The Russia Conundrum

As long ago as 2001, the threat to free speech in Russia had prompted me to set up a training scheme for young journalists, in which promising reporters from regional newspapers, television and radio could learn from prominent figures in the industry. Guest lecturers from independent journals such as Novaya Gazeta

, Kommersant

and the online gazeta.ru tried to develop a spirit of questioning curiosity in our young journalists, but found the task harder than they had expected. One lecturer said he struggled to convince the trainees that they should always distrust the official version of stories promulgated by the central or local authorities. He said they had lost the journalist’s natural reflex to question the motives of politicians and PR men, so he had to make them promise always to ask themselves, ‘Who benefits from this story?’

In the years since then, independent-minded TV channels and newspapers have been targeted, threatened or taken over by Putin-friendly billionaires. Their editors are now made to attend regular ‘discussions’ with the Kremlin’s media-oversight team, at which their editorial lines are dictated to them. The editors are instructed to avoid reporting issues of economic and social shortcomings and are pointed instead towards puff pieces about the government. They are instructed to adopt a critical approach to the West, promoting the perception that the Western democracies are in social and moral decline, while Russians should be thankful to Putin that they live in a stable, morally upright nation. Konstantin Ernst, the chief executive of the main state TV channel, Perviy Kanal, and the man who orchestrated the grandiose patriotism of the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, explained the media’s role in terms redolent of Bolshevik ideology. ‘The main task of television today,’ Ernst declared, ‘is to mobilise the country’,’ adding that ‘informing the country’ is merely ‘task number two’.

The result of the Kremlin’s new media-propaganda nexus is a caricatural representation of an America riven by racial injustice, where rampant Russophobia is surpassed only by identity politics so out of control they risk triggering a full-blown ethnic war. As for Western Europe, the picture painted by the Russian media is of societies dominated by LGBTQ+ activists, which they depict as a degenerate ‘Gayropa’. The influential, pro-Kremlin TV presenter Dmitry Kiselev, known as ‘Putin’s mouthpiece’, announced on air that gays ‘should be prohibited from donating blood and sperm, and in the case of a road accident, their hearts should be either buried or cremated as unsuitable for the prolongation of life’. During the Tokyo Olympics, Olga Skabeyeva, the main presenter of Rossiya 1’s primetime talk show, Sixty Minutes

, delivered a startlingly homophobic commentary over images of Tom Daley, Britain’s gay, gold-medal winning diver, while Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, explained that the Russian competitor came only third because he was ‘constantly forced to puke at the sight of those queers’.

Putin’s increasing reliance on stoking chauvinistic Russian nationalism to maintain his support base in difficult economic times has led him to depend on ever-more extreme expressions of xenophobia. America and Europe are now depicted as spoiling for a fight with Russia, inciting anti-Russian unrest in former Soviet republics considered part of Russia’s ‘near-abroad’. In recent years, Putin has sought to propagate a simplistic narrative of jealous foreign rivals, desperate to hurt Russia. ‘It has always been thus,’ he wrote in 2021:

from times of ancient folklore through to our modern history. Our opponents or potential opponents have always used very ambitious, power-hungry people to attack Russia. People, including Russians, are growing tired. In all countries of the world, people’s irritation has grown, and there is displeasure, including about living conditions and income levels. When a person’s living standards decline, he starts blaming the authorities … And, of course, people in Europe, in the US and in other countries are trying to take advantage of that.