during Russia’s invasion of Georgia, RT became a source of active disinformation, depicting the Georgians as the ones who committed genocide against Abkhazians and residents of South Ossetia. This narrative was embraced by other Russian news outlets and scholars at prestigious Russian universities (i.e., MGIMO), and it persists today among Russian journalists and the Russian political elite.9 From the moment RT’s focus began to change. Defensive “soft power” tools were replaced with an offensive tool of disinformation that helped RT accentuate the negative sides of the West in general, and the United States in particular. Routinely, an emphasis was made on the growing social inequality, race problems, homeless people’s suffering, mass unemployment, human rights violations, and the consequences of the banking crisis. Anchors of RT programs, such as Peter Lavelle, did not hide their explicit anti-American views.10
RT began to invite “experts,” many of whom represented marginal or extreme right groups. One of these groups was the “truthers,” people who believed that the 9/11 attacks were not the work of al-Qaeda, but of the U.S. government.11 Another group was the “birthers” who, without offering any evidence, doubted Barack Obama was born in the United States, and questioned his eligibility to serve as American president. Manuel Ochsenreiter, an “expert” from Germany and the editor of the neo-Nazi magazine Zuerst! has been regularly invited as a speaker by RT’s English-language channel. The Economist did not hesitate to qualify RT’s programs as “weirdly constructed propaganda” characterized by “a penchant for wild conspiracy theories.”12 Despite this sort of criticism, and Western nations’ constraints and regulations which prescribe the rules of impartiality, RT acquired free access 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
