in periods of international turbulence especially, a close and trusting collaboration between Moscow and Washington is required.”^[13]

Thomas Graham, head of the Russian department of Kissinger Associates, was the author of the report Resurgent Russia and U.S. Purposes that was published in 2009. This report was full of good advice for the new Obama administration. Graham started with an attack on Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. He criticized Saakashvili’s “vitriolic anti-Russian rhetoric” and mentioned “Georgia’s reckless military operation last August” as one of the reasons for the new administration to “cease U.S. pressure for the near-term expansion of NATO.”^[14] Graham also advised the Obama administration to react positively to Medvedev’s proposal for a new European security architecture, adding, “If this ultimately leads to the subsuming of NATO into a larger structure over the long term, we should be prepared to accept that. America’s essential goal is not securing NATO’s long-term future as the central element of our engagement with Europe, no matter how valuable an instrument of U.S. policy in Europe NATO has been in the past.”^[15] The reader might feel an urge to rub his eyes in disbelief. But the text is unequivocal: Thomas Graham seemed not only to be ready to give the Kremlin a veto over NATO decisions but was even prepared to sacrifice NATO for an illusory entente with the Kremlin bosses. It came as no surprise, then, when on the next page he declared himself to be in favor of “Finlandizing” Ukraine.^[16] The United States, he continued, should also stop criticizing Russia on human rights and the lack of democratic standards. Issues of democratic development should be “raised in a non-confrontational and non-accusatory manner,” because Russia “is deeply sensitive about any appearances of interference in its domestic affairs.”^[17] The best way to raise these issues would be to abstain from public declarations and instead organize “discussions among experts.” Thomas Graham’s report is an indication of how successful the Kremlin’s strategy of hiring Western lobbyists had, by now, become: the report could have been written by Vladislav Surkov or another Kremlin pundit, if not by Putin himself.

The idea of hiring Western lobbyists had already emerged in 2001 when Mikhail Lesin, the Russian media minister, declared that the country needed to groom its image abroad, unless, in his words, Russians wished to “always look like bears.”^[18] However, it took another five years before the idea materialized. The actual occasion was the Russian presidency of the G8 in 2006. To improve its PR, the Kremlin hired the New York–based firm Ketchum together with its Brussels-based sister organization GPlus Europe, both owned by the parent firm Omnicom. The $2 million contract was meant to improve the Kremlin’s image when it was at a historical low: in January of the same year, Russia had started its gas war with Ukraine and cut off the gas supplies to that country, while in May, Moscow banned a gay march and homosexuals were beaten up by nationalists. This led to calls by US senator John McCain to boycott the Petersburg G8 summit. Ketchum sent twenty-five people to St. Petersburg to arrange interviews for journalists with Russian government leaders. They established podcasts featuring Russian officials and made a webcast of the summit with the BBC. Ketchum was satisfied with the results. The firm proudly declared that it “succeeded in helping . . . shift global views of Russia to recognize its more democratic nature.”^[19] Ketchum’s effort in shifting the world’s views of Russia’s “more democratic nature” apparently boosted its reputation: the firm won a “Silver Anvil” prize from the Public Relations Society of America and a PRWeek Global Campaign of the Year Award for its work.

The Kremlin also was satisfied.^[20] Eager to continue the collaboration, it signed in January 2007 a two-month contract worth $845,000 with Ketchum and the Washington Group, another subsidiary. The latter was the lobbying arm of Ketchum with good contacts in the US government and Congress. One of the persons involved was John O’Hanlon, a former fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. Ketchum organized interviews with Russian government officials for journalists like David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, or a meeting between the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and top executives of Gazprom. The apotheosis of Ketchum’s efforts, however, was its successful lobbying on behalf of Putin, elected in 2007 by Time Magazine as “Person of the Year.” (Later, Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, emphasized that being Time’s Person of the Year “is not and never has been an honor.”) As in the case of Kissinger, the lobbying soon became overtly political, especially one year later, during the war in Georgia. “In the midst of the conflict between Russia and Georgia,” writes James Kirchick, “employees for the Washington Group, including former Republican congresswoman Susan Molinari, then CEO of the firm, contacted Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, her former colleague and ranking Republican member on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, as well as staffers for Representative Joe Crowley and then-Senator Joe Biden, according to documents filed with the Department of Justice.”^[21] Ketchum’s policy of “business as usual” with a country that in Georgia had committed a flagrant breach of international law led to internal criticism. “During Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008,” wrote the New York Times, “there was a movement in Ketchum’s New York office to drop Russia as a client, according to a former Ketchum employee who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the firm.”^[22] The protesters did not succeed: “Those who expressed concern were placated by the Washington office, the employee said.”^[23] Ketchum was also helpful in setting up a web platform, called ModernRussia, the name of which was later changed to ThinkRussia (http://www.thinkrussia.com). Its home page announced that it contained material disseminated by Ketchum Inc. on behalf of the Russian Federation. After the annexation of the Crimea and the creeping invasion into eastern Ukraine in 2014, Ketchum’s relationship with the Kremlin again came into the limelight. According to Kathy Jeavons, a Ketchum partner in Washington who heads Russia’s account, in the summer of 2014 the number of employees working for this account had diminished from three dozen to “about ten,” but the firm had no plans to stop its collaboration. According to Angus Roxburgh, a former Ketchum consultant, Ketchum’s aim was to make Russia more attractive to investors, which “means helping them disguise all the issues that make it unattractive: human rights, invasions of neighboring countries, etc.”^[24]

The goal of the Kremlin was not only to improve its PR and communications; it had a keen interest especially in political lobbying. This became clear in the choice of Ketchum’s Brussels-based sister organization, GPlus Europe. GPlus Europe was founded by Peter Guilford and Nigel Gardner, two former European Commission trade spokespersons. On its website, the firm claims to have a team of over fifty experts of whom “several have held senior posts in the European Commission, European Parliament or national governments.” In France, GPlus is represented by Bernard Volker, who, as a former TV news presenter, is a well-known face in that country. According to the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, Volker is

On January 25, 2009, during the Russian-Ukrainian gas war, GPlus was suspended from the EU’s lobbying register for refusing to disclose the identity of three clients. Peter Guilford, one of the founders, said the firm had confidentiality agreements with these clients.^[26] In London, GPlus subcontracts to Portland, led by Tim Allan, the former deputy of Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell, and Angus Roxburgh, the former Moscow correspondent for the BBC.^[27] In his book, The Strongman, Roxburgh gives an oratio pro domo for his work for the Kremlin:

Roxburgh’s narrative resembles that of a teacher complaining about a bad pupil. But was the PR work for the Kremlin as innocent and politically neutral as he suggests? In January 2012 in the United Kingdom, a controversial debate emerged in a four-part BBC2 documentary series entitled “Putin, Russia and the West.” According to Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet dissident who spent twelve years in Soviet prisons and who has lived in Britain since 1976, the series had a clear pro-Putin bias. The film did not discuss painful events, such as the 1999 apartment bombings in which the FSB was suspected of being involved, nor the savage war in Chechnya. No representatives of the opposition were featured in the series. Luke Harding, former correspondent of the Guardian in Moscow, drew attention to the link with Ketchum. The series consultant, he pointed out, was Angus Roxburgh, who worked for Ketchum between 2006 and 2009. The documentary’s producer, Norma Percy, “told the Guardian that her production team had hired Roxburgh ‘to get a foot in the door’ and to persuade the notoriously suspicious Kremlin that the BBC series would be genuinely fair-minded.”^[29] The end result seemed, indeed, to be fair-minded enough for Moscow. In Russia in Global Affairs, the leading Russian foreign policy magazine, Fyodor Lukyanov writes: “The series, shown on BBC2, is good in that—in a calm and objective fashion—it shows the real person of Vladimir Putin.” He does not hide his satisfaction when he concludes: “And generally the creators of ‘Putin, Russia and the West’ may be congratulated on the excellent work which, I hope, will also be shown on Russian television at some point. As an example of genuine objectivity and professionalism.”^[30]

The Kremlin’s great satisfaction with the work of Western PR firms became clear from the fact that between 2006 and 2009 it paid Ketchum and the Washington Group at least $14 million for their services. Gavin Anderson, a London-based financial PR firm, was paid $5 million for representing the state gas giant Gazprom. Even the “governments” of the Georgian breakaway provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia followed in the Kremlin’s footsteps and hired their “own” PR firm: Saylor Group, based in the California city of Pasadena. It has been suggested that the fee was paid by the Kremlin.^[31] Individual Russian oligarchs have also found their way to Western PR firms. When Oleg Deripaska, said to be Russia’s richest oligarch and a prominent friend of Putin, was denied a visa for entry to the United States due to alleged shadowy business dealings, he hired the Global Options Group Inc., a Washington, DC–based private company, which, in turn, hired Alston and Bird, a law firm whose special counsel was former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. “New documents,” write Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, “obtained by the authors shed light on Dole’s lobbying services for Deripaska. One invoice, dated 15 April 2004 was sent by Alston and Bird to Deripaska himself in Moscow for £45,000. The invoice was submitted for ‘legal services in connection with . . . immigration’ while ‘Robert Dole’ was the designated lawyer. In 2008 Dole himself was still actively lobbying on the oligarch’s behalf.”^[32]

On September 12, 2013, Vladimir Putin published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “A Plea for Caution from Russia,”^[33] warning the United States against intervening in Syria and at the same time ridiculing Obama’s remark that America’s ability to act against injustice around the globe was what makes the United States “exceptional.” It was an important “soft-
power” coup. In the article, Putin poses as a peace apostle, lecturing the United States for its tendency to use “brute force” abroad. The paper had received the article the day before, on Wednesday, September 11 (a strange coincidence: exactly the anniversary of 9/11). Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the New York Times, said that the newspaper was approached by Ketchum. The PR firm confirmed that “the opinion piece was written by President Putin and submitted to the New York Times on his behalf by Ketchum for their consideration.”^[34] According to files of the US Department of Justice, Ketchum received $1.9 million in the first half of 2013 for promoting Russia “as a place favorable for foreign investments.”^[35] Apparently, for Ketchum, helping Putin in publishing this highly political op-ed was part of the package. It is telling that Putin’s article, which was reproduced by many newspapers and news sites over the world, got positive reactions elsewhere. A commentator from Pakistan called it an example of how “soft power overpowers hard power.”^[36] For Putin, to be seen as an example of “soft power” reigning in American “hard power” must have been music to his ears.

Tim Allan, head of Portland, who admitted giving advice to Vladimir Putin, said: “All organisations are professionalising the way they communicate. When governments which have previously been secretive do that, it is not an affront to democracy. In many cases, communicating more professionally is an essential part of that process. And getting good professional ethical advice is part of it as well.”^[37] It is hard to see, however, how Portland’s “ethical advice” did support democracy in Russia. Ultimately, not only are Western PR firms communication coaches to their dubious clients, but they become instrumental in selling their dubious policies to Western governments and audiences. How instrumental they can become can be seen in a peculiar case in which the French PR firm Euro RSCG played a dubious role.

A French PR Firm and the Poisoning of
Viktor Yushchenko

In 2004, a very special case of intervention by a Western lobbying firm took place after the poisoning of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko during the election campaign. At that time, the French firm Euro RSCG had Viktor Pinchuk as a client. Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch, is one of the richest men in Ukraine. He is married to the daughter of Leonid Kuchma, a former Ukrainian president. Pinchuk’s holding, Interpipe, has a steel division that produces gas and oil pipes. Its important clients include the Russian state firms Gazprom and Rosneft. Outgoing President Kuchma and his son-in-law Pinchuk supported the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych. The Kremlin considered these elections crucial, and there was a lot of Russian meddling. On September 5, 2004, after a meal with the head of the Ukrainian secret service, Yushchenko suddenly became severely ill. In haste he was flown to the Rudolfinerhaus, a specialized clinic in Vienna. According to Taras Kuzio, an expert, “Yushchenko’s near-fatal poisoning on September 5–6, 2004, nearly succeeded as Yushchenko arrived at the Vienna clinic where he was treated with only 12 hours to spare before he could have died.”^[38] Professor Abraham Brouwer of the Free University of Amsterdam, where blood samples were sent, claimed that “the concentration of dioxin found in Mr Yushchenko’s blood was the second highest recorded in human history.”^[39] On September 21, 2004, back in Kyiv, in a speech to parliament, Yushchenko declared that he had been poisoned. To refute these allegations, Viktor Pinchuk traveled to the clinic in Vienna. But he was not alone. According to the Financial Times,

Nouvellon was accompanied by a colleague, Ramzi Khiroun. It was Khiroun who, on September 28, 2004, organized a press conference in the private clinic. In the press release one could read that “the allegations that Viktor Yushchenko has been poisoned are totally unfounded in medical terms.”^[41] This was taken over by Reuters and disseminated by Reuters to the international press. “It is Yffic Nouvellon and Ramzi Khiroun, sent to Vienna by Euro RSCG, who have written this much discussed press release.”^[42] Viktor Pinchuk, the financier and supporter of the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych, as well as his friends in the Kremlin knew very well the truth of the proverb “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.”

Euro RSCG worked not only for Kremlin-friendly oligarchs but also directly for the Kremlin itself. In December 2006 the Moscow correspondent of the French paper Le Monde reported a strange meeting. Foreign correspondents were invited to be informed about the launch of a new political party, called “A Just Russia,” headed by Sergey Mironov, president of the Federation Council and a friend of Putin. The meeting was organized by two French PR firms, Euro RSCG and Bernard Krief. The new party, created in October 2006, was set up as an “opposition party” while at the same time supporting Putin. The goal of this fake opposition party was to attract leftist voters from the Communist Party. “It is a very interesting project,” one of the PR people is quoted. “Because in Russia a real opposition would have no chance at all of having access to the media, you must take into account the framework created by the government.”^[43] The “framework created by the government” in which the French consultants were ready to work was that of Putin’s fake democracy. Ultimately, it is profit and money and not morality or democratic principles that are the overriding factors. Against the background of the flexibility of Euro RSCG—its souplesse in accepting the conditions imposed by the Kremlin—it was no wonder that the firm was chosen to organize the communication for the “Exchange Year France-Russia” (L’Année Croisée France-Russie), a series of cultural events, organized in 2010 in both countries, which had, according to its organizer, Nicolas Chibaeff, the aim of “overcoming the clichés.”^[44]

However, even the most professionally conducted PR campaign cannot take away the fundamental bias in Moscow’s approach: the Kremlin’s efforts to build a good reputation with the help of Western communication firms is constrained by the reality on the ground. People may be duped by state-sponsored propaganda, but not indefinitely, no matter how cleverly packaged. In the end, therefore, Moscow’s manipulation of the “soft-power” concept tends to turn against the masters of the Kremlin, because even the most professional PR campaign cannot circumvent the fact that the essence of “soft power” is and remains the power of attraction. An example of this “revenge” of real soft power was the unwillingness of Western investors to invest in Russia, despite Putin’s announcement in 2012 of a bold $33 billion privatization program. Moreover, Putin’s desire to turn Moscow into a financial center did not prevent Russian companies from bringing their initial public offerings to London. Andrey Kostin, chairman of the VTB group, the second-largest bank in Russia, was candid about the reasons why. He said the country was undervalued “because of its image of corruption and lack of necessity to comply with the law.”^[45] In the “Global Financial Centers Index 2012,”^[46] Moscow ranked 64, and in the “Doing Business” ranking, published by the World Bank, the Russian Federation occupied a poor 112th place among a total of 185 countries.^[47] However, this performance was still better than its results in the “Corruption Perceptions Index 2012” of Transparency International, where Russia ranked 133 among 176 countries.^[48] One would expect that the Russian government would give priority to enhancing its real soft power by tackling the endemic corruption and by reinforcing the rule of law. Instead, it decided to do more of the same: it hired Goldman Sachs to polish Russia’s image abroad. In February 2013 the bank signed a three-year contract with the Economy Ministry of the Russian Federation. Its task was “to advise on issues such as communicating government decisions and setting up meetings with investors.”^[49]

A Personal Experience

Let me tell here a personal experience with the work of these firms. On July 3, 2012, I published a paper on the website of the Cicero Foundation. In this paper I warned that the massive Kavkaz-2012 exercise, organized by Moscow in September 2012 in the Caucasus, could have a destabilizing effect on the countries in the region. I mentioned in this article the upcoming parliamentary elections in Georgia in which the new “Georgian Dream” coalition was participating, led by the Georgian oligarch Ivanishvili. I wrote: “The election campaign will be rude. A new opposition coalition has emerged: ‘Georgian Dream,’ led by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian oligarch who has made his fortune in Russia with his Unikor holding and who is an important stakeholder of Russia’s gas giant, Gazprom. Ivanishvili, who has returned from Russia in 2004, has more than doubled his worth since 2004–2005 and is recently estimated by Forbes to possess $6.4 billion. The oligarch has started to sell some assets in Russia for liquidity to pay for his political campaign.”^[50] Nine days later, on July 12, 2012, I received a call at the Paris bureau of the Cicero Foundation. The telephone screen showed a Brussels number. The man at the other end started speaking in French but then asked whether he could continue in Dutch. He introduced himself as Aart Van Iterson, working at Cambre Associates, a Brussels-based public relations and public affairs consultancy. His firm worked for Ivanishvili, he explained. He told that my article on Georgia had led to “a lot of email traffic between Georgia and Brussels.” “In your article there are inaccuracies,” he said, and he asked me whether he could meet me so that he could give me the correct information. He was even ready to come to Paris. I told him that I was willing to meet him, but not immediately. “You write that he is an important stakeholder of Gazprom,” Van Iterson said. “However, he owns scarcely 1 percent of the shares.” “But that 1 percent has a value of about one and a half billion dollars,” I answered. “It represents a quarter of his fortune.” I knew that Ivansihvili had hired communication firms in the United States and Europe to improve his image in the West, and apparently he was not happy with my article. “I am not a political adviser,” Van Iterson tried to reassure me. “I work as a media adviser.” He proposed again to arrange a meeting and when I said that I could not meet him because I would be traveling abroad, he suddenly asked: “Maybe you are going to Berlin?” “No,” I said. “Why?” “There will be a meeting of a number of advisers,” he answered, “also from Georgia.” He did not give any more details. I told Van Iterson that I would be glad to receive more information and that he could send me the documentation by mail or email. I never received any documentation. Ivanishvili’s “Georgian Dream” coalition won the elections. It was considered a sign of the maturity of Georgia’s democracy. Possibly, it was also a sign of the effectiveness of the work of the PR firms hired by Ivanishvili.

The Valdai Discussion Club: How It Is Used
by the Kremlin

Hiring lobbying firms has become a well-established method used by the Kremlin to influence Western elite opinion. Another method is the organization of international forums. One of these forums is the Valdai Discussion Club. On its website (http://www.valdaiclub.com) it presents itself as a “global forum for the world’s leading and best-informed experts on Russia to engage in a sustained dialogue about the country’s political, economic, social and cultural development.” The Valdai Club, named after the Valdai Hills, a district between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, was organized for the first time in 2004 on the initiative of the Kremlin. Its objective is to invite Western “Russia experts,” let them meet with their Russian counterparts, and organize “an open dialogue” with the Russian leadership. This initiative served three objectives:

The first objective, to create goodwill, is realized by inviting Western scholars and analysts for a week in pleasant Russian surroundings and letting them mix socially with Russian colleagues. During the Valdai conference that took place from August 31 to September 7, 2010, for instance, participants enjoyed a five-day cruise aboard a ship that brought them to two islands in Northern Russia. Although the visit to the island of Valaam had to be canceled because of a storm on Lake Ladoga, there was plenty of time to socialize on board. After the cruise, the group went to Saint Petersburg and was then flown to the Black Sea tourist resort of Sochi to meet with Prime Minister Putin. This “holiday atmosphere” is an excellent means to create personal relationships between the participants, and it is certainly conducive to bringing even the fiercest critics of the Russian regime to a more positive assessment of the situation in Russia. Because the Western participants are opinion leaders in their respective countries, this will have a positive influence on the way Western publics are informed.

A second objective of the Valdai meetings is networking: by forging direct, personal, face-to-face contacts with Western analysts, it will be easier to contact them later for other initiatives. A third objective is to use the conference as a testing ground. The Kremlin is not interested in diplomatic, superficial, polite discussions. On the contrary, it wants the Western experts to express themselves freely and without any constraint. Only if Western experts say what they really think can the Kremlin adapt and fine-tune its arguments in the international arena in order to make its diplomacy more effective. For this reason, both Putin and Medvedev participated in the conferences, often in lengthy question-and-answer sessions. Undoubtedly, these sessions were afterwards meticulously analyzed by the presidential staff. The Western analysts were unconsciously being used as valuable guinea pigs and—ironically—it was especially those who were most critical of the Kremlin who were most helpful in making the Kremlin’s diplomacy more effective. In order to make the Valdai conferences attractive to Western participants, some conditions had to be fulfilled. All appearance of authoritarianism and ideological one-sidedness had to be avoided. The conferences would have to be organized completely “in Western style,” with “open” discussions that would come close to the ideal discussion situation, described by the sociologist Jürgen Habermas as herrschaftsfreie Diskussion—the unforced power of the better argument. This “openness” is achieved by inviting selected critical voices to these conferences. This might be a journalist of the Novaya Gazeta or a politician of the opposition, such as Vladimir Ryzhkov, who was invited to the 2009 conference. During the 2014 Valdai conference, Putin openly boasted about this “openness,” telling the audience: “I hope the ‘Valdai spirit’ will remain—this free and open atmosphere and chance to express all manner of very different and frank opinions.”^[51] The Valdai formula resembles the creation of small artificial islands of “open discussion” amidst a repressive society. Creating such small islands, which operate differently from the surrounding society, is not new in Russia. During the Soviet era, centers for nuclear research and weapons development were organized in a similar way. These centers were zakryt (closed), completely shielded from the rest of society. Employees had high salaries and enjoyed many privileges. Another example is the new high-tech zone Skolkovo near Moscow, the pet project of former president Dmitry Medvedev, which was equally destined to be become such an artificial island. Unlike in the rest of the country, property rights of foreign investors would be guaranteed in order to attract Western capital.^[52] The creation of these small islands in a repressive society—a mini Rechtsstaat in Skolkovo or the “free discussion” in the Valdai seminars—is, of course, as deceptive as the fake villages Prince Potemkin is said to have built to please tsarina Catherine the Great: they are not real and will function only as long as they serve the interests of the ruling elite in the Kremlin.

