19 May 22
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Current and former employees describe Russian state television as an army, one with a few generals and many foot soldiers who never question their orders.
All broadcast television in Russia is either owned or controlled by the state. The main evening newscasts on the two main state channels, Channel One and Russia One, cover more or less the same stories, in more or less the same order. On April 30th, for example, Channel One led with a report from a village recently “liberated from the neo-Nazis”; Russia One began its newscast with a general update on the gains made by Russian troops—“Hundreds of neo-Nazis liquidated, tens of airborne targets hit, and several hits against command centers and equipment stockpiles.” Both newscasts reported on atrocities ostensibly committed by Ukrainian troops. “The Ukrainian Army once more bombed civilian targets,” Russia One claimed. Channel One carried a detailed confession supposedly made by a Ukrainian prisoner of war, who said that he had raped a Russian woman and murdered her husband. Both channels carried reports from a military hospital where a group of young men in identical striped pajamas received medals for their heroic roles in “liberating” Ukrainian towns and villages.
Coverage is repetitive not just from day to day, television channel to television channel; nearly identical stories appear in print and online media, too. According to a number of current and former employees at Russian news outlets, there is a simple explanation for this: at weekly meetings with Kremlin officials, editors of state-controlled media, including broadcasters and publishers, coördinate topics and talking points. Five days a week, a state-controlled consultancy issues a more detailed list of topics. (The organization did not respond to a request for comment.) I have not seen these lists myself—individuals with access to them said that they were too scared of being prosecuted under new espionage laws to share them—but they agreed to analyze the lists during the course of a couple of weeks. They said that the lists generally contained six to ten topics a day, which appear designed to supplement the Ministry of Defense’s war updates that constitute mandatory coverage. Those among my sources who have seen these lists work for non-broadcast media, but the talking points they described invariably appeared in the news lineups on Channel One and Russia One.
Topics fall into four broad categories: economic, revelatory, sentimental, and ironic. Economic stories should show that Western sanctions against Russia have made life harder in Europe than in Russia: people in Britain can’t afford heat, Germans could be forced to ride bikes because gas prices are rising, stock markets are falling, and Western Europe may be facing a food crisis. Revelatory topics focus on misinformation and disinformation in the West. These may include stories about Ukrainian refugees exposing their true criminal selves by shoplifting in a Western European country, or a segment about Austin Tice, an American journalist who was kidnapped in Syria, in 2012, narrated to suggest that he was punished for telling the truth about the United States. Sentimental stories focus on connections between Russians in Russia and in eastern Ukraine: a couple getting married in newly “liberated” Berdyansk, humanitarian aid from Russia arriving in the Donetsk region, and Russian doctors providing medical treatment to children injured in Ukraine. Finally, ironic stories focus on mocking the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, frequently, Joe Biden’s supposed mental decline. For these, Russian television often uses segments from Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.
In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was in Moscow, watching television, and I was struck by the ways in which channels downplayed the war: the tone was matter-of-fact, the length of newscasts unchanged. I assumed that this was a strategy aimed at making Russians pay little attention to what the Kremlin was calling a “special military operation.” But, according to my sources, what I was observing was not a deliberate strategy but a lack of strategy. At least some of the Kremlin’s media managers hadn’t known that the invasion was coming. Now television is all war all the time; in addition to talk shows and newscasts, there are special reports that claim to debunk Western and Ukrainian propaganda or to expose the roots of so-called Ukrainian fascism, and fictional dramas on the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s term for the Soviet part of the Second World War. In the past, journalists in television and print media would be instructed to pursue specific angles on stories. But people who have seen the lists describe a less prescriptive process today. “It’s this, not that—for example, Mariupol, and not Bucha,” one of my sources said. “And within that space you can even have a discussion.”
