"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 65

In this episode: How Does the Russian Propaganda Machine Work? Rebroadcast

August 27, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 65

Episode 65: How Does the Russian Propaganda Machine Work? (Rebroadcast)

When Ukrainian soldiers liberated the town of Bucha, Ukraine in March, 2022, news reports showed scenes of bodies lying in the streets. Human Rights Watch documented cases of summary executions. But on Russian state television, the news was presented as “fake,” a staged event. Objective reporting about the war in Ukraine is now against the law in Russia and journalists can’t even use the word “war” in their stories. But it wasn’t always like this. Two veteran Russian journalists, who’ve experienced the changes firsthand, explain what’s happened and how “fake news” has helped solidify authoritarian rule in Russia. (Originally published 9/8/2023.)

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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When Ukrainian forces pushed into the southern Russian region of Kursk in early August, it was the first foreign invasion of Russia since WWII. It took Russia — and much of the world — by surprise.

If this vulnerability caused any Russians to question the war or the Russian military’s competence — they wouldn't be able to say so. Criticizing the military is now a crime in Russia, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

That’s just one way Russian president Vladimir Putin has been able to control the message about this war. Arresting American journalists, like the ones who were recently released as part of a prisoner swap, is another.

To help you understand all the ways Putin manages information about this war that’s been going on for well over two years, we ran this episode last year. And as Russia responds to the Ukrainian invasion, we thought we’d revisit the story of how an autocrat like Putin is able to quash freedom of speech and spread propaganda.

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After Bucha was liberated by Ukrainian soldiers in March of 2022, it was clear what had happened there: A massacre.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: At least 31 children have been killed and 19 wounded in Ukraine's Bucha district. That's according to a local prosecutor in that region.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Russia's withdrawal has revealed what look more like crime scenes than the aftermath of battle. Ukrainians shot in the head at close range, bodies bearing signs of torture and rape.

The images of bodies lying in the street are hard to forget. News reports used words like genocide and war crimes to describe the actions of Russian soldiers in Bucha.

ARCHIVAL Reporter 1: This is what war crimes look like. Defenseless civilians shot in the head with their hands bound. Residents taking their last ride, mass graves filled with the bodies of nearly 300 executed people

ARCHIVAL Reporter 2: President Zelensky toured Bucha yesterday, describing what he saw as a war crime and genocide.

Yet anyone watching coverage of what happened in Bucha on Russian state television would have seen and heard a VERY different story.

ARCHIVAL Russian Reporter (translated): These are fake atrocities which the Russian army was immediately accused of. And Western media began to repeat the accusations simultaneously and without a break for sleep.

Galina Timchenko: They covered this like it was staged. It was not for real. Bucha - it was massacre in Bucha. What they covered is that Bucha killings, mass murders were staged by the Ukraine regime.

(Coverage from Russian news media, in Russian)

Galina Timchenko: They pushed people to think about anything except the war, anything except atrocities, anything except destroyment of cities.

Alexey Kovalev: You could see how corrosive that could be, like, how even reasonable, well educated people could be, pretty cheaply and easily deceived into believing all kinds of nonsensical and self contradictory stuff.

In 2022, Russia passed a law that criminalizes objective reporting about the war in Ukraine.

Alexey Kovalev: You cannot mention the word Bucha unless you are talking specifically about it being a staged provocation.

Even the use of the word “war” is prohibited. And people who violate that law face up to 15 years in prison. In 2022, there were more than 21,000 arrests made for anti-war statements and speeches, according to OVD-Info, a Russian-based human rights group.

And the arrests continued last year. More than 200,000 internet resources have been blocked. And Russians are now flooded with all kinds of conflicting and false accounts about what’s really taking place in Ukraine.

Alexey Kovalev: A very apt metaphor was always a fire hose of nonsense or lies or whatever you call it, whose purpose is not to uh, imprint a specific kind of worldview, but to dissuade the target audience that the truth can even be ascertained at all.

Reporting the truth rather than the prescribed Putin propaganda has become an even more dangerous job for Russian journalists — who’ve had their fingers broken, been poisoned, and even killed.

And sometimes that's even happened outside of Russia.

