Thread by @nimkef

11 March 2015

In 1999, Alexei Gromov became Putin's press secretary and Mikhail Lesin became Communications and Press Minister.

themoscowtimes.com/2015/03/11/how…

According to Svetlana Mironyuk, who served as chief editor of the RIA Novosti state-owned news agency from 2003 to 2013, beginning in the early 2000s the authorities divided the media into three categories.

(Gromov and Lesin began the task, and later they were joined by first Surkov, and then his replacement: Vyacheslav Volodin.) The three categories are:

1) "Outsiders," or those with views alien to the official line. These include Vedomosti newspaper, Forbes magazine, ...

Novaya Gazeta newspaper, the Lenta[.]ru website (until March 2014) and several others such as Dozhd television. As with Western media, the authorities either have strictly business relations with them or no relationship at all. They cannot be bought, sold or manipulated.

2) "Our guys." These are primarily state media. Since the mid-2000s, this group included the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, and the group of publications and media owned by Aram Gabrelyanov — Zhizn, Lifenews[.]ru and Izvestia.

According to Mironyuk, this category primarily includes editors Alexei Gromov has long had good personal relations, whom he can strike "deals" for informational barter: The Kremlin organizes exclusive interviews for the publications but expects certain "services" in return.

3) "In-betweeners." These are either semi-outsiders or semi-locals with whom the authorities can sometimes strike deals, but not always. Radio station Ekho Moskvy and news agency Interfax are the most notable examples.

Vladislav Surkov

Currently serves as presidential aide responsible for relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia

Surkov began his career as a public relations specialist with the Menatep bank, which was created by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Over the past 20 years, Surkov has held almost every post in the hierarchy of the Putin administration.

Surkov did his most significant work in developing the "new censorship" when he served as deputy head of the presidential administration from 1999 to 2008.

He played a leading role in shaping domestic policy and the structure of the Russian political system while also continually experimenting w/ social initiatives & movements that support the ruling regime — orgs like Walking Together, Nashi and the Young Guard of United Russia

It is Surkov who probably created the concept of "sovereign democracy," used to describe how Russia's democracy differs from democracy in the West and how the West should not intervene in Russia's domestic affairs.

The concept served as the political underpinning of Vladimir Putin's first two terms as president. It was apparently during the process of formulating that concept that he also created his "theories of how the world works" that state-controlled media have since imposed...

on the Russian people with the illusory and fanciful agenda that dominates today's media environment.

The new "system" is primarily designed to make the media effective in publicly presenting the agenda, whether real or imagined, which, in turn, helps the president govern

Over time, everything that does not help achieve this goal is considered an "obstacle" or "inimical" to the plan.

The task of the new censorship is to produce an agenda for the public discourse that the greater part of society will support, regardless of what it thought yesterday about those ideas or of how it feels now about more personally pressing issues