Solovyov, whose show airs on Russia One, is a master of orchestrating what sounds like discussion, within the narrow space defined by authorities. On April 26th, he and Margarita Simonyan, who runs both Rossiya Segodnya, a domestic state-news holding, and RT, the international arm of the television-propaganda machine, discussed a purported plot to assassinate them and several other propagandists that had ostensibly been foiled by the secret police a day earlier. Footage of the raid looked like a parody—among the evidence police claimed to have found was a pendant with a swastika on one side and a Ukrainian trident on the other, Molotov cocktails in plastic bottles (not a thing), and three video-game cartridges. Simonyan mused that the assassination was planned on orders from the opposition politician Alexey Navalny, in collaboration with Zelensky, because both are neo-Nazis.
In 2020, Navalny himself survived an assassination attempt that appears to have been carried out by Russia’s security service, the F.S.B.; he has been in prison for more than a year. “Can you even imagine the things he would have done here, if he hadn’t been jailed?” Simonyan said. Before I dived into watching Russian propaganda, Lev Gudkov, an independent sociologist, told me that television rhetoric was based on “ascribing their own traits to the opponent.” It really is that simple. Solovyov and his guests, along with the other news anchors, reporters, and hosts on Channel One and Russia One, sound like aggrieved kids on a playground: “No, you are the Nazi!”; “You are shelling residential neighborhoods!”; “You kill journalists!”; “You rape and kill civilians!”; “You are genocidal!” (I asked Solovyov and Simonyan for interviews; Solovyov didn’t respond, and Simonyan used her Telegram channel, which has about three hundred thousand subscribers, to announce that she would not speak to me.)
The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizo-fascism” to describe actual fascists who call their enemies “fascists.” Snyder has said that the tactic follows Hitler’s recommendation to tell a lie so big and outrageous that the psychic cost of resisting it is too high for most people—in the case of Ukraine, an autocrat wages a genocidal war against a democratic nation with a Jewish President, and calls the victims Nazis. The talking heads on Russian television regularly acknowledge the apparent absurdity of the situation they claim to describe. “The world has gone mad,” Dmitry Drobnitsky, a political scientist, said on Solovyov’s show, on April 29th. “Russians are Russophobic, and Jews are the worst anti-Semites.” A few days later, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, in an interview on Italian television, repeated the same canard about anti-Semitic Jews, adding that Hitler was part-Jewish. Solovyov, who is Jewish, has referred to Zelensky as “a supposed Jew.”
The culture of state television formed gradually in the course of the past two decades. In 2000, Putin began his first Presidential term by launching a state takeover of the country’s leading privately owned broadcast-television channel; within a few years, all broadcast television, including local stations, was controlled by the state. State television, which had languished in the nineteen-nineties, now received good money from the government, and many of the journalists, editors, and producers who had worked for private channels went to work for the state. In 2004, during Putin’s second Presidential election, I sat down to talk with Evgeny Revenko, a deputy news editor for All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, a holding that includes what is now Russia One. “It’s a simple logical chain,” he told me. “We are state television. Our state is a Presidential republic. Hence, we don’t criticize the President.” Revenko, who had previously worked as a correspondent and news anchor on independent television, went on to head the holding’s news operation.
Farida Kurbangaleeva, a former daytime news anchor, started working at Russia One in the spring of 2007, when she was twenty-seven. “Those were very mild times,” she told me over Zoom from Prague, where she now lives. “We could start a newscast with a story on the Large Hadron Collider or the death of fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré, those kinds of general-interest stories. It was considered in poor taste to lead with a story on Putin.” By 2013, Kurbangaleeva said, general-interest stories, particularly international ones, were out, and reports on Russian military exercises were in. Kurbangaleeva described the editing process to me. “You are writing your copy in a proprietary program, and my bosses—Revenko and the person who was between me and him—have it open on their screens. The phone is ringing constantly: ‘change this,’ ‘drop that.’ ”
In fall, 2013, she said, she was writing copy for a story on protests that had broken out in Ukraine—in a few months, these would grow into a revolution. “I typed the word ‘protesters,’ and Revenko called me to say, ‘Where do you get off calling them protesters?’ ” He directed Kurbangaleeva to call them Nazi collaborators instead. (Revenko, who is now a member of the Russian parliament and one of the leaders of Putin’s United Russia Party, declined to talk to me for this article.) After Russia occupied Crimea, anchors and reporters were directed to call the act “reunification,” never an “annexation.” Kurbangaleeva told me that she did what she could, for example, by using the term “Ukrainian authorities” even when copy she had received used the word “junta.” But when Russian-backed troops in Eastern Ukraine, using Russian missiles, allegedly shot down a Malaysian airliner in 2014, Kurbangaleeva said on air that the plane had been downed by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Soon after, she quit and left the country.