As the war in Ukraine has progressed, Putin has tightened his grip on the media. Even reporters working in Russia for well-established foreign news organizations, like the Wall Street Journal, haven't been spared.

Just look at the case of Evan Gershkovich, who was recently released after nearly 500 days in a Russian prison. He was arrested in Russia last year and accused of spying, something that the Wall Street Journal and the U.S. government vehemently denied.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: For the first time in nearly 40 years, Russian authorities have arrested an American journalist and charged him with espionage.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Police took him into a closed court hearing, and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, accused him of, quote, acting on instructions from the American side.

But it was not always like this.

Galina Timchenko: Now we have not just authoritarian state, we have fascist state. There is no independent media inside Russia at all. Still, there are many good journalists who are risking their freedom and lives on an everyday basis.

So what happened? How does the propaganda machine work inside of Russia? How does the Putin regime keep its tight grip on the media? And how do independent journalists try to get around the controls, often at great risk to their lives?

I'm Peter Bergen. Up next, we go “In the Room” with two Russian journalists who’ve experienced these changes firsthand: investigative reporter Alexey Kovalev and Galina Timchenko, CEO and publisher of the independent news organization Meduza.

They take us inside the disquieting world of Russian media.

(Theme music)

Russian state propaganda certainly didn't begin with the war in Ukraine-There was plenty of it during the Soviet era when newspapers were tightly controlled and violating official state propaganda could get you sent to a labor camp or maybe even worse.

Still, many say things weren’t always as bad as they are now for Russian journalists interested in covering the truth and reporting critically about the Russian government. Like when Galina Timchenko began her career working for the Russian business newspaper Kommersant in the 1990s.

Galina Timchenko: My trial period was one week. After one week, I come to the head of the desk and said, Okay, maybe ... I have to leave, and he said, no, it's, uh, for my honest opinion, you are one of the best and please stay. And then I stayed. I recall my job at the business newspaper as the happiest time in my life.

That's in part because the job had reasonable hours. She started at 9:00 AM and finished by 7:00. There was no 24 hour news cycle, but there was plenty of news to report in the 1990s.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power and there are tanks now in the streets of Moscow. Vice President Gennady Yanayev says he has taken over as acting president as the head of state of a special state committee.

The Soviet Union collapsed. Places like Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine declared their independence.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The Baltic peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and their democratically elected governments have declared their independence and are moving now to control their own national territories and their own destinies.

Under the new President, Boris Yeltsin, many Russian industries were privatized. Price controls were lifted, inflation soared.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: It is called shock therapy, and it will quickly produce a world that Russians like 83 year old Mila Rost have never seen before. (Mila Rost) Bacon was, last year, 4 rubles a kilogram. 4 rubles. Now 1,200.

There was social and economic upheaval. And lots of independent news organizations got started.

Peter Bergen: Back then, there were unwritten rules about what you could write and not write.

Galina Timchenko: No, you know, it was the time of almost absolute freedom in Russia. It was President Yeltsin who strongly opposed any censorship. So we were free to do whatever we wanted to.

Even though she was free to write and report whatever she wanted for Kommersant, this definitely wasn't her dream job. So in 1999 — the same year that Vladimir Putin first came to power — she went to work for Lenta.Ru, one of Russia's first entirely digital new sites. And eventually she made her way up to be editor-in-chief.

But while she was at Lenta.Ru, things began to change. That freedom to report what was actually happening, particularly things unfavorable to Putin, began to disappear. It was a gradual shift.

Galina Timchenko: Putin said not once, but many times that media should serve not the people, but the government, the officials, the state. And all his allies turned their back to the media. They refused to talk. They refused to comment. They did not share information. And year from year, the situation became worse and worse.

Alexey Kovalev also experienced these changes. He was working for RIA Novosti, one of Russia's largest newswires. Back then RIA Novosti had reporters in more than 40 countries and covered news in more than a dozen languages.

Alexey Kovalev: RIA Novosti was a pretty respected place.

Respected because although it was completely government funded, it had a reputation for independence and a diversity of viewpoints. RIA Novosti was headed up by an editor who Alexey says was not afraid to cover tough stories or issues that might not be favorable to Putin.

