Strongman, The

smartly dressed and in his early 40s, he has a charming, easy-going style, and speaks excellent English (and also Turkish, having worked for many years in the embassy in Ankara). He was spotted by President Yeltsin during a trip to Turkey in 1999 and brought back to work in the presidential administration. When Putin came to power he became head of the Kremlin’s press relations office and deputy spokesman to the president. Ever since then he has been a priceless asset, almost the only person in Russia with the ability, the authority and the willingness to give on-the-record interviews to the foreign press. As a result he was in huge demand. My colleagues in the BBC Moscow bureau, who had an insatiable demand for talking heads, used to plead with me: ‘Please get them to provide other spokespeople. Dmitry’s great, but he just doesn’t have the time …’ But other than a few ministers, no one else in Russia was willing to give interviews to the Western press. No wonder they found it so hard to get their message across.
    I gave Dmitry media training to help him feel more comfortable in front of the television camera. It was an opportunity not just to draw his attention to his voice or mannerisms, but also to subject him to the toughest possible questions, and train him in the art of expressing a few essential ideas succinctly and coherently. Many interviewees who have not studied how a Western news bulletin works tend to ramble on interminably, never getting to the point.
    During a G8 summit in Germany in 2007, Peskov approached me with a special task – to rewrite and spice up a speech President Putin was to make in Guatemala City in support of Russia’s bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The bid was successful – for which I naturally take the entire credit! (In truth, most of my suggestions were not accepted!) When Dmitry Medvedev became president in 2008 I gave advice about videos and podcasts, and saw at least some of my ideas incarnated in his innovative video-blogs.
    Dmitry’s boss, Alexei Gromov, was one of the most important men in the Kremlin during Putin’s presidency. He was described to me as ‘the only person who could walk into Putin’s office without an appointment’. He saw him every day and was a constant sounding board for policy ideas. He also exercised tight control over the Russian media. I was once drinking tea in his office when the head of Russian state television walked in. Gromov introduced me briefly to him, then waved him through to his back office, asking him to pour himself a drink and wait. This was the regular weekly pep-talk, where Gromov talked through the agenda for the coming period and made sure coverage would be ‘correct’.
    Like Peskov, Gromov started out in the diplomatic service, posted to Prague and Bratislava, and was brought back to head Yeltsin’s press service in 1996. He has a penchant for patterned cardigans and smokes Marlboros through long cigarette-holders. As Putin’s press secretary he dealt exclusively with the Russian media, leaving the foreign press to Dmitry Peskov. During one meeting with Gromov I raised one of my perennial themes: the West regarded Russia as reverting more and more to Soviet ways of thinking and behaviour, and in order to combat this it was necessary not only to stop acting like the Soviets (by banning opposition demonstrations, for example) but also to forcefully repudiate the Soviet past in speeches and in documentaries that could be shown on state television. Gromov’s reply was revealing. He conceded that this would have a positive effect on the West’s attitudes, but, he said, ‘we have to think about domestic public opinion, which generally is positive about the Soviet Union. We have to think about political stability inside the country first and foremost.’ I found it depressing that he simply accepted that many Russians, especially older ones, were nostalgic about the past, and that challenging this view could lead to ‘instability’. With his influence over the state media, he could have launched a campaign to change perceptions of the past. After all, this had been done under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and attitudes had changed. Now the government, by its inaction, was allowing Stalinism and communism to enjoy a revival. Worse than that – as we shall see in a later chapter – school textbooks were being rewritten to play down Stalin’s crimes.
    Over the years I tried to be as candid as possible