That the Valdai seminars did serve the interests of the ruling Kremlin elite became clear in September 2008, a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Georgia. Anatol Lieven, a prominent Valdai participant, writes: “During two lunches over the course of the conference, the president and prime minister of Russia spoke with us for a total of almost seven hours, answering unscripted questions without the help of aides. The foreign minister, deputy prime minister and deputy chief of the general staff spoke with us for several more hours. The chances of this happening in George Bush’s Washington, or indeed most other Western capitals, are zero.”^[53] It seems, in my opinion, at least a little strange for a British analyst to accept an invitation from the Russian government only a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Georgia and only a few days after the unilateral recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Even more so since the conference included meetings with the “presidents” of the two breakaway provinces. Lieven’s unequivocal pro-Kremlin stance becomes clear when, in the same article, he calls the negative US reaction to the Russian aggression “mass hysteria.”^[54] Other participants also mentioned the opportunity to have “open discussion” with the Russian leaders as one of the attractive aspects of the Valdai discussions. The American analyst Ariel Cohen said, for instance: “I practically do not know of a similar situation in world practice, for heads of state and governments, people so responsible and busy, to spend so much time and explain the policy of their country in such detail.”^[55] After the Valdai conference of 2011, Tim Wall, editor in chief of the English-language paper the Moscow News, wrote, in the same vein:

The participants of the Valdai conferences are clearly flattered. The Kremlin appeals to the vanity and narcissism of analysts, who dream that the prince listens to their advice—a dream that, in reality, seldom comes true. But even greater than their narcissism is their naïveté: their firm belief that the interest shown by the Kremlin in the opinions of Western analysts is a sign that the Russian leaders want to learn from these opinions. If the Russian leaders are eager to listen to these analysts and are prepared to discuss with them for hours, seemingly open to hearing all kinds of possible criticisms, this is only because they have a clear interest in these discussions. And this interest is not so much to change their policies but first to influence their Western audience and second to get a very precise and detailed picture of the prevalent Western elite opinion, which can help them to improve and fine-tune the arguments for selling their diplomatic initiatives on the Western political market.^[57] Angus Roxburgh, who worked for the Kremlin as a consultant from the American PR consultancy firm Ketchum, writes: “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.”^[58] Roxburgh adds: “I know privately from Dmitry Peskov [Putin’s spokesman] that Putin himself (who quite clearly enjoys an argument) despairs at the lack of combative questioning.”^[59] Roxburgh does not ask, however, why Putin is so interested in this “combative questioning.”

I certainly do not want to call into question the moral and intellectual integrity of the majority of the Western Valdai participants. However, I would like them to consider for a moment the question addressed to them by Nikolay Petrov of the Carnegie Moscow Center: “How justified from the moral point of view is it for Western analysts to participate in Valdai, a project used as blatant propaganda by the Kremlin? . . . I hope that many participants in the Valdai meetings will decline the next Kremlin invitation.”^[60] In an article in the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza with the title “Putin’s Useful Idiots,” the Russian sociologist Lilia Shevtsova, a colleague of Petrov, criticizes the Valdai conferences, in which Western participants “wine and dine with Russia’s leading ‘tandem’ [Putin and Medvedev]” as “one of the most effective tools for brainwashing the Western intelligentsia while using it for the Kremlin’s propaganda goals.” Shevtsova continued: “I think all the Valdai Club invitees must understand what kind of spectacle they are participating in. They are not stupid, after all. Some may be naïve, but not so naïve that they don’t understand the purpose of the show they are taking part in and their role in it.”^[61]

Valdai’s success seemed to be a good occasion for taking a new initiative. In 2012 the Youth Association for a Greater Europe (http://www.greater-europe.com) was founded, a nonprofit organization with “the aim to strengthen Europe’s dialogue with Russia.” From July 29 to August 4, 2013, the association organized its first summer seminar in Strasbourg. Almost two hundred students and graduates participated. Guest of honor was Alexander Orlov, ambassador of the Russian Federation in France. The 2014 seminar took place in Paris, while Vienna will be the venue for the meeting in 2015.

Notes

Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Holt, 2002), 319.

Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), 213.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 197.

Gregory Feifer, “Why the Russia Spy Story Really Matters,” rferl.org (July 9, 2010).

Henry Kissinger, On China (London and New York: Penguin, 2011), 426.

“Kissinger, Primakov to head Russia-U.S. working group-1,” RIA Novosti (April 26, 2007).

Andrei Piontkovsky, “It’s All Business between US and Russia,” Gulfnews.com (June 2, 2009).

“Kissinger-led U.S. Group Attends Closed Debate at Putin Home,” RIA Novosti (July 13, 2007).

Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 80.

10.

Putin, First Person, 81.

11.

Putin, First Person, 81.

12.

In the 1970s, Kissinger’s boss, Richard Nixon, was already arguing that “the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises.” (Quoted in Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12.) Joseph Nye comments: “But whether such multipolarity would be good or bad for the United States and for the world is debatable. I am skeptical.”

13.

Vladimir Putin, “Rossiya i menyayushchiysya mir,” Moskovskie Novosti (February 27, 2012).

14.

Thomas Graham, “Resurgent Russia and U.S. Purposes: A Century Foundation Report,” Century Foundation, New York and Washington (2009), 23.

15.

Graham, “Resurgent Russia,” 24.

16.

Graham, “Resurgent Russia,” 25. Graham’s plea in favor of a Finlandization of Ukraine was only a consequence of his opinion that “a robust Russian presence throughout the former Soviet space serves U.S. interests in building stable balances.” (Cf. Thomas Graham, “U.S.-Russian Relations: Towards a Strategy beyond the Reset,” Expert (September 6, 2010).) In an article in The American Interest in 2012, Graham repeats this wish for a “robust Russian presence” in the former Soviet space. “To ease Moscow’s concerns,” he writes, “Washington would have to acknowledge that the threat to its own interests is not Russia’s resurgence, but rather Russia’s withdrawal from the former Soviet space.” (Thomas Graham, “Putin, the Sequel,” The American Interest 7, no. 4 (March/April 2012), 57.)

17.

Graham, “Resurgent Russia,” 30.

18.

Quoted in Claire Bigg, “Russia: Kremlin Hoping to Speak West’s Language,” RFERL (June 9, 2006).

19.

Quoted in James Kirchick, “Pravda on the Potomac,” The New Republic (February 18, 2009).

20.

However, not all Russian analysts shared the Kremlin’s satisfaction with the results obtained by Ketchum. Georgy Filimonov, for instance, wrote: “Also, the foreign public relations agencies hired under state contracts were not very effective. In particular, this applies to the agency Ketchum. Which the Russian presidential staff in 2006 asked to provide a positive news background during Russia’s presidency of the Group of Eight in 2006.” (Georgy Filimonov, “Russia’s Soft Power Potential,” Russia in Global Affairs (December 25, 2010).)

21.

Kirchik, “Pravda on the Potomac.” In November 2008, the Washington Group merged with Clark & Weinstock, another Washington-based lobbying firm owned by the Omnicom Group. In a Ketchum news release, the new firm is said to create “an extraordinary package of Democratic and Republican advocates with experience in the House, Senate and executive branch.” (“Clark & Weinstock and The Washington Group Merge,” Ketchum, news release (November 14, 2008).)

22.

Ravi Somaiya, “P.R. Firm for Putin’s Russia Now Walking a Fine Line,” The New York Times (August 31, 2014).

23.

Somaiya, “P.R. Firm for Putin’s Russia.”

24.

Somaiya, “P.R. Firm for Putin’s Russia.”

25.

Vincent Jauvert, “Nos amis du Kremlin,” Le Nouvel Observateur (February 25, 2010).

26.

Roman Kupchinsky, “Russia’s Hired Lobbies in the West,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 6, no. 148 (August 3, 2009).

27.

Cf. David Teather, “PR Groups Cash In on Russian Conflict,” The Guardian (August 24, 2009).

28.

Angus Roxburgh, The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2012), 186.

29.

Luke Harding, “BBC Criticised over ‘Pro-Putin’ Documentary,” The Guardian (February 1, 2012).

30.

Fyodor Lukyanov, “Putin, Russia and the West: Beyond Stereotype,” Russia in Global Affairs (February 12, 2012).

31.

Teather, “PR Groups Cash In on Russian Conflict.”

32.

Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, Londongrad: From Russia with Cash—The Inside Story of the Oligarchs (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 335–336.

33.

Vladimir V. Putin, “A Plea for Caution from Russia,” The New York Times (September 12, 2013).

34.

Alec Luhn and Adam Gabbatt, “Vladimir Putin Wrote ‘Basic Content’ of New York Times Op-Ed, Spokesman Says,” The Guardian (September 12, 2013).

35.

Luhn and Gabbatt, “Vladimir Putin Wrote ‘Basic Content.’”

36.

Alauddin Masood, “Soft Power Overpowers Hard Power,” weeklypulse.org (October 14, 2013), retrieved October 30, 2013.

37.

Quoted in Gideon Spanier, “Reputation Launderers: The London PR Firms with Their Own Image Problem,” London Evening Standard (March 30, 2011).

38.

Taras Kuzio, “State-Led Violence in Ukraine’s 2004 Elections and Orange Revolution,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, no. 43 (2010).

39.

Cf. Tom Warner, “Yushchenko Links Poison to Meal with Secret Police,” Financial Times (December 16, 2004).

40.

Warner, “Yushchenko Links Poison to Meal.”

41.

Cf. Ariane Chemin, “Quand Khiroun ‘niait’ l’empoisonnement de Ioutchenko,” Le Nouvel Observateur (April 22, 2010).

42.

Chemin, “Quand Khiroun ‘niait.’”

43.

Millot Lorraine, “Une Opposition Russe . . . Pro-Poutine,” Le Monde (December 6, 2006).

44.

“Quand les Etats font leur pub,” France 24 (December 11, 2010).

45.

Jason Corcoran, “Russia Hires Goldman as Corporate Broker to Boost Image,” Bloomberg (February 5, 2013).

46.

“The Global Financial Centres Index 12” (September 2012), available at http://www.longfinance.net/Publications/GFCI%2012.pdf.

47.

“Doing Business 2013—Comparing Business Regulations for Domestic Firms in 185 Economies” (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank), 190.

48.

“Corruption Perceptions Index 2012,” Transparency International.

49.

Jason Corcoran, “Russia Hires Goldman as Corporate Broker to Boost Image.”

50.

Cf. Marcel H. Van Herpen, “2012: A New Assault on Georgia? The Kavkaz-2012 Exercises and Russian War Games in the Caucasus,” Cicero Foundation Great Debate Paper No. 12/04, (July 2012), available at http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_2012_ASSAULT_ON_GEORGIA.pdf.

51.

“Vladimir Putin Meets with Members of the Valdai International Discussion Club: Transcript of the Final Plenary Session,” Valdai Discussion Club (October 25, 2014), http://valdaiclub.com/valdai_club/73300/print_edition/.

52.

Medvedev spoke, for instance, about “the possibility of establishing a special intellectual property rights court within our arbitration court system and have it located at Skolkovo.” See “Joint Meeting of Commission for Modernisation and Skolkovo Fund Board of Trustees,” official site of the President of Russia (April 25, 2011), http://eng.special.kremlin.ru/state/news/2126.

53.

Anatol Lieven, “Lunch with Putin,” The National Interest (September 17, 2008).

54.

In another article, Lieven wrote that “US policy has encouraged Georgia to attack Russia and thereby endanger and destabilize itself.” (Anatol Lieven, “How Obama Can Reform Russia Policy,” The Nation (January 12, 2009).) Here, Lieven’s Kremlin-friendly attitude brings him to write an outright lie. How could Georgia “attack” Russia when there was not one single Georgian soldier in Russia but thousands of Russian troops in the territory of Georgia? It is no wonder that shortly after its publication, this article was reproduced by an official, Kremlin-related Abkhaz website. Cf. http://www.abkhazworld.com/articles/analysis/162-obama-russia-policy.html.

55.

Quoted in Lilia Shevtsova, Lonely Power: Why Russia Has Failed to Become the West and the West Is Weary of Russia (Washington and Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010), 101.

56.

Tim Wall, “Putin’s De Gaulle Moment,” The Moscow News (November 14, 2011).

57.

Two Valdai participants from the United States, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, seemed to grasp this when they wrote: “He [Putin] . . . views other individuals as sources of raw intelligence. He does not seem to rely on others for direct counsel or interpretation of people or events.” (Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, “Putin and the Uses of History,” The National Interest, no. 117 (Jan./Feb. 2012), 31.) They added that Putin acts according to the principles: “Don’t destroy your enemies. Harness them. Control them. Manipulate them, and use them for your own goals” (30).

58.

Roxburgh, The Strongman, 195.

59.

Roxburgh, The Strongman, 195.

60.

Lilia Shevtsova, Lonely Power, 98.

61.

Lilia Shevtsova, “Pożyteczni idioci Putina,” Gazeta Wyborcza (September 6, 2010).

The Propaganda Offensive in the Western Media, Part I

Overt and Covert Propaganda

In the Soviet era, the Kremlin was already making use of different channels to disseminate its overt and covert propaganda. The official channels were radio broadcasts in foreign languages by Radio Moscow, press releases distributed by the Soviet press agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, publications of books and brochures in foreign languages, and the distribution of cheap, glossy magazines. One of these was Soviet Union, which had editions in several languages. The magazine proudly presented the achievements of state socialism and showed full-color pictures of pretty blonde Komsomol girls with red neck scarves in impeccable uniforms. One could read reportages on model kolchoz farms accompanied by photos of endless fields of waving, ripe corn. There were also stories on Russian kosmonavty, these latest “Soviet hero” specimens, floating weightlessly in their mighty Soyuz spaceships. The problem with this kind of propaganda was that it was consumed by those who did not need to be converted. The same was true of another, more indirect means of propaganda: the communist press in Western Europe. It was read by those who were supposed to be susceptible to its message. More interestingly, therefore, was covert propaganda, which was disseminated by front organizations that were not openly communist but were controlled by the Soviet Union or by communist “sister” parties. These organizations worked under the guise of innocent labels, such as “World Peace Council” or “Medical Committee Vietnam,” which ensured that the identity of those who provided the information remained unknown.

However, the best propaganda was that of so-called fellow travelers: notorious noncommunists—often liberal, individualist intellectuals and artists—who, although critical of their own governments, displayed a great naïveté vis-à-vis the Soviet regime, for which they functioned as “useful idiots.” A well-known example of this category was George Bernard Shaw, a British author and Nobel laureate in literature, who visited Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1932—precisely at the time of the Holodomor in Ukraine, a manipulated famine in which millions of people, many of them young children, died. After his return to Britain, Shaw attacked “the intensity of the blind and reckless campaign to discredit [Russia].” This “lie campaign” was, according to Shaw, far from deserved: “Everywhere we saw hopeful and enthusiastic working-class, self-respecting, free up to the limits imposed on them by nature . . . , developing public works, increasing health services, extending education, achieving the economic independence of woman and the security of the child . . . setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our systems supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it.”^[1] Winston Churchill commented on Shaw’s visit to Stalin’s Russia with cold irony: “Here was the World’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon in one,” he wrote, “and Arch Commissar Stalin, ‘the man of steel,’ flung open the closely-guarded sanctuaries of the Kremlin, and pushing aside his morning’s budget of death warrants, and lettres de cachet, received his guests with smiles of overflowing comradeship.”^[2] In 1935 two other famous Britons, Shaw’s fellow Fabian socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb, followed in his steps and published a booklet entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? In this pamphlet they denied that Stalin was a dictator. However, one should note that at that time, apart from the support of these individuals and the local communist parties, Soviet propaganda had practically no access to the Western mass media.

This situation changed dramatically after the fall of communism. Because of its conversion to capitalism and a Western-style democracy, Russia was no longer an international outcast. It became overnight—if not an ally and completely friendly power^[3]—a more or less “normal” country. It gained almost unrestricted access to Western markets and—helped by its newly acquired wealth—it was soon able to buy itself a place in the Western media landscape. Agitprop (agitation and propaganda) was one of the main departments of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Putin had no known equivalent of this otdel agitatsii i propagandy,^[4] this former Soviet propaganda department, but propaganda remained one of the spearheads of his regime. The ideological supremacy of the Western world and of the United States in particular during the Cold War had convinced the Russian leadership of the importance of soft power. At home, as well as in the Warsaw Pact countries, the Soviet Union had always relied disproportionately on its military might. The concept of “soft power” was then still unknown. According to Nye, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”^[5] “This aspect of power,” he writes, “getting others to want what you want—I call soft power.”^[6] Soft power is for Nye not the exclusive trump card of the rich and democratic Western countries. He admits that “the Soviet Union had a good deal of soft power, but,” he adds, “it lost much of it after the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Soviet soft power declined even as its hard economic and military resources continued to grow. Because of its brutal policies, the Soviet Union’s hard power actually undercut its soft power.”^[7] He concludes: “A closed system, lack of an attractive popular culture, and heavy-handed foreign policies meant that the Soviet Union was never a serious competitor with the United States in soft power during the Cold War.”^[8] What came closest to soft power during the Soviet era was the communist ideology. However, after the public denunciation of Stalinist atrocities by Khrushchev, this ideology gradually lost its attractiveness. During Brezhnev’s reign it had become an obsolete legitimation theory totally unrelated to the bureaucratic reality of a semitotalitarian state.

When Putin became president, the soft-power potential of Russia had reached its nadir. The country was virtually bankrupt. In the North Caucasus it was confronted with an unruly and de facto independent Chechen Republic. The Russian population was plagued by alcoholism and a rampant AIDS epidemic, resulting in demographic decline. However, when oil and gas prices went up, the newly acquired wealth offered new chances. Moreover, Russia fully took these chances. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, one could witness one of the most impressive soft-power offensives ever conducted by the Kremlin. Russia, write Popescu and Wilson, “not usually considered particularly adept at the use of soft power—has learned the power of incentives as well as of coercion.”^[9] They add: “Its soft power is built on a bedrock of historical and cultural affinity—the presence of Russian minorities in neighbourhood countries, the Russian language, post-Soviet nostalgia and the strength of the Russian Orthodox Church.”^[10] These authors rightly emphasize that the turning point came with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, which triggered a fundamental tactical rethink by Russia: “Drawing its lessons from the central role played by civil society groups and NGOs in the Orange revolution, Russia began developing a rival ‘counter-revolutionary’ ideology, supporting ‘its’ NGOs, using ‘its’ web technologies, and exporting its own brands of political and economic influence. Gleb Pavlovsky [a Kremlin adviser] described the Orange revolution as ‘a very useful catastrophe for Russia. We learnt a lot.’”^[11]

In the previous chapter we have already seen how the Kremlin contracted Western PR firms and began to organize the Valdai series of high-level seminars and conferences for international experts. However, in order to conduct its propaganda offensive, the Kremlin had a much broader panoply of instruments at its disposal. These included:

In this chapter we will analyze the first five of the above-mentioned strategies, which all had the task to influence—directly or indirectly—the Western media landscape.

Russia Today (RT): Conspiracy Theories and Weirdly Constructed Propaganda

In May 2005, just one month after Putin had delivered his famous speech in which he called the demise of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” the Kremlin announced the launch of a new Kremlin-sponsored international TV news channel. The idea came from Putin’s press minister, Mikhail Lesin. This new twenty-four-hour English-language channel, called “Russia Today”—later known by the abbreviation RT—had the task of becoming a global competitor of CNN, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. The newly appointed editor in chief was Margarita Simonyan, a twenty-five-year-old ethnic Armenian born in Krasnodar in southern Russia. Between 2002 and 2005, Simonyan was a member of the prominent Kremlevskiy Pul, the “Kremlin Pool”—a Russian equivalent of the US White House Press Corps—where she represented Rossiya, the second-largest state television network. To become a member of this press pool, a journalist was not expected to excel at critical thinking nor even set himself or herself the minimum professional goal of impartial, objective fact finding. On the contrary, one had to be extremely loyal and trustworthy. Journalists who were admitted to this exclusive inner circle had completely interiorized the objectives of their Kremlin masters. They were convened every Friday by Vladislav Surkov, the deputy chief of the presidential administration, to discuss and “prepare” the news for the coming week.

