In fact, Lavrov has a different memory of Miliband’s small talk, equally inappropriate. He recalls with a laugh: ‘David started our conversation by asking why our party, United Russia, was a partner of the Tories, and not the Labour Party. For me, it was unexpected. Inter-party cooperation has nothing to do with me, but he was extremely interested in this.’ As for fresh ideas on how to get over the Litvinenko crisis, says Lavrov, ‘I heard nothing. I repeated the Russian position, including the prosecutor general’s offer to open a joint investigation with the British, if they were provided with all the materials at the disposal of British investigators.’
Putin had referred to Britain’s ‘insulting’ demand as a ‘remnant of colonial thinking’, and Lavrov took up the theme. Miliband recalls: ‘He said we needed to stop looking at ourselves as an imperial power, who could tell other countries to change their constitutions. He was absolutely clear about that.’
Far from healing the rift, it widened even further after Miliband’s meeting with Lavrov. In December the Kremlin announced it was closing two British Council offices in Russia, on the pretext of unpaid taxes and irregularities in its official status. Many saw it as an own goal, since the British Council’s main tasks include teaching English and organising cultural exchanges. But Lavrov decided the offices were ‘in violation of an international convention on consular relations’ – while at the same time explicitly saying the action was further retaliation for Britain’s ‘unilateral actions’ against Russia – specifically the freezing of negotiations on visa facilitation.
David Miliband looks back at his time jousting with Lavrov and sees it is a clash of post-imperial nations. ‘I’ve come to believe that Russia believes that Britain is a declining power and Britain believes that Russia is a declining power. That is a recipe, not for misapprehension, but it’s a recipe for the sort of toughness and difficulty and, in some ways, unwillingness to compromise, that seems to go with the territory of British–Russian relations.’
For five years political contacts between the two countries remained virtually frozen. And even after a new prime minister, David Cameron, visited Moscow in September 2011, relations remained in the doldrums, beached on the sandbar of that atrocious Cold War murder in London in 2006.
Showing initiative
The spate of murders, which would continue over the coming years, destroyed Putin’s attempts to portray his country as a free and modern democracy. Dozens of journalists were murdered in Vladimir Putin’s two terms as president. Not all the cases were politically motivated, and few of the victims had the stature of Anna Politkovskaya. But hardly any of the murders have been solved, giving the impression that journalists can be killed with impunity in Russia, especially if they have angered the authorities. The journalist Politkovskaya and the political exile Litvinenko had both earned themselves enemies in high places. They were extremely hostile to the Putin regime – indeed both wrote in rather similar terms, accusing the FSB of terrible subversive acts that allegedly sacrificed hundreds of innocent lives in order to shore up the regime.
In his investigation of the Litvinenko affair, Martin Sixsmith concludes that Putin himself did not order the killing, but that he can be implicated in the affair ‘because he created the atmosphere and conditions in which the killing could take place, in which an enterprising group of current or former FSB men read the signals from the Kremlin and embarked on their own initiative.’12 I think the same can be said about the Politkovskaya murder. In both cases, it is likely that the assassins did not receive, or even require, a direct order, nor did they need permission to kill, because they knew that ‘taking out’ an ‘enemy of the state’ had the tacit approval of the authorities. They may have been acting on their own initiative, for revenge or to ‘please’ their masters. Either way, they knew they would not be punished.
The very fact that the FSB had a unit known as URPO, whose operatives specialised in unlawful killings, speaks volumes about Russia today. The unit may have been disbanded by Putin, but it would be naïve to think that the FSB has suddenly become a club of amiable Clouseaus. Or that the fair trial and the jury have replaced the revolver and the phial of polonium.
9
MEDIA, MISSILES, MEDVEDEV
A Western PR machine
Two thousand and six should have been a landmark year in Russia’s post-communist history, and in President Putin’s campaign to bring his country back to prominence as a respected and valued player on the world stage. Russia had become a member of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations in 1997, and this year, for the first time, it was its turn to chair it – a chance to shape the global agenda and to impress with a flawless summit in July, to be hosted by Putin in his home town, St Petersburg.
As we have seen, however, the year began with Russia cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine – hardly the image it was looking for. In the preceding months Putin had already unnerved the West with a series of moves aimed at tightening his own grip on power and stifling the opposition, including his curbs on NGOs and the unleashing of the youth group Nashi to cow both political opponents and uppity foreign ambassadors.
Already there were calls from conservative quarters to expel Russia from the G8, or at the very least for President Bush to boycott the St Petersburg summit.
In the gloomy corridors of the presidential administration, hidden behind the dark-red walls of the Kremlin, they came up with a novel idea: Russia needed to project its image better. They needed a Western public-relations company to help them. There was no tender.1 Personal contacts led them to a leading New York PR firm, Ketchum, and a European partner, GPlus, based in Brussels. The most senior executives from the two companies flew into Moscow and made a joint pitch to Putin’s press secretary Alexei Gromov, and his deputy Dmitry Peskov. (The two men divided the role of spokesman between them: Gromov was in overall charge, but the fluent English-speaker Peskov dealt almost exclusively with the foreign press.)
It was at this point that the directors of GPlus – former journalist colleagues of mine – asked me to join their team as chief Russia consultant. Much of this chapter is based on my experiences there.
We saw our main task as Kremlin advisers as a rather simple one: to teach the Russians about how the Western media operate and try to persuade them to adopt the best practices of government press relations. We were advisers, not spokespeople. But whereas the Westerners who advised Boris Yeltsin’s government on economics in the 1990s were beating on an open door, advising Putin’s team on such an ‘ideological’ subject as media relations was never going to be so easy. Peskov did, in fact, show great interest in studying Western practices, but after some initial success we watched our ‘client’ drifting back into their old ways. As the Politkovskaya murder was followed by the Litvinenko murder, and then by the Russian invasion of Georgia, I began to wonder whether the very reason the Kremlin had decided to take on a Western PR agency was because they knew in advance that their image was about to nosedive.
They were prepared to pay big money to try to burnish that image. Ketchum declarations filed with the US Department of Justice show that the Russians paid, in the early years, almost $1 million a month.2 (A separate Ketchum contract with Gazprom – in deep trouble over its ‘gas wars’ with Ukraine – cost about the same). The financial arrangements were not directly with the Kremlin, but with a Russian bank, thus avoiding the need to be approved in the state budget.3 The whole idea was criticised by some Russian media, which wondered why the Kremlin needed a Western (as opposed to a Russian) PR agency, and why it was not put out to tender as a state contract.4