Alexey Kovalev: She ran RIA Novosti as a kind of pretty regular newswire, which was a radically different place back then.

When he first started working for RIA Novosti, he says there was just one topic that you couldn't cover.

Alexey Kovalev: There was only pretty much one unspoken rule: don't come anywhere near Vladimir Putin's family. It wasn't like a memo. (laugh) nobody would put things like that in the memo. So you kind of were supposed to um, instinctively figure it out for yourself what kind of things were off limits.

Alexey says he violated that rule just one time when he ran a kind of satirical story congratulating one of Putin’s daughters on her marriage. But nothing happened. His boss simply said, don't do it again. But if someone ran that same story now…

Alexey Kovalev: That would be a pretty serious offense now. People have been hounded out of Russia and persecuted and, uh, a whole publication shut down for violating that rule. But back then in 2011-12, Russia was a very different place and, uh, it was more like... just do what your sense of journalistic ethics tell you.

So at RIA Novosti, they covered the big stories, even the ones Putin didn’t like. For example about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died recently in a Russian prison. Russian state television hardly reported on Navalny’s death and the circumstances surrounding it at all. But more than a decade ago, at RIA Novosti, they could cover stories about Navalny.

Alexey Kovalev: It covered, uh, things that really happened. For example, if the public enemy number one, Alexei Navalny ran for the mayor's office, it would cover his mayoral campaign like any other publication would do.

Alexey and Galina say things started to really change when Putin was reelected to his third term as president in 2012.

ARCHIVAL Reporter 1: The Constitution barred him from a third term, at least without a break. So after stepping down for four years to become just Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin is once again President of Russia.

ARCHIVAL Putin (through translator): We have passed a long and difficult road together. We now feel confident. We have made our country stronger. We restored our dignity as a great nation. The world now sees a restored Russia.

Galina Timchenko: Putin returned to Kremlin, almost all Kremlin administration changed and they began to talk with the journalists as the rich guys talk to their slaves or servants.

(Protesters chanting in Russian)

His re-election was marked by a series of mass protests.

(Continued chanting in Russian)

With protestors accusing him of vote rigging, calling his government illegitimate.

(More sounds of speeches and shouting at Russian protests)

Alexey Kovalev: Russians woke up, to the fact that these elections, both the parliamentary elections and the presidential elections were ridiculously rigged. People who came up, who went to monitor these polling stations in Moscow and elsewhere saw government officials just simply stuffing ballot boxes full of already signed ballots.

And it was a major scandal and hundreds of thousands of people in Moscow and other cities went out to the streets. And Putin was really, really spooked. Like, he didn't expect it at all. Now, you can see how the Kremlin was really kind of, uh, discombobulated by this whole thing.

In May 2012, uh, at one of these major, um, mass demonstrations in Moscow, there was a huge police crackdown, it was like unprecedented brutality, unseen in decades. And then Putin just kind of went off the deep end, and, I think that's when he kind of shut himself in this conspiracy bunker.

And Alexey and Galina say he also really tightened his control over the media, weeding out anyone who wasn't considered loyal. People like them.

Alexey lost his job in December 2013. So did his boss.

Alexey Kovalev: We were all commuting to our work. And then we found out that President Putin, by his personal decree, disbanded RIA Novosti and merged it into a huge propaganda conglomerate.

Putin's chief of staff said the decision to shut down the newswire and reorganize it was about an effort to reduce costs. But Alexey says that’s not what happened.

Alexey Kovalev: It was kind of a hostile merger, because the first thing they did was fire the previous administration and everyone, every deputy editor and desk chief, including myself, and replace them with hardcore loyalists who are still running it to this day.

For Alexey, this was devastating. And it was a sign that more was coming.

Alexey Kovalev: The whole propaganda fake news machine went into overdrive.

After RIA Novosti was taken over by government appointees, things began to deteriorate even further and reliable information about what was really happening in Russia, rather than simple propaganda, became a lot harder to come by.

Alexey and his boss weren't the only ones to lose their jobs. Other top editors lost their jobs or were pressured to resign. In 2014, it was Galina's turn.

Peter Bergen: In 2014 you were fired.

Galina Timchenko: Yep. In a second.