The newly appointed Simonyan, helped by a team of equally young journalists, started her new job with great energy. After three months of rehearsal, the channel went live on December 10, 2005. The Kremlin was ready for a huge effort and assigned large sums to the project. In 2005, $23 million were invested in launching the channel, with an additional budget of $47 million. In 2007, the budget went up to $80 million. In 2008, this was increased by 50 percent to $120 million. In 2011, this already sizable sum more than tripled when $380 million were assigned.^[12] The Russian opposition politician Garry Kasparov commented: “There are certain rules of any dictatorship: never save money on police or propaganda.”^[13] The results of this “propaganda war effort” were, indeed, impressive. In 2011 RT had grown into an organization with a staff of two thousand employees worldwide, reporting from twenty bureaus. Amongst this staff was included an office with about one hundred personnel in Washington. RT’s global staff had become larger than that of Fox News, which has worldwide a staff of about 1,200. In 2009 Nielsen Media Research found that viewers in the Washington, D.C., area preferred to watch prime-time news on Russia Today rather than on other foreign English-language networks, including Al Jazeera, France 24, and Deutsche Welle.^[14] In 2013 two million Britons watched RT regularly, and its online presence was “more successful than those of all its competitors. What’s more, in June [2013], Russia Today broke a YouTube record by being the first TV station to get a billion views of its videos.”^[15] RT did not confine itself to broadcasting in English but also offered programs in Arabic and Spanish. After the annexation of the Crimea in March 2014 and the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in August 2014, the Kremlin decided to focus on the two leading European countries, Germany and France. A German-language channel was planned for launch in 2015, and RT’s budget was increased by $39 million to fund its expansion into French.^[16] “The focus on Germany and France,” writes the Wall Street Journal, “reflects the Kremlin’s attempts to open a gap between Europe and the U.S., and between the European public and its governments, over how to respond to the Ukraine crisis.”^[17]

But what about the contents of RT’s programs? In the first years of its existence, Russia Today aimed at improving Russia’s image abroad and concentrated on information programs about Russia. These programs stressed Russia’s positive points: its unique culture, its ethnic diversity, its role in World War II, and so on. RT also reported on Russia’s “modernization,” featuring new shopping malls and newly built highways. However, most of the time viewers would seek in vain for reliable information on more critical subjects, such as election fraud, corruption by government officials, the repression of demonstrations, the frequent murders of journalists, the lack of independence within the judiciary, and the HIV epidemic. This absence of reliable, balanced, and objective information turned into active disinformation during the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008. Julia Ioffe writes: “Russia Today correspondents in Ossetia found that much of their information was being fed to them from Moscow, whether it corresponded to what they saw on the ground or not. Reporters who tried to broadcast anything outside the boundaries that Moscow had carefully delineated were punished.”^[18] She continues: “Another correspondent, whose reporting departed from the Kremlin line that Georgians were slaughtering unarmed Ossetians, was summoned to the office of the deputy editor in chief in Moscow, where they went over the segment’s script line by line. ‘He had a gun on his desk,’ the correspondent says.”^[19] Shaun Walker, the Moscow correspondent of the Independent, gives the following opinion on RT’s coverage of the war in Georgia: “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a ‘New Cold War’ headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted ‘GENOCIDE’ across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”^[20]

From 2009 onward, the focus of Russia Today began to change. From a defensive soft-power weapon, RT began to develop into an offensive weapon. RT began to report on the negative sides of the West, especially of the United States. Favorite news items included the growing social inequality, the fate of homeless people, mass unemployment, human rights violations, and the consequences of the banking crisis. Anchors of RT programs (such as Peter Lavelle) did not hide their explicit anti-American views. RT also started inviting representatives of marginal, often extreme right antigovernment groups, who were presented as “experts.” One of these groups was the so-called 9/11 truthers, people who believe that the 9/11 attacks were not the work of al-Qaeda terrorists but a US government conspiracy. Luke Rudkowski, the founder of We Are Change, who purports “to seek the truth” behind 9/11, was invited for an extensive interview. “Truthers” like him were in-
vited on several occasions. Another group was the “birthers,” people who doubted—against all evidence—that President Obama was born in the
United States and denied that he was eligible to be US president. One of these was James David Manning, a pastor of a Harlem church, who saw “pure evil” in Obama.^[21] RT’s “experts” also included Malik Zulu Shabazz, the leader of the New Black Panther Party, a hate group. Another invited pundit was Daniel Estulin, who considered the European Union to be the realization of a secret plan invented by the Bilderberg Group and who also claimed that the US government was building thirteen secret bases in Afghanistan for the forward push to an eventual war against Russia.^[22] The same penchant for conspiracy theories was revealed in the RT program The Truthseeker, which suggested that the US government was behind the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon in April 2013, in which two ethnic Chechens killed three people.^[23] Manuel Ochsenreiter, a guest speaker about German affairs on RT’s English-language channel, is actually the editor of the neo-Nazi magazine Zuerst!, a monthly radical-right magazine that pledges “to serve German—not foreign—interests” and speaks out against “de-nazification.”^[24]

For James Miller this is problematic, “as RT used Ochsenreiter to defend Russia’s invasion of Crimea, an invasion which the Kremlin said was done to defend the peninsula against neo-Nazis.”^[25] Another RT guest, Ryan Dawson, who was presented as a “human rights activist,” was in reality a Holocaust denier who wrote blogs about anti-Semitic ideas.^[26] The Economist, in an article with the title “Russia Today Goes Mad,” does not hesitate to qualify RT’s programs as “weirdly constructed propaganda,” characterized by “a penchant for wild conspiracy theories.”^[27] To attract new viewers, the channel also did not hesitate to use methods that were far from subtle. It was, for instance, running full-page ads featuring Josef Stalin in a general’s uniform, armed with a writer’s quill in his hand. “Stalin wrote romantic poetry,” the ad states. “Did you know that?” The German magazine Der Spiegel comments: “It’s about as subtle a message as a scenario in which German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle were to advertise with Hitler and the question: ‘Did you know that Adolf Hitler also painted?’”^[28] On another occasion, RT published ads on billboards in the United Kingdom featuring the face of Barack Obama morphing into that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the text: “Who poses the greater nuclear threat?” In US airports these ads were banned. In August 2014, during the crisis in Ukraine, another aggressive poster campaign was launched around New York, featuring the text: “In case they shut us down on TV—Go to RT.com for the second opinion.” The poster was accompanied by a second one, denouncing the former US government’s claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.^[29]

One may conclude that RT has become a full-fledged propaganda tool of the Kremlin. It has acquired free access to Western audiences without being bothered by Western nations’ regulations which prescribe impartiality rules (in Britain, for instance, Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code, section 5, on Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy and Undue Prominence of Views and Opinions). In 2012, despite its lack of impartiality and its reputation for being a Kremlin mouthpiece, RT succeeded in hiring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to present a series of talk shows. In May 2013 RT even signed a contract with former CNN anchor Larry King to present two programs.^[30] RT’s propaganda is supported by other media, such as Russia Profile, an internet paper. The Kremlin’s international radio station, the Voice of Russia, a revived version of Radio Moscow of Soviet times, also got a facelift. By presidential decree of December 9, 2013, it was merged with the news agency RIA Novosti and became part of a new entity called Rossiya Segodnya. The new international radio station was rebaptized into “Radio Sputnik” and became part of a broader platform, “Sputnik News,” which has also an online presence. The new radio station began to broadcast on November 10, 2014. The Kremlin’s propaganda effort, however, is not restricted to these initiatives. It has found other and quite unexpected ways of influencing Western public opinion, as we will see below.

Russia beyond the Headlines: New Methods to Build Soft Power

Apart from RT, another important project to disseminate official Russian state propaganda in the West is “Russia beyond the Headlines” (http://www.rbth.ru), which started in 2007. It consists of the publication of newspaper supplements by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russian Paper). This is the official Kremlin paper in which laws and decrees are published and the official views of the regime are ventilated. From the beginning, the propaganda project was very ambitious. Once a month, an eight-page supplement is added to a group of highly influential Western papers, including the Washington Post (United States), the New York Times (United States), the Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom), Le Figaro (France), Repubblica (Italy), El Pais (Spain), and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). There are also arrangements with leading papers in India, Brazil, Argentina, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The title of this paid supplement is Russia Now in the United States and the United Kingdom, La Russie d’Aujourd’hui in France, Russland Heute in Germany, Russia Oggi in Italy, and Rusia Hoy in Spain. The supplements’ titles are in fact the same as the former full name of the Kremlin’s TV channel RT. The different supplements have their own websites, which can be reached via links on the official websites of the respective papers. When the project started in 2007, an American journalist made an ironical comment. He wrote that “it’s a bad sign for the Putin regime if it thinks this expensive PR exercise will elicit anything but laughter from the West.”^[31] But in the meantime, the Kremlin has not only learned a lot, it has also begun to spend a lot. “In 2011,” writes Luke Harding, “the Russian government will spend $1.4 billion on international propaganda—more than on fighting unemployment.”^[32] And one has to admit that this spending spree is beginning to show an impact.

The supplements of Russia Now have an attractive layout and offer a mix of sport, culture, faits divers, Russian cuisine, and serious information. The most important lesson the publishers have learned is to make the supplement resemble a Western newspaper. This means that you will not find any straightforward Kremlin propaganda in it. On the contrary, criticism of the Kremlin leaders sometimes takes a prominent place. Difficult topics, such as the Khodorkovsky trial or the suppression of demonstrations by the opposition, are not avoided. In the February 2011 supplement to the French Le Figaro, for instance, the opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov is quoted, and, similarly, one could find an interview with the Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who talks about her correspondence with the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and praises him as “brilliant” and “an outstanding businessman,” qualifications normally rather found in the Russian opposition paper Novaya Gazeta. After the rigged Duma elections of December 2011 and the subsequent massive protest rallies, in the December supplement of that year political life in Russia was said to have “become more lively” because of these events, a description that would certainly not have the same positive connotations in the Kremlin as in the West. A Western reader could, therefore, easily get the impression of reading a “normal” paper. And that is what it is all about. The “critical” texts in the supplement are meant to mollify the Western reader so that he is also ready to take in the other texts.

In fact, here two stratagems are used to manipulate Western readers. The first stratagem is to diminish their cognitive dissonance by adapting the contents and the style of the articles to fit their “critical” Western mind.^[33] The second stratagem is an application of the two-step flow of communication theory of the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. This is the theory that information delivered by the mass media does not find its way directly to the broader public but is rather channeled indirectly to it via opinion leaders. For this reason, it is especially the Western quality newspapers that are targeted by the Kremlin’s soft-power offensive. In fact, it is a modern form of the old agitprop. The project “Russia beyond the Headlines” is, as in former Soviet times, a living example of “active disinformation.” The “critical” articles that are published in the supplements for a Western public would never stand a chance of being published in their mother paper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Their only function is to give the Kremlin a “liberal” image—an old strategy of which the KGB has always been a real master: for instance, after the repressive KGB chief Yury Andropov was appointed general secretary, the KGB presented him as a modern, Western-style, jazz-loving whisky drinker. Andropov had kidney problems and drank no alcohol.

The Kremlin Assault on RIA Novosti

On Monday, December 9, 2013, President Putin issued a decree ordering the liquidation of RIA Novosti, the state-owned Russian news agency. According to the Moscow Times, Sergey Ivanov, the head of the Kremlin administration, “justified the decision to shut the agency on financial grounds, while also admitting to the ‘soft power’ purposes behind its replacement.”^[34] It is interesting that Ivanov also mentioned “soft power” as one of the reasons for this Kremlin “coup.” It reveals—once more—the Kremlin’s idiosyncratic way of defining “soft power”: rather as official state propaganda than as the result of attractive policies. “Russia is pursuing an independent policy, firmly protecting its national interests and explaining this to the world is not easy, but it can and must be done,” said Ivanov.^[35] Explaining that a country is “firmly protecting its national interests and [is] explaining this to the world” has not much to do with soft power. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the extreme-right Liberal-Democratic Party, came closer to the truth when he said that what was at stake here was building “more powerful ideological centers, propaganda centers.”^[36]

In actual fact, RIA Novosti, despite being a state-owned news agency, had a reputation for being quite objective as a news provider—which was not to the liking of the Kremlin, which needed a more powerful Kremlin voice in the international arena. RIA Novosti employed about 2,300 staff and had offices in sixty-nine Russian cities. It had an international presence in forty-nine countries. The agency, as such, did not disappear. It was simply renamed and revamped. The new name is Rossiya Segodnya, which means “Russia Today.” This is also the former name of the Kremlin’s international cable TV station RT. There were, however, no plans to merge RIA Novosti with RT (only with the international radio station the Voice of Russia). RIA Novosti’s new name is, therefore, in effect the product of a lack of imagination on the part of the Kremlin bureaucrats. Svetlana Mironyuk, RIA Novosti’s editor in chief, who, over the past decade, built the agency into a modern and highly professional organization, has been replaced by Dmitry Kiselyov, a popular television host on Russia’s state-owned Channel One. Kiselyov, who presents the talk show The National Interest, certainly in the eyes of the Kremlin is the right man for the Kremlin’s new soft-power offensive. A loyal Putin supporter, he is known for his praise of Stalin and his homophobia. In 2012 he said the hearts of gay organ donors collected after fatal car crashes should be “buried or incinerated as unsuitable to prolong someone’s life.”^[37] In late June 2014, Kiselyov cast the Ukraine conflict as an echo of the run-up to World War I, which he described as engineered by Washington and London to decimate their adversaries on the continent. “Now, just as back then, the English and the Americans have the common goal of making enemies of Germany and Russia and thus to exhaust them,” Kiselyov told his viewers.^[38] These remarks came after having reminded his audience already in March 2014 that Russia was capable of “turning the U.S. into radioactive ash.”^[39] It is telling that a news agency which, on the basis of its objectivity and professionalism, has succeeded in building real soft power abroad was replaced by the Kremlin with a clone of the former Soviet agitprop agencies.

This policy of creeping resovietization of Russia’s media sphere was also evident when, on September 1, 2014, the director of the news agency ITAR-TASS, Sergey Mikhailov, announced that the agency would return to its historical name TASS (without the prefix ITAR), a strange decision because the acronym TASS stood for Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union no longer exists. To give this former mouthpiece of Soviet state propaganda a new credibility, the acronym ITAR (Information Telegraph Agency of Russia) was added in 1992. According to Jefim Fistein, former director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian Service, this odd name change is deliberate: “For many people now, the Soviet past, paradoxically, reflects the happy future of present-day Russia. . . . They don’t expect a happy future to come in the form of modernization or in the form of approaching the Westernized world. For them, the future lies in the Soviet past of Russia.”^[40] This return to the Soviet past could also be observed in the attack in 2014 on one of the remaining independent media, Dozhd (Rain) TV. On the seventieth anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, the station organized a debate on the question of whether the surrender of Leningrad would have saved millions of lives—a debate which is legitimate, because Stalin’s decision to defend the city to the bitter end, notwithstanding the tremendous civilian death toll, is criticized by many historians. However, in the Russian national consciousness, the siege of Leningrad has become an epic event of mythical proportions, and a debate on this question is taboo. The public outrage was a good pretext for the authorities to curtail this independent news outlet: “Major cable and satellite TV operators began to pull the plug. The station’s audience fell from 20 million to just 2 million, as broadcasters abandoned the channel.”^[41] According to Mikhail Zygar of Dozhd TV, “The owners of all those companies, operators, told us privately that that’s not their wish. . . . They were asked to do it by phone call, by someone from the Kremlin.”^[42]

Notes

George Bernard Shaw, “Social Conditions in Russia—Recent Visitor’s Tribute,” Letters to the Editor, The Manchester Guardian (March 2, 1933), Gareth Jones Memorial Website, available at http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/bernard_shaw.htm.

Winston Churchill, “George Bernard Shaw,” in Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937), 55.

In a Gallup poll conducted in 2010, a majority of respondents in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria considered Russia to be a “partner” of their country. However, a majority of respondents in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, and Malta considered Russia rather to be their country’s “frenemy.” (Quoted in Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe,” policy report (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010), 30.)

However, even in this respect, Russia is still haunted by a return of the old Stalinist ghosts. On October 20, 2012, President Putin signed a decree creating a new subdivision within his presidential administration, which intended to “work on the strengthening of patriotic education and the spiritual-moral foundations of Russian society.” The department, headed by Pavel Zenkovich, will have a full-time staff of thirty to thirty-five people. Nezavisimaya Gazeta did not hesitate to label this initiative as “the Kremlin’s agitprop.” (Cf. Aleksandra Samarina, “Kremlevskiy Agitprop,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (October 22, 2012).)

Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8.

Nye, The Paradox of American Power, 9.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 9.

Nye, Soft Power, 75.

Nicu Popescu and Andrew Wilson, “The Limits of Enlargement-Lite: European and Russian Power in the Troubled Neighbourhood,” policy report (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, June 2009), 27.

10.

Popescu and Wilson, “The Limits of Enlargement-Lite,” 29.

11.

Popescu and Wilson, “The Limits of Enlargement-Lite,” 29.

12.

Cf. Marcin Maczka, “The Propaganda Machine,” New Eastern Europe 3, no. 4, New Europe, Old Problems (July–Sept. 2012).

13.

Andrew E. Kramer, “Russian Cable Station Plays to U.S.,” The New York Times (August 22, 2010).

14.

Sonia Scherr, “The Conspiracy Channel,” UTNE Reader (January–February 2011), available at http://www.utne.com/media/conspiracy-channel-russia-today-anti-american-propaganda.aspx.

15.

Benjamin Bidder, “Putin’s Weapon in the War of Images,” Spiegel Online (August 13, 2013).

16.

Anton Troianovski, “Russia Ramps Up Information War in Europe,” The Wall Street Journal (August 21, 2014).

17.

Troianovski, “Russia Ramps Up Information War.”

18.

Julia Ioffe, “What Is Russia Today?” Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 2010).

19.

Ioffe, “What Is Russia Today?”

20.

Ian Burrell, “From Russia with News,” The Independent (January 15, 2010).

21.

Cf. Scherr, “The Conspiracy Channel.”

22.

Scherr, “The Conspiracy Channel.”

23.

Bidder, “Putin’s Weapon in the War of Images.”

24.

Gianluca Mezzofiore, “RT Host Manuel Ochsenreiter Exposed as Neo-Nazi Editor,” IB Times (March 24, 2014).

25.

James Miller, “Throwing a Wrench in Russia’s Propaganda Machine,” The Interpreter (June 18, 2014), available at http://www.interpretermag.com/throwing-a-wrench-in-russias-propaganda-machine/.

26.

Miller, “Throwing a Wrench.”

27.

“Airways Wobbly—Russia Today Goes Mad,” The Economist (July 6, 2010).

28.

“Using Stalin to Boost Russia Abroad,” Spiegel Online (November 20, 2007).

29.

Catherine Taibi, “Russia Today Launches Provocative New Ad Campaign,” The Huffington Post (August 18, 2014).

30.

Charles Clover, “Talk Show Host Larry King to Present Russia Today Programme,” Financial Times (May 29, 2013).

31.

Jack Shafer, “Hail to the Return of the Motherland-Protecting Propaganda! The Russians and Their Unintentionally Hilarious Washington Post Ad Supplement,” Slate (August 30, 2007).

32.

Luke Harding, Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia (London: Guardian Books, 2011), 115.

33.

In fact, the Kremlin is using the tactics of the “indirect strategy,” as described by the French strategist General André Beaufre, who wrote that “the propaganda can be very different at home and in the outside world.” (André Beaufre, Introduction à la stratégie, with a preface by B. H. Liddell Hart (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1965), 106.)

34.

Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, “Putin Shuts State News Agency RIA Novosti,” The Moscow Times (December 10, 2013).

35.

Tétrault-Farber, “Putin Shuts State News Agency.”

36.

Quoted in “Kiselyov: narabotki RIA Novosti v novom agenstve budut vostrebovany,” RIA Novosti (December 11, 2013).

37.

Paul Sonne, “Putin Shakes Up Russian Media Landscape,” The Wall Street Journal (December 9, 2013).

38.

Quoted by Troianovski, “Russia Ramps Up Information War.”

39.

Troianovski, “Russia Ramps Up Information War.”

40.

Charles Recknagel, “ITAR-TASS Looks Ahead by Traveling Back to Soviet-Era Name,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (September 2, 2014).

41.

Mary Gearin, “Vladimir Putin Accused of Using Soviet-Style Propaganda Strategy to Control Russian Media,” ABC News (September 17, 2014).

42.

Gearin, “Vladimir Putin Accused of Using Soviet-Style Propaganda.”

The Propaganda Offensive in the Western Media, Part II

Buying Western Newspapers, Part I: The Case of France-Soir in France

Buying advertising space in Western papers and reformatting RIA Novosti and ITAR-TASS into Soviet-style agitprop agencies were not the only strategies the Kremlin used to influence Western public opinion. There were other, more indirect ways already exploited by the KGB in Soviet times. For instance, in the 1970s, the KGB already had contacts with two important journalists of the French paper Le Monde. At that time, the French news agency AFP would also have been infiltrated.^[1] Pierre-Charles Pathé, the son of a prominent French film tycoon, working for the KGB, launched a biweekly magazine, Synthesis, in this period. The first issue, published in June 1975, was sent to five hundred opinion leaders, including deputies, senators, and journalists. “Pathé is finally arrested by the DST [French counter intelligence] in 1979,” writes Andreï Kozovoï, and “in 1980 the journalist is condemned to five years prison.”^[2] Pathé was to be released one year later, thanks to an amnesty by President François Mitterrand, who had communist ministers in his government.

