Protecting Russia's image
Kremlin chief-of-staff Sergei Naryshkin will head a new commission that aims to improve Russia's international image and fix the mistakes made in President Medvedev's first year. The new commission intends to rely on domestic resources, not hiring any Western consulting agencies Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports.
In late May, the presidential administration established a new commission on shaping Russia's international image. Sergei Naryshkin, head of the presidential administration, will work to improve Russia's public relations in the West - aiming to alleviate the negative impact of some decisions made by the Russian leadership during President Dmitri Medvedev's first year in office.
Until recently, the Foreign Ministry had a commission for supporting Russia's image abroad. It was decided three weeks ago to boost this commission's status substantially by transferring it to the presidential administration. The new commission will be chaired by Sergei Naryshkin. Its members include Alexei Gromov, deputy head of the presidential administraiton, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Sergei Prikhodko, presidential aide for foreign affairs.
The new commission's chief task will be to fix the image errors made during Medvedev's first year in office. It has become a firmly-established opinion in the West that Russia completely lost the PR campaign in Georgia. Although it's close to a year since South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared independence, only one country other than Russia has recognized them: Nicaragua. Not even Russia's CIS partners have done so, though Moscow has been generous with loans to support their crisis-affected economies. Russia's gas conflict with Ukraine has also caused problems in relations with the European Union. Russia needs to find a new image - and that is what Naryshkin will have to handle.
Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Federation Council's foreign relations committee, told us that efforts to advance Russia's image abroad should be aimed at public opinion: "Professionals and politicians abroad already know that we don't have bears on the streets in Russia, and that our human rights situation is not radically worse than the situation in other countries. If human and civil rights were observed flawlessly everywhere, the Council of Europe and non-governmental rights organizations would be out of a job. Yet public opinion abroad still tends to see Russia as similar to the Soviet Union." In Margelov's view, we should be promoting the image of a "good Russia" rather than a "strong Russia." Margelov says: "Soft power is in fashion."
According to Margelov, the main problem with efforts to promote Russia's image is the lack of any coordinated plan: "This plan should be offensive rather than defensive - because the image of those who make excuses is always vulnerable. For example, there are national memory institutions in some former Soviet states. They develop grievances against Russia and engage in what specialists term opposition research. This means that our image is largely out of our hands. So why shouldn't we set up a similar organization?" The new commission intends to rely on domestic resources, not hiring any Western consulting agencies. But a source close to the Kremlin told us that cooperation with foreign firms will continue in some form. For example, a contract with Ketchum (USA) will be extended. This public relations agency provided media support for coverage of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg and Russia's turn at holding the G8's rotating presidency.
Yevgeny Minchenko, director of the International Institute of Political Assessment, maintains that contacts with Western PR agencies should be minimized; they should only be used for one-off projects such as organizing expos and forums. Minchenko says: "The Ketchum agency, for example, has contracts worth millions with the USA - so if any conflict of interests arises, and clients like America and Russia are in the balance, it's clear whose interests this agency will choose." Moreover, says Minchenko, hiring Western PR agencies is passe. The new technique entails establishing networks of experts and working with public opinion leaders worldwide, starting joint projects and allocating grants for them. Minchenko says: "We're hardly doing anything like this. We have few arenas for experts, and the quality isn't very good."
Translated by InterContact
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