An article in Kommersant this week claimed the Russian government was working to set up a new, pro-Kremlin think-tank in Washington, as a means to improve Russia’s standing in the US.

Kremlin spin-doctor Gleb Pavlovsky told the Moscow Times the new institute would counter-act the “increasingly ideological and propagandistic approach” of some Russia-watching institutes, such as the Carnegie. He suggested the institute could be set up in partnership with the Nixon Center, a foreign policy think-tank in Washington, using money from aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.

The next day, however, the executive director of the Nixon Center, Paul Saunders, angrily dismissed the Kommersant article in a letter to the Johnson’s Russia List, saying: “We have not discussed any plans like this with Mr Deripaska, Mr Pavlovsky, or anyone else”.

So is the Nixon Center working with the Kremlin or not? Dmitri Simes, the think-tank’s president, tells me he has held discussions with Kremlin officials in the past to set up a Moscow branch of the Nixon Center “to act as a counter-balance to some foreign NGOs in Moscow that do not always provide a reliable picture of Russian society” [i.e. the Carnegie]. However, the idea was stymied before the question of funding arose.

Simes says the Center has no plans to open up a new, pro-Kremlin institute in Washington, and he is dubious that Pavlovsky’s plan could work. He says: “If the Russian government provided major funding for a Washington think-tank, and then that think-tank suddenly started to speak more favourably of it, there would be a lot of scepticism of it. It could actually backfire.”

Operation Image Improvement

It’s interesting to note that Pavlovsky genuinely thought his idea could work, and seemed unaware that it would cause embarrassment to the Nixon Center. It suggests that he doesn’t know the difference between PR – when a client hires a company to improve their image for them – and a genuine think-tank. What is the difference?

The difference is that a PR executive would not be embarrassed to say he did not personally hold the opinions that he put forward in a press release. He would say without shame that he was merely paid to do so. Perhaps a ‘political technologist’ would say the same.

But a think-tank expert, or an op-ed journalist, or an academic, would be embarrassed to say he didn’t believe what he said, that he was just paid to say it. Such an admission would, in fact, spell the end of his career as an analyst. From then on, he would be considered a mere hired mouthpiece.

Now, the Kremlin and some of its supporters believe some foreign NGOs are little more than PR merchants. They say the Carnegie and other NGOs are only critical of the Kremlin because they have been paid either by Kremlin-hating oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Vladimir Gusinsky, or by foreign governments. They are thus simply mouthpieces either for oligarchs or for foreign security apparatuses. As president Putin put it, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

With perfect logic, therefore, the Kremlin has decided to pay the foreign piper itself. It has, through Novosti, set about hiring foreign journalists for Russia Today, it’s put Novosti money into the Russia Profile project, it’s hired the respected op-ed writer Peter Lavelle to work for Novosti, and now it’s looking to provide financing directly to foreign think-tanks.

All of this has been somewhat controversial in the Russia watching community. Lavelle recounts how another Russia expert denounced him as a “collaborator” while at the Valdai Club [a Novosti out-reach initiative to Russia experts] in August. Lavelle points out that the person in question had herself worked at an international law firm which represented Vladimir Gusinsky.

The accusation that such-and-such an expert is a paid mouthpiece for shadowy interests is a familiar one in Moscow’s paranoid and Byzantine atmosphere. Follow the money, the theory goes, and you will find the hand beneath the glove puppet.

Material determinism

It’s a good enough theory. I myself have traced the funding of various western think-tanks like the AEI who oppose anti-global warming measures, and found that sure enough, a lot of their funding comes from oil companies.

But there is a limit to this line of thinking. If we completely ignored what people were saying, and only looked to who was paying them to say it, then public discourse would be practically impossible.

You have to believe in the possibility of a rational debate that goes beyond immediate material interest. Such a debate was, according to Marxism, impossible. Beneath each idea was a determining material factor. So we could ignore all ideas, and simply examine the material conditions beneath them. Who was paying, in other words.

But that’s an overly simplistic view. Experts and journalists are not motivated solely by money. They are in fact motivated far more by desire for fame and the esteem of their peers, and are unlikely to risk that esteem for money.

A lot of the financiers of media and civil society certainly have their own specific interests. They might be oil companies, or steel magnates, or the US government, or even the FSB. Some of the money is unsavoury – it comes from aggressive capitalists or convicted fraudsters or even arms traders like Alfred Nobel. You can make ethical objections to just about every financier of media and civil society there is.

All funders, from the Russian government to Exxon-Mobil, may put pressure on journalists or academics who work for organizations which they finance. They may threaten to withdraw funding or advertising, they may even threaten to fire you or close your organization down. The only real protection against that pressure is a journalist’s own conscience and, a slightly different thing, concern for their reputation.

This concern for one’s professional reputation is, over time, a greater regulator of the behaviour of the media and civil society than any government measures. However, making the financing of think-tanks and NGOs more transparent would certainly help, because it would make it more obvious which experts were blatant mouthpieces for their funders.

But as I’ve said, if you believe in civil society, you have to believe it’s possible for people to express opinions independently of those who finance them. You have to believe that the piper can play his own tune regardless of which organizations pay him, because he values his reputation more than their money. The president says he supports the growth of independent civil society, but also that such independence is impossible. Which does he believe?

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

December 8, 2005