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"If Stalin was 80 percent violence and 20 percent propaganda," Russian journalism professor Igor Yakovenko once told me, "then Putin is 80 percent propaganda and 20 percent violence." Media are crucial to Vladimir Putin's rule. When he was first appointed prime minister in the late 1990s, Putin was considered by many to be a bland nobody with few political prospects. But after a war in Chechnya and a massive TV-makeover that recast him as a strong military leader, Putin managed to win the 2000 presidential election and later cement his hold on power. One of his first moves after becoming president was to capture television and put it under his direct control. Russia's media moguls-both those who had supported Putin's rise and those who had opposed him- were arrested or forced into exile.
Russian television had begun spinning political pseudorealities as early as 1996, when oligarchs such as Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky helped to keep President Boris Yeltsin in power by broadcasting claims that the candidates running against him were part of a fascist-communist menace. Yet for most of the 1990s, Russia's oligarchs opposed one another, creating a sort of perverse system of checks and balances among the various campaigns of disinformation. With power centralized under Putin, however, the Kremlin could run both television and politics like one vast scripted reality show.
At the center of the show was the president himself: Putin bare-chested, riding on a horse; Putin stroking tigers; Putin in leather, riding a Harley. The staged images of Putin as B-movie hunk were used to cultivate his image as superhero-czar and to set him above the fray of real politics (a regular set piece on Russian news has Putin scolding government ministers and regional governors for failing the country). From 1999 to 2011, the man running this show was Vladislav Surkov. Officially the deputy head of the presidential administration, Surkov was actually in charge of everything from the arts to religion to political parties and civil society. Every Friday, Surkov met with the heads of the major news channels to tell them what the week's main stories should be and which political figures would be allowed on television.
This system has only become more stringent since the start of the war...