Strongman, The

uppity foreign ambassadors.
    Already there were calls from conservative quarters to expel Russia from the G8, or at the very least for President Bush to boycott the St Petersburg summit.
    In the gloomy corridors of the presidential administration, hidden behind the dark-red walls of the Kremlin, they came up with a novel idea: Russia needed to project its image better. They needed a Western public-relations company to help them. There was no tender. 1 Personal contacts led them to a leading New York PR firm, Ketchum, and a European partner, GPlus, based in Brussels. The most senior executives from the two companies flew into Moscow and made a joint pitch to Putin’s press secretary Alexei Gromov, and his deputy Dmitry Peskov. (The two men divided the role of spokesman between them: Gromov was in overall charge, but the fluent English-speaker Peskov dealt almost exclusively with the foreign press.)
    It was at this point that the directors of GPlus – former journalist colleagues of mine – asked me to join their team as chief Russia consultant. Much of this chapter is based on my experiences there.
    We saw our main task as Kremlin advisers as a rather simple one: to teach the Russians about how the Western media operate and try to persuade them to adopt the best practices of government press relations. We were advisers, not spokespeople. But whereas the Westerners who advised Boris Yeltsin’s government on economics in the 1990s were beating on an open door, advising Putin’s team on such an ‘ideological’ subject as media relations was never going to be so easy. Peskov did, in fact, show great interest in studying Western practices, but after some initial success we watched our ‘client’ drifting back into their old ways. As the Politkovskaya murder was followed by the Litvinenko murder, and then by the Russian invasion of Georgia, I began to wonder whether the very reason the Kremlin had decided to take on a Western PR agency was because they knew in advance that their image was about to nosedive.
    They were prepared to pay big money to try to burnish that image. Ketchum declarations filed with the US Department of Justice show that the Russians paid, in the early years, almost $1 million a month. 2 (A separate Ketchum contract with Gazprom – in deep trouble over its ‘gas wars’ with Ukraine – cost about the same). The financial arrangements were not directly with the Kremlin, but with a Russian bank, thus avoiding the need to be approved in the state budget. 3 The whole idea was criticised by some Russian media, which wondered why the Kremlin needed a Western (as opposed to a Russian) PR agency, and why it was not put out to tender as a state contract. 4
    The biggest problem Ketchum faced was that the Russians had little clue about how the Western media function. Based on their experience of the domestic media, they were genuinely convinced that we could pay for better coverage – that a positive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal , for example, had a certain price. They believed that journalists write what their newspaper proprietors (or governments) order them to write, and wanted to ‘punish’ correspondents who wrote critically about them by refusing to invite them to press events (thereby, in fact, forfeiting the chance to influence them). They subjected the Guardian ’s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding (and his family) to constant harassment, apparently because of an interview his paper published with Boris Berezovsky in which he called for Putin to be overthrown – even though Harding had nothing to do with the conduct or content of the interview. 5 At the height of the Litvinenko affair, three members of the BBC’s Russian team in Moscow were attacked in the street. All this was hardly likely to incline the journalistic community towards the kind of positive coverage the Kremlin craved. They would constantly demand that Ketchum ‘use our technologies’ to improve coverage. I had no idea what they meant. The technology we wanted them to use was a West Wing-style press room, every morning at ten o’clock. But it never happened.
    In briefing-paper after briefing-paper we hammered away at our basic theme – open up to the press. Mix with journalists, take them for lunches, schmooze, give them titbits off the record, and gradually win them over. Speak to them, explain yourselves, and they will begin to trust you. Give interviews and get on air, because if you don’t your opponents