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Media Notes:
The Rise and Fall of Vladimir Putin
We need a foreign media smear campaign against Putin now, for his own sake.
by Alexei Pankin
Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals.
MOSCOW--Before and during the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the United States, I was reading heaps of Russian newspapers and scanning lots of American papers’ websites. As I did, a feeling of deja-vu developed. Both the summit’s agenda and the tone of the media resembled the mood of late 1980s. Breakthroughs in strategic arms reduction are being achieved; Russia and America are discarding their past suspicions towards each other; and Putin is becoming a popular person in the West.
I wish Putin well and so would like to send a word of caution to him and to his Western partners. In modern Russian history, there are trends afoot that have no logical explanation but which nevertheless work with the inevitability of doom. For example, starting with Vladimir Lenin, Russia has been ruled first a bald and then a hairy leader, one after another in succession. More importantly, in our late communist and early post-communist history, none of the Russian leaders who have been loved in the West have ended well.
When Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the USSR Communist Party, he was viewed with mistrust in the West for quite a long time. “Is he a genuine reformer, or is just putting a new face on totalitarianism?” was the question most often asked. Even as late as 1988, then-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was comparing him to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, revealing a degree of suspicion among the Western elites. At the same time, Gorbachev was adored by his compatriots.
The tide changed around 1989, when Gorby had virtually become a national hero of the Western democracies while Russians took to actively hating him. Soon he was to become the most despised person in his own country, while the Western leaders were worshipping him almost like a god.
Roughly at the same time, Boris Yeltsin won the hearts and souls of the Russians. Western leaders, predictably, were quite suspicious of him: They refused to meet with him during his foreign visits, and when they did, went to great lengths to stress that their contact person in Russia was Mikhail Gorbachev. Eventually, Yeltsin had to disband the Soviet Union to attract all foreign attention to himself.
Afterwards, he did become a Western hero, and the inevitable slide of his popularity thus began. Leaders of “mature” democratic nations praised the dismissal and shelling of the legitimately elected Russian parliament in October 1993 as a great achievement of Yeltsin, while the Russians sent far-right leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky to the Duma in a symbolic gesture to humiliate Yeltsin and his followers. On the eve of the 1996 Presidential elections, only 2 percent of the Russians wanted to see Yeltsin as their president again, while Western leaders did all they could to support his re-election bid.
Yeltsin ended his career laboring under his image as a sick clown.
From this perspective, Putin began his presidential career extremely well. He was popular in Russia, while the Western press was full of unfriendly discussions about who this ex-KGB officer was, and the governments publicly criticized him for the war in Chechnya and suppression of the free press.
Dangerous trends began to show several weeks ago. After Putin gave a speech in German at the Bundestag in Berlin, he began showing signs of becoming another Russian Western hero. The current U.S. visit has consolidated the trend.
At present, he is popular both in Russia and in the West, but, if recent history teaches us anything, that can’t last long. He either has to antagonize the West again or fall out of grace with the Russians.
I think Putin is a good president, and I want him to end his presidential term in good health, preferably in the same country in which he began it. To achieve that, Russian public opinion is more important than the Western one.
Hence, we in Russia desperately need an anti-Putin campaign in the West. For obvious reasons, the governments cannot afford to do it now, so this must be done by the media. I would ask editors of the world’s leading media to contact Putin’s spin-doctors for innovative ideas on how to best criticize their boss.
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