This old KGB tradition of influencing Western public opinion^[3] indirectly seemed to have made a glorious comeback in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when a totally new phenomenon began to develop: Russian oligarchs started buying important stakes in what in Soviet times would have been called “the bourgeois press.” One example was the French daily France-Soir. France-Soir, a popular paper, was founded in 1944. It had its time of glory in the 1960s, when it employed four hundred journalists and sold about one million copies. At the end of 2008, its circulation had gone down to 23,000 copies. A company called “Sablon International,” registered in Luxembourg, which had a stake of 19.9 percent in the capital, made an offer to raise its stake to 85 percent. On January 16, 2009, it became known that the Commercial Court of Lille had given the offer the green light.^[4] But who was behind Sablon International? Its owner was Alexander Pugachev, then twenty-three years old, the youngest son of the Russian oligarch Sergey Pugachev. Young Alexander had just received a French ID card from the prefecture of Alpes-Maritimes—a necessary condition for the transaction because according to French law, a foreigner cannot own more than 20 percent of a French paper. Pugachev is a famous family name in Russia. It was a Pugachev who, in the eighteenth century, led a powerful peasants’ rebellion against tsarina Catherine the Great. But the Russian oligarch Sergey Pugachev, whose fortune in 2008 was estimated by Forbes at $2 billion, was not, like his eighteenth-century namesake, a Kremlin critic. On the contrary, as the owner of the Mezhprombank (International Industrial Bank IIB), he had the nickname “Putin’s banker.”^[5] According to Paris Match, “Some have also christened him the ‘Orthodox banker’ because of his close relationship with the Orthodox Church and with nationalist circles that are in favor of the return of ‘Holy Russia.’”^[6] The man himself, with a big black beard, resembles an Orthodox priest and calls himself a francophile. He is the owner of a château near Nice and two villas in the jet-set resort of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, known as the “billionaires’ peninsula.” Pugachev, who was also the owner of the Severnaya Verf shipyard in Saint Petersburg, had good personal contacts with Putin, whom he knew from the days when the latter was deputy mayor in Saint Petersburg. He also knew personally French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his presidential adviser Claude Guéant, who, in 2009, started negotiations with the Kremlin on the sale of four French Mistral helicopter carriers, two of which would be built at Pugachev’s shipyard.^[7]

However, is being a francophile in itself a reason to buy the loss-making France-Soir? Certainly not. The real objective was to make this paper into a popular, mass-selling French tabloid, similar to the British Sun or the German Bild. The political impact of these popular tabloids is well known. Tony Blair’s election and reelection was, for instance, at least partly a result of the support he received from Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. Similarly, Bild’s support for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was legendary. Pugachev’s son Alexander, who was in charge of France-Soir, took Holger Wiemann as an adviser. Wiemann was a former manager of Gruner and Jahr, the largest European printing and publishing firm, which is 74.9 percent owned by the Bertelsmann media group. Pugachev Jr. reputedly said: “If, in order to make
money, I have to make a trash paper, I will make a trash paper.”^[8] He is also quoted as having said that his favorite headline would be: “All Arabs are rapists,”^[9] something he later denied. According to a blog by the French weekly L’Express, the editor of France-Soir was seriously concerned about what it called Alexander Pugachev’s “extreme right-wing stance that would not be challenged by a Le Pen.”^[10] Alexander Pugachev openly aired his extreme-right sympathies. “I like the ideas of Le Pen,” he said. “There is more and more immigration and insecurity in France.”^[11] This bias in favor of the extreme right became even more clear in March 2011, when, just two days before the second round of the regional elections, on the first three pages of France-Soir the results of an opinion poll on the Front National were published. The poll was commissioned by the paper. Marine Le Pen, wrote the paper, “is changing the image of the FN.” And in an editorial comment, Gérard Carreyrou (a journalist who replaced star reporter Anne Sinclair in 1988 on 7/7, a famous TV program, when she refused to interview Jean-Marie Le Pen) wrote that “the Front National, having become the party of Marine Le Pen, is tending towards becoming, little by little, a party just like the others.”^[12] This overt attempt to make the extreme-right party more acceptable to a broader public was a welcome boost for the Front National, just two days before the election, at a moment when political leaders of the democratic left and right called for a “republican front” to isolate the party.

In the fall of 2011, young Pugachev exposed his views with more clarity. Asked on November 11, 2011, in a TV program for whom he would vote in the presidential elections of 2012, he declared: “I am tempted by Marine Le Pen.” When the journalist asked whether he was serious, he answered: “In any case there are 20 percent who want to vote for her.” He added: “There are not many people who openly declare themselves [in favor], but I don’t know why, she is not a fascist.”^[13] The interview led to loud protests from the trade unions Comité Inter CGT and Info’Com CGT, which declared that they “will never accept that France-Soir should become a new channel for the theses of the extreme right.” The Society of Journalists of the paper equally expressed its “vivid outrage” and emphasized “its will to preserve a form of neutrality and political equilibrium.”^[14]

How did the paper develop? Christian de Villeneuve, a newly appointed chief editor, succeeded in more than tripling the circulation from 23,000 copies in January 2010 to 87,000 in June of the same year. Despite these positive results, he was fired by his young boss, who had set a target of 150,000 sales by the end of that year. And even 150,000 copies was still a far cry from his two great models: three million sales of Bild in Germany and about two million of the Sun in Britain. However, the real reason to fire his chief editor was a disagreement about the political line of the paper. “He is leaving,” said Pugachev Jr. in an interview with Le Figaro, “because we have certain points of disagreement together, especially as concerns the image and the editorial line of the paper.”^[15] The identity of the new editor, Rémy Dessarts, left no doubts about Pugachev’s plans. In the past, Dessarts had led a Springer project to launch a French version of Bild. Despite positive results from the market analysis, this project was ultimately abandoned in 2007 due to logistical reasons, such as the fact that there were not enough newspaper kiosks in France and that printing and distribution were controlled by unruly trade unions.^[16] Pugachev hoped to circumvent these problems by concentrating on the regions outside greater Paris.

The German weekly Der Spiegel writes about Bild that it “serves up tripe, trash, tits and, almost as an afterthought, a healthy dose of hard news seven days a week.”^[17] Bild is known for its nationalist, anti-EU, and anti-immigrant stance and clearly has political aspirations. Der Spiegel writes that Bild “in fact is taking on the role of a right-wing populist party that has always been lacking in German politics.”^[18] This opinion was shared by a former editor of Bild am Sonntag who said that by its campaigns, “the red carpet is being rolled out for a party that has not yet been founded, led by a German Jörg Haider [an Austrian extreme-right politician].”^[19] In the 1970s, Heinrich Böll, a German Nobel Prize winner for Literature, accused Bild of “naked fascism, agitation, lies and dirt.”

The fate of France-Soir took a new turn at the end of 2011. The number of copies sold, still at 75,000 in 2010, was more than halved. In October 2011, only 36,074 copies found a buyer.^[20] In the first six months of 2011, the paper had generated a loss of almost 13 million euro. Alexander Pugachev, who had already invested about 70 million euros in three years, had to make a decision. Rumors claimed that he was prepared to sell the paper for a symbolic price of one euro. But he was not yet willing to give up his hold over a French media outlet. On December 13, 2011, the last paper edition appeared. Pugachev fired eighty-nine people but used the remaining staff to continue with an internet edition of the paper.^[21] This initiative, however, was short-lived. When the website did not attract enough advertisers, the young owner threw in the towel, and on July 23, 2012, the Commercial Court of Paris announced the liquidation of the paper.^[22] The remaining forty-nine personnel were fired. The attempt to create a popular, extreme-right,
Kremlin-friendly paper in France had failed.^[23]

Buying Western Newspapers, Part II:
The Case of the London Evening Standard and the Independent in Britain

There was, however, another example of a Russian oligarch who had become the owner of a Western paper. It was Alexander Lebedev, a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB, whose fortune was estimated at $3.1 billion before the credit crunch and at $2.5 billion thereafter. In January 2009, Lebedev bought 75.1 percent of the loss-making London Evening Standard from its parent company, Daily Mail & General Trust, for the symbolic price of £1. The paper is widely regarded as “the voice of London” and had a circulation at that time of just under three hundred thousand. “The purchase will be an astonishing moment in British press history,” wrote the Guardian at that time, “the first time a former member of a foreign intelligence service has owned a British title.”^[24] Lebedev said that it was his task to read the Evening Standard and other British newspapers when he was a young spy at the Soviet embassy in London in the late 1980s. To reassure some Tory MPs who had expressed reservations about the takeover, Lebedev came up with the names of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, who would, he said, be invited onto the advisory board, together with “leading Russian editors.”^[25] The name-dropping also included Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling. Later, however, the names of Blair, Chirac, and Rowling were no longer mentioned. Lebedev denied that he had immediate plans to buy other papers, saying, “I can help one newspaper but not 10.”^[26] Despite guarantees that editorial independence would be safeguarded, doubts remained, especially when it was confirmed “that the transaction had been authorized by the Kremlin.”^[27] Also, the ex-KGB billionaire’s statement that he could “help one newspaper but not 10” was relative: at that moment, he had already tried—in vain—to buy the old and venerable Times.

A former KGB agent gaining hold over an important paper in the British capital led to concerned comments. John Lloyd writes in the Guardian, “He [Lebedev] has done good works. His proprietorship of Novaya Gazeta means he has lent his wealth and protection to the most radical oppositionists among Russia’s journalists. He has offered the equivalent of £1m for the capture of the assassin of Anna Politkovskaya, the paper’s famed writer on Chechnya. He has remained faithful to the (unpopular, in Russia) Gorbachev, bankrolling many of his political initiatives.”^[28] Lloyd concedes that Lebedev might “indeed be a better man than many of his proprietor colleagues, past and present.” However, he adds, “the appearance in their ranks of a former lieutenant colonel in an organisation with the blood of millions (of Russians, mostly) on its books should give us a pause.”^[29] Lloyd continues, “Ownership of a newspaper is different from other ownerships. It is to have a position of power over the minds of men and women—not so much in telling them what to think, but what to think about.”^[30]

One year later, in March 2010, Lebedev bought the loss-making quality newspaper the Independent—again for the symbolic price of £1. His twenty-nine-year-old son Yevgeny became the official owner. The Independent, which sold four hundred thousand copies in 1989, was, with a circulation of 92,000, at the brink of collapse. Again one could hear concerned voices. The Times wrote that “the elder Lebedev’s relationship with the Russian Government was called into question in January after he received a huge cash injection in a deal personally sanctioned by Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister. The sale of Mr. Lebedev’s £450 million stake in the airline Aeroflot and other assets back to the Russian Government led some to question his reputation as a critic of the Kremlin as well as his motivation for buying the newspaper titles.”^[31]

Indeed, some interesting parallels are evident between the acquisition of the Evening Standard and the Independent in London and the acquisition of France-Soir in Paris:

There were, however, also some differences. Alexander Lebedev was an ex-KGB lieutenant colonel who, as such, had even been expelled from Britain. Alexander Pugachev’s father, Sergey Pugachev, had no KGB past. The fact that Lebedev was a former KGB agent was a disadvantage. But it was balanced by the fact that he—together with Gorbachev—owned 49 percent of the shares of Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s famous opposition paper. Lebedev liked to present himself as a kind of semidissident. In reality, however, he always had a rather close relationship with the Russian leadership. The question was whether or not there existed an unspoken partition of tasks. The Kremlin needed Novaya Gazeta for its image abroad: it was its fig leaf to show its democratic credentials. This ambiguous relationship between the Russian leadership and the opposition paper became, for instance, clear in April 2009, when President Medvedev granted Novaya Gazeta a long interview—the first of its kind to a Russian paper. Undoubtedly, Lebedev’s image as a “semidissident” has helped him to buy the British newspapers. “Against him,” writes François Bonnet, “many Russian observers quote the old principle: ‘Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.’”^[38] And he adds: “Mr. Lebedev’s boldness is said to be limited. He would know to stop when the Kremlin whistles. The proof? He closed overnight the Moscow daily paper ‘Moskovskii Korrespondant’ which had published an article that criticized the ruling elite.”^[39] (The paper had written about Putin’s purported secret liaison with Alina Kabayeva, a former Olympic gymnast.)

Equally, Luke Harding, who was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, remarked that “in Moscow, Lebedev’s position is of someone who is inside the political elite rather than outside it.”^[40] From 2002 to 2007 he was a Duma deputy of the pro-Kremlin party United Russia. Having refused in 2008 to join Garry Kasparov’s opposition movement Solidarity, he announced in May 2011 that he would endorse Putin’s Popular Front. The Popular Front, however, did not want Lebedev as a member. “To critics,” wrote Harding, “the move is proof that Lebedev is in bed with the Kremlin.”^[41] At the same time, Lebedev still upheld his reputation as a semidissident. In June 2012 he helped the anti-corruption blogger and opposition leader Aleksey Navalny become a member of the board of directors of Aeroflot. He also launched a debit card, issued by his National Reserve Bank. One percent of all purchases would go to RosPil, a fund launched by Navalny to expose government corruption.^[42] Had Lebedev at that point overstepped the mark and evoked the wrath of the Kremlin? This seemed the case when, in September 2012, the billionaire was charged with hooliganism and battery for punching a businessman in the face live on television one year earlier.^[43] He could face up to seven years in prison. His son Yevgeny expressed his concern, saying his father could be murdered in prison by “some sinister elements that he’s crossed in the past with his anti-corruption campaign. We believe there’s been a contract taken out on his head.”^[44] However, when, on July 2, 2013, the verdict came, Lebedev avoided jail and was instead ordered to do 150 hours of community service.^[45] He was, apparently, not considered a real enemy of the state.

What is the impact, so far, of the Russian influence on Western media? We have already discussed Alexander Pugachev’s open support for the extreme right Front National, which is, one should not forget, an anti-EU, anti-NATO, and openly pro-Putin party.^[46] In 2010 the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur hinted at a possible political outcome from the Russian ownership of France-Soir: an eventual deal between the owner and Nicolas Sarkozy to support the latter in the presidential elections of 2012 in exchange for the sale of French Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia. Pugachev, wrote the magazine, “prepares to relaunch the right-wing paper mid-March [2010], between the two rounds of the regional elections. A deal?”^[47]

In the British case, however, there were no signs of direct interference of the Lebedevs in the editorial policy of the Independent or the Evening Standard. Alexander Lebedev and his son Yevgeny also showed themselves more astute managers than the Pugachevs. The loss-making Evening Standard, which in 2009 was turned into a free paper distributed at London metro stations, made for the first time a (modest) profit of £82,000 in the year September 2011–September 2012.^[48] Not only did the circulation grow from 250,000 to 700,000 copies, but the paper succeeded in upholding its reputation of being a quality paper, preferred by the young, well-educated, urban commuters. In February 2013 the Lebedevs managed to get a license for a local twenty-four-hour TV information channel, London Live, which was launched in March 2014. The editors of the Evening Standard and the Independent are responsible for its programs.^[49] This channel, however, had a difficult start: in May 2015 it was announced that London Live had to cut twenty jobs, one third of the total. So far, the hands-off approach of the Lebedevs, who—unlike Alexander Pugachev—did not interfere in their papers’ editorial policies, has paid off. The oligarch and his son have become respected members of the British media establishment. How respected becomes clear from the fact that they have direct access to the British government. The influence of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch on British politics is legendary. It is telling that during the hearings of the Leveson government inquiry, held after the telephone hacking scandal by Murdoch’s News of the World, Lebedev’s son, Yevgeny, testified that he had met with British Prime Minister David Cameron on four occasions—a number of personal meetings a simple Russian or British citizen could only have dreamed of.^[50]

Suspicions that the takeovers of Western news media are motivated by the strategic interests of the Kremlin are also aired elsewhere. In August 2008, one week after the Russian war against Georgia, the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for instance, wrote about the sale of the Czech publishing house Economia by its German owner Handelsblatt, a division of the German Holtzbrinck group. Economia is the editor of Hospodařské noviny, a renowned Czech economic paper. The Italy-based bank UniCredit acted as a trustee for anonymous buyers. “The lack of transparency,” wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine, “is feeding fears that investors from Russia want to obtain the quality newspaper in order to influence public opinion in the Czech Republic in the Kremlin’s interests. Apparently the anonymous investors are even prepared to pay Holtzbrinck about twenty million euro more than one could get for ‘Hospodařské noviny’ from serious publishing houses.”^[51]

During the November 2013 EU summit in Vilnius, Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev told a presummit meeting of the European People’s Party (EPP) that “90% of the media in Bulgaria work for Russian masters.”^[52] In August 2014, the website of the Bulgarian Defense Ministry published a fourteen-page report—Outlook 2020. The report, meant to be presented by Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev and the caretaker defense minister Velizar Shalamanov at the NATO summit on September 4–5, 2014, in Cardiff, Wales, warned that the main risks for Bulgaria were “the new hybrid war, which combines conventional methods with guerrilla, cybernetic and information war.”^[53] Heavily criticized by parties of the left, the report was withdrawn.^[54]

Are suspicions of a Kremlin-inspired prise d’influence in Western news media exaggerated? Maybe. However, there remain many questions—many unanswered questions—such as the fact that these takeovers of Western news media seem to be motivated less by economic than by strategic reasons. In November 2012, the Russian magazine Russkiy Reporter published an interesting article in which the economic liberalization of Russia was presented as a KGB project, masterminded by general secretary and former KGB chief Yury Andropov. It is no secret that Andropov was Gorbachev’s mentor. Gorbachev started the perestroika. In the transformation of Russia’s planned state economy into a private-market economy, the KGB is thought not only to have played a leading role but also to have provided the initial capital and picked the individuals who were to become the new owners of the country’s huge natural resources and economic infrastructure. “In this way,” wrote the magazine, “the present oligarchs would, indeed, only be hired managers controlled by the real owners. . . . According to this model the oligarchs would be simple ‘operators,’ people who, it was decided, would manage assets acquired with money that did not belong to them.”^[55] The magazine also mentioned “the strange story of the sudden prosperity of the banker Alexander Lebedev, that many in bankers’ circles cannot explain other than by the legendary ‘gold of the Communist Party,’ as regards the short time he needed, in the middle of the 1990s, to find himself sitting on top of huge sums. In the past Lebedev worked in the secret service and he worked undercover at the Soviet embassy in Great Britain.”^[56] In this version of the facts, Lebedev acted as a “manager” of money “that did not belong to him.” It is, therefore, not at all counterintuitive that the master of the Kremlin—himself a former KGB chief—could have asked him to show his patriotism by expanding into Western media. However, another possibility for the emergence of Russian “oligarch-tycoons” is suggested by Novaya Gazeta reporter Yuliya Latynina. According to her, “Pugachev has bought France-Soir because he belongs to a category of [Russian] businessmen, who have developed a passion for foreign media, wanting to rebuild their image and to prove their importance to the Russian authorities.”^[57] In this scenario, the oligarchs’ initiative of buying Western papers would have completely been their own, without interference from the Kremlin. Particularly in the case of the Lebedevs this last interpretation seems rather plausible.

Gaining a Hold over the Social Networks: The Case of Facebook and Vkontakte

The Kremlin’s interest is not restricted to the print media. It also has a growing appetite for gaining a hold over the social media. In the aftermath of the mass protests against Putin in the winter of 2011–2012, the Kremlin began to tighten its grip on the internet. The Russian government introduced a blacklist of banned websites, supposedly to protect minors, but according to human rights advocates, intended to attack free speech.^[58] The technology required to enforce the blacklist would make it possible for the government to closely monitor the internet. Additionally, it took other repressive measures. Libel has been redefined as a crime. “High treason” also has been redefined, making it easier for the state to bring charges against regime critics. A law against “blasphemy” is under consideration. However, the Kremlin has not only legal means at its disposal. It can also rely on the cooperation of Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. In this context, the role played by the oligarch Alisher Usmanov deserves our special attention. Usmanov is the king of the Russian internet, of which he controls about 70 percent. He has stakes in Mail.ru—the Russian equivalent of Yahoo!—as well as in Yandex, a search engine, and in Vkontakte, a Russian equivalent of Facebook. Usmanov was ranked by Forbes in 2010 as the hundredth-richest fortune holder of the world with $7.2 billion—ahead of Rupert Murdoch ($6.3 billion) and Apple’s Steve Jobs ($5.5. billion).^[59] Usmanov’s curriculum vitae is very special. Born in 1953 in Uzbekistan to a Muslim family, the son of the public prosecutor in the capital Tashkent, Usmanov studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, or MGIMO. He returned to Tashkent to work for the local branch of the Soviet Peace Committee, a KGB front organization, which, at that time, was headed by the later SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) chief Yevgeny Primakov. Usmanov’s career took an unexpected turn when he was arrested and sent to jail for six years for alleged fraud and embezzlement. But his prison past was not an impediment to a fast-rising career. Apparently, Usmanov had powerful friends. In 2000 he was appointed director of Gazprominvestholding, the investment branch of Gazprom, and in 2005 he became the main shareholder of Metalloinvest, a gigantic iron and steel company with fifty thousand employees. Shortly afterwards, Usmanov started his expansion into the Russian internet and began to build his internet empire. Usmanov liked to show off his success. He took a 28 percent stake in the British soccer club Arsenal and bought a 110-meter yacht as well as a Tudor manor in Surrey and a property in Sardinia with direct access to the golf course. Usmanov is certainly no friend of press freedom. On December 13, 2011, he fired Maxim Kovalsky, the editor in chief of Kommersant Vlast, a paper of which he is the owner. Kovalsky had attracted Usmanov’s ire after publishing a photograph critical of Putin.^[60]

Usmanov has shown himself a shrewd investor. When, in 2009, during the financial crisis, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, turned to Russian investors because other sources of financing were drying up, Mail.ru Group, the leader of the Russian internet, took, via its international investment vehicle Digital Sky Technologies (DST), a 2 percent stake in Facebook for $200 million. In September 2010, DST became an independent company with the name DST Global. In January 2011, Mail.ru Group had invested $310 million in Facebook. Together with DST Global, it possessed 10 percent of Facebook’s shares.^[61] Rumors soon emerged that the Kremlin had succeeded—via Usmanov—in gaining a hold over Facebook, the world’s most important social networking site. It became, indeed, a cause for concern. The New York Times wrote on Usmanov’s financial stake in Facebook: “His ties to the Kremlin and Facebook have stirred concerns that he might influence the company’s policies in subtle ways to appease governments in markets where Facebook is also an important tool of political dissent, such as Russia.”^[62] There was, however, one caveat. The Russian owners had been able to invest in Facebook only by transferring their voting rights to Zuckerberg. Therefore, Usmanov would have no direct influence on Facebook’s policies in Russia.

