Angry Planet - 'Nothing is real, anything is possible': How Putin's propaganda machine works

Episode Date: December 1, 2015

The media in Russia is lively, often entertaining and largely state controlled. Still, an illusion of freedom remains key for the Kremlin to maintain its grasp over a country that spans 11 time zones. In this episode of War College, we look at how Vladimir Putin crafts his message for both internal and external consumption.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. If Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% propaganda and 25% violent. The media in Russia is lively, often entertaining, and largely state-controlled. Still, an illusion of freedom remains key to the Kremlin's grip on a country that spans 11 times of.

Today on War College, we look at how Vladimir Putin crafts his message for both internal and external consumption. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. Today, we're speaking with Peter Pomeranzov, a journalist and former Russian TV producer. His book, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible, which, by the way, is a fantastic title, explores the Kremlin's weaponization of information.

So thanks very much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. So, Peter, I want to open with a quote from your book and then a question. So you say that TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country, referring to Russia. It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism, one far subtler than the 20th century strains. Can you explain to us what this new type of authoritarianism is,

and how is it more subtle than its predecessors? Sure. I mean, the big difference between, well, there's two or three big differences between contemporary authoritarianisms. And it's not just Russia. I mean, there's several, there's several ones we could focus on. I thought one Russian professor who appeared very well to me. He said, like, if Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% propaganda and 25% violence. You know, in a world where there's just so many more information mechanisms, new authoritarian

can use them to a much more sophisticated degree. I mean, the way it was more sophisticated, and it is shifting now, was that if the Soviets would basically suppress any kind of descent and try to hammer home one big message, Putin's teabocracy was much more cunning. it would allow sort of pockets of freedom. It would allow liberals to exist, but then it would frame and manipulate them in a certain way to make them, at the end of the day, strengthen Putin and the Kremlin. I mean, in a world, there are so many media resources, you can't censor everything, you can't suppress everything, but you can be subtle and sort of play it. I mean, so I'll

give you a few examples. So you do have talk shows in Russia. I mean, if you've sort of debating shows, political debating shows. They're actually very, very good. But they're centrally scripted. So there's a sort of fake left-week party, which is created in the Kremlin and run by the Kremlin. And there's a fake right-wing party, which is created and run by the Kremlin. And they kind of debate with each other. Both of them are so absurd, they make Putin look sensible by contrast. Or, for example, there is, you know, one of the institutions I worked for in Russia was something called Snob Media, which was run by. created by Russia's richest man. And it was meant to be like the Russian version of the New Yorker.

Plus, there's going to be a TV channel which never materialized, but there was a publishing house. And there was a website, sort of an elite Facebook, sort of a closed Facebook. And anyway, so it was dedicated to creating a new type of Russian, what we called global Russians. And you could tell everyone how awful Putin was. Mashigessen, you know, the great Maschegosin, you know,

the Great Matchesson, I'm sure you know, it was one of the editors. It was, it was, you know, an arc, a Noah's arc of liberalism in many ways. But at the same time, we were all really aware when we worked there that, my God, you know, this is being funded by Russia's richest man. There's no way he couldn't have done this without the Kremlin's kind of, you know, permission. And that was kind of the point. So, I mean, the point was to give liberals a place to breathe and sort of bend their frustrations.

But at the same time, you know, it was called snob. It was funded by Russia's richest man. The Krebren could easily go, look at these liberals, look at their global Russians, look at the lifestyle they promote. Their politics is liberal and their lifestyle that promote a sort of holidays in Europe, which is inaccessible to the vast majority of Russians. So the Kremlin could go, look at our liberal oppositions, funded by these sort of like the westernized, spoiled oligarchs.

And sure enough, the guy who funded it then became the pseudo-liberal candidates at the elections. He got a very respectful of 14%, soaked up the liberal vote, and then promptly disappeared from the political scene. He kind of done his job. So it's a much, much subtler and much more kind of system than just like, you know, stupid old Soviet rule to suppress dissent and thus created a really sort of like strong anti-communist movement.

So who's behind it? Who's thinking in such a, I don't know, a sophisticated, smart way? Well, I mean, look, it developed. You know, we can look at the way it developed through the 90s. Actually, the first people who let it happen were Democrats. So in the mid-1990s, it looks as if Yeltsin, who was a more kind of pro-Western president, would lose the elections to the communists, who'd really become social democrats by then. And so all the oligoths got together, because they were really scared of this.