I talked to several people who had quit. All of them said that they should have left sooner. One former correspondent said that it took him several years of therapy to be able to resign. Another person, who worked as a news writer at Russia One for more than a decade, told me that for years she tried and failed to do something else. “I realize now that I am an ideal state-television worker,” she told me. “I am apolitical, uninterested in politics at all. That is the kind of citizen this regime cultivates.” She quit as soon as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began and is now studying to change her profession.
Zhanna Agalakova, a former prime-time news anchor for Channel One, traded her desk for a foreign correspondent’s job back in 2005. “I thought I’d be filing reports on real elections and protests and would save myself from having to lie about what was happening inside the country,” she said. But in 2016, when Agalakova was in the United States, reporting on the Presidential election, her task was to portray Hillary Clinton as ailing. She made repeated use of a single instance in which Clinton, who was ill on the campaign trail, stumbled during an appearance. In 2019, when Agalakova was reporting on French protests, her editor told her to cut the reason for them: pension reform. Russia, too, was undertaking an unpopular reform of its pension system. “I was supposed to focus instead on the fact that every protest ended in clashes with police,” Agalakova said. “They didn’t spell it out, but the idea was to create the impression that protests always lead to destruction.”
That same year, Agalakova was reporting on the unveiling of a monument to Soviet citizens who took part in the Belgian resistance during the Second World War. She interviewed a Belgian woman who remembered the fighters, saying that a couple of them wrote her postcards as they made their way back to the U.S.S.R. But communication had ceased once they arrived in Leningrad. The woman speculated that her friends—Agalakova suspected there had been a love affair with one of them—might have ended up in the Gulag. Agalakova’s editor cut this part. Agalakova told me, “Maybe the state is laying the groundwork for concentration camps.” She finally quit when the full-scale invasion began. She gave up her Paris apartment and car, Channel One perks, and traded the status of foreign correspondent for that of exile.
These days, while Solovyov and a couple of others are particularly visible, most of the content for television is produced not by zealots but by drones, people who have very small jobs. They rewrite copy that comes from the Defense Ministry, and write voice-over for silent video handed down by various government agencies; these are known in the trade as “the mandatories,” stories that must be shown. Many of these workers have easy schedules—six to eight hours a day, seven days a week, with every other week off—that might make them feel like barely a cog in the wheel, albeit a decently remunerated one. “I don’t think,” a news editor told me, when I asked if they thought that referring to Ukrainian forces as “Nazis” was accurate. “I’m not a politician or a historian. I follow the official sources. If officials use this terminology, then that’s how it is.” (This source was one of only two people currently employed by a Russian state channel who agreed to speak to me directly.)
I wanted to test my hypothesis—that Russian propaganda is designed not to convince its audience that Ukrainians are Nazis and that Russia is waging a defensive war but to muddy the waters, to create the impression that nothing is true. Does truth exist? I asked. “Truth exists, that’s absolutely certain,” my interlocutor said. It’s just that it is unknowable. Unless one could personally travel to Bucha or Mariupol, one could never learn what happened. “We live in an era of fakes,” the editor said. “It’s hard to identify true information. It’s like believing in aliens, or in God. Everyone decides for themselves.” Unlike most Russians, this person has unfettered access to Western newswires alongside Russian sources, but “it’s impossible to tell which is more true,” the editor said. “Every country has its own interests. Russia is interested in protecting the civilian population of the Donbass. The West is interested in interfering with that, in attacking Russia with sanctions, and giving military aid to Ukraine. It’s very hard, under these circumstances, to think about whose story is more true.”