In effect, it was in Russia where Usmanov’s main interests lay. In 2010, an IPO of Mail.ru allowed Usmanov to gain a voting majority in this company.^[63] In October 2012, Mail.ru sold an important stake in Facebook, cashing in about $320 million and keeping only 0.75 percent of the shares.^[64] Usmanov needed this money for his next move: the control of Vkontakte. Vkontakte is the Russian equivalent of Facebook and the biggest social network there. Mail.ru already owned 40 percent. However, two other investors, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev, holding 48 percent of the shares, said that they had no plans to sell their shares to Mail.ru.^[65] Usmanov thereupon began to woo a third owner, Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Vkontakte, who owned 12 percent, proposing to buy his stake. This would give Usmanov a majority vote in Vkontakte, a move that was fully supported by the Kremlin.^[66] Durov was accused of playing a dubious role in the Russian social media world. In March 2013, the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta published a letter supposedly written in December 2011 by Durov to Vladislav Surkov, then first deputy chief of the presidential administration, in which he wrote that “we have already worked together for some years with the FSB and the ‘K’ department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, engaged in supplying information on thousands of users of our site.”^[67] In the letter Durov boasted that Vkontakte had actively countered opposition initiatives during the December 2012 anti-government rallies in Moscow by creating fake profiles on the site of purported “opposition groups.” By receiving false information on imminent fake rallies, potential protesters were redirected away from the real rallies. However, Vkontakte’s spokesman, Georgy Lobushkin, denied that Durov had sent this letter.^[68] Doubts remained, in particular because in 2012 Usmanov—instead of buying Durov’s shares—handed Durov the control of Mail.ru’s 40 percent stake, which seemed rather to confirm the version given by Novaya Gazeta. In April 2013, Mirilashvili and Leviev, the two remaining shareholders, sold their 48 percent shares to United Capital Partners (UCP), an investment fund headed by Ilya Shcherbovich, who is a board member at the state-owned oil giant Rosneft, which is headed by Igor Sechin, an ally of Vladimir Putin. From that moment, 88 percent of the shares of Vkontakte seemed to be in Kremlin-friendly hands.^[69]

In January 2014, Pavel Durov sold his 12 percent stake to Ivan Tavrin, CEO of MegaFon, a mobile phone operator controlled by Mail.ru Group’s main shareholder, Alisher Usmanov. Usmanov seemed now to control a majority of the shares. On April 21, 2014, Pavel Durov, who had remained Vkontakte’s CEO, was dismissed. He left Russia immediately. In his own words, he left Russia “for ever.” On his Vkontakte page he recounted how he had come under increasing pressure from the FSB, which sent him an order in December 2013 to hand over the personal details of the members of Vkontakte’s Euromaidan group, which supported the protests in Ukraine against President Yanukovych.^[70] Durov refused. On his Vkontakte page, Durov explained: “Our answer was and remains a categorical no—Russia’s jurisdiction does not extend to Ukrainian users of Vkontakte.”^[71] The FSB also ordered him to shut down the Vkontakte group dedicated to anti-
corruption activist Aleksey Navalny—an order he equally refused. He said that this pressure from the FSB was the reason he had sold his stake in the company.^[72] After Durov’s departure, the new owners could not agree on the company’s strategy. The conflict was resolved when, on September 16, 2014, UCP sold its stake in the company to Mail.ru for $1.47 billion.^[73] Alisher Usmanov’s grip on Russia’s most important social media group seemed to be complete. From now on, the FSB would be able to monitor Vkontakte without restraint, and its surveillance was not restricted to the territory of the Russian Federation. Because Vkontakte also has millions of users in the former Soviet republics, it offers the FSB unprecedented opportunities to watch closely—and subsequently manipulate—events in the neighboring republics. Taking control of the most important social media, however, seemed not to be enough to satisfy the Kremlin’s appetite for strengthening its grip on the internet community. On July 1, 2014, the Duma passed a law at first reading on blokirovka, which made it possible to block the World Wide Web in order “to rescue Russian transmissions from enemy intelligence services.” From September 2016 onward, sites that store data on Russian citizens on servers outside Russia can be “blacklisted.” According to Andrey Mima, a Russian internet expert, “Protecting data from Western intelligence services simultaneously means feeding these data to Russian intelligence.”^[74]

Trolls and Kremlin Bloggers

Finally, we should mention here the activities in the blogosphere, where a close and almost symbiotic cooperation has been developed between Russia’s secret services and the youth movement Nashi. In 2009 a project was set up, called the “Kremlin School of Bloggers.” It was organized by Gleb Pavlovsky’s Foundation for Effective Politics. The “Kremlin School of Bloggers” sells the Kremlin’s policies to the young internet community by writing blogs, attacking opposition websites, and posting ideological YouTube videos.^[75] The name of its website (liberty.ru) is Free World (Svobodnyy Mir), and its motto is—why not?—“Freedom is better than unfreedom.” The Russian bloggers post comments on the websites of Western papers and think tanks, attacking articles and analyses which are critical of the Kremlin or the Russian leadership.^[76] “Some observers believe that the bloggers are simply a spontaneous group of patriotic enthusiasts,” wrote Luke Harding. “More convincing, though, is the view that the Kremlin discreetly funds these anonymous pro-government commentators, in order to discredit opponents and to promote Moscow’s authoritarian agenda.”^[77] In times of increased tension with the West, these activities reach new heights. In May 2014, for instance, during the Ukraine crisis, the British paper the Guardian received an overwhelming number of pro-Russian comments. A moderator said: “Zealous pro-separatist comments in broken English claiming to be from western countries are very common.”^[78] Although there was no conclusive evidence about who is behind these actions, the Guardian’s readers’ editor Chris Elliott believed “there was an orchestrated campaign.”^[79] Ilya Klishin, the editor in chief of the (opposition) Dozhd television website, was able to give more information on these practices:

According to the Ukrainskaya Pravda, the Kremlin bloggers were also active in Ukraine. They were said to be paid twenty-four euros per day for their activities.^[81]

Notes

Cf. Andreï Kozovoï, Les services secrets Russes: Des tsars à Poutine (Paris: Talandier, 2010), 229.

Kozovoï, Les services secrets Russes, 230.

This strategy may even predate the KGB and the Soviet Union. Marquis Astolphe de Custine wrote in 1839: “For many years Paris is reading revolutionary papers, revolutionary in any sense, paid by Russia.” (Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie: La Russie en 1839, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 369.) The Russian government’s objective, wrote Custine, was fomenting “anarchy, hoping to profit from a destabilization, which was caused by her . . . it is the history of Poland over again, but now on a great scale.” (Ibid.)

“France Soir racheté par Sablon International,” Le Nouvel Observateur (January 16, 2009).

Pauline Delassus, “Alexandre Pougatchev, l’apprenti Tsar de ‘France-Soir,’” Paris Match (October 4, 2010).

François Labrouillère, “Sergueï Pougatchev: avis de tempête pour l’oligarque francophile,” Paris Match (November 20, 2010).

However, Sergey Pugachev lost his two shipyards in the fall of 2010, when his bank, unable to repay $200 million in debts to the Central Bank, lost its registration. The shipyards, which were offered as collateral for the loan, were sold for $500 million to United Shipbuilding Corporation, at that time headed by Igor Sechin. The estimated real value of the shipyards was $3.5 billion.

Marie-Pierre Subtil, “‘France soir’ est secoué par le raidissement éditorial de son propriétaire russe,” Le Monde (August 14, 2008) (emphasis and English word in the original).

Renaud Revel, “Nouvelle crise à France Soir: Pougatchev, qui veut du trash, menace de virer le patron de la rédaction,” L’Express Blogs (August 11, 2010), http://blogs.lexpress.fr/media/2010/08/11/nouvelle_crise_a_france_soir_p/.

10.

Revel, “Nouvelle crise à France Soir.”

11.

Frédérique Roussel, “Russie-Soir,” Libération (February 17, 2011).

12.

Gérard Carreyrou, “Le FN n’est plus ce qu’il était,” France-Soir (March 25, 2011).

13.

“La CGT craint que ‘France Soir’ ne devienne un organe du FN,” Le Monde.fr (November 11, 2011).

14.

“La CGT craint que ‘France Soir’ ne devienne un organe du FN.”

15.

Delphine Denuit, “Pugachev: ‘France-Soir ne sera pas un quotidien trash,’” Figaro (August 23, 2010).

16.

“Der ‘France Soir’ wittert Morgenluft,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (August 26, 2010).

17.

“Bild Zeitung Rules Germany,” Spiegel Online (April 25, 2006).

18.

“Im Namen des Volkes,” Der Spiegel, no. 9 (February 28, 2011), 132.

19.

“Im Namen des Volkes,” 135.

20.

Alexandre Debouté, “Clap de fin pour ‘France-Soir,’” Le Figaro (December 15, 2011).

21.

Guy Dutheil, “A 67 ans, ‘France Soir’ abandonne le papier pour le tout-numérique,” Le Monde (December 16, 2011).

22.

“France Soir est liquidé,” Libération (July 23, 2012).

23.

Sergey Pugachev, Alexander’s father, fared hardly better. After having been forced by the Kremlin to sell his St. Petersburg shipyards at an undervalued price, his Mezhprom bank went bankrupt in 2010. Accused of having taken more than one billion euros from the bank before it went bankrupt, Interpol issued a red notice. The Russian billionaire, fallen from grace with the Kremlin, is hiding in London. (Cf. Benoît Vitkine, “La disgrâce d’un oligarque,” Le Monde (January 20, 2015).)

24.

Luke Harding, “Russian Oligarch Alexander Lebedev to Buy London Evening Standard,” The Guardian (January 14, 2009).

25.

Harding, “Russian Oligarch Alexander Lebedev to Buy London Evening Standard.”

26.

Harding, “Russian Oligarch Alexander Lebedev to Buy London Evening Standard.”

27.

“GB: Un milliardaire russe, ancien du KGB, rachète l’Evening Standard,” AFP (January 21, 2009).

28.

John Lloyd, “Why Nobody Lords It Over the Press Barons,” The Guardian (January 29, 2009).

29.

Lloyd, “Why Nobody Lords It Over the Press Barons.”

30.

Lloyd, “Why Nobody Lords It Over the Press Barons.”

31.

Alexi Mostrous, “Former KGB Spy Alexander Lebedev Buys Independent for £1,” The Times (March 26, 2010).

32.

Harding, “Russian Oligarch Alexander Lebedev to Buy London Evening Standard.”

33.

“‘France-Soir’: nouvelle formule et investissements supplémentaires,” Le Monde (January 18, 2011). However, on August 29, 2011, the paper was placed under supervision by the Commercial Court of Paris, which decided to impose a preservation plan (plan de sauvegarde). An administrator was appointed who was given four months to make the paper profitable. “Today the daily is losing 1 million euro per month,” wrote Le Figaro, “and there remain 5 million euro to hand.” Of Alexander Pugachev, who had already invested 50 million euros, it was said that “he no longer has the intention of losing money.” (Cf. “‘France-Soir’: 4 mois pour changer de modèle,” Le Figaro (August 30, 2011).)

34.

Stephen Brook and Mark Sweney, “Alexander Lebedev’s Evening Standard Takeover: Dacre Announces Sale to Staff,” The Guardian (January 21, 2009).

35.

Roussel, “Russie-Soir.”

36.

Delassus, “Alexandre Pougatchev, l’apprenti Tsar de ‘France-Soir.’”

37.

Delphine Denuit, “Pugachev: ‘France-Soir ne sera pas un quotidien trash.’”

38.

François Bonnet, “La presse et les gentils,” Mediapart (January 21, 2009).

39.

Bonnet, “La presse et les gentils.”

40.

Luke Harding, Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia (London: Guardian Books, 2011), 109.

41.

Harding, Mafia State, 114.

42.

Miriam Elder, “Alexander Lebedev Launches New Project against Russian Corruption,” The Guardian (July 11, 2012).

43.

“Alexander Lebedev Says Hooliganism Charge Is Revenge,” The Guardian (September 27, 2012).

44.

“Russian Tycoon Alexander Lebedev ‘Expects Jail’ over Punch-Up,” BBC News Europe (November 25, 2012).

45.

“Russian Tycoon Lebedev Avoids Jail over TV Brawl,” Reuters (July 2, 2013).

46.

On the close ideological affinity between Putinism and the Front National and other radical-right movements in Europe, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “Putinism’s Authoritarian Allure,” Project Syndicate (March 15, 2013), http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putinism-as-a-model-for-western-europe-s-extreme-right-by-marcel-h--van-herpen.

47.

Vincent Jauvert, “Nos amis du Kremlin,” Le Nouvel Observateur (February 2, 2010).

48.

Marc Roche, “L’ ‘Evening Standard’ est bénéficiaire, quatre ans après son passage à la gratuité,” Le Monde (June 30–July 1, 2013).

49.

Roche, “L’ ‘Evening Standard’ est bénéficiaire.”

50.

Charles Clover, “Lunch with the FT: Alexander Lebedev,” Financial Times (July 27, 2012).

51.

“Russen ante portas? Dubioser Verlagskauf in Tschechien,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (August 16, 2008).

52.

“Official Report: Russia Is a Threat to Bulgaria,” EurActiv (August 27, 2014).

53.

“Official Report: Russia Is a Threat to Bulgaria.”

54.

“Bulgaria Govt Withdraws Outlook 2020: Bulgaria and NATO in European Defence Document,” Focus News Agency (August 28, 2014).

55.

Dmitry Kartsev, “Plan Andropova—Plan Putina: Kak Chekisty poluchili kontrol nad stranoy,” Russkiy Reporter 43, no. 272 (November 1, 2012). This is confirmed by an insider who quoted Putin as saying: “A chicken can exercise ownership of eggs, and it can get fed while it’s sitting on the egg . . . but it’s not really their egg.” (Cf. Steven Myers and Jo Becker, “Even Loyalty No Guarantee against Putin,” The New York Times (December 26, 2014).)

56.

Dmitry Kartsev, “Plan Andropova—Plan Putina.”

57.

Millot Lorraine, “Pougatchev se paie une image,” Libération (January 14, 2009).

58.

“Russia’s Big Leap in Internet Control,” The Washington Post (November 13, 2012).

59.

Guillaume Grallet and Katia Swarovskaya, “L’ ‘ami’ russe de Facebook,” Le Point (January 27, 2011).

60.

Miriam Elder, “Russian Editor Fired over Anti-Putin Jibe,” The Guardian (December 13, 2011).

61.

“Au coeur de l’explosion du Web social, un géant russe,” Le Monde (February 24, 2011).

62.

Andrew E. Kramer, “A Russian Magnate’s Facebook Bet Pays Off Big,” The New York Times (May 15, 2012).

63.

Ilya Khrennikov and Alex Sazonov, “Usmanov Spurns IPO for Grip on Technology,” Bloomberg (November 30, 2012).

64.

Ilya Khrennikov and Amy Thomson, “Usmanov’s Internet Company Sold $320 Million Facebook Stake,” Bloomberg (October 25, 2012).

65.

Amy Thomson, “Mail.ru Seeks Deal for Russian Social Network Operator VKontakte,” Bloomberg (November 15, 2012).

66.

Ilya Khrennikov, “Billionaire Usmanov Seeks to Boost Stake in VKontakte Next Year,” Bloomberg (December 21, 2012).

67.

“Rukovodstvo ‘VKontakte’: ‘My uzhe neskolko let sotrudnichaem s FSB i otdelom “K” MVD, operativno vydavaya informatsiyu o tysyachakh polzovateley nashey seti,’” Novaya Gazeta (March 27, 2013).

68.

“Vkontakte Manipulated Web Content to Counter Opposition, Report Says,” The Moscow Times (March 27, 2013).

69.

Simone Foxman and Gideon Lichfield, “Putin’s Friends Now Own 88% of Russia’s Facebook,” Quartz (April 18, 2013).

70.

Jennifer Monaghan, “Vkontakte Founder Says Sold Shares Due to FSB Pressure,” The Moscow Times (April 17, 2014).

71.

Pavel Durov’s Vkontakte page (April 16, 2014), http://vk.com/durov?z=photo1_327778155%2Falbum1_00%2Frev.

72.

“Vkontakte Founder Pavel Durov Learns He’s Been Fired through Media,” The Moscow Times (April 22, 2014).

73.

Mark Scott, “Mail.ru Takes Full Ownership of VKontakte, Russia’s Largest Social Network,” The New York Times (September 16, 2014).

74.

Andrey Mima, “Zapretit Internet,” TJournal (July 3, 2014), http://tjournal.ru/paper/mima-servers.

75.

Cf. Evgeny Morozov, “What Do They Teach at the ‘Kremlin’s School of Bloggers’?” Foreign Policy (May 26, 2009).

76.

To give one example: an article critical of Putin, published in October 2012 on the website of the French paper Le Figaro, received forty-five comments, of which thirty-three were in favor of Putin and his version of democracy. Is this really representative of the readership of this paper? Several pro-Putin commentators, writing in impeccable French, presented themselves as Russians living in Russia. (Cf. Pierre Avril, “Vladimir Poutine, le poignard et le goupillon,” Le Figaro (October 5, 2012), retrieved November 6, 2012, available at http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/10/05/01003-20121005ARTFIG00630-vladimir-poutine-le-poignard-et-le-goupillon.php.

77.

Harding, Mafia State, 116.

78.

William Turvill, “Guardian Fears ‘Orchestrated’ Pro-Kremlin Campaign in Website Comments,” The Guardian (May 6, 2014), http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-fears-orchestrated-pro-kremlin-campaign-website-comments.

79.

Turvill, “Guardian Fears ‘Orchestrated’ Pro-Kremlin Campaign in Website Comments.” On August 22, 2014, the Dutch internet paper De Correspondent published an interview with me on my book Putin’s Wars. The following days the paper received more than 150 comments. About 75 percent of these comments were pro-Putin and anti-US/EU. In these comments, the integrity of the reporter and the interviewee were put in doubt and the paper was accused of receiving financial support from dubious sources. See Tomas Vanheste, “Na jaren van wegkijken zien we nu Vladimir Poetin’s ware gezicht,” De Correspondent (August 22, 2014), https://decorrespondent.nl/1618/Na-jaren-van-wegkijken-zien-we-nu-Vladimir-Poetins-ware-gezicht/160548549810-f249e501. This wave of pro-Putin comments, accompanied by a slur campaign against the paper, was a reason for the chief editors to publish a declaration in which they distanced themselves from these comments, considering them “unfounded, [while] expressing conspiracy theories which cast doubt on the integrity, independence, or transparency of correspondents.” They also rejected “allegations of double agendas, as if we were being ‘paid’ to present this perspective.” See Karel Smouter and Rob Wijnberg, “Een hoofdredactionele reflectie op het artikel over Vladimir Poetin,” De Correspondent (August 23, 2014), https://decorrespondent.nl/1626/Een-hoofdredactionele-reflectie-op-het-artikel-over-Vladimir-Poetin/161342362170-f4b2132b.

80.

Ilya Klishin, “The Kremlin’s Trolls Go West,” The Moscow Times (May 21, 2014).

81.

Cf. Antoine Arjakovsky, Russie Ukraine: De la guerre à la paix? (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2014), 63. In June 2015 more information became available on the activities of the Russian “troll farms” when Lyudmila Savchuk, a former employee, sued her purported former employer, a company based in St. Petersburg called “Internet Research,” for having failed to provide her any contract. The firm employed an estimated workforce of four hundred employees, who worked around the clock in two twelve-hour shifts. They were paid high salaries of about 41,000 rubles ($777) a month for posting comments on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. (Cf. Viktor Rezunkov, “Whistle-Blowing Russian ‘Troll’ Gets Her Day In Court,” RFERL (June 1, 2015); and Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine (June 2, 2015).)