And in order to save democracy, they hired a sort of a new type of political consultant called a political technologist, sort of a 21st century propagandist, to create sort of pseudo-scare stories and help rig the votes and help rig the election. And it's quite funny, it was a class of liberal political consultants who actually made this happen. A lot of the regret it now, a lot of them say, openly, that was the moment when Russia lost it in 96. So in order to save democracy, we used undemocratic means. But with time, kind of one of this class of political consultants emerged as the most powerful one. A guy called Vladislav Sorkov,

who's very much a tight guy's kind of figure. He was a bohemian and a dissident, all kind of dissident in Soviet times, studied theatre, then became a PR guy, he sponsors modern art festivals, writes postmodern novels, which are okay about a cynical PR man. And he kind of,

he calls himself one of the authors of the system. I mean, he talks about it openly, and he ran him for a while, around TV and political parties. But I wouldn't say it's one person. It's a very, you know, it's a big state. It's a very fluid, reactive state. Sook came to symbolize it in many ways.

I don't think anyone has total control. Not even Putin himself? Well, Putin doesn't, oh, in that sense, you mean? As in like, is it? Putin is the arbiter of all the decisions. I mean, nobody's, the system isn't, it is a postmodern system that way. You know, it can sort of like work in very,

ways and like somebody in the provinces can be running their own mini project or some of the oil and gas thing will be running their own mini project. It's quite flexible. It's not actually very rigid that way. We've said the word postmodern a couple times here. And in your book, you say a postmodern dictatorship is one that uses language in the institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends. And you kind of talk about how this model of Kremlin propaganda kind of takes the West, digests it, and then perverts it. So could you explain how the Kremlin does this? How do they use the Western messages and twist them on television?

And what exactly is, do you mean by a postmodern dictatorship? So the key ideas of postmodernity are the idea of the, you know, or Bodri article, the Simulacra, yeah, a thing which looks like something, but actually isn't it itself and something quite different. Some Lacra is maybe the most overused word in Russian politics, all the analysts use it. So we have pseudo-political parties, pseudo-independent media. It's all pseudo.

It all looks free, but actually once you get into it, it works to completely different ways. This was one of the great things of Khachabendu Kizza, the great Georgian reformer, maybe one of the most effective post-Soviet reformers, who was like, we live, and he used to quote Boudriard quite a lot. We live in a world where nothing is what it seems. I mean, the police do not are not. actually police, they're involved in racketeering. The tax agency, I'm not the tax agency.

All the signs you see are something else. So that's what we mean. Also, we mean by the loss, the lack of any one coherent narrative, many, many, many, many little narratives and the lack of a stable social individuality and role. But just coming back to this idea of some alacro, because that's the most coherent one where we talk about policy. So take elections in Russia. Russia has, you know, elections with different political parties. running against each other and competing and, you know, there are debates on TV. If you were to just tune into it, you would think, oh my God, it looks just like America. However, everybody knows who's going to win, at priori.

Everyone knows that they will be rigged. And there's a great essay by Stephen Holmes about this. New York University professor that it's actually a ritual. It's actually a ritual where you go and pretend to sort of take part in the serious vote. Everyone knows exactly what's going to happen. the faking is quite transparent. The state is saying, we are so powerful, we can fake these results. And the whole point is for the state to show its power.

So even though it's authoritarian power. So through the ritual of a democratic vote, or looks like a democratic vote, you're actually reinforcing an authoritarian model. So that's one, I think, very, very good example of it. And that's sort of a fairly pointed one, because elections is always what we sort of associate with democracy. So that's actually taken from the West in a way, right? I mean, that's, I mean, the Western idea and ideal of democracy.

And you talk about how the U.S. is used. Foreign media is woven into the Kremlin's version of the media. Right, you talk about Larry King quite a bit in your book and his RT show. Yeah, well, not quite a bit. I think Larry King has two lines in my book, but there are very important two lines. I apologize. You talk about Larry King as an example in your book.

Well, Larry, look, so I mean, here we're talking about RT, which is Larry King had a show in RT, which is the Kremlin's foreign broadcaster. It's not in Russian. It's an English, Spanish, Arabic, a few other languages, I think. So RT is very interesting, again, for the same reason.

So RT, when you switch it on, looks just like CNN on the BBC. I mean, down to the music, you know, it's like it's very, very similar. The presentation, everything. Switching on and going, oh, look, it's just another sort of like international TV news channel. And its slogan is very interesting. The slogan is question more, which is a really clever slogan because, you know, that's very much the Western ideal of what journalism should be all about. I don't know if you saw their advertising in Washington, D.C.

