#10 - JRL 9066 - JRL Home
Moscow News
www.MN.ru
February 23, 2005
Spinning Russia
By Anna Arutunyan

I have written before that Russia’s national product is not oil, but snow. Snow as in bullshit. As a professional bullshitter, I thought I’d shed some light on Russia’s preoccupation with what can be more politely termed as ’spin’.

For all the heavy-duty propaganda they’ve had to put up with over 70 years of communism, Russians must be the most media savvy bunch of information consumers in the world. Why, just last week, five Russian spin-doctors were busted in Moldova for spinning opposition “propaganda”, as the local authorities saw it.

Before that, there was the whole Putin backing Yanukovich fiasco. Now, how are candidates “backed”? Well, a couple of million goes to a smart looking bespectacled Russian spin-doctor. Then there was talk about U.S. spin-doctors putting on the whole Orange Revolution ­ a model campaign, because the simplest way to advertise is to convince the consumer that “wearing orange is hot”.

But the truth is, everyone in Russia is an armchair spin-doctor. Many get paid top dollar for it (and I do mean dollar). In fact, I can hardly think of a single person who has not had a spinning stint sometime during his career. Before coming to this paper, I was a “media analyst” for Russia’s spin-doctor king, Gleb Pavlovsky, and his Foundation for Effective Politics. We wrote reports for the government of Kazakhstan on how to improve their media image.

Russia’s spin industry is one of the fastest growing in the world, with profits rivaling those of the nation’s top export, oil, in GDP percentage. Okay, I made that up. The success of spin-doctors like Gleb Pavlovsky goes back to a deeply engrained ethnic tradition of “spinning” in the kitchen. That’s right, when a bunch of eggheads suffering from information deprivation got together in someone’s apartment and started making up stuff. I heard that’s what led to the breakup of the U.S.S.R.

Today, while public relations is a more or less respectable profession in the States, here in Russia PR ­ or ’piar’ as it has made it way into every savvy Russian’s lexicon ­ is an all-powerful deity. Russians are convinced that you can make a person believe in anything if you just put the right spin on it.

And so, the hyper-skepticism of Russians has in fact made them more naive and more susceptible to spin than anyone else. Trained to disbelieve everything they see on television or read in the newspaper, they now think of themselves as the most unspinnable people on the planet. But if you automatically deny everything the media tells you, you’re just as close to the truth as the Americans, who, local belief has it, “gobble up everything the TV feeds them”.

This, of course, leads to a propensity of conspiracy theories. In the States, if I had a friend who believed Russian spin-doctors were taking over his school, I would think of him as quirky. But in Russia, the friend would head a think-tank.

Carrying on a discussion with a smart, respectable, and well-read person, it is not uncommon to hear the following: “As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I can quite accurately pick up when U.S. newspapers are suddenly all part of a campaign run by the Jews. It’s quite obvious, really.”

Or this sparkling example of sophistication: “I’ve tried to explain to people like Ms. Arutunyan that the New York Times is a red newspaper run by the communist faction of the Democratic party. At first I thought that she just didn’t understand, but now I know that she is intentionally lying, just like all the Soviets used to do.”

All this is cute and everything, but what Russians don’t seem to realize is that by seriously believing that their entire world consists of spin ­ like that alternative universe Viktor Pelevin described in Generation P, a novel about how television was literally generating reality during the Yeltsin years ­ it makes them incredibly gullible and vulnerable to lies.

It’s not that I don’t believe in spin and the power of advertising. But if I see a banana, I don’t automatically assume that I’m being deceived into mistaking it for a cigar.