Financing Politicians and Political Parties

Introduction: The Soviet Legacy

During Soviet times, the Kremlin was already secretly giving financial support to foreign political parties and governments. A famous case is that of Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, the father of what has been called “Finlandization.” At the beginning of the 1990s, a former KGB agent resident in Helsinki revealed that Kekkonen had received millions of dollars from Moscow for his reelection and, in effect, for his private expenditure also. These transfers were confirmed when Moscow opened the archives of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. At that moment it became clear that, far from protecting the Finns from Russian interference, “Finlandization” had offered the Soviets a unique opportunity to meddle constantly in Finnish internal affairs.^[1] Apart from the Finnish president, foreign communist parties were also supported. In each “sister party,” one prominent member acted as a contact person for the Soviet secret service. The name of this person was known only to the secretary of the party and to one or two members of the Central Committee—to avoid the party becoming involved in spy scandals.^[2]

Through the communist parties Moscow was able to influence the political landscape in other countries. After 1991, the new post-Soviet Russia had lost this capacity. It was no longer the center of the world communist movement, and many communist parties abroad disintegrated, merged with other political parties, or simply disappeared. However, this did not mean that the Kremlin leaders no longer had the capability to influence political parties abroad: the loss of control over the communist parties was largely compensated by the availability of new targets—the so-called “bourgeois” political parties—which in Soviet times had been more difficult to approach. These new ways of influencing the political systems of the West available to the Kremlin were less visible and even more secretive than in Soviet times. They were, however, often not less effective.

Suspicion in France and the Netherlands

Two French analysts, Hélène Blanc and Renata Lesnik, confirm that “the [Russian] infiltration is intensifying equally via the political world. It is more urgent [than ever] to open one’s eyes because it is gaining ground.”^[3] They cite the example of François Bayrou, the centrist candidate in the French presidential elections of 2002. “At that time via a French personality above any suspicion, who acted as an intermediary, unknown Russians had offered to pay for the complete campaign expenditure. The message was explicit: ‘We have been following your career for a long time, we believe in your political future. And we are ready to finance you.’”^[4] Bayrou, who refused the generous offer, was alerted to “certain influences that could exist about which no one would be aware.”^[5] Indeed, as concerns the funding of political candidates, controls over the origin of the funding are, in general, rare. In an interview, Hélène Blanc emphasized that according to Interpol, “next to terrorism, infiltration by dubious businessmen who have come in from the cold, ex-Soviet and especially Russian, is the second scourge threatening the [European] Union. A danger that is most of the time hidden. These individuals are weakening our democracies. Their strength is based mostly in our weakness and our blindness. I am convinced that as well as the economic and financial power, they also want here the same political power they already possess in Russia. From well informed sources I know that elected politicians have been approached in other countries of Europe.”^[6] And she continued, “these generous donors are not stupid: the money will be transferred via a European bank, not from Moscow but from Monaco, from Luxembourg, Austria, or Malta, or even Cyprus where 4,000 Russian companies are registered.”^[7]

The lack of strict regulations concerning party funding, in particular, creates an area of weakness. This was the case, for instance, in the Netherlands, where, on April 3, 2008, former Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk started a new right-wing populist party with the name Trots Op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands). For a new party, there was no obligation to publish the sources of its funding.^[8] When the list was leaked, it came out that one of the top funders was “Pershore,” an unknown company registered in Cyprus, which had donated 100,000 euros. The party did not want (and, unfortunately, was not obliged) to provide any details about this mysterious sponsor. There were suspicions that the money might have come—directly or indirectly—from a Russian source. There was, however, no proof. If it had been true, then it would have been, at that time, a good investment. The polls predicted that the new party would get 22 out of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament.^[9]

An EU Commissar, British Politicians,
and a Russian Oligarch

In Britain there were also rumors of Russian political influence and illegal party funding. A key role in these rumors was attributed to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminium magnate and Russia’s richest oligarch. Deripaska is married to Polina, the daughter of Valentin Yumashev, former chief of the presidential administration of Boris Yeltsin. Because Yumashev remarried with Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, Deripaska became a member of the influential Yeltsin “family.” He is a close ally and protégé of Vladimir Putin, completely loyal to the master in the Kremlin. Deripaska presents himself not as a tycoon but rather as a custodian of (former) Russian state property. In July 2007 he said, for instance: “If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up. I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.”^[10]

A strange story began on Friday, August 22, 2008, when European trade commissioner Peter Mandelson and conservative MP and shadow chancellor George Osborne were on the Greek island of Corfu to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Oleg Deripaska also happened to be there, and the oligarch invited both men onto his yacht, the Queen K, for drinks. Two days later, Osborne returned to Deripaska’s yacht, accompanied by Andrew Feldman, the Conservative Party’s fund-raiser, and the banker Nat Rothschild, heir to the famous Rothschild banking dynasty and a personal friend and business associate of Deripaska. On October 5, 2008, there was an unexpected sequel to this private meeting when Osborne leaked to the Sunday Times that in Corfu, Mandelson had made derogatory remarks about Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It was apparently a political coup by the Conservatives, meant to destabilize the Labour government. A few days earlier, Mandelson had been appointed by Gordon Brown as business secretary in his cabinet. Nat Rothschild, Deri-
paska’s business partner, reacted with a letter to the Times. His letter was a bombshell. Rothschild wrote:

Osborne and Feldman vehemently denied these allegations. However, in a commentary, the BBC’s Robert Peston observes that Rothschild “does not make allegations lightly,” adding, as a kind of understatement: “I would not have described him as a Labour supporter.”^[12] “So,” he continued, “these allegations are not going to vanish into thin air as quickly as they’ve come.” As concerns the sum in question (£50,000): “The Tories have said they did not solicit such a donation. I suspect that much will hinge on that word ‘solicit’—whether the donation was sought or simply offered.”^[13] Osborne and Feldman were not able to dismiss these allegations.

This was not the end of the “Corfu story.” It would soon lead to other revelations which were equally surprising and potentially extremely embarrassing. Commentators began to take a closer look at the relationship between Peter Mandelson, then European trade commissioner, and Oleg Deripaska. They highlighted the fact that Commissioner Mandelson, five weeks after the yacht meeting and just before leaving office in Brussels, announced new European trade rules which were extremely profitable for Deripaska, whose aluminum companies benefited from lower EU tariffs. The British Independent published an article with the title “A Final Favour? How Mandelson’s Last Act in Brussels Boosted Russian Oligarch.”^[14] According to the author, political editor Jane Merrick, “critics said that the announcement of new trade rules, five weeks after the yacht meeting and five days before he became Secretary of State for Business, fuelled the suspicion of a conflict of interest.” Mandelson denied any wrongdoing. When doubts surfaced about the frequency of Mandelson’s contacts with the oligarch, European Commission officials suggested that the two men had met “at a few social gatherings in 2006 and 2007.”^[15] Mandelson, however, had to admit that he had already met Deripaska in Moscow in 2004 and 2005. A key role in arranging a meeting in Moscow was said to have been played by Valery Pechenkin, the head of security at Deripaska’s holding company Basic Element. Pechenkin, the oligarch’s right hand, is not an ordinary security man but a former high-ranking officer in the KGB and a former FSB colonel general. He is called “one of Deripaska’s strongest links to the Kremlin.”^[16] The veteran spy would have organized an instant entry visa for Mandelson when he arrived in Moscow in the Rothschild executive jet for his meeting with Deripaska.

An article in the Guardian ended with the following “remaining questions”: “Did Lord Mandelson meet Oleg Deripaska before a 2004 Moscow dinner? Was he aware that the oligarch had been barred from entering the US and of allegations that he had been associated with alleged organized criminals? How many times has he been on board Deripaska’s private jet or his yacht? Did Mandelson and Deripaska discuss aluminium tariffs at any of their meetings? . . . Did he arrive in Corfu aboard Deripaska’s yacht, or board it on the island?”^[17] Important questions indeed. They were—partly—answered some years later when Deripaska’s friend Nat Rothschild sued the owner of the Daily Mail over an article published in this paper in May 2010. Rothschild lost the case. Feldman, the Conservative Party’s fund-raiser, told the High Court that he “had never approached Mr. Deripaska for a donation, but said Mr. Rothschild had made the suggestion twice during the summer of 2008.” Feldman said: “Mr. Rothschild asked about my involvement in the Conservative Party and suggested that his friend, Mr. Deripaska, could be interested in making a party donation.”^[18] This testimony confirms that an offer was made rather than a gift solicited. How serious this offer was becomes clear from the fact that three weeks later, Rothschild is alleged to have told Feldman that “[Deripaska’s British firm] Leyland DAF was interested in making a donation.”^[19] This gift, however, was ruled out by senior party officials because of its “political sensitivity.” Rothschild, for his part, “denied the suggestion that it was an example of Mr. Deripaska ‘seeking political influence.’”^[20]

In May 2013, yet another unexpected sequel to the Mandelson story emerged, when Mandelson followed in the footsteps of another high-level European politician, Gerhard Schröder, and the Guardian announced that he had been offered a place on the board of directors of the Russian conglomerate AFK Sistema.^[21] The Guardian accused Sistema—a Fortune Global 500 business with a reported revenue of $34.2 billion in 2012—of links with organized crime. According to a cable released by WikiLeaks, Sistema is allegedly linked to one of the biggest organized crime gangs of Russia, Solntsevo. The cable alleges that Evgeny Novitsky, the former president of Sistema, “controlled the Solntsevo criminal gang.” According to Mark Galeotti, an expert on organized crime, the gang was based in Moscow but had links in Israel, the United States, and Europe. “It’s so large that it’s a stretch to call it a gang. It doesn’t really have a leadership or a hierarchy, it’s more like a criminal club full of regional clubs.”^[22]

Despite these liaisons dangereuses of the Russian oligarchs, other highly placed British officials also seem to have exercised little self-restraint and let themselves be easily seduced by these new, generous bosses. In 2011, for instance, Sir Michael Peat, the former principal private secretary to Prince Charles, was appointed to the board of Evraz, Roman Abramovich’s steel and mining group, on a salary of £250,000 a year. One year later, in March 2012, Peat appointed Eugene Shvidler, Abramovich’s right-hand man who is himself a billionaire with a personal fortune of £1.5 billion, to the board of his stockbroking company MC Peat & Co.^[23] Another oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, even had no problem in hiring the services of “real” blue blood when he recruited the Prince of Kent, a member of the royal family. It is telling also that Tony Blair Associates, a counseling firm founded by the former Labour prime minister, had among its clients oligarchs from Kazakhstan who were close to the autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.^[24]

Conservative Friends of Russia

In August 2012 in London, a new club was launched, called the Conservative Friends of Russia. This was an initiative of the diplomat Sergey Nalobin, first secretary in the political section of the Russian embassy in London. Nalobin had a solid KGB/FSB family background. Both his brother and his father worked for the secret service. His father, Nikolay Nalobin, a former KGB agent, became an FSB general and was said to have been the former boss of Alexander Litvinenko, the dissident spy who was allegedly killed by the FSB in London with radioactive polonium-210. The Conservative Friends of Russia was inaugurated on August 21, 2012, at a garden party at the Kensington residence of the Russian ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko. About 250 guests, including Tory MPs and Tory peers, attended the party. The guests were served vodka, champagne, and shashlik and received a biography of Vladimir Putin as a present. The festive inauguration of the Conservative Friends of Russia, coming only a few days after the verdict in the “Pussy Riot trial,” met with critical reactions. Labour MP and former minister for Europe Denis MacShane called it “inappropriate” to accept hospitality from the Kremlin just a few days after this crackdown.^[25] However, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Conservative foreign secretary, saw no problem in accepting the honorary presidency of the new group. Richard Royal, a PR consultant who worked at Ladbrokes, a betting and gaming enterprise, became its chair. On the website of Ladbrokes, Richard Royal was cited as the contact for information about “political betting, betting and gaming policy, governmental liaison, security issues.”^[26] One month later, in September 2012, Richard Royal and other members of the Conservative Friends of Russia were invited to Moscow and St. Petersburg, where they visited the Hermitage museum and the state ballet and participated in gala dinners. In between, they had meetings with politicians of Putin’s United Russia Party. Their ten-day trip was paid for by Rossotrudnichestvo, the Kremlin’s new soft-power organization.

The idea of setting up Conservative Friends of Russia as an instrument to influence elite political opinion in Britain came directly from the Kremlin. The Guardian published an e-mail sent by Sergey Nalobin to Sergey Cristo, a Russian-born Tory and fund-raiser, in which Nalobin wrote: “We’ve received instructions from Moscow to discuss the perspective of co-operation between British Conservatives and United Russia in the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe.”^[27] The two parties both belong to the European Democrat Group (EDG) in the council’s parliamentary assembly, with Tory members often voting with their Russian colleagues against motions condemning Moscow. Sergey Cristo said Nalobin had already approached him in December 2010, seeking introductions to top Conservative Party figures. According to Cristo, Nalobin also offered to make donations to Conservative Party funds via UK-registered, Russian-owned companies. “No companies were named, however, and the offer never materialized.”^[28] In November 2012, the Conservative Friends of Russia published a controversial photo of the Labour MP Chris Bryant in his underpants on its website. Chris Bryant, a former minister for Europe and chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Russia, was an outspoken critic of Putin whom the Russian embassy wanted removed. The homophobic attack on Bryant led Malcolm Rifkind and two other Tory MPs, Nigel Evans and Robert Buckland, to quit the Conservative Friends of Russia.^[29] These complications, however, did not cause Russian diplomats to tone down their efforts to influence British politics. Emma Reynolds, a Labour MP, told the Guardian that she had met Nalobin at a Labour party conference. “The Russian diplomat suggested it would be a good idea to set up a Labour Friends of Russia. She declined.”^[30]

In July 2014, the Guardian published details of the Conservative Party’s fund-raising dinner which was organized the year before. The dinner, on June 24, 2013, was said to have attracted 449 attendees who had a combined wealth of £11 billion. “One of the most surprising guests,” wrote the paper, “was Vladimir Putin’s judo partner, Vasily Shestakov, who was introduced to the prime minister. The Russian president’s key aide had been tasked with improving Russia’s reputation in the UK and the handshake was ‘to make wheels go round,’ a member of the Russian’s party said.”^[31] Shestakov, a Duma member for United Russia, is a long-time friend of Putin and Putin’s coauthor on several books, including Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin and Judo: History, Theory, and Practice. During the fund-raising dinner, Shestakov was introduced to David Cameron by David Burnside, director of the PR firm New Century Media, a firm which in the years 2009 and 2010 donated £91,000 to the Conservative Party. In June 2013, the same month in which the fund-raising dinner took place, David Burnside founded with Tim Lewin, a colleague, the Positive Russia Foundation. This seemingly “British” initiative was Kremlin inspired. The Russian news agency ITAR-TASS presented Vasily Shestakov as “one of the head officials of the new foundation,” adding that the plans to create the foundation “were approved by Prince Michael of Kent and British Prime Minister David Cameron.”^[32] Its purpose was to combat “‘anti-Russian propaganda’ in the British media.”^[33] In an interview, Shestakov described the Positive Russia Foundation “as a new variant of RT, but under the patronage of English aristocrats.”^[34] Labour MP Chris Bryant, former chairman of the all-party parliamentary Russia group, said: “This shows the utter hypocrisy of David Cameron’s Tory party and explains Cameron’s spinelessness in relation to Putin. Voters will think that it’s not just bizarre but despicable that Cameron will shake hands with, sit down to dinner with, and quite possibly take the money off, people such as these—the very people he is pretending to criticize over Crimea.”^[35] The Conservative Party’s spokespersons did not react and apparently agreed with the old adage: pecunia non olet.

Conservative justice minister Chris Grayling also rejected criticisms of a £160,000 donation to the party from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, a former deputy finance minister in Putin’s government. She had paid this sum in a fund-raising auction in the summer of 2014 to play tennis with David Cameron. Minister Grayling insisted: “When you contribute money to the Conservative party, you don’t buy policy decisions.”^[36] He was certainly right that buying political influence is often not a question of giving A in exchange for B. However, Francis Fukuyama rightly points out that such an explicit exchange need not be a necessary condition for effective lobbying: “Interest groups are able to influence members of Congress legally simply by making donations and waiting for unspecified return favors.”^[37] It is, indeed, the unspecified return favors in which the generous donors could be interested.^[38]

Buying Influence in the Former Soviet Bloc: The Cases of Lithuania, Estonia, and the Czech Republic

The Kremlin’s efforts in buying political influence are probably even more successful in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. In 2004 the president of Lithuania, Roland Paksas, was removed from office after being impeached for having accepted $400,000 from a Russian businessman, Yury Borisov. “According to the parliamentary inquiry,” wrote the Economist, “Mr. Borisov was linked to a Russian lobbying firm probably tied to Russia’s security services.”^[39] Borisov was granted Lithuanian nationality by President Paksas in return but made threats against Paksas when he did not get a government position.

Another case is that of the Centre Party in Estonia. The Centre Party is an opposition party of which 80 percent of the electorate consists of Russophones. According to information from the Kapo, the Estonian intelligence service, published at the end of December 2010, the leader of the Centre Party, Edgar Savisaar, who is mayor of the capital, Tallinn, had asked for financial support from Russia: 1.5 million euros for the party and 1.5 million euros for the construction of an Orthodox church in a suburb of Tallinn. The Kapo had observed several meetings between Savisaar and Vladimir Yakunin, president of the Russian railways and a well-known Russian oligarch. He is the son of a pilot with the Soviet Border Troops of the KGB and during his youth lived in Estonia, a country he knows very well. Since the beginning of the 1990s he has been a very close friend of Vladimir Putin. Both men had a dacha at the shore of Lake Komsomolskoye near Saint Petersburg and were members of Ozero (Lake), the cooperative society of dacha owners. Yakunin, who between 1988 and 1991 was first secretary of the Soviet diplomatic mission to the UN, worked according to some sources as a KGB officer under diplomatic cover in the First Chief Directorate (for foreign espionage)—the same directorate as Putin.^[40] The contacts between Savisaar and Yakunin were a reason for Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to warn Savisaar. “It is not a secret,” he said, “that there exist in Russia forces that still seek to bring Estonia into their sphere of influence. Unfortunately, Savisaar is lending them a helpful hand.”^[41] An officer of the Estonian intelligence service told Le Monde that they had met with Savisaar on November 4, 2010. “We drew his attention to the fact that he risked being compromised if his party received money from abroad and that that could represent a national security risk.”^[42]

The Kremlin is also active in the former satellite states. In the Czech Republic, rumors concerning former president Vaclav Klaus circulate. “Klaus has backed Moscow so consistently over the years that jokes in Prague about his being a Russian agent prompt chuckles tinged with more than a little nervousness,” wrote two experts on Central Europe.^[43] Klaus, who long opposed signing the Lisbon Treaty, putting him in step with “one of Moscow’s biggest foreign-policy goals: splitting European unity,” in the 1990s promoted gas and oil deals with Russia while opposing a deal to buy gas from Norway. Lukoil, the Russian oil company, paid for the translation of an anti-global-warming book written by him. “There are worries,” wrote the authors, “that Klaus . . . is just the tip of the iceberg. A growing number of Czech politicians across the spectrum appear to have ties to Russia in one or another form, and it’s setting off alarm bells. Twenty years after the end of communism—and four decades after the Red Army crushed the Prague Spring in 1968—a few lonely voices are warning that the Czech Republic and its neighbors are in danger of falling under Moscow’s influence once again.”^[44] Former President Vaclav Havel warned that Russian state-
controlled and private enterprises that play a role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy are “undoubtedly influencing the behavior of various Czech political parties and politicians. . . . I’ve seen several cases where the influence started quietly and slowly began projecting onto our foreign policy.”^[45]

The Kremlin is not only interested in enhancing its influence in the national parliaments of Europe, it is equally interested in enhancing its influence in the European Parliament. The Russian Orthodox Church, acting as one of the agencies of the Russian Foreign Ministry, “is expressing open support for assisting ethnic Russians in election campaigns to legislative bodies in the European Union.”^[46] The Russian Orthodox Church also acts as an intermediary in establishing contact between United Russia and conservative parties in the West.^[47] (The prominent role assigned by the Kremlin to the Russian Orthodox Church in projecting soft power abroad is discussed in more detail in part II of this book.)