It was sort of Tony Blair preaching before really nicely sort of drawn posters. Tony Blair preaching before the Iraq war. and, you know, below says, this is what you get, I said, the Iraq war, if you don't have a second opinion. And then Conan Powell as well, which is, you know, how can you possibly disagree with that idea? That's, you know, the essence of Western, the Western ideal of journalism is to question more and question power and have a second opinion. But then RTE used that ideal to kind of do something very, very interesting. they sort of, well, basically they destroy, well, they destroy sort of the line between sort of information and disinformation.

Once you sort of get rid of the idea that there's any kind of sort of, you know, objective truth out there, which is, you know, there probably isn't. They kind of take that to its extreme by saying, well, then it's fine for us to do disinformation. Or they'll have experts who aren't, which literally just not cases taken off the street, a lot of the time, sort of a neo-Nazi from Germany will suddenly be key German expert on European affairs or somebody from Linda LaRoucher's organization will suddenly be key American experts on world development. Because once you get rid of, you know, once you take the very noble idea of questioning more, of undermining sort of hegemonic truth, and you take it to its

absolute extreme, you can basically say there's no difference between a Cambridge University professor and a freak. And so they take that, so strangely, they take a very, very healthy idea, and they take it to kind of like a place where it starts to undermine sort of its own, its own ideals. So again, a little bit like election. You take elections and you push them to a place, which is the opposite of their original meaning. So that's why RT is very interesting. And Larry King, God bless his soul and God bless his conscience, had a show on this.

And I really liked the advert for it because it was, you know, it was Larry King going, come watch my new show on our team. And then it was like all the words that we associate with good journalism, I don't know, you know, truth-seeking, research, you know, bravery, all these words sort of going very, very, very, very fast across the screen. And just visually, it was sort of taking all the cliches of Western journalism and sort of putting them through this kind of fast-forward effect, which in the end sort of makes to feel almost meaningless.

You know, they just become just words. And it always seemed to be like a big effew towards Western journalism. It's like, we can take your cliches and we can destroy them from inside. I don't know if they meant that. You know, sometimes an advert says something deeper than it's the people who created it, intended it. I have this feeling that RT, or at least RT.com, used to be a little bit more subtle. And the reason I say this is a couple of years ago, I don't know if you remember there was an American, at least alleged American spy who was a fairly low-grade official in the Moscow embassy, who was wearing, at least according to the RTV footage, a bad wig. when he was caught.

I think that was true. Yeah. Everyone covered that. Well, it was absolutely fascinating, though, because, of course, they broke the story. And I remember sitting in a newsroom, people wondering, oh, wow, who is this RT? And I think at least at first, it was kind of subtle. People didn't really recognize it as Kremlin propaganda. And I don't.

I don't know. When I watched RTV not very long ago, it was right before the Russians stepped in and started bombing in Syria. And they were talking about the U.S. bombing in Syria. And on the television channel, one thing I noticed is exactly what you were talking about. I mean, they did seem to have experts off the street. And they spoke about when they were talking about the U.S. bombing of ISIS, they referred to it very specifically as bombing civilians in Syria. And I don't know. Was it more subtle? I mean, was it always sort of this level?

I mean, they had some prominent anchors walk out a couple of years ago, saying things had gone too far. You know, it actually started as a soft PR project, quite classic soft PR project, just doing fluffy stuff about Russia. And then nobody wanted that. And they kind of changed in 2008 during the Georgian War. But they go through peaks and troughs, you know what I mean? My sense is that maybe they've really decided. it's a zero in on the kind of on the viewer they feel isn't catered for in the US, which is the kind of fringe left and fringe right view.

I think before maybe they were going for slightly more, you know, maybe PBSy sort of viewer. So I don't know, but listen, they occasionally do really good stories. I mean, they have a couple of, you know, it's all mixed in. It's the whole point. You do a good one, then you do a crazy one. You do a good one, do the crazy one. So even now, you could switch it on. and see a perfectly good story. So my sense is that after Crimea, it got really, really, really,

crass during the war in Ukraine. That's when they were told off by Offcock, the British regulator. And like in the US, we have regulators in the UK, and they've been told off, I know, four or five times, which is, you know, a lot for just, you know, telling lies, basically. So I don't know. It's a, I mean, I think, look, it's a tool of Russian foreign policy. So if the foreign policy is very sharp at the moment, at that moment, they'll really go for it. If the foreign policy is being friendly with the U.S., maybe they'll change their approach over the next couple of months because now Russia and the U.S. are bosom buddies again. All right, I have a question for you, Peter. You actually worked in Russian TV.

