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will, and they will set the agenda. It worked for a while. Peskov held a few dinners for Moscow correspondents in fancy restaurants (rather more formal than the kind of thing we really had in mind), and that went down well. They instituted ‘Tuesday briefings’ with selected ministers. The Moscow press corps was delighted. But after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, Peskov became too worried: he knew that whatever the formal topic of a briefing, journalists would end up asking about human rights and democracy. Safer not to meet them.
    Much of Ketchum’s work involved the kind of things that most governments get done internally, by their embassies and foreign ministry – in whom the Kremlin evidently had little faith. We organised press conferences for government ministers when they travelled abroad, and provided briefing papers for them with the questions they were likely to be asked (and sometimes with the answers we thought they ought to give – though they rarely used them). We drafted articles for ministers (and even the president) which were generally redrafted out of all recognition in Moscow and became so unreadable that they were difficult to place in any newspaper. Part of the mystery of this aspect of the work was that Peskov would ask us to draft an article for, say, the energy minister, or the foreign minister, but give us no guidance whatsoever as to what they wished to say. He would usually reply, if asked: ‘Just put in what you think he should say.’ So we would draft articles –and speeches – blind. And then they would be completely rewritten. Foreign minister Lavrov, in particular, (rightly) had no interest in having his articles drafted by ignorant foreigners.
    Every day Ketchum provided the Kremlin with three press reviews, compiled in Japan, Europe and the United States, which gave a comprehensive – perhaps rather too detailed – picture of coverage of Russia around the globe. The reviews often came to well over a hundred pages, with summaries and full texts of any article that mentioned the word Russia, but with little analysis. During the period of the first contract, for the G8 year, Ketchum employed an outside agency to colour-code every article in the press, with red, yellow or green, to indicate negative, neutral or positive stories, so that by the end of the G8 year this could be plotted on a graph to demonstrate that there were more greens and fewer reds. This is a common PR technique which unfortunately did not transport well to the nuanced world of Kremlin politics. Often the colours seemed to be picked at random, and bore little relation to the content – even sports news or a weather report could turn up with a red or green button. (This ‘service’ was eventually dropped, after it was realised it was useless.)
    The Kremlin received regular ‘road-maps’ – ‘big picture’ PR strategies for the coming three months / six months / year, wrapped in management-speak about ‘leveraging opportunities going forward’, ‘deliverables’ and ‘reaching out to stakeholders’. In practice much of the work boiled down to the more mundane business of helping with ministerial visits, organising press conferences and briefing on key developments in the West.
    As a newcomer to the PR world I was amused by the nebulous concepts of ‘influencer’ relations and ‘third-party outreach’ – cultivating contacts with experts and ‘thought leaders’ who had an interest in Russia. Ketchum was meticulous in reporting any contact, such as having lunch with someone from a think-tank or attending a lecture, which would all end up in the record of completed tasks sent each month to Moscow. And if one of those influencers produced a positive line in some article, this could then be quoted in a report-back as a ‘success’. I remember one report of Ketchum’s achievements included a quotation from the Canadian prime minister, saying, ‘I think Russia’s made an enormous amount of progress in recent years.’ It was not clear whether the Kremlin really believed that we contributed to that.
    One undoubted success was the introduction of ‘tele-briefings’, where journalists could call in to participate in a news conference with Peskov or a government minister. The Russians found these more agreeable than face-to-face meetings, and finally acquired a way to interpret their actions to the press.
    Over the three years working with him I got to know Dmitry Peskov fairly well. Tall,