The Kremlin cultivates its relations with Western politicians not only directly but also indirectly via Russian firms or Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. In the Czech Republic, for instance, the Russian oil giant Lukoil cultivates its ties with leading Czech politicians with the help of lobbyists. Contacts include not only the Russia-friendly President Vaclav Klaus but also former prime minister Miloš Zeman, who left the Social Democratic Party and started his Party of Civic Rights. This party “admits taking money from Russian-connected lobbyists. Chief among them is Miroslav Slouf, a former communist youth leader whose Slavia Consulting company brokered the Lukoil deal to supply Prague’s airport. Slouf, who is known to be Lukoil’s main promoter in the Czech Republic, also happens to be Zeman’s right-hand man.”^[48] On January 26, 2013, Miloš Zeman won the presidential elections. According to Riikka Nisonen, an analyst, “Zeman’s presidential campaign received money from the head of Lukoil’s Czech office. Zeman claims the money was a personal donation.”^[49] It may seem an exaggeration to call Zeman “Moscow’s man.” However, the Kremlin had every reason to be satisfied. As Corinne Deloy of the French think tank Fondation Robert Schuman reminds us: “If Milos Zeman can be expected to bring Prague closer to its European partners, the new president could also do the same with Russia with which he entertains a close relationship.”^[50] Some months later, this prophecy seemed to be vindicated when the president—apparently drunk—attended an official ceremony at the Prague Castle. He had spent the day at a reception at the Russian embassy, where there was no shortage of vodka. Zeman was not only accused of “grave disrespect for the presidential institution and his ceremonial duties”^[51] but was also criticized for something perhaps much more disturbing: his “overt inclination toward Russia.”^[52]

In July 2009 a group of leading East European politicians^[53] published in the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza an “Open Letter to the Obama Administration.” In this letter they expressed their concern, writing that “Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods. . . . It uses overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic orientation of Central and Eastern Europe.”^[54] The signatories also warned that “there is a danger that instead of being a pro-Atlantic voice in the EU, support for a more global partnership with Washington in the region might wane over time,” due to a leadership change and the fallout from the global economic crisis, which “provide additional opportunities for the forces of nationalism, extremism, populism, and anti-Semitism.”^[55] In September 2014 these words seemed almost prophetic when, at the NATO summit in Wales, Miloš Zeman declared his government to be opposed to sanctions against Moscow because there was not yet “clear proof” of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine. Zeman was supported by Slovakia and by Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, openly rejects the principles of liberal democracy, opting for an “illiberal” democracy along Putinist lines.^[56] Alexandr Vondra, former minister of defense of the Czech Republic and one of the signatories of the “Open Letter,” wrote: “Five years have passed since 2009. One can easily reach the conclusion that the reset policy was a failure. . . . Russia annexed Crimea. . . . Ukraine is in a de facto state of war with Russia. The art of Russian propaganda has reached Goebbelsian proportions—and celebrates a successful road show in many European capitals. The Russian espionage and intelligence services are active in the West as never before. . . . Rereading the 2009 open letter five years after, I would not change a word of it. . . . All our arguments remain valid.”^[57]

Corruption Risks in Europe

In 2012, Transparency International published a report on corruption risks in Europe. The report identified political parties, public administrations, and the private sector “as the weakest forces in the promotion of integrity across Europe.”^[58] One of the report’s conclusions was that “political parties and businesses exhibit the highest risks of corruption across Europe; with few exceptions they are rated among the weakest sectors when it comes to anti-corruption safeguards. One of the intersections at which parties and businesses meet—political party financing—is a particularly high-risk area, which even countries often described as ‘low corruption contexts’ have not managed to insulate themselves against.”^[59] Another conclusion was that “lobbying remains veiled in secrecy: In most European countries, the influence of lobbyists is shrouded in secrecy and a major cause for concern. Opaque lobbying rules result in skewed decision-making that benefits a few at the expense of the many.”^[60] It is precisely by making use of these weak spots of Western democracies that the Kremlin tries, often successfully, to influence the decision making of Western governments.

Notes

Cf. Walter Laqueur, Mein 20. Jahrhundert: Stationen eines politischen Lebens (Berlin: Propyläen, 2009), 129.

Cf. Thierry Wolton, Le KGB en France (Paris: France Loisirs, 1986), 22–23. This system was installed by Leon Trotsky as early as 1924.

Hélène Blanc and Renata Lesnik, Les prédateurs du Kremlin (1917–2009) (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 330–331.

Blanc and Lesnik, Les prédateurs, 331.

Hélène Blanc, “Les mafias russes menacent l’Europe,” L’Express (June 28, 2004).

Blanc, “Les mafias russes.”

A report of Transparency International judged the Netherlands’ regulations concerning party financing to be “wholly inadequate, as the rules only apply to political parties at the central level who have chosen to receive state subsidy. For all other political parties (those not receiving a subsidy and those at the regional or local levels) no rules on political financing exist.” (Suzanne Mulcahy, “Money, Politics, Power—Corruption Risks in Europe,” Transparency International (2012), 23.) A new law, adopted by the Dutch parliament in 2012, made it obligatory for all parties operating at the national level to reveal gifts of more than €4,500 (even for those not receiving a state subsidy) but failed to impose the same regime for local parties and local party branches, thereby making it possible for national parties to circumvent the new regulations. The new liberal-socialist coalition government, installed in November 2012, promised to extend the new legislation to the local level.

When, in June 2010, the parliamentary elections were held, the party failed to gain a single seat. It was the populist Party for Freedom (PVV) of competitor Geert Wilders that got twenty-four seats.

10.

Quoted in Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, Londongrad: From Russia with Cash—The Inside Story of the Oligarchs (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 342.

11.

Nathaniel Rothschild, “Letter to the Editor,” The Times (October 19, 2008).

12.

Robert Peston, “Rothschild v Osborne,” BBC (October 21, 2008).

13.

Peston, “Rothschild v Osborne.”

14.

Jane Merrick, “A Final Favour? How Mandelson’s Last Act in Brussels Boosted Russian Oligarch,” The Independent (October 26, 2008).

15.

Merrick, “A Final Favour?”

16.

Keith Dovkants, “Veteran KGB Spy Revealed as Deripaska’s Right-Hand Man,” London Evening Standard (October 29, 2008).

17.

Tom Parfitt, “Mandelson Silent on Deripaska,” The Guardian (October 28, 2008).

18.

Vanessa Allen, “Rothschild ‘Suggested Russian Oligarch Could Become a Tory Donor,’” Mail online (January 24, 2012).

19.

Allen, “Rothschild ‘Suggested.’”

20.

Allen, “Rothschild ‘Suggested.’”

21.

“Peter Mandelson Joins Board of Russian Firm ‘with Organised Crime Links,’” The Guardian (May 30, 2013). The article was taken down from the Guardian’s website on June 1, 2013, “pending an investigation.”

22.

Quoted in “Peter Mandelson Set to Join ‘Mafia-Linked’ Russian Firm,” The Week (May 31, 2013).

23.

Tim Walker, “The Queen’s Man Sir Michael Peat Strengthens His Ties to Roman Abramovich,” The Telegraph (March 13, 2012).

24.

Marc Roche, “Ces politiques qui cèdent aux sirènes des oligarques russes,” Le Monde (June 2–3, 2013).

25.

Luke Harding and Nicholas Watt, “Conservative Friends of Russia under Fire for Launch after Pussy Riot Verdict,” The Guardian (August 22, 2012).

26.

Ladbrokes website, retrieved on December 12, 2012, http://news.ladbrokes.com.

27.

Luke Harding, “How Kremlin Got Diplomats to Woo Tories,” The Guardian (November 30, 2012).

28.

Harding, “How Kremlin Got Diplomats to Woo Tories.”

29.

Andy McSmith, “Chris Bryant Accuses Russian Officials of ‘Smear Campaign,’” The Independent (November 24, 2012).

30.

Luke Harding, “Tory Blushes Deepen over Activities of Conservative Friends of Russia,” The Guardian (November 30, 2012).

31.

Robert Booth, Nick Mathiason, Luke Harding, and Melanie Newman, “Tory Summer Party Drew Super-Rich Supporters with Total Wealth of £11bn,” The Guardian (July 3, 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/01/-sp-tory-summer-party-drew-super-rich-supporters-with-total-wealth-of-11bn.

32.

Lyudmila Alexandrova, “Russia Takes New Steps to Improve Its Image Abroad,” ITAR-TASS (July 9, 2014).

33.

Booth et al., “Tory Summer Party.”

34.

Booth et al., “Tory Summer Party.”

35.

Booth et al., “Tory Summer Party.”

36.

Rajeev Syal, “PM’s Tennis Match with Wife of Former Putin Minister Will Go Ahead, Say Tories,” The Guardian (July 31, 2014).

37.

Francis Fukuyama, “America in Decay—The Sources of Political Dysfunction,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (September/October 2014): 15–16.

38.

According to the BBC, since 2010 the Conservative Party has received at least £1,157,433 from British citizens who were formerly Russian citizens or are married to Russians or from their associated companies. This sum does not include donations from companies with links to Russia or who deal with the country but whose owners and directors cannot be verified. It was emphasized that “Labour and the Lib Dems have not received any donations from Russians over the same period.” Cf. “UK-Based Russians Donating Large Sums to Tories,” BBC (July 23, 2014), http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-28450125?print=true.

39.

“Muddling On,” The Economist (January 8, 2004).

40.

Cf. “Antikompromat,” http://www.anticompromat.org/yakunin/yakunbio01.html.

41.

Olivier Truc, “La présence russe au coeur des législatives en Estonie,” Le Monde (March 5, 2011).

42.

Truc, “La présence russe.”

43.

Gregory Feifer and Brian Whitmore, “Czech Power Games: How Russia Is Rebuilding Influence in the Former Soviet Bloc,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (September 25, 2010).

44.

Feifer and Whitmore, “Czech Power Games.”

45.

Feifer and Whitmore, “Czech Power Games.”

46.

Robert C. Blitt, “Russia’s ‘Orthodox’ Foreign Policy: The Growing Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Shaping Russia’s Policies Abroad,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 33, no. 2 (December 2011): 426.

47.

“Russian Church to Help Expand Dialog between United Russia and Western Conservatives,” Interfax (May 31, 2010).

48.

Feifer and Whitmore, “Czech Power Games.”

49.

Riikka Nisonen, “Miloš Zeman Is the New President of the Czech Republic,” Baltic Worlds (January 31, 2013), http://balticworlds.com/new-president-of-the-czech-republic/.

50.

Corinne Deloy, “Milos Zeman, nouveau président de la République tchèque,” Fondation Robert Schuman, Observatoire des Elections en Europe (January 28, 2013), available at http://www.robert-schuman.eu/oee.php?num=818.

51.

Jan Hornát, “Russian Vodka and Czech Crown Jewels,” openDemocracy (May 17, 2013).

52.

Hornát, “Russian Vodka.”

53.

The group included Valdas Adamkus, Emil Constantinescu, Vaclav Havel, Alexander Kwasniewski, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, and Lech Walesa, respectively former presidents of Lithuania, Romania, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Latvia, and Poland.

54.

Cf. “An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (July 16, 2009).

55.

“An Open Letter to the Obama Administration.”

56.

Cf. Harold Meyerson, “Hungary’s Prime Minister a Champion for Illiberalism,” The Washington Post (August 6, 2014).

57.

Alexandr Vondra, “Letter to Obama: Five Years Later,” Center for European Policy Analysis (July 10, 2014).

58.

“Money, Politics, Power—Corruption Risks in Europe,” 3.

59.

“Money, Politics, Power—Corruption Risks in Europe,” 22.

60.

“Money, Politics, Power—Corruption Risks in Europe,” 5.

Spies and Spooks as Soft-Power Instruments?

Willy Brandt and the Guillaume Affair: A Model?

Spies and spooks are normally not considered as a constitutive part of a country’s soft-power arsenal, and they certainly do not fit into Nye’s definition of soft power as “power of attraction.” However, they deserve a place here because they fit very well within Putin’s definition of soft power as an integral part of an overarching hard-power game—a zero-sum game in which the influence of one party is detrimental to the influence of the other—adversarial—party. One might expect that the Russian government—the highest leader and core officials of which have a KGB/FSB background—would give the secret services an important role in the realization of Putin’s soft-power offensive. Moreover, they can fall back on an old tradition developed during the Soviet era, when the Kremlin was not in a position to contract the services of Western PR firms or to buy advertising space in Western papers. At that time, however, it had other means of influencing Western public opinion and Western political leaders.

A famous example is the case of Günter Guillaume, an agent of the Stasi, the secret service of the former German Democratic Republic. Guillaume became a close aide to German Chancellor Willy Brandt—so close, indeed, that he even accompanied Brandt on his holidays. Due to the “Guillaume Affair,” Brandt had to resign in 1974. For Brandt, the father of Germany’s Ostpolitik who sought a rapprochement with Moscow and the leaders in East Berlin, it was an extremely traumatic and humiliating event. “Almost for a year he travelled with this Judas through Germany, they ate and drank together. Guillaume was his paymaster, he paid the bills, small things of which the chancellor often was not aware, in the saloon carriage [of Brandt’s special train] he laid out his clothing and prepared his shoes for the next day. The traitor assisted at many confidential discussions of the party.”^[1] It is striking that in his autobiography, Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975 (Meetings and Insights: The Years 1960–1975), a book of 647 pages, Brandt mentions the name of Guillaume only once, writing: “I have to disappoint readers who expected from this book revelations on the ‘Guillaume Affair’. The competent court and a parliamentary inquiry commission have dealt with that. I have nothing to add here to what I said there to the best of my knowledge and belief.”^[2] He added, tellingly: “It is certain that I accepted advice that, looking back, I should not have accepted.”^[3] Brandt here openly admits that some of his decisions in his function as German chancellor were influenced by the Stasi, the KGB’s East German sister organization.

1991: The Taming of the Beast

The East German Stasi disappeared definitively with German reunification, which brought about the end of the German Democratic Republic. The situation, however, was different in Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union. After the KGB-inspired coup d’état of August 1991 and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union in December of that year, Russian President Boris Yeltsin did not disband the KGB but sought only to weaken it by splitting it into different independent agencies. In this way the old KGB gave birth to five children: the Foreign Intelligence Service SVR, the internal counterintelligence service FSB, the Border Guard Service PSR, the Federal Protective Service FSO (responsible for the protection of government buildings and highly placed persons), and FAPSI (a service tasked with secure communications and cryptography). However, this “taming of the beast” did not last long. Under Putin there began a new centralization. By presidential decree of March 11, 2003, the FSB absorbed the PSR and the FAPSI. It is not excluded that—in time—the FSB will also try to bring the foreign intelligence branch (SVR) back under its wing, which would come close to restoring the near-monopoly of the former KGB.^[4] For the moment, however, there remain two secret services tasked with working abroad. These are the SVR and the GRU. The latter is the Russian military intelligence service, responsible for military espionage. Both services have four functions: intelligence gathering and analysis, industrial and military espionage, dissemination of disinformation, and infiltration of foreign governments and international organizations. It is especially the last function—the infiltration of foreign governments and international organizations—which interests us here.

Stationing “Illegals” in Foreign Countries:
The Chapman Story

Russian espionage activities in the West, having declined in the early 1990s, are now back to their former Cold War levels. Not only do the Russian secret services place their spies under diplomatic cover in embassies abroad, but they also invest heavily in “human relations” by stationing so called “illegals” or “sleepers” in foreign countries, a practice that was already widespread in Soviet times. “Illegals” live for many years in the target country, often under a false identity, unnoticed by their colleagues and neighbors. Target countries are especially the United States and Western Europe. The French analyst Thierry Wolton estimates that in 1984 about one hundred illegals were living in France alone.^[5]

A reminder of the persistence of this strategy was the arrest by the FBI on June 27, 2010, of a Russian spy ring in the United States. An eleven-strong team of “deep cover” agents with mostly faked names and false passports had been living in the United States for many years, some of them for almost two decades. They were leading normal lives in the suburbs of New York, Boston, and Washington. Some couples even had children together. Their mission was not only to gather information on nuclear plants, the CIA, and US foreign policy but also to infiltrate circles close to the government. On July 8, 2010, ten captured spies were exchanged in Vienna for four US agents. In Moscow the Russian spies were welcomed like heroes. They were the invitees of Putin and sang patriotic songs with him. After receiving medals from President Medvedev, they were offered prestigious positions in state firms. One of them was a young woman named Anna Chapman. (Her own name was Kushchenko, Chapman being her former British husband’s name.) She had her photo, showing her in sexy black underwear, published on the cover of Maxim, a glossy men’s magazine. Chapman got a job as adviser to the director of the Moscow FundServiceBank FSB, a bank linked with Roskosmos, the Russian space agency. (Ironically, the bank name’s abbreviation FSB was the same as that of the KGB’s successor organization FSB.) This new job was a reason for Chapman to fly to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, for a photo session with Russian cosmonauts, evoking memories of the glorious days of the Soviet past. The former spy also got a leading position in the Molodaya Gvardiya, the youth organization of the ruling United Russia Party, and in January 2011 she was invited to present her own TV show on REN TV. Anna Chapman-Kushchenko is a pure KGB product. She is the daughter of Vasily Kushchenko, a high-ranking officer of the secret services who worked in the Russian embassy in Zimbabwe. Coming from an authentic “KGB nest,” Chapman represents for the Putin regime the new Russian heroine of the modern epoch: the “Chekist” (member of the secret service) who, motivated by deep patriotic feelings, is ready to do anything for his or her country.

Chekists are characterized by almost unlimited commitment, similar to that of monks and nuns in religious orders. However, their loyalty is not to a heavenly god but to the earthly hierarchy of their organization and to what they consider to be their country’s interests. “Illegals” are prepared to live double lives: to enter into fake marriages, including having children together while the children are not informed about their parents’ real activities. One of the illegals in Chapman’s spy ring, living under the adopted name of Juan Lazaro, confirmed this explicitly. He declared that he had “sworn loyalty to the Russian intelligence service. He even explained that this oath was more important than everything else, including his wife and his children.”^[6] After the arrest of the members of the spy ring, the Economist wrote that Moscow was embarrassed not so much “because Russia was spying on America, but because it did it so clumsily.”^[7] Maybe so. But one could ask why the Russian government continues to invest so much money and energy in a kind of espionage that requires a real long-term investment, including agent training, the creation of phony identities, the purchase of cars and houses, buried money, bank accounts, encrypted Wi-Fi connections, and more. The reason is that in the past, illegals have often been very effective. They have succeeded in infiltrating the highest levels of foreign governments.

The dismantling of Chapman’s spy ring in the United States had a spin-off in Europe. After a tip-off from the FBI, a German couple, Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, were arrested on October 18, 2011, in Germany, accused of having been working for the SVR for more than twenty years. They had passed on secret information about the EU and NATO via “dead letter boxes” to their spy masters and were paid €100,000 per year for their services.^[8] When the police raided their home, Heidrun was caught sending coded messages to Russia with her shortwave radio. From October 2008 to August 2011, the couple had been managing another agent, Raymond Poeteray, an official of the Dutch Foreign Ministry, who had worked as vice-consul in Hong Kong and had access to highly confidential information. Poeteray was arrested on March 24, 2012.^[9] Another diplomat, this time from Belgium, was recalled from the Belgian embassy in Copenhagen at the end of 2011. The man, who had worked in embassies in Japan, India, Portugal, and the United States, was accused of working for the KGB and its successor organizations since the late 1980s.^[10] The man was suspected of setting up false identities for Russian spies in Belgium. It came, therefore, as no surprise when, in October 2012, the FBI discovered another extended spy ring in the United States, again composed of eleven people. This time it concerned a conspiracy to export cutting-edge microelectronics to Russia via a Houston-based company called Arc Electronics Inc. This firm had been set up by Alexander Fishenko, a recently naturalized American, born in Soviet Kazakhstan. Between 2002 and October 2012, the firm exported approximately fifty million dollars’ worth of microelectronics to Russia, which could be used in a wide range of military systems, including radar and missile-guidance systems. The firm allegedly evaded the US government’s licensing system and export controls by providing false end-user information and using intermediary procurement firms. The end users allegedly included the Russian military and Russian intelligence agencies. To American suppliers, the firm reportedly produced benign products such as traffic lights. On its website, the firm—Arc Electronics Inc.—claimed to be a traffic-light manufacturer.^[11] Houston FBI special agent in charge, Stephen L. Morris, commented: “In this day and time, the ability of foreign countries to illegally acquire sensitive and sophisticated U.S. technology poses a significant threat to both the economic and national security of our nation. While some countries may leverage our technology for financial gain, many countries hostile to the United States seek to improve their defense capabilities and to modernize their weapons systems at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.”^[12]

The “Magnificent Five” and Their Heirs

Russian spy rings are not new. A famous example is that of the Magnificent Five, a spy ring set up by Kim Philby in Britain. The members of this group were recruited in the 1930s when they were still students at Cambridge University. They succeeded in penetrating the Foreign Office and MI5 and MI6—respectively, the internal and foreign branch of the British secret service. One of them, Donald Maclean, was the son of Sir Donald Maclean, a former liberal cabinet minister and leader of the parliamentary opposition after World War I.^[13] Attempts by the KGB to recruit members of the British elite continued well into the 1980s. To this day rumors persist in Britain that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned from office on March 16, 1976, because of presumed links with members of the secret services from the Soviet bloc. In his book The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5, the British historian Christopher Andrew refutes these allegations.^[14] However, having had full access to the British counterintelligence service files, he discovered a secret permanent file for Harold Wilson, created when he entered the House of Commons in 1945. The file, in which Wilson was given the code name Norman John Worthington, was kept throughout Wilson’s two premierships (1964–1970 and 1974–1976). It was kept secret, including from the prime minister himself, which led to allegations of an MI5 plot to topple his government.

