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to Western audiences and became an effective propaganda tool of the Kremlin. RT’s success inspired the Kremlin to also revamp The Voice of Russia, an international radio station. On 9 December 2013, Putin issued a presidential decree, merging The Voice of Russia with the news agency RIA Novosti and forming a new international news agency Rossiia Segodnia (Russia Today). The radio station was transformed into Radio Sputnik, becoming part of a broader platform, Sputnik News, which also had an online presence. The new international radio station began to broadcast on 10 November 2014.
“Russia Beyond the Headlines”: Targeting Western Elites
The objectives of RT and Sputnik included targeting broad international audiences, yet the Kremlin never gave up the idea to also reach out to the Western elites. This was the reason to launch another project in 2007—Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH). The initiator of this project was the Rossiiskaia Gazeta (The Russian Newspaper), the official Kremlin paper in which state laws and decrees are published and official views are reflected. This project was extremely ambitious, and once a month a Russian eight-page supplement was added to a number of highly influential Western papers, including The Washington Post (United States),13 The New York Times (United States), The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom), Le Figaro (France), Repubblica (Italy), El País (Spain), De Standaard (Belgium), and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). The titles of this supplement were: Russia Now in the United States and the U.K.; La Russie d’Aujourd’hui in France; Russland Heute in Germany; Russia Oggi in Italy; and Rusia Hoy in Spain. Each of these printed supplements had their own website that could be reached via links offered by these newspapers at their official websites. The Russians succeeded in making the supplement look like a Western newspaper, with an attractive layout and interesting texts that covered sport events, cultural issues, cuisine, art, and faits divers.
Interestingly, one could not find any straightforward Kremlin propaganda in it. In fact, some publications openly criticized Kremlin leaders. One of them was an interview with the Russian writer Liudmila Ulitskaia who discussed her correspondence with the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, praising him as “brilliant.” The 2011–2012 mass protests in Russia were characterized as the events that had made political life in Russia “more lively.” These texts, critical of the political regime in Russia, had no chance to be published in these supplements’ mother paper—Rossiiskaia Gazeta (Russian Newspaper). So what was the strategy behind these practices?
The Russians understood very well that merely copying the content and layout of Izvestiia (News) or Moskovskii Komsomolets (Moscow Komsomol Member) into the supplement would hardly win the hearts and minds of Western readers. Therefore, Russian propagandists designed two stratagems that were used to mollify and manipulate Western readers. The first included diminishing their cognitive dissonance by adapting the content and the style of publications to fit their liberal critical Western mind. The second stratagem was the application of the two-step flow of communication model, offered by the Austrian-American sociologist and the founder of Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research Paul Lazarsfeld. He has argued that information disseminated by the mass media does not find its way directly to broader audiences, but is rather indirectly channeled to them through opinion leaders.14 For this reason, it was especially the Western quality newspapers that were targeted by the Kremlin, and not the tabloids. The RBTH project was a living example of active disinformation. Its main objective was to ascribe a “liberal” image to the Kremlin, a KGB old strategy. Attributing liberal values to the KGB chief Yurii Andropov can serve as an example of this strategy. In 1982, when he became the Soviet leader and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the KGB presented him as a modern, Western-style, jazz-loving man and a whisky drinker. In reality, Andropov had kidney problems and could not drink alcohol.
The RBTH project has gone through several changes in recent years. On 9 January 2016, the RBTH became part of TV Novosti, and in 2017 the printed versions were dropped, although printed supplements in the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal continued into 2018. The decision to drop the print media was probably made because the project was costly and was increasingly criticized in Western media. This might have been one of the reasons why in September 2017 the project name, RBTH, dropped the last two words, becoming Russia Beyond.15
Buying Western Papers: The Case of France-Soir
In 2009 in France, where a popular paper France-Soir was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was bought by the Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev and his son Aleksandr. They planned to transform this paper into a popular mass-selling tabloid, similar to the German Bild or the English Sun. The young Pugachev who was in charge openly expressed his extreme-right sympathies. “I like the ideas of Le Pen,” he said.16 His bias in favor of the extreme right became even clearer in March 2011, when during the campaign for the regional elections in March 2011 the paper published the results of an opinion poll, commissioned by the paper, about the Front National, an unconditional supporter of the Putin regime.17 The results of this poll were accompanied by an editorial that praised the Front National for having become a party “just like the others.”
In order to have a significant influence on their subscribers, papers need mass readership. In the United Kingdom, for instance, The Sun has a readership of approximately two million, and in Germany Bild reached approximately one million. The Pugachevs aimed high. They even hired a man who had led an (abandoned) Springer project to launch a French version of Bild. However, the paper never sold more than 75,000 copies, and in 2012 the paper was liquidated. As a result, an attempt to win support of a mass tabloid in France for the Front National, a party that supported Putin’s regime unconditionally, failed.
Interestingly, in the United Kingdom the former KGB agent Aleksandr Lebedev and his son Yevgenii launched a similar project. They bought The London Evening Standard and The Independent. Although Lebedev publicly supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, he is far from being a Kremlin tool or a fan of the extreme right. Together with the former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev owns the Russian opposition paper Novaia Gazeta (New Newspaper). One of its prominent journalists, Anna Politkovskaia, who covered Russia’s campaigns in Chechnya and who was a vocal critic of Putin and the FSB, was assassinated on 6 October 2006 in the center of Moscow.18 Until today, the editorial line of The Independent has remained true to its name.
Kremlin Trolls
Anonymous state-sponsored Internet political commentators, known as Kremlin trolls, is another innovation in Russia’s information war against the West. The origin of this phenomenon is associated with symbiotic cooperation that developed among the Russian government, the Russian secret services, and the Kremlin-sponsored youth movement, known as Nashi (Ours). In 2009, the Kremlin pundit and the director of the Foundation for Effective Politics Gleb Pavlovskii set up a project entitled the “Kremlin School of Bloggers.”19 Pavlovskii’s Foundation for Effective Politics is a think tank that has been instrumental in shaping the Russian ideology and Russian identity over the last decade.
Since 2009, the “Kremlin School of Bloggers” has been advocating, defending, and selling the Kremlin’s policies to the Internet community by writing blogs, attacking opposition websites, and posting comments on Facebook and Twitter. In times of increased tension with the West these activities reached new heights. In May 2014,