It wasn’t just mold and spies. There was (and is) a lot of glitz, too. Turn on Russian TV and you’ll see Jerry Springer style talk shows stuffed full of Hells Angels who have become Russian Orthodox holy warriors ready to defeat the decadent West. You’ll see neo-Nazis with MTV-dancer bodies who film themselves beating up gay teenagers in the name of patriotism and whip-wielding Cossacks attacking performance artists on the streets. But in the end the errand is always the same: to keep the great, 140-million-strong population reeling with oohs and aaahs about gays and God, Satan, fascists, the CIA and far-fetched geopolitical nightmares.

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When the financial crisis hit Russia in 2008, Ostankino producers began to speak of the need for new types of programming to keep the nation under control. “The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried,” a friend who worked at Ostankino told me. “Spiritual stuff is always good to keep people distracted.”

This approach had pedigree in Russia. Back in 1989, a new show appeared on Soviet TV. Instead of the usual ballet and stodgy costume dramas, the audience saw a close-up of a man with 1970s porn star looks, black hair and even blacker eyes. He had a very deep voice. Slowly, steadily and repeatedly he instructed the viewer to breathe deeply, relax, breathe deeply. “Close your eyes. You can cure cancer or alcoholism or any ailment with the power of thought,” he said. This was Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a professional hypnotherapist who had prepared Soviet weight-lifting teams for the Olympics. His mission was to keep the country calm and pacified while the Soviet Union collapsed. Kashpirovsky’s most famous lecture involved asking the audience at home to put a glass of water in front of their TV sets. Millions did. At the end of the program Kashpirovsky told the audience the water was “charged with healing energy” from his through-the-screen influence. Millions believed him.

Kashpirovsky had been taken off air in the 1990s, but in 2009, Kashpirovsky was again given a series, Séance with Kashpirovsky, to explore the paranormal and keep the country distracted with shows that addressed such subjects as immortality and ghosts. Honestly, the show seemed a bit behind the times: Ostankino producers had by then moved on to more sophisticated forms of psychological manipulation.

The heads of the networks were obsessed, for example, with Neuro-Linguitic Programming (NLP), a form of subliminal influence pioneered in the United States after 1975. The biggest of the Ostankino channels made a pilot for a show based on Lifespring, the controversial U.S. private, for-profit “life training” courses that went bankrupt in the 1990s after former participants successfully sued for psychological damage. Lifespring’s approach, informed by NLP and Gestalt Therapy, was to “reprogram” people—first by confusing them to the point where their critical thinking breaks down, then by frightening and humiliating them with the recollection of past traumas, all before lifting them up with the promise of success and then, when they are putty, implanting key messages to make them pliant to the demands of the Lifespring “trainers.” The pilot program Ostankino produced replicated the Lifespring sessions in a studio, with participants and the audience at home meant to experience the emotional roller coaster, and addictive effect, of the trainings.

As the decade came to an end and as the Kremlin became ever more aggressive and paranoid, I began to notice how Ostankino TV was increasingly starting to reflect, however haphazardly, the underlying principles of a Lifespring training. It’s programs confused viewers with bizarre conspiracy theories and itched at unresolved traumas about Stalin, the collapse of the USSR and the destitution of the 1990s—all before lifting the viewer up with stories of Putin-era triumph. Meanwhile current affairs TV presenters would pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly. It was a powerful technique. As I watched programs where political pundits would lecture to the camera, such as Mikhail Leontiev’s Odnako, or more recently Dmitry Kiselev’s Vest Nedeli, I could tell they were deeply manipulative. But would still find myself nodding my head as I watched them, their paranoid mindset (temporarily) imprinted on my mind.

Meanwhile, the social situation was worsening. When TNT, a youth entertainment channel I worked for, asked me to make documentaries about topics that young people cared about, I found that Russian youth were increasingly angry and isolated from the state. For many boys the greatest problem in their lives was their mandatory years of army service, where they faced physical abuse and being forced into black-market jobs for a corrupt class of army officers. Battles between teens and cops were regular: In 2009, I followed the story of a bunch of teens beaten black and blue by police for the dubious sin of drinking beer in a public place. The films I and other documentary directors made around such issues rated well: There was a hunger among the younger generation to watch programs that portrayed their own world. Such films would have been impossible on the Ostankino channels, but as we were a “youth channel” and not necessarily on the Kremlin’s radar, we managed to get away with it—for a while. In 2010, I was politely told that the channel would not be making any more “social” films. But would I be interested in making something about footballers’ wives?

By this time I was starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable about working in Russian TV and decided to return to London. I wasn’t the only one having serious doubts. Several Western producers I knew had come over to work for Russia Today (now renamed RT). Set up by presidential decree in 2005, RT is Russia’s answer to BBC World and Al-Jazeera, a rolling 24/7 news channel broadcasting in English (and Arabic and Spanish) across every hotel and living room in the world. Its annual budget is over $300 million and its mission is to “give Russia’s point of view on world events.”

British and American 20-somethings straight out of journalism school would be offered generous compensation packages to work for the station, upwards of $55,000 plus a relocation fee, whereas in London or Washington they might have been expected to work for free. Of course they all wondered whether RT would turn out to be a propaganda channel. On occasion I would hang out with these 23-year-olds after work and talk to them about their jobs: “Well, it’s all about expressing the Russian point of view,” they would say, a little uncertain. Since the war in Iraq and then the 2008 financial crash many were skeptical about the virtue of the West. What could be wrong with a “Russian point of view?”

It took awhile for those working at RT to sense something was not quite right. In between the bland sports reports, Julian Assange appearances and Larry King Live broadcasts came the softball interviews with the president. (“Why is the opposition to you so small, Mr. President?” was one legendary question.) When one journalist, a 23-year-old straight out of Oxford, wrote a news story in which he stated that Estonia had been occupied by the USSR in 1945, he received a bollocking from the head of news: “We saved Estonia,” he was told and was ordered to change the copy. When another, straight out of Bristol University, was covering forest fires in Russia and wrote that the president wasn’t doing much about them, he was informed: “You have to say the president is at the forefront of fighting against the fires.”

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