In the spring of 2017, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in about 100 Russian cities to protest political corruption and other problems in national government.

Western media and Russian Internet news outlets published stories about the marches, many focusing on the police who brutally dispersed the crowds and arrested nearly 2,000 protesters. But Russian viewers of the country’s television channels saw little of this. For most of them, the March 26 protests never happened at all.

Why did Russia’s broadcast media ignore the demonstrations? It may be that the orders came from a man who has served Russian President Vladimir Putin for nearly two decades: Alexey Gromov, formerly the president’s press secretary and now first deputy head of the presidential administration.

Credit: kremlin.ru Alexey Gromov.

Described as an unassuming man whose passions include collecting antique coins, Gromov is nonetheless a key manager of the Putin government’s control over what gets said — or not — in Russia’s major print and broadcast media. He is also a co-creator of RT, the international propaganda network formerly known as Russia Today.

Despite his great influence, Gromov remains relatively unknown to most Russians.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s he studied history at Moscow State University, focusing on the South and West Slavs. His fellow students included Konstantin Nikiforov, who became President Boris Yeltsin’s speechwriter, and Oleg Dobrodeyev, future chairman of Russia’s main state-run television station.

But in many ways, Gromov’s youth was unremarkable. One classmate remembers him as a friendly guy who loved to play soccer. He met his wife Anna while harvesting potatoes; such agricultural work was a mandatory tradition for Soviet students.

After graduating, he entered the Soviet diplomatic service, spending several years in the former Czechoslovakia before returning to Moscow.

Gromov stayed in diplomacy after the Soviet Union collapsed, serving at the Russian Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 1996, his boss, the Russian ambassador, was made President Boris Yeltsin’s press secretary. Gromov quickly followed him to Moscow, becoming head of Yeltsin’s press service.

Elena Tregubova, a journalist whose 2003 tell-all book “Tales of the Kremlin Digger” warned that Putin was reinstituting Soviet-style control of the media, describes Gromov as a modest man who treated people well and, most critically, never expressed his own opinion on political issues during his tenure.

In 2000, he was appointed as the press secretary for Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin. This promotion radically changed Gromov, Tregubova wrote. He began to behave less like a press secretary and more like a security guard, driving away journalists from the president and forbidding reporters from asking questions.

His and his new boss’s influence on the country’s media environment would soon make itself felt.

Gromov’s First Assignment

Credit: kremlin.ru Alexei Gromov and Vladimir Putin in 2000.

Vladimir Putin began his presidency by distancing Russia’s influential oligarchs from power. In particular, he deprived them of their national TV stations: Vladimir Gusinsky lost NTV and Boris Berezovsky lost ORT (now Channel One). The process involved both criminal cases and arrests; first Gusinsky, then Berezovsky were forced to leave Russia by the end of 2000.

The first to be hit was NTV, which was critical of the government and aired frequent attacks on Putin and his policies. In particular, the satirical program “Kukly” (The Puppets) portrayed the relatively short president as Klein Zaches, a fairytale dwarf who gains a fortune by taking credit for the work of others. During the 1999–2000 election campaign, NTV and Guinsky’s other outlets openly sided with Putin’s competitors, leading the Kremlin to view the oligarch as a personal adversary.

The shut-down of NTV was led by Mikhail Lesin, who was press minister at the time. But Gromov also took part, according to Evgeny Kiselyev, the station’s head at the time.

Kiselyev recalls first becoming aware of Gromov’s role when they both attended a 2001 meeting with the president in which the channel’s editorial staff asked for his protection, explaining that criminal cases against Gusinsky were endangering the station. Putin’s reply, in which he stressed the supposed independence of the Russian judicial system, made it clear that no help was forthcoming.

Credit: kremlin.ru President Putin meets with representatives of NTV in January 2001.

Later that day, Kiselyev remembers receiving a call from the Kremlin inviting him to meet one-on-one with the press secretary in the basement of a restaurant in central Moscow. There, according to Kiselyev, Gromov told him that he would make every effort to help Anton Titov, one of NTV’s managers, who had recently been arrested for embezzlement, and that the station had nothing to worry about.