Peter Bergen: Why?

Galina Timchenko: You know, 2014 started with this silent Crimea annexation, And uh, there were huge protests in Kiev. And I asked one of my reporters to come to Kyiv and to make a report from the Independence Square in the center of Kyiv.

He made an interview with the, uh, leader of the so-called right sector, East Nationalists Party in Ukraine. And we published this interview because it was very interesting. It was a hot topic. And after that they threatened to revoke our media license.

The owner of our media holding organized a meeting. And when I came into the room, he said, ‘I deeply understand that you're a great editor, but you're fired. I have no cards to play with Kremlin. They demanded directly from the Kremlin administration, for me to fire you.’

More than 60 reporters at Lenta. Ru published a statement in protest of her firing on Lenta Ru's website. And then many quit their jobs. Galina knew she was going to be fired. The annexation of Crimea went hand in hand with a ramping up of the Russian propaganda machine. And a strategy to muzzle journalists like her so Putin could control the story about what was happening there.

Galina Timchenko: And we were in such a hurry those months before my firing, to publish this piece, and this piece, and that, and that. And we decided that it's just a matter of time. Every day could be the last day. And we are trying to publish as much as possible the uh, most important investigations and reporting from Ukraine.

After she was fired, Galina felt like if she was going to have any real sort of impact going forward she needed to create an entirely new independent news organization. And she knew couldn't do that inside Russia.

Galina Timchenko: I understood that there is no chance that Kremlin would allow me to do this media inside Russia.

So in 2014, she and a group of colleagues created Meduza. They established the headquarters in Riga, Latvia.

Galina Timchenko: it's the same time zone, the same climate. Russian speaking population. And It was very important that it was cheap to establish media inside Latvia.

When we started to discuss how will we, um, do it from the scratch, I was sure that Russian authorities would block us in a minute. So, once during pre editorial meeting, I said, guys, I need this media, that if they cut our head, the two heads should grow. What's the name of the beast? And somebody says, Meduza. I said, no, it's Hydra. But, what a perfect word, Meduza.

In those early years, Meduza still had a staff of reporters based inside Russia- eventually they’d have to pull them out — but at this point, they could still do their work. They published on their website, and created strategic partnerships like one with Buzzfeed and their reach grew. They even created a mobile app designed to do an end run around Russian censors.

Galina Timchenko: Our silver bullet is our mobile application. And, uh, it has five built in mechanisms of bypassing blocking that switch one to another, uh, if necessary.

They had millions of readers.

Galina Timchenko: Our mobile application has 1.5 million downloads.

But as Meduza grew its staff outside of Russia's borders, independent news inside the country continued to shrink.

Alexey Kovalev: By the time Russia annexed Crimea, all of the biggest national media were already under very restrictive Kremlin control.

In 2017 a law that could designate an organization a foreign agent was updated to make it easier to apply it to the media. Expressing an opinion about Russian policies or officials could put a news organization at odds with the law.

And in 2021, Meduza was labeled a FOREIGN AGENT. This meant Meduza had to attach a warning to every single bit of content they produced — videos, articles, Tweets, even ads. The warning had to appear in all-caps, in a font twice the size of the actual content. This effectively killed Meduza’s advertising revenue.

Galina Timchenko: So we lost our advertising revenue in a week. We lost 90 percent of our advertising revenue.

In addition to scaring away many of their sources. And since then the Russian government has labeled dozens of media outlets and over 100 individual journalists as “foreign agents,” including the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which won the Nobel Peace Prize for its reporting and was first created in 1993 when Boris Yeltsin was president.

(Music)

Then in February, 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine again in an escalation of the war it had begun in Crimea. As the war — which is referred to as the “special operation” and that Putin says is about “denazifying” Ukraine — waged on, the Putin government took things a step further.

Russia's prosecutor general designated Meduza an undesirable organization. This meant it actually became ILLEGAL for people inside Russia to interact with Meduza’s content, like linking to a story by Meduza. And it meant the staff of reporters in Russia were even more at risk.

Alexey, who’d gone to work for Meduza at that time, left the country on foot.