The defection of Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak spy, to the United States in 1969, where he joined the CIA, had more serious consequences. In 1975 Frolik, who had worked as a spy for the Czechoslovak secret service StB in the London embassy in the guise of a diplomat, published a book titled The Frolik Defection: The Memoirs of an Intelligence Agent. In this book he accused three Labour MPs of being Soviet agents. The names of the accused were Will Owen, Bob Edwards, and John Stonehouse. The last one was postmaster general in Wilson’s government. Will Owen was tried for spying for the Czechoslovak StB but was acquitted. However, according to Christopher Andrew, “he was, almost certainly, guilty as charged.”^[15] Another revelation in Frolik’s book was a plot of the StB to seduce and then blackmail Edward Heath, who would later become British prime minister (1970 to 1974). Heath, a lifelong bachelor, was suspected of being gay. The StB’s plan was to invite Heath, who had a love of classical music, to a concert in Prague, where—according to the blueprint—a romantic affair would ensue, which would be filmed by the agents of the StB. Eventually, the MI5 warned Heath that a trip to Czechoslovakia could expose him to blackmail by the StB. The trip did not take place.^[16]

How persistent these attempts to engage members of the British political elite were becomes clear from remarks made by British Prime Minister David Cameron during a speech to students at Moscow State University in September 2011. Cameron told his audience:

The naïve Cameron did not immediately realize what was happening until he returned to England and reported the event to his tutor at the university. It was considered serious enough for Cameron to disclose the incident to MI5 when he applied for a job as a special adviser to Norman Lamont in the Treasury.^[18]

High-Level Infiltration Is Reaching
Unprecedented Heights

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Russian espionage activities continued unabatedly—possibly even at a higher level than during the Cold War. This is the case not only in the United States but also in Europe. In Germany, memories of the Guillaume Affair were reawakened in March 2010, when it became known that the Verfassungsschutz, the German counterintelligence service, had unmasked two high-ranking civil servants in the state chancellery of Brandenburg, a German Land (state) in the former East German part of the country.^[19] The spies had free access to circles close to Matthias Platzeck, the president of the federal state of Brandenburg. One of them, a doctor of law, already had close contacts with the StB, the KGB’s Czechoslovak sister organization, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The other, a woman, may have been engaged by the Russian KGB when she studied in Moscow. A third person, a business adviser, who organized Brandenburg President Platzeck’s visits to Moscow, was similarly unmasked as a collaborator with the FSB. At the same time, it became known that the Brandenburg bureau of criminal investigation LKA had been infiltrated by two members of the GRU, the Russian military secret service. These were not “illegals” with fake identities but people working for the Russian secret services under their own identity.

In the United Kingdom in June 2008, Andrew MacKinlay, a Labour MP and member of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee, received a warning after the British counterintelligence MI5 discovered that he was meeting a suspected Russian spy. He even had tea with the agent at the House of Commons. His contact, Alexander Polyakov, worked as a counselor at the Russian embassy and was suspected to be one of the senior Russian SVR agents in the United Kingdom.^[20] MacKinley, despite the warnings, continued to meet Polyakov and present a series of parliamentary questions on Russia-related matters. One of his questions concerned why Britain had granted political asylum to Putin critic Boris Berezovsky. MacKinlay’s “tea at the Commons” came at the height of Britain’s argument with the Kremlin over Andrey Lugovoy, who was suspected of killing the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London with the radioactive substance polonium-210.

In the United Kingdom in December 2010, another spy affair came out into the open when the British counterintelligence MI5 asked for the deportation of Katia Zatuliveter, the twenty-five-year-old Russian assistant of Mike Hancock, a British Liberal Democrat MP for Portsmouth South. Hancock’s constituency, Portsmouth, is an important British naval base, and Hancock himself is a defense specialist. As a member of the Defence Select Committee he received classified briefings from military sources and secret papers. Chris Bryant, Labour’s former minister for Europe, said he had ousted Hancock as chairman of the all-party Russian group because he was too lenient towards Moscow. “We were concerned by Mike Hancock’s pro-Putin and pro-Medvedev position,” said Bryant. “That is why I stood against him and ousted him. . . . The combination of being on the delegation to the Western European Union, the Council of Europe, his membership of the common defence select committee and his position as Portsmouth MP: you can see how he was attractive. Russian secret operatives are working as assiduously now as they did 30 years ago.”^[21]

Suspicions arose because Hancock had tabled a series of parliamentary questions about Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Hancock insisted, however, that “there was nothing unusual about asking for the locations of berths for submarines.”^[22] Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer who defected to Britain, claimed that Britain was under attack from Russian spies. “They’re spying on all western countries like mad. It’s just their psychology and their tradition.” The news story explains, “Mr. Gordievsky said the Russians were spying just as much as they always had but that now it was easier to do so in the west. . . . In the past it would have been impossible for Russia to be able to infiltrate the House of Commons so easily.”^[23]

In December 2010, Mikhail Repin was expelled from Britain after he was caught trying to recruit politicians and civil servants as agents. “Young, good looking and articulate,” writes the Telegraph, “he introduced himself as ‘Michael’ at events at Westminster think tanks and embassy receptions.”^[24] Repin, a junior officer in the SVR, was operating under diplomatic cover from the embassy. His job was apparently to “cultivate” individuals who might be of value to the Kremlin and recruit them as agents. Repin attended events organized by think tanks, such as the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Chatham House, and the Royal United Services Institute, where he was certain to meet MPs, civil servants, and executives from defense firms. “An annual fee of a few hundred pounds got him access to private lectures by senior military and intelligence officials and the chance to mingle with them at the drinks parties and finger food buffets that often followed the talks. This so-called ‘overt information gathering’ is often the first step in identifying individuals for cultivation.”^[25]

In 2014 in France, a similar case was reported. It concerned a certain Colonel Ilyushin, deputy air attaché of the Russian embassy, who had the task to place a “mole” in the heart of the French government. Like his colleague in London, the young Russian colonel, who worked for the GRU, the intelligence service of the Russian army, participated in seminars organized by the École Militaire, the Institut de l’Armement, or the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, where he tried to make contact with officers, researchers and journalists. Le Nouvel Observateur writes:

With one of the journalists, who could give intimate information on a close aide of French President François Hollande, the approach entered phase 2. However, the reporter contacted the DCRI, the French counterintelligence service, and told H4, the department for Russia, about his experiences. After the Russian colonel had received a warning that he was being observed, he left for Moscow. However, this does not mean that these activities stop, but only that the personnel rotates across the different Russian embassies. Etienne de Durand, a researcher for the French think tank IFRI who is a specialist on military affairs, is said to have been contacted at least four times.^[27]

The level of Russia’s spying activities can be inferred from the number of personnel staffing its embassies. In 1982 the Soviet embassy in Paris had about seven hundred personnel, of whom at least 10 percent were suspected of working for the secret services.^[28] Between 1960 and 1986, France expelled eighty-three KGB and GRU officers from its territory—which is an average of more than three per year for a quarter of a century.^[29] At present, not only West European states are targeted, but also, and possibly even more so, post-Soviet states and former satellite states. A famous case is that of Herman Simm, an Estonian security expert who worked at the Estonian Defense Ministry from 1995 to 2006. Simm, who had access to top-secret documents, participated in international meetings and commissions of the EU and NATO concerning bolstering information security.^[30] He handed over more than two thousand pages of information to his Russian bosses. These included many classified NATO documents.^[31] In a report NATO would later conclude that Simm’s activities made the alliance “more vulnerable to cyber threats and attacks” because “our weak points are now well-known by our adversaries.”^[32] These vulnerabilities were apparently exploited during the three weeks of cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007 that all but paralyzed this small Baltic country. The Economist called Simm “a potential European equivalent of Aldrich Ames,” who was once Russia’s top spy in the United States. For years Ames headed a CIA counterintelligence department and is now serving a life sentence in jail after his conviction in 1994.^[33] The NATO report called “particularly worrisome” Simm’s participation in the annual security conferences organized at the NATO military headquarters in the Belgian town of Mons, as well as his participation in 2006 and in 2007 in two counterespionage conferences. During a conference in the Dutch town of Brunssum in 2006, attendees received a CD containing the names of all known and suspected Russian NATO spies, including detailed information on double agents. According to Sergei Yakovlev, the SVR agent who was Simm’s contact person, the compact disk “landed directly on Putin’s desk” and “caused quite a stir” in Moscow.^[34] Simm would have received a €5,000 bonus above his regular salary. On February 25, 2009, Simm pleaded guilty and was jailed for twelve and one-half years.

Estonia was not the only weak spot in the former Soviet bloc. After the eviction in 2009 of two alleged Russian agents from the embassy in Prague, the Czech domestic intelligence service BIS published in June 2010 a report in which it warned that up to 150 people were working for the Russian secret services.^[35] A recent affair that attracted much publicity was that of Robert Rakhardzho, a prison psychologist who started a relationship with a female army major who was chief of staff to three senior generals. The first of these, Josef Sedlak, was a military representative to the NATO command in Europe, the second, Josef Proks, was deputy general for the chief of staff, and the third, Frantisek Hrabal, head of the military office of the president. All three resigned. The alleged spy, son of a Russian mother and an Indonesian father, was believed to have been recruited by the Russian secret service while on vacation in Crete in 2003. His mission was to gather kompromat (compromising information) on leading Czech personalities that could be used for blackmail. The man fled to Moscow in September 2009, leaving his wife and two children behind. In its 2011 report, the Czech intelligence service stated “that Russian spies work under different covers, mainly at Russian diplomatic missions, and in numbers that are utterly unjustified
given the current status of Czech-Russian relations.”^[36]

In the 1980s, when Putin worked for the KGB in the German Democratic Republic, his cover job was deputy director of the House of German-Soviet Friendship in Leipzig. There he did not use his own name but was known as Mr. Adamov. Mr. Adamov’s task was mainly to recruit agents for espionage in West Germany. Using a “cultural” cover is not new for Russian spies. It came, therefore, as no surprise when, in October 2013, the American magazine Mother Jones revealed that the FBI was investigating Yury Zaytsev, the head of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Washington, for alleged spying activities.^[37] The center, set up by Russia’s new soft-power agency Rossotrudnichestvo, organized all-expenses-paid trips to Russia for young professional Americans. One of these had been an adviser to an American governor. It was suspected that these trips were used in an effort to cultivate young Americans as intelligence assets (an “asset” could be someone who actively works with a foreign service as well as someone who provides information without realizing that it is being used). The participants of the June 2012 trip were treated as VIPs. They stayed in St. Petersburg at the Sokos Hotel Palace Bridge, a luxury hotel that has hosted delegations for the G8 and G20 summits. They met with the governors of the Moscow and Leningrad regions and with Aleksander Torshin, a prominent member of Putin’s United Russia Party. In the years 2011–2013, Rossotrudnichestvo has organized six trips, most of which included about twenty-five people. The FBI agents, interviewing Americans who participated in the program, would have discovered that Zaytsev or his associates had built files on the participants. The Russian embassy in Washington dismissed the accusations.^[38]

The Russian embassy in the Austrian capital Vienna, where many international organizations are based, employs 116 diplomats. This is almost double the number of diplomats employed by the US embassy and almost four times the number employed by the French embassy.^[39] One might ask: Why? According to Hans-Georg Maaßen, director of the BfV, the German counterintelligence office, one third of the Russian diplomats stationed in Berlin are spies.^[40] Brussels also is an important European capital. According to Alain Winants, the head of Belgium’s State Security Service, VSSE, in Belgium “Russian espionage . . . [is] at the same level as the Cold War. . . . We are a country with an enormous concentration of diplomats, businessmen, international institutions—NATO, European institutions. So for an intelligence officer, for a spy, this is a kindergarten. It’s the place to be.”^[41] Winants describes their approach as follows: “They make friends with officials at seminars or social events in the EU capital. EU security staff use an acronym for the kind of people they target: Mice (money, ideology, compromise, ego)—people who are greedy or in debt, who have radical ideas, who have guilty secrets or who want to be James Bond.”^[42]

According to the American security expert Mark Galeotti, “It would be easy to write off Western concerns as an anachronistic relic of the Cold War, but they are genuine. Of course, the West also spies on Russia, but across the board they are reporting a pattern of not just sustained but actually increasing Russian espionage, which is now as extensive and as aggressive as at the height of the Cold War.”^[43] This view is shared by Edward Lucas. “For the Siloviki in Moscow,” he writes, “Western society is a spies’ paradise. . . . To worry about Russian spies still counts as almost comically paranoid. The popular assumption is that we have no secrets worth stealing. . . . [However], Russia is not like other countries, as the case of Sergei Magnitsky demonstrates. It uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making.”^[44] Lucas adds: “Russian spies’ activities are not just a lingering spasm of old Soviet institutions. . . . They are part of a wider effort to penetrate and to manipulate, which targets the weakest parts of our system: its open and trusting approach to outsiders and newcomers.”^[45] According to Western standards, these activities would certainly not be subsumed under the term “soft power.” In the Kremlin’s mindset, however, they are valuable assets in its information warfare.

Notes

Peter Merseburger, Willy Brandt 1913–1992: Visionär und Realist (Berlin: Pantheon, 2013), 727.

Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1976), 586.

Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten, 586 (emphasis mine).

This scenario was predicted by the Russian security expert Pavel Felgenhauer. He expected that the mass spy exposure in the United States in the summer of 2010, due to betrayal in the SVR headquarters, might “lead to serious changes in personnel and possibly in the organization of the intelligence community in Moscow, namely the subordination of the SVR to the FSB, to root out negligence and corruption.” (Pavel Felgenhauer, “Russian ‘Illegal’ Spies in the US Were Betrayed by a Double Agent,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 7, no. 210 (November 18, 2010).) However, it is not clear whether such a consolidation of the different branches of the secret services is in the interests of the political leadership.

Thierry Wolton, Le KGB en France (Paris: France Loisirs, 1986), 280.

Olivier O’Mahony, “Anna: le visage d’ange du nouveau KGB,” Paris Match (July 9, 2010).

“Spies Like Us,” The Economist (July 3, 2010).

Jorge Benitez, “Germany Charges 2 Alleged Russian Spies Accused of Snooping on EU, NATO Strategy,” Atlantic Council (September 27, 2012).

Jorge Benitez, “Dutch Arrest Foreign Ministry Official for Spying for Russia,” Atlantic Council (April 2, 2012).

10.

Jorge Benitez, “Belgium Suspends Senior Diplomat Suspected of Being a Russian Spy,” Atlantic Council (October 11, 2012).

11.

“Russian Agent and 10 Other Members of Procurement Network for Russian Military and Intelligence Operating in the U.S. and Russia Indicted in New York,” FBI, Houston Division (October 3, 2012).

12.

“Russian Agent and 10 Other Members of Procurement Network.”

13.

Cf. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London and New York: Penguin, 2000), 75–88; and Vladimir Fédorovski, Le roman du Kremlin (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2004), 115–141.

14.

Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010).

15.

Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 413.

16.

Joseph Fitsanakis, “Did Czechoslovakian Spies Plan to Blackmail British Leader?” Intelnews.org (January 26, 2012), http://intelnews.org/2012/06/26/01-1020/.

17.

Robert Winnett, “David Cameron Tells Russian Hosts: KGB Tried to Recruit Me but I Failed the Test,” The Telegraph (September 12, 2011).

18.

Winnett, “David Cameron Tells Russian Hosts.”

19.

“Russischer Geheimdienst Spione in Potsdam,” Focus Online (March 13, 2010).

20.

Glen Owen, “Labour MP Pulled before Chief Whip for Inviting ‘Russian Spy’ to Tea in the Commons,” Daily Mail Online (June 28, 2008).

21.

Nicholas Watt and Luke Harding, “Mike Hancock, His Russian Assistant and Questions on Trident,” The Guardian (December 5, 2010).

22.

Mike Hancock was still involved in other affairs. According to the BBC, “Mr. Hancock was arrested in 2010 after a complaint was made about his behaviour towards a vulnerable constituent who had a history of mental health problems, but no charges were brought.” (“Mike Hancock MP Resigns from Liberal Democratic Party,” BBC (September 18, 2014), http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27909267.) In June 2014 the complainant agreed to a confidential settlement and the MP issued an apology over an “inappropriate and unprofessional friendship.” Being already suspended by his party, he resigned from the party in September 2014.

23.

Victoria Ward, “Russian Spy Echoes Anna Chapman,” The Telegraph (December 6, 2010). After Hancock, Katia Zatuliveter had an affair with another older high-ranking defense expert: a NATO official dealing with Ukraine and Russia. When the British home secretary ordered her deportation, she appealed and won. The reason was insufficient evidence.

24.

Jason Lewis, “Mikhail Repin: The Perfect Party Guest Who Was Whitehall Spy for the Russians,” The Telegraph (December 10, 2011).

25.

Lewis, “Mikhail Repin: The Perfect Party Guest.” SpyBlog.org asks, “Will The Independent or the London Evening Standard newspapers keep silent about this story, given that their proprietor Alexander Lebedev is a former KGB diplomat/spy who was stationed at the Russian Embassy in London?” (“Daily Telegraph Names Last Year’s Expelled Russian Diplomat/Spy as Mikhail Repin,” Spy Blog (blog) (December 11, 2011).)

26.

Vincent Jauvert, “Révélations sur les espions russes en France,” Le Nouvel Observateur (July 24, 2014), 12.

27.

Jauvert, “Révélations sur les espions russes.”

28.

Jean-Dominique Merchet, “Paris en guerre froide,” Libération (November 9, 2009).

29.

A list with the names of the expelled KGB and GRU officers can be found in Wolton, Le KGB en France, 294. He adds that even this long list is “incomplete” (286).

30.

Cf. Vladimir Vodo, “Estoniya vychislila pervogo shpiona,” Kommersant (September 23, 2008).

31.

Cf. Tony Barber, “NATO Expels Russian Envoys,” Financial Times (April 29, 2009).

32.

Fidelius Schmid and Andreas Ulrich, “New Documents Reveal Truth on NATO’s ‘Most Damaging’ Spy,” Spiegel Online (April 30, 2010).

33.

“Estonian Spies: Fog in the Baltic,” The Economist (November 6, 2008).

34.

Fidelius Schmid and Andreas Ulrich, “New Documents Reveal Truth on NATO’s ‘Most Damaging’ Spy.”

35.

Dan Bilefsky, “Russian Spy Tale Rattles Czechs,” The New York Times (December 23, 2010).

36.

“Russia’s Spy Services Identified as ‘the Most Active Espionage Organizations’ in the Czech Republic,” Atlantic Council (August 22, 2012).

37.

Molly Redden, “FBI Probing Whether Russia Used Cultural Junkets to Recruit American Intelligence Assets,” Mother Jones (October 23, 2013).

38.

“Russia Rejects US Allegations That Russian Cultural Exchange Director Was Spying against US,” The Washington Post (October 24, 2013).

39.

Joëlle Stolz, “Vienne, nid d’espions,” Le Monde (November 17, 2010).

40.

Jauvert, “Révélations sur les espions russes,” 13.

41.

Jorge Benitez, “Intelligence Chief: ‘Brussels Is One of the Big Spy Capitals of the World,’” Atlantic Council (September 17, 2012).

42.

Benitez, “Intelligence Chief.”

43.

Mark Galeotti, “Keeping Tabs on Putin’s Spooks,” The Moscow News (December 26, 2011).

44.

Edward Lucas, Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West (London and Berlin: Bloomsbury, 2012), 311–312.

45.

Lucas, Deception, 22.

The Search for Russian “Soft Power”

Russian Soft Power

Introduction: US Soft Power and the Father of Perestroika

What Is Soft Power?

Soft Power Is a Variable Currency

How to Measure Soft Power?

“Myagkaya Sila”: The History of the Soft-Power Debate in Russia

How Did Russia Assess Its Own Soft-Power Potential?

The Triple Reduction: How the “Soft-Power” Concept Was Redefined in Contemporary Russia

Vladimir Putin’s Concept of “Soft Power”: Hard Power in a Velvet Glove

Notes

The Three Components of the Kremlin’s Soft-Power Offensive

The Kremlin’s Mimetic Soft-Power Instruments: The Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, Rossotrudnichestvo, and Russkiy Mir

Other Mimetic Structures: The Russian International Affairs Council and the Gorchakov Foundation

“RollBack”: The Assault on the Russian NGOs

Invention: New Tools for the Kremlin’s Soft-Power Offensive

Notes

“Reputation Laundering”

Hiring Western Lobbying Firms: The Cases of Kissinger Associates and Ketchum

A French PR Firm and the Poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko

A Personal Experience

The Valdai Discussion Club: How It Is Used by the Kremlin

Notes

The Propaganda Offensive in the Western Media, Part I

Overt and Covert Propaganda

Russia Today (RT): Conspiracy Theories and Weirdly Constructed Propaganda

Russia beyond the Headlines: New Methods to Build Soft Power

The Kremlin Assault on RIA Novosti

Notes

The Propaganda Offensive in the Western Media, Part II

Buying Western Newspapers, Part I: The Case of France-Soir in France

Buying Western Newspapers, Part II: The Case of the London Evening Standard and the Independent in Britain

Gaining a Hold over the Social Networks: The Case of Facebook and Vkontakte

Trolls and Kremlin Bloggers

Notes

Financing Politicians and Political Parties

Introduction: The Soviet Legacy

Suspicion in France and the Netherlands

An EU Commissar, British Politicians, and a Russian Oligarch

Conservative Friends of Russia

Buying Influence in the Former Soviet Bloc: The Cases of Lithuania, Estonia, and the Czech Republic

Corruption Risks in Europe

Notes

Spies and Spooks as Soft-Power Instruments?

Willy Brandt and the Guillaume Affair: A Model?

1991: The Taming of the Beast

Stationing “Illegals” in Foreign Countries: The Chapman Story

The “Magnificent Five” and Their Heirs

High-Level Infiltration Is Reaching Unprecedented Heights

Notes

Introduction: US Soft Power and the
Father of Perestroika

Invention: New Tools for the Kremlin’s
Soft-Power Offensive

A French PR Firm and the Poisoning of
Viktor Yushchenko

The Valdai Discussion Club: How It Is Used
by the Kremlin

Buying Western Newspapers, Part II:
The Case of the London Evening Standard and the Independent in Britain

An EU Commissar, British Politicians,
and a Russian Oligarch

Stationing “Illegals” in Foreign Countries:
The Chapman Story

High-Level Infiltration Is Reaching
Unprecedented Heights