But these assurances came to little in the end. Titov ended up serving nearly two years in prison. By the time he was released, NTV had already been placed under the control of the Russian state monopoly Gazprom.

Details Matter

Gromov’s career continued to rise. In 2008, he was named deputy head of the presidential administration, which greatly increased his influence and put him in charge of the entire national television apparatus.

Despite his ever-higher positions, Gromov maintained a keen interest in the details of his work.

A prominent Russian broadcast journalist tells a story of needing money to make a documentary and asking for a meeting with Gromov. To his surprise, Gromov not only met with him, but immediately started making calls to line up the financing. The journalist asked Gromov why he didn’t have a subordinate make the calls.

“Shit doesn’t work if I don’t do it myself,” Gromov told him.

That’s Gromov’s approach in all things television. He alone has the authority to order state channels to air a news item. He also retains the authority to prevent news from being shown.

Last October, leaders at the state-run VGTRK, which operates the popular “Russia” and “Russia-24” channels, received a furious call from Gromov. The channels were broadcasting video of a mass shooting at the Polytechnic College of Kerch in Crimea that left 20 people dead. Gromov ordered them to stop showing the video, recalls a man who overheard the conversation.

An Angry Fax Gromov could be very direct about the coverage he disliked. One piece of evidence comes in the form of a fax a wealthy Russian media owner received from the Kremlin a few years ago. On a sheet bearing the letterhead of the presidential administration was a copy of an article written by one of the outlet’s correspondents who covers the president’s events. The text was riddled with indignant handwritten notes. The fax came from Gromov, apparently seeking to intimidate the editor for how his outlet had covered the president, and was shown to The Project by the editor-in-chief of the outlet in question.

But in most cases, no call is needed. The heads of television channels attend weekly meetings at Gromov’s office at the presidential administration building in Moscow, where they are told what must be broadcast and what is forbidden.

Gromov’s sessions bring together the heads of all Russia’s major public and private TV companies — Channel One, VGTRK, NTV, TVC, REN TV, and Channel Five — plus representatives of key government agencies, including the office of the president, the government, and the parliament. A Kremlin official responsible for election campaigns also participates, along with foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

A few regular attendees of these meetings told The Project how they work.

Gromov outlines the president’s schedule and gives direct orders about how to cover his appearances and what exactly should be shown or said in news reports.

“You can ignore this,” one participant recalls Gromov saying as a way of indicating that a particular event should not be covered.

The TV networks also report their plans. They can offer ideas for news coverage, but only Gromov can give the go-ahead.

His instructions may also invoke restrictions on coverage in so-called “control regions.” If an important event is taking place — the election of a governor or the construction of a World Cup stadium, for example — the stations are forbidden to air negative information about anything happening in the entire region.

These restrictions apply to state security agencies as well. The Attorney General’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, the Investigative Committee, and other state bodies also generate large flows of information through their press services. Representatives of these services also attend a special regular meeting with Gromov, who dispenses instructions on what not to cover.

His role also includes convening important players together in particularly sensitive moments and coordinating their response, as he did when Western countries began to impose sanctions on RT, the state news channel widely dismissed as Russian propaganda.

While adept at exerting minute control over his subordinates, Gromov is also widely considered a master at managing up. Like few others, he knows how to obtain the decisions he wants from Putin, sometimes by selectively presenting unflattering information.

The 2013 firing of the head of state news agency RIA Novosti, Svetlana Mironyuk, is a good example of this. According to several sources, Gromov convinced Putin the outlet was producing inappropriate coverage of the post-election protests in 2011 and 2012.

In other cases under Gromov’s tenure, journalists have been removed from the presidential pool for publishing negative stories about Putin. Tregubova, the author of the book about her time covering the Kremlin, is one such example. Another reporter, Pavel Aptekar, was expelled from the pool after reporting without Gromov’s permission about Putin’s cancelled visit to a school in the North Caucasus on the day of the 2004 terrorist attack in Beslan.

But the presidential press pool is also a source of income for people close to Gromov.