Alexey Kovalev: When the full scale invasion started, the Russian censorship ministry sent the memo to all the surviving online media and told them that unless you expect to be completely outlawed and blocked in Russia and lose access to all your audience, the only source you can use about these special military operation, uh, is the press releases of the defense ministry.

And it still is like if you are media working in Russia, you can only use, uh, information provided to you by the Russian defense ministry. I think it was March one or two, like a week into the invasion.

Alexey Kovalev: 25 people and their families working at Meduza were still in Russia at the moment. I wasn't planning to leave my home. I was planning to stay and cover this because that's like, like the most important job in my life. But at some point there were rumors circulating in Moscow that they were about to introduce martial law, which would of course mean the suspension of all civil liberties and freedom of the press officially, but also maybe close the borders.

We went on a kind of a group call and decided that it was no longer safe for us to remain in Russia. And it was a very timely and wise decision because by the time I crossed the Russian Estonian border on foot with my wife and my dog, the next day Meduza was completely blocked in Russia.

As the war in Ukraine has moved past the two year mark with no end in sight, the Russian propaganda machine is in full swing.

Alexey Kovalev: Every single publication I worked for is now illegal to send a link to someone in Russia. They are all blocked.

A majority of older Russians and people living in rural areas still tend to get most of their information from TV. I’ve seen some stats that suggest as many as 82 million Russians watch state TV every day.

And with the government in full control of what's on TV, Alexey says it can be pretty difficult to make sense of what's really going on.

Alexey Kovalev: Kremlin relies on this social contract where people disengage themselves from politics, but at the same time, the war effort requires the kind of total mobilization of the population.

So there's like this friction between these two contradictory goals: what dominates the news agenda, like top of the hour, it's always the, real or made up victories, uh, in Ukraine.

And then, our heroes like a softball, uh, segment about, kind of, volunteers behind the front line…

(Sounds from Russian media, in Russian)

Alexey Kovalev: …we are constantly winning and there's like, the whole west is against us.

(Russian media sounds)

Alexey Kovalev: And here's a story about, uh, CIA's involvement in regime change operations, uh, from 1949 to present day. And there's like, like there's very little that connects to actual people's lives.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: Do they get talking points from the Kremlin, is there a particular copy to be read on the air, how does it work?

Galina Timchenko: It’s, uh, very simple.Every Friday, there is a meeting inside Kremlin administration building where heads of Russian state TV, uh, gather and there are some, list of topics, main topics of the week. And, the head of, media desk of Kremlin administration. It's mentioning how every topic should be covered. with the precise words or precise tone of voice and so on and so forth. So, uh, it's very easy. It's weekly meetings inside Kremlin.

Peter Bergen: Well, give us an example or two of those kinds of stories that they have generated that fit this.

Galina Timchenko: My favorite, but very short, example is that they forbid to call an explosion, “explosion.” I do not know how is it in English, but if you clap, they call it clap. The citizens of the city heard a clap, not an explosion. They invented their own vocabulary.

Russian television is also big on conspiracies about the war. And Alex Jones has made appearances.

ARCHIVAL Russian media: Alex Jones, good morning.

ARCHIVAL Alex Jones (on Russian media): It's good to be here while we're still alive and not dying in nuclear war. Well, you know, it's one of those things. You never know. Bill Gates.

Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News, is also very popular.

Alexey Kovalev: Like you wouldn't believe how big Tucker Carlson is in Russian on Kremlin television. They translate every word he utters and it's broadcast because he says pretty much the same thing as the Russian state television.

And you can translate Tucker Carlson's rhetoric into Russian and it'll sound so natural. Like all these shadowy forces trying to deprive you of what you are owed.

Alexey Kovalev: There's like one defining feature of Russian state propaganda, is it's, uh, blazing inferiority complex. So they always have to have an American figurehead saying the same things they just said because it makes them more believable. That's why Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson are like the biggest stars on Russian television. People in Russia know that the government television is lying. But when it's the American guy saying the same things, it's entirely different. So there's like a lot of synergy between, uh, these guys.

That synergy was on full display in February, when Tucker Carlson headed to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin.

ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: The interview, as you will see if you watch it, is primarily about the war in progress, the war in Ukraine, how it started, what's happening, and most pressingly, how it might end. One note before you watch…

Carlson began the interview talking directly to camera and his viewers, advising them how they might want to think about the contents of the interview.

ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: There was no time limit on the interview. We ended it after more than two hours. Instead, what you're about to see seemed to us sincere, whether you agree with it or not. Vladimir Putin believes that Russia has a historic claim to parts of Western Ukraine. So our opinion would be to view it in that light, as a sincere expression of what he thinks. And with that, here it is … Mr. President, thank you. On February 22, 2022…

In the two-hour-long interview Carlson rarely interrupted Putin, who gave rambling lengthy answers, starting with Carlson’s very first question.

ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

ARCHIVAL Putin (through translator): It's not that America, the United States, was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia. I didn't say that.

And Putin also offered his own version of the history of Russia.

ARCHIVAL Putin (through translator): So if you don't mind, I will take only 30 seconds or one minute to give you a short reference to history for giving you a little historical background. Please. Let's look where our relationship with Ukraine started from. Where did Ukraine come from? The Russian state started gathering itself as a centralized statehood, and it is considered to be the year of the establishment of the Russian state in 862…

And that promised minute-long “short reference to history” turned into a bloviating 12-minute answer. Carlson offered little pushback to Putin’s meandering monologues, giving Putin the chance to deliver his propaganda, nearly unfiltered.

ARCHIVAL Putin: Hitler offered Poland peace and a treaty of friendship, an alliance demanding in return that Poland give back to Germany the so-called Danzig Corridor, which connected the bulk of Germany with East Prussia and Königsberg. Hitler asked them to give it amicably, but they refused.

ARCHIVAL Carlson: Of course.

That’s actually completely false. Hitler didn’t offer Poland a peace treaty and invaded Poland without notice. And so what Putin told Carlson is total nonsense, just meant to confuse people. As Poland’s speaker of Parliament put it, Carlson played the role of “useful idiot”. And the fact that Carlson didn’t challenge Putin on these lies helps bolster the conspiracy theories that are often told by the Russian President.

Alexey Kovalev: Conspiracy theories about, how nothing you do is ever your fault, but it's always, the kind of a shadowy, manipulations by these, uh, kind of malign forces. It's a very popular narrative in Russian propaganda. Conspiracy theories offer easy answers to very complicated questions.

Putin can't run the machine all by himself, of course. He relies on some key players, like his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.

Galina Timchenko: We made a news game for our readers because we noticed that Dmitry Peskov likes three types of answers.

Any question he was asked, he answered, Putin knows, Putin doesn't know, I do not know does Putin know or not. So we took real news topics, news titles, and our readers should guess how did for real Peskov answer — Putin knows, Putin does not know, I do not know, does Putin know or not. It seems to me that more than a million of our readers played this game.

Peter Bergen: You know, one interesting thing about propaganda is — and tell me if you think this is what Putin is doing and Russian TV — is, you don't have just one explanation of event. You might put out several, some of which may be even contradictory. But the point is —

Galina Timchenko: Contradictory.

Peter Bergen: Yeah, the point is not to, uh, persuade people of an alternative story. The point is just to confuse people about the truth because there's so many versions out there and no one knows what to believe. Is that the approach?

Galina Timchenko: Yeah, absolutely. It's the main idea. Uh, you know, almost all Russians know this poem of Alexander Pushkin, that there is no truth on Earth. But Pushkin wrote it about the Lucifer. Uh, it was the words of, uh, the Satan. Uh, but it, it's the main Putin's idea. There is no truth on this earth. Everybody lies. Okay, maybe we are lying, they said. But they are as well. And that's the main point of Putin's propaganda,.

Peter Bergen: So I'm fascinated by these polls by the Levada Center, which is described as an independent polling, outfit in Russia and, uh, is sort of treated that way by the international media and Putin still kind of polls above 80%, which is sort of pretty, pretty extraordinary given the fact that even if you're watching Russian TV, there's plenty of information from some of the nationalist Russians that the war is not going as planned. Clearly everybody knows there are sanctions. It's not that easy to travel abroad. So why does he continue to get these extraordinarily high ratings?

