“Alright, follow me and we’ll see the news room”, said Margarita Simonian, chief editor of the Russia Today TV channel. I and another 15 or so foreign journalists followed the diminutive Simonian through a door and down a dusty corridor, with no news room in sight. She looked around bewilderedly. “Wait…it’s upstairs. Follow me…”

We eventually found the news-room. It was full of young Russians and British people looking studious at their desks. I watched some of the news show being played on the screen. The English presenter reminded me somehow of college radio, of a kid playing at adult games.She spoke of riots in Iraq, and the screen showed a crowd of angry Arabs. Then she spoke of Iran’s attempts to get nuclear weapons, and the screen showed the same crowd.

In another room, I tried to engage a young English journalist in conversation. She looked terrified. She explained she was watching the wires for stories. I watched her as she went over to a table, where an older Russian journalist was talking to a colleague in Russian. The English girl stood there awkwardly, while they ignored her. Eventually the older journalist looked up. “Um…hi…there’s a story on the wires, apparently, er, Yushchenko…the poisoning…dioxides or whatever…it hasn’t been proven. Is that interesting?” The editor said “Ok” and carried on talking to her colleague in Russian. The English girl sat back down and watched the wires some more.

The idea of a state campaign to promote Russia’s image abroad has been around for almost a decade. In 1996, Yeltsin ordered the foreign ministry to take up the task, but the ministry, full of Soviet-era diplomats more used to hitting tables with shoes than reaching out to the West, failed to rise to the challenge.

In 2001, press minister Mikhail Lesin came up with the idea of a full-scale advertising campaign in the US, with giant bill-boards saying things like ‘Russia – come for the vodka, stay for the girls!’ But that too failed to take off.

It was only last year, when Russia’s image in the west had sunken pretty low, thanks to the Yukos affair, various oligarchs’ PR campaigns against the Kremlin, and Putin’s ill-conceived intervention in the Ukrainian election, that the government decided it had to take what the German Russia expert Alexander Rahr calls “extraordinary measures”.

Lesin teamed up with Novosti, the state news agency which is the government’s main tool for ‘image enhancement’, and hammered out the details of the channel. They put aside $30 million as an initial budget for the project, and hired Margarita Simonian as the chief editor.

That raised a few eyebrows – Simonian is only 25, was a young lobby correspondent for Rossiya, and had no previous management experience. Her main claim to fame was being presented with a bunch of flowers by Putin on her 25^th birthday. It’s surprising that Rossiya even put a journalist so young in the Kremlin pool. How’s a 24-year-old going to hold the president of Russia to account, let alone run an entire TV channel?

To her credit, she seems a particularly smart and switched-on 25-year-old. But she still seems out of her depth, chain-smoking her way through interviews and looking very small in her chair. When I ask her what she thinks is Putin’s greatest flaw, there is a long pause, then she says ‘it’s a huge country’. I ask her what she means, and there is another pause, so long and awkward that I feel sorry for her, and change the subject.

The channel set about hiring 70 foreign journalists for the channel, mainly from Britain. They arrived in August, mainly young graduates in their early twenties, fresh from British journalism schools. They were tempted to Russia by the adventure, the night-life, and the salaries starting at £30,000. While they admit to knowing next to nothing about Russia today, yesterday, or any other day, they are a hard-partying lot, and have already established themselves as welcome new arrivals in the Moscow bar scene.

The 230 Russian staff, meanwhile, is on average paid half as much. This has led to a certain amount of tension.

The question most frequently posed of Simonian at a recent press tour was whether the channel’s reporting was going to be independent. “How can you be independent when you’re state-owned?” asked the BBC correspondent. “Well, so is the BBC”, replied Simonian. “Aren’t you independent?” Touche!

I put the same question to the deputy head of Novosti, Alexander Babinsky, asking him if the channel would produce stories that were critical of the Kremlin. His reply was quite revealing: “Imagine you hired a defence lawyer, and the first thing he did when you were in court was tell the jury what a monster you were, what a liar, how you only took a bath once a month etc. You’d be pretty annoyed, wouldn’t you?”

The impression I get from the programmes I have watched, which to be fair to Russia Today were just rehearsal programmes, was that the channel would dutifully pick up any Kremlin-critical stories that were already in general circulation. In that sense, it would be independent. However, its original stories on Russia – which are the only reason to watch the channel – are likely to be bland in the extreme. The three original documentaries I saw were on Buddhist medicine, the Old Believer religious sect, and Anastasia Myskina. Not exactly the stuff to get one’s pulse racing.

It’s a pity, because as Simonian says, western interest in Russia is waning, and I for one would enjoy an English-language channel on Russia which had some genuinely interesting and original stories on it. There’s so much that goes unreported, so many violent, ugly, dark, but also beautiful, hopeful and brave stories. But you have to fight for those stories, fight against authorities and companies who don’t want to let the stories out. The best journalism – and I’m by no means saying I produce it – requires that sort of grit, fight and real courage. It’s not produced by people like me, sitting in Moscow, who know they can flee to London if things got nasty. It’s written by unknown journalists in the regions, who risk their lives to uncover local gangsters and regional corruption, and then occasionally end up shot dead, and get maybe two inches in the Moscow Times as their reward.

But when I ask Simonian if she will be prepared to fight for her journalists, she says ‘I hope no one has to fight’. Well, if you had wanted an interesting channel you would have had to fight, Margarita. You would have had to fight hard.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

October 12, 2005