Other current and former employees described state television as an army, one with a few generals and many foot soldiers who never question their orders. “It runs on military discipline,” Nikolay Svanidze, a historian and journalist who spent years hosting a weekly news-analysis show on Russia One, said. (Svanidze, a sort of liberal, is still affiliated with the channel, though his weekly comment was suspended when the full-scale invasion began.) Everyone knows that they are part of the force. Solovyov’s laptop visibly has a large letter “Z”—a symbol of Russia’s war in Ukraine—taped to the back. On Channel One, a correspondent reporting from “liberated” Ukraine sported an armband with the “Z”—and the word “PRESS” across the chest of his bulletproof vest.
The Russian state and its propaganda machine form a feedback loop. Putin watches his own television and quotes it back to itself, the television amplifies the message, and so on. Messages can originate anywhere along this closed loop. On February 12th, Maria Baronova, a former opposition activist who went to work for RT’s Russian-language service in 2019, wrote a long, unhinged post on her personal Telegram channel, arguing that nato and its allies should be “de-Nazified.” She soon heard from a senior editor who praised her post and encouraged her to write more like it. Twelve days later, Putin announced the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and declared that its goal was the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine.” Baronova couldn’t find an instance of the term “de-Nazification” being used by Russians (not in reference to Germany) that preceded her Telegram post. The propaganda machine had been calling Ukrainians Nazis for years, but this word was novel; it had come to her following a fight with a Russian-speaking friend in the United States. “I pulled it out of my ass for that post,” she told me. “And then, when they were scraping together verbiage for Putin’s speech, they picked it up.”
It’s not an unlikely theory: autocratic ideologies in general, and Putin’s in particular, are cobbled together on the fly. Usable words and quotable quotes are few and far between—that is, among other things, why the propaganda machine makes such extensive use of a couple of Putin’s sayings from 2018, the ones about Russians going straight to Heaven and about not needing a world in which there is no Russia. Baronova’s job was to write and edit neediest-case-type stories to raise money and awareness. She didn’t do much, she told me, because she didn’t have to. Funding was lavish, expectations were low, and Baronova concluded that “the more people get good salaries for doing nothing, the better.” The system worked because it had an audience of one—Putin—and whatever he saw apparently satisfied him. She quit her job on February 24th. “Too late, I know,” she told me. In early May, the independent Russian investigative publication Proekt reported that the Kremlin was dropping the term “de-Nazification,” because it hadn’t gained traction with the public.
If Russian propagandists think of themselves as the foot soldiers and officers of an army, this is an army shaped by the mythology of the Great Patriotic War. Victory in this war is the centerpiece of contemporary Russian historiography, the single event that justifies Russia’s claim to do what it wants in the world, and especially in its fight against those it has labelled Nazis. But the story of the war that Russians learn in school—and from books, movies, and television series—stresses the sacrifice made by Soviet forces even more than these forces’ ultimate triumph.
Russian schoolchildren today, just as their parents and grandparents did, memorize the stories of martyrs: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a partisan who was captured by the Germans and refused to talk, effectively choosing death by hanging; Alexander Matrosov, who died after throwing himself in front of a German machine gun. One of the highest-grossing Russian movies of all time, the 2013 film “Stalingrad,” ends with its sole surviving protagonist radioing for an air strike against the building where he has taken shelter, so that both he and a large number of German troops will be killed. Being willing to die for your country is an element of the mythology of any military, but, for Russian soldiers, dying—and taking others with them—is the better part of valor.
Every night, the propagandists model heroism as though they were suicide bombers strapping on explosive vests, live on air. During the April 26th show, Solovyov and Simonyan discussed the most likely outcomes of the current conflict. “Personally, I see the path of a third world war as the most realistic,” Simonyan said. “Knowing us, knowing our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, knowing how things work around here . . . I think that the most improbable outcome—that it will all end in a nuclear strike—is still more probable than defeat. This horrifies me, on the one hand, but on the other I understand that this is how it is.”
“But we are going straight to Heaven,” Solovyov reminded her.
“Yes,” Simonyan said.
“And they’ll just croak.”
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