Galina Timchenko: One of my favorite expert, Russian sociologist, uh, Grigory Yudin, used to say that there is no proper polls in authoritarian state. Real polls could not exist. in a Nazi Germany and Russia is a fascist state.

For example, you know that most of these polls are conducted during daytime. So, they call you by your home phone and this is the time when seniors are at home and every person who is younger than 70 is at his job. Second, sometimes they are conducting polls from door to door. Somebody ring the bell. You open the door. And you see two people, they have your name, your address, your personal data. And they say, do you approve Putin's policy?

For sure, in this state of repressions, people have to choose their living strategy. They are scared. And what's the easiest way to answer? Say, yes, yes, I approve. And lock the door as soon as possible. And you know this environment of fear and of reports from neighbor to neighbor, from your coworker, from teachers, it's, unfortunately, it became absolutely total.

So there is no polls and there is no active support of Putin. People prefer to answer the easiest way they could. And, you know, Soviet people are very good and they’re used to hide and they’re used this double thinking and we are very good at it. And now, unfortunately, Putin's regime provoked this ghost of Soviet era way of thinking.

Peter Bergen: Leaving aside the question about can you really have accurate polling in Russia right now, but the war doesn't seem unpopular. The conscription may not be popular, but, uh, there seems to be kind of, to the extent you can tell, support for the war.

Galina Timchenko: I think the opposite.

Peter Bergen: Okay.

Galina Timchenkco: You know, during Soviet Union, Russians had this habit to hide and to, uh, live under the slogan, guys, please leave us alone.

Peter Bergen: Right.

Galina Timchenko: And after maybe 15 years of so-called freedom, more or less freedom, now the state intervenes into everyday life, into lives of their kids, into school education, into museums and theaters and movie theaters. And the total mood, it seems to me more like, uh, leave us alone. Please. Please. We do whatever, uh, you want, but leave us alone, please. It's not a support. It's — people are tired.

Peter Bergen: So is the Putin propaganda machine working?

Galina Timchenko: Yeah, but you know Putin's propaganda actors, they are not so creative. They repeatedly shout one word, one phrase, and they are not so creative. So, they are lazy jerks who used to receive enormous amount of money just for criticizing the opposition or any other voices than their own. So, people are tired.

Alexey Kovalev: You can see kind of a friction between this Kremlin agenda setting which demands that Russia's invasion in Ukraine and Russia's version of invasion in Ukraine completely dominates the news agenda.

But you can also see that people are very tired, like of war because, uh, they keep releasing these propaganda movies painting Russia's version of Ukraine's war, but they all fail miserably. And, uh, right now, for example, they released, kind of, a very crude propaganda movie about, uh, war in Ukraine painting the massacre in Bucha as an operation by kind of Western security agencies, trying to frame Russia and all that.

And then at the same time, there's Barbie, the pirated version of Barbie in Russian cinemas because Russia cannot legally import Western, uh, movies. So there's a, like a, this pirated version of Barbie completely beat this propaganda movie about Bucha, because people don't want to be bombarded with this war propaganda 24/7.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: Are you concerned about your personal safety?

Galina Timchenko: Uh, you know, not, uh, not so much, because, uh, more than a year ago, we developed, uh, safety protocols, it's banned, uh, option for me to order delivery service, for example, or, I could not order tap water at restaurant. Only the bottle, and in the glass, and so on. So, it's a little bit disturbing, but, uh... nothing special.

And even though Galina says those safety protocols are nothing special, the danger she faces is real. Take the case of her colleague, Elena Kostyuchenko. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Costun chen koe was working for Novaya Gazeta, the Nobel Peace prize winning newspaper that’s since been shut down by Putin’s government. Elena broke a major investigative story about the Russian military abducting and torturing people in the city of Kherson in Ukraine. Because of her critical reporting on the war, she was unable to return to Russia. She fled to Germany, eventually joining Galina’s news organization, Meduza.

She had plans to return to Ukraine to do additional reporting, but on the day she picked up her visa in Munich, she began to feel strange, something she described in this interview with France 24 last year.

ARCHIVAL Elena Kostyuchenko: First what I noticed is that I'm sweating a lot, and the sweat smells strange. Not like a sweat, but like rotten fruit.

And it got worse.