You were a TV producer. How overt is the control from your bosses? Like when you wanted to tell a story that they didn't necessarily want to tell, would they just, how did that work? How did they kind of steer the ship? Well, listen, I worked for an entertainment channel Because when I arrived When Iceland was working with Russian channels Which is 2006 to 2010

It was already kind of dodgy to work for in these channels So I was working for, you know My background is in entertainment So I worked for a channel which brought the sitcom to Russia And bought stand-up comedy to Russia And brought some reality shows to Russia And all that kind of stuff There was very

I mean they were actually Because they're an entertainment channel They could do really risque stuff in their comedy I mean, they did a Russian version of a British sketch show called Little Britain where they could do really risque stuff without ever naming names. I mean, there was a regular sketch about Russia's most corrupt, Russia's only uncorrupted traffic cop. And it's like, you know, he refuses to take any bribes. And he lives in Penurie and his wife has always, he must become corrupt like everyone else.

And there was a sketch about a hospital where, like, you know, there's a room where you pay a bribe. And, you know, you get this incredible sort of like, incredible health care and prostitutes and everything, and then next door is the normal one where just the sort of a national health thing and the people just dying horribly. Well, I got to say, though, speaking as an American here, I don't know about the NHS, that is actually literally the case. Yeah, no, no, no, no, I mean, I think the whole world knows about America's health care due to the excellent subjective and analytical reports to Michael Moore.

But the difference in Russia is you just give a bribe to the doctor. You just put in this pocket. You don't pay it to an institution. It's not. You know, they haven't got to the point where corruption becomes market capitalism. It's just corruption still. Maybe they'll mature into that. Actually, one of the big arguments for fighting corruption is just why don't you just institutionalize it, you know?

just make it exactly. Have it like in the US. Have it done officially. But so anyway, so actually being an Entame Channel, they could do a lot of, a lot of really risque stuff. But I also worked in their documentary department.

And one of the things they wanted to do was stories about teens, because it was kind of youth-oriented. And when I started doing stories about teens, I just found a lot of the stories had a political edge, because it was about teens being beaten up by the cops, which is a real problem.

Teens, you know, being sent to the army, is national service in Ukraine. And, you know, there's a terrible problem with hazing in Russia, like really bad. I mean, a lot of suiciders story about suicides among conscripts. And these shows rated well, because they were about people's lives,

and people enjoyed them, and young kids enjoyed them. But suddenly that made it political. And when I pitched the next one, they were like, go and do one about footballers' wives. So it's everyone kind of decide to themselves and everyone senses where the lines are.

And it's much, more a case of self-censorship in that sense, rather than anything else. People just instinctively know that they've gone too far. You were just talking about the military service. That was another really interesting part of your book. You wrote, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that moulds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service. And I wanted to see if you would speak to, like, explain to us what those rituals of avoidance are and how they shape those people's relationship with the state. Sure, sure. I mean, I always find this fascinating as well. It's a great question.

So, you know, compulsory national military services, one of the, you know, basic ways that many states build loyalty and identity. So Israel, clearly, probably the most obvious example of a state that's people really become Israeli when they're in the army. So Russia has compulsory national service. Certainly in Soviet times, going through the army was a big, big deal and a big part of you. really, you know, in a sense, being broken by the state. You know, that's where you were kind of broken in and humiliated a lot, and you became a good Soviet citizen. Nowadays, there's still compulsory national service,

but everyone who can gets out of it. But some people, if you're studying, you know, if you're a student at the university, that's one way of getting out. And actually, there's all these sort of, again, this is a blacklist, there's all these pseudo sort of higher educational institutions that get founded that you just pay some money and say you're studying. there and that gets you off. But not everyone can, you know, that's a lot of money. Imagine like just buying a college degree. It's going to be pretty expensive. So a lot of people can't

afford that. So what do they have to do? They have to pretend, they have to get like a letter from a hospital saying that they're physically unfit, you know, that they, you know, you've got asthma, diabetes or whatever. And that basically involves both the young person and their parent. essentially kind of being sucked into a world of corruption, even if they never wanted to be corrupt. Because you firstly have got to find a doctor who's going to give you this false piece of paper. You've got to find it. You've got to pay him money. That it's not, I mean, this is where Russia is so much fun. The doctor won't just give it to you.

You still have to come into hospital and spend a week there pretending to be really ill. So already a young person of 18 is already learning how to sort of like to survive in a society. he's going to fake it. A bit later when he grows up, he's going to pretend to vote. And everybody knows that they're pretending, but everyone kind of plays along, because this is the way society is formed over a long period of time. So you lie there pretending to be ill.

