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Russian bid to counter Western criticism
New publications tout Putin's achievements and aim to clear up 'misunderstandings.'
By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 8, 2007 edition
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MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides at the Kremlin say they feel surrounded, and they're not going to take it anymore.
Russian corporations are being foiled abroad; the Russian state is being unfairly blamed for volatility in global energy markets; and suggestions that the state is eliminating its critics are just preposterous.
Why all the bad press? Because of "Russophobia" – an unreasoning Western hostility toward Russia – according to the Kremlin.
"I see a campaign here," Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in a TV interview last week. "The stronger we are becoming, the greater, perhaps, is the number of those willing ... to prevent us from getting stronger."
Amid all the allegations that the Kremlin – in a reprise of KGB tactics – is behind the mysterious deaths of two investigative journalists and a former KGB agent turned critic in recent months, President Putin is turning to a page out of the old Soviet playbook.
His aides are reviving elements of the Soviet Union's once-massive propaganda machine as well as considering fresh approaches.
Novosti, the USSR's "information agency," has been renamed RIA-Novosti and is being bolstered by a flood of Putin-era petrocash. It has started an English-language satellite news network called Russia Today and a monthly feature magazine named Russia Profile, both of which carry offerings on the good job Putin is doing in the world and next to nothing on things like the conflict in Chechnya or the murder of government critics. The organization also brings Moscow's spin to US readers with paid supplements in The Washington Post and other papers.
"Many forgotten forms of work are being restored," says Pyotr Romanov, a Novosti veteran. "We feel there is a lot of misunderstanding about Russia out there, and that the Russian point of view urgently needs to be expressed in the world media."
But recently, that's become a tougher sell.
Investigative journalists who died
Ivan Safronov, a reporter for the Kommersant daily who was investigating planned Russian weapons sales to Syria and Iran, fell to his death from a window in his Moscow apartment building last Friday. His paper said he was being pressured by the government to stop his investigations and that he had been questioned multiple times by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the agency that replaced the KGB.
His death followed the mob-style killing of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya last October in Moscow, who had written extensively about government torture and murder in Chechnya, and the murder by poisoning of former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London the next month. Litvinenko had accused Putin of mob ties and of ordering Politkovskaya's murder.
Wednesday, the US Embassy in Moscow confirmed that two Soviet-born American women had been hospitalized for thallium poisoning in Moscow, though both were recovering. How they were poisoned is under investigation.
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