Ms Chapman has also moved into politics: with a prominent but nominal role at Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard). Founded in 2005, this is the youth wing of the ruling United Russia Party. Though it portrays itself as an apolitical do-gooding organisation, keen on ecology, education and cleaning up government, it is in fact part of a wider Kremlin attempt to forestall any mass protests that might threaten the regime. A nightmare for the ‘political technologists’ who advise Russia’s rulers is a movement on the lines of Ukraine’s 2005 Orange Revolution – a spontaneous youth revolt against a corrupt and incompetent regime, prompted by blatant election rigging. Russia may seem unpromising ground for this, but this does not mean that the authorities are complacent. Like the parallel organisation Nashi (Ours), the Young Guard offers its members excitement, glamour, perks such as holidays and a professional and educational leg-up. It also has a thuggish streak, harassing opposition figures and interfering foreigners.
She appears less useful to her real-life business employers. Yulia Shamal, head producer at the ‘Mysteries’ show, says the new presenter doesn’t have time to do research but does come to editorial meetings. ‘Anya remembered she knew this clever successful person, an artist actually, who not only saw a UFO but managed to take a picture of it,’ says Ms Shamal, struggling to find an example of her star presenter’s editorial talents.
Ms Chapman’s biography does not suggest that she was a class act. But she was an effective one. Her glib but accented English, imperfectly tinted hair, garish clothes and unremarkable professional career were not a clever bluff, but the real thing. Neither ferociously clever nor blessed with steel nerves or hypnotic people skills, she never sought to match, like Heathfield, the talents of the global elite; her forte was to dance with them, to date them and to work alongside them. As a spy, her tradecraft was startlingly sloppy. In London, her company Southern Union was unable even to spell its phoney address properly on official documentation. Her written English was embarrassingly bad. Under pressure from the FBI she failed even to buy a mobile phone without mistakes that would shame a trainee in the first week of a course at Fort Monckton. In a panic, she called her father on an easily intercepted telephone line.
If that signalled the decline in professionalism of what was once the most efficient bit of Soviet bureaucracy, the way Ms Chapman got her job highlighted something else: nepotism. It is easy to infer that she had gained her plum job, complete with generous taxpayer backing for her business, thanks to birth not brains. Andrei Soldatov, the spy-watcher and author of The New Nobility, says: ‘All she did was to try and exploit her father’s connections in the SVR for money.’ Yulia Latynina, a leading opposition journalist, refers to Ms Chapman as ‘a very high-class prostitute in the West, with the state paying for all of her beautiful underwear and all her expenses’.
If it is hard to see what service Ms Chapman has rendered to Russia abroad, it is easy to see what she has done on her return. The failed spy has been a blank canvas on which the regime’s propagandists have painted their own image of Russia: unstoppable abroad, electrically exciting at home, youthful, daring and sexy. But the first priority was damage control. Aleksei Navalny, an opposition activist who has made his name with an online campaign against corruption in big business, notes that a bad image for Russia’s spies also damages Mr Putin, who has played heavily on his own background in the KGB. Mr Putin’s former senior speech-writer Simon Kordonsky, now a professor at the liberal Higher School of Economics, sees the regime’s eagerness to get its spies out of American custody as a manifestation of ‘corporate solidarity’ among Chekists, who felt compelled to show that ‘one of their own cannot be taken’. But as her celebrity status grew, Ms Chapman’s allure, not failure, quickly became a dominant theme. Some seasoned KGB veterans seem genuinely awestruck by her nerveless approach. Viktor Cherkashin, a former counter-intelligence officer in Washington and West Germany who retired in 1991, says she has the right mix of qualities for the modern age.
A person who can behave so naturally, be such a well-known figure in Russia, be part of high society, present a TV show – anyone who can behave like that is an ideal member of an illegals programme.
The growing hype was laced with another potent ingredient: anger over the spies’ betrayal. A Russian official told the Kommersant newspaper that an assassin had already been dispatched to deal with the defector who betrayed the illegals, though this seems to have been bravado.30 Mr Putin, after an evening singing patriotic ditties with the returned spies, said grimly that traitors end up ‘in the gutter’ and blamed ‘treason’ for the spies’ exposure. This approach fits broader propaganda themes favoured by the regime: cynical Western penetration and manipulation of Russian society, the ruthless use of foreign money, and the Soviet-style heroism of the state’s servants in difficult conditions.
In Russia’s glitzy, sex-obsessed media culture, Ms Chapman’s mysterious past and curvy figure were an easy sell. Joanna Seddon, an expert on branding, sees the ex-spy as a classic example of a celebrity who has ‘leveraged her misfortunes into not only media popularity but also tangible wealth’. She likens Ms Chapman to Martha Stewart, the billionaire American businesswoman who launched a triumphant commercial comeback after her five months in jail for insider trading. Each woman, she notes, ‘maintained the rightness of her actions throughout her troubles, providing a reason for her public to believe in her’. Having averted disaster and created a commercial triumph, the culmination of the propaganda response was to turn Ms Chapman into a political asset for a tired-looking regime that presides over a drab and increasingly backward country. Ms Chapman’s symbolic role in Young Guard provided the perfect platform. Yana Lantarova, the organisation’s Federal Charity Director, gushes about her new colleague:
She’s a very profound person – she loves her homeland sincerely. In the short time that she’s joined us she’s learnt how to speak sincerely and convincingly about it.
Ms Lantarova adds helpfully that Ms Chapman ‘fires up’ the movement’s male members. The enthusiasm is not universal. Kirill Schito, a member of the movement’s governing council and of the Moscow municipal assembly, is slightly less flattering, insisting that the benefit is ‘mutual’ and that Ms Chapman is ‘quite smart’. But however artificially staged Ms Chapman’s initial foray into politics may have been, it has struck a genuine chord among at least some ordinary Russians. Support is most enthusiastic in her native Volgograd. Referring to the legendary Second World War Soviet spy, local journalist Stanislav Anishchenko explains:
Our national hero is Stirlitz, a spy that fought against fascism. Anna Chapman is Stirlitz as a girl. So our media made her a hero and we organised the song contest. People always need heroes – that’s why Anna Chapman was born.