Selling my soul to the devil: why I worked for the Kremlin and what it’s like meeting Putin Angus Roxburgh signed up to work for a PR firm representing Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin after leaving journalism. He explains why […]

Angus Roxburgh signed up to work for a PR firm representing Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin after leaving journalism. He explains why he did it – and what Russia’s leader is like in person

Given Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule of Russia, his crackdown on human rights and backsliding on democracy, I am often asked how it could have happened that I ended up, from 2006, working for three years as a media consultant to his press secretary.

Towards the end of my time with the BBC, the whole direction of TV news was getting me down. What I had loved about the job was the human side – getting out and meeting ordinary people, spending days gathering material for a crafted, original package. Now the stress was on instant, live reporting.

Working in television is also a fickle business. One day your face doesn’t fit any more. Suddenly, I found myself being dropped from the main news programmes. My confidence stumbled. I began to dry up sometimes during live interviews.

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I decided to go freelance, but soon found myself struggling professionally and emotionally. I shrivelled up like a potted plant without water, and for six whole months I did almost nothing except stare mindlessly out of the window.

“I came to see Putin as a ruthless narcissist, a boorish control-freak, a man who instilled fear and trampled on human rights.”

That was the situation in March 2006, when I got a call from two former journalist colleagues who now working in PR. They had just secured a nine-month contract with the Kremlin’s press office – and had no one on their staff who spoke Russian, knew about Russian politics, and also knew about the media.

The prospect of using my skills again was irresistible. How could I refuse? It certainly wasn’t a future I had ever imagined for myself, and I didn’t like the idea of it. But if I was going to sell my soul to the devil, I could at least use the time to find out what the devil was like.

When I finally got to meet Putin, in a session with invited reporters and academics, having a chance to shake his hand and watch his mannerisms was clearly the best way to get a sense of the man.

There’s nothing like waiting in an anteroom for two hours just for him to turn up, to understand that he sees himself as unconstrained by the niceties of normal social behaviour – a tsar who keeps visitors waiting (whether a foreign president or a bunch of hacks), as a deliberate display of power.

Close up, you see what angers or amuses him. The persistence of what he called “stereotypes” about Russia in the West was one of the things that angered him most.

It was certainly easy, in the presence of such a commanding figure, to be cowed – and some of the academics (more so than the journalists) tended to preface their questions with sickeningly sycophantic verbiage: “I just want to thank you…” And the atmosphere was such that hardly anybody dared to ask a follow-up question if Putin had dodged answering the first.

At the end of one session, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told me: “Why do they behave like this? Putin detests it! He comes here hoping for a good argument, and all he gets are these boring, soft questions. They should challenge him.”

I came to see Putin as a ruthless narcissist, a boorish control-freak, a man who instilled fear and trampled on human rights – though I still also think we must criticise Western policies, over many years, towards his Russia.

This is an edited excerpt from ‘Moscow Calling: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent’ by Angus Roxburgh (£17.99, Birlinn), which is out now