ARCHIVAL Elena Kostyuchenko: And then I got a headache, and later on it's like hard to orient in the space, like, where to go. I couldn't really understand how I can get home from the railway station.

Over the next few weeks she became really sick. She experienced extreme pain and nausea, her limbs became swollen and she suffered severe exhaustion. She went to see a doctor and they ran a battery of tests.

ARCHIVAL Elena Kostyuchenko: Two months and a half of testing, they said that poisoning is the most likely explanation, and actually the only explanation.

Though she’s mostly recovered, she still has lingering health problems.

More recently, Galina’s phone was infected with the highly effective Pegasus spyware.

Galina Timchenko: When my iPhone was infected with the Pegasus spyware I tried to be sarcastic because I said I'm very fond of being the first. We were the first, uh, the biggest Russian independent media, but not this time. I do not want to be the first Russian whose iPhone was infected with the Pegasus. But it happened.

But she says she’s focused on staying ahead of the Kremlin’s reach. Meduza recently expanded its offices beyond Latvia and now has people based in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Galina Timchenko: Latvia has a big borderline with Russia, and Russia is an aggressive state.

And they have a system for protecting the journalists who are still reporting inside Russia. They divide up the reporting for a story among multiple people so no single reporter is ever asking all the questions or doing all the interviews.

Galina Timchenko: Because it's too dangerous to, do it in one hands.

Meduza's also running a campaign to promote the use of VPN in Russia- it’s a way to connect to the internet via a remote server — sometimes through another country — that also encrypts your personal data, masks your IP address, and lets you get around website blocks. Meduza even offered their readers a free VPN service to use.

Galina Timchenko: After Meduza was blocked inside Russia, we saw 40 percent declining in our website, but 700 percent growth in the Netherlands. 500 percent growth in France, and I could not imagine that every French person or every Dutch person once woke up and said, let's read Meduza in Russian. You know; Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Ireland It's the usual gate for VPN service.

There are millions of Russians, of Russian readers who desperately need independent information. They are locked inside the country. They have their own circumstances in their everyday life. So we could not blame them that they did not overthrow, uh, Putin. But at the same time without them we will not exist, and it's the vital condition for any democratic changes inside Russia. Those people who are receiving independent information.

So they persevere. Alexey says as an investigative journalist living in exile in Berlin, there's still plenty he can do online, combing through databases and documents.

Alexey Kovalev: I can just spend years, uh, going through it, exposing all kinds of really eye watering corruption and, uh, maybe even find the, definitive answer why Putin decided to invade Ukraine.

It might be out there somewhere in these billions of billions of megabytes of leaked and stolen, stolen data. Sure, you can do that. And some of my colleagues chose that, like completely immersing themselves in the kind of hidden goings on of the Russian government and exposing it little by little, leak by leak.

But he worries about the future. And the long term effects that all this propaganda will have on Russian society, because it's not something he says that you can fight with reason.

Alexey Kovalev: I chose exile because I'm not nearly as, uh, courageous as some of the people who are serving seven to nine years in Russian prisons. And, little by little, I'm losing touch with my audiences in Russia because I'm not there. No matter how hard I try, I'll never, uh, really feel what it really feels like to be in Russia. And I can only cover what I see with my own eyes, and that's really not much.

The choice for Alexey and Galina is a nearly impossible one … and it’s hard to see how trying to tell the real story of what’s happening in Russia from the outside is anything but the best a Russian journalist can do now.

Galina says she just can’t go back to Russia.

Galina Timchenko: They could arrest me at the border because I am the top manager of so-called undesirable organization and this position is a crime by definition. So the minimum prison term will be six years, but at the same time they could charge me with any crimes according to the new military censorship laws — up to 22 years for high treason.

I said farewell to my homeland nine years ago, I remember I drove my car to the border, and I cried, I cried all my road from Moscow to Riga. So I said farewell nine years ago.

(Music)

If you're interested in knowing more about the issues and stories we talked about in this episode, we recommend the following books: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev, and also Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia by Joshua Yaffa. They're both available on Audible.

CREDITS

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon with help from Holly DeMuth and Andrew Meriwether.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Luke Cregan, Nathan Ray, and Sandy Melara.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.