Then you get out, and you still have to go to the military place, where they will test you again. You'll give them the letter. They'll test you again, but they go along with it as well. You usually have to give another bribe there. And so, you know, to get out of military service,

you've gone through this whole kind of sort of labyrinth of of faking it and bribery and corruption which actually makes you the ideal citizen of contemporary Russia because all your life you're going to be sort of faking your voting in elections, faking your taxes, you're part

of this game, but where you're actually very dependent on the state because once you've faked it, firstly psychologically you're a little bit like that. Corruption was a great way. It always corrupts the person who's who's, you know, at the bottom of it giving the bribe as all as a person demanding it. And you kind of learn to think it's normal. You know, if you're already faking it from the age of 18,

then you know, it's no big deal to then kind of like go and pretend that you're, you know, voting in a real election or pretend you're paying the taxes when you're not. We had a guest just a couple of weeks ago, Mark Galiati, who was talking about the fact that Russian military conscription is only for one year. and that in fact it's very, very hard to train anyone and then turn them into good soldiers. And he said, basically, you have like three months of someone you can actually use on a battlefield

before they're gone. So I guess what you're saying would actually almost explain that. It's about breaking people in. Mark is the world's biggest exeter on the Russian military. I mean, so I actually have no idea what happened to the battlefield. But it definitely explained that it's much more about breaking people in. But the idea is very much to, you know, socialize people, make them part of, you know, make them part of the states rather than make them into great soldiers.

All right, Peter, what do you see are the, what are the weaknesses of this system that you've described and are the cracks kind of showing? The weakness is that it's got nothing to do in reality. You know, it's a pseudo, everything is fake. You know, there's, there's, there's, Putin is like this Tori Ador, you know, this bullfighter with this red cape of corruption and propaganda through which you avoid reality. And that's what everyone in Russia says. When will reality catch up with Russia? Because this world of truth is actually quite a useful thing.

There's a reason democracies allegedly try to stick to a real process. Makes us face up to the problems in the country. Elections make us sort of like checks, checks how well your administration's action you work and so on and so forth. And so it's just a system based on pretence and fakery, at one point, should hit the iceberg of reality. I'm really mixing my metaphors. Every time Putin comes near reality, he finds a way out there so far.

So, you know, in 2012, there were mass protests calling for real democracy, a real modernization plan, and he looked in trouble, and he invented a fake war. He invented fake fascists in Ukraine, and, you know, this kind of complete enough solution, but it was efficient to get his ratings back up. Now, you know, that's kind of expanded into the war with ISIS. I mean, ISIS, of course, is a very real enemy and it does need to be dealt with. But again, he's found a new story, a new narrative that distracts from the sad reality of the way Russian economy and society is going.

There is no domestic policy anymore in Russian TV. I worked on an EU project recently about Russian TV, and we did like an analysis of, content analysis of the news and stories on Russian news and current affairs. And there's hardly anything about social problems. It's all, when we were doing it, it was Ukraine. It was all, you know, the global conspiracy against Russia, civil war in Ukraine. The whole world is going to, you know, going to hell.

Only Putin can save it. It's like this movie about a world disintegrates into chaos with Putin as a sort of Batman-type hero to save it. Not a mention of sort of like, you know, hospitals or anything like that. So every time we think he's going to hit reality, he thinks of something bigger and better. And there's still a little big stories that he can think of. You can still do a big missile crisis somewhere.

There was the Arctic War, which they were playing with. They go on and on and on. Which when he runs out of stories, but he's like herazade of the Arabian nights. Thinks of another story. As soon as we think he's going to get executed, no, he pulls another one out of the hand. which is very much based on TV which comes back to our first thing. TV is obviously

sort of the satanic machine that cooks up all these new stories. They don't need to be that related to reality. With ISIS, they are related to reality. In Ukraine it was, you know,

hallucinated a war into reality. So they just need to do good stories. So there you go. He's like a huge TV producer, a huge entertainment TV producer. Like I was a tiny entertainment TV producer in Russia. He's like the great entertainment TV producer.

Well, that sounds like a terrific point to stop. I don't think we're going to get much better than that. So thank you very, very much, Peter, for joining us. Oh, and let me mention the name of the book again. Again, I think the title's fantastic. The book is, nothing is true and everything is possible. So check it out.

Next time on War College. In a general way, climate change means that there's going to be migration from south and north, both in Eurasia, Africa, and in North America, the question is how quickly we're going to act to slow it down.