Russia Pumps Tens of Millions Into Burnishing Image Abroad

MOSCOW -- In early 2004, when Svetlana Mironyuk became director general of the Russian news and information agency RIA Novosti, she discovered that the descendant of the Soviet Union's global propaganda machine was dying on its feet.

Some of its writers were still using typewriters from communist days. The agency was publishing just one English-language newspaper, Sputnik, which was supposedly sold in Britain, although Mironyuk said she could find no evidence of that. Travel agents and dentists had moved into RIA's stolid Moscow headquarters building.

"It was a desperate situation," she said.

No more. The agency's newly refurbished offices include a high-tech newsroom, complete with flat screens and a circular news desk, where 300 journalists disseminate a multimedia package of news to an international audience every day.

RIA Novosti is part of a massive effort by Russia to build and project to the world an image of a country where the economy is booming and democracy is developing. The campaign is designed to counter what the government and many people here see as unrelenting and unfair Western criticism of declining political freedoms under President Vladimir Putin, who is preparing to hand over his post, but perhaps little of his power, after the election last Sunday of his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev.

Flush with foreign reserves from oil and natural gas sales, the Kremlin is pumping tens of millions of dollars into various forms of public diplomacy. They include new media ventures to target international audiences; foundations to promote Russian language and culture around the world; conferences to charm Western opinion-makers; and nongovernmental organizations that are setting up shop in Western capitals to scrutinize the failings of Western democracy.

The Kremlin has hired the giant U.S. public relations firm Ketchum Inc. "to help the government tell its story of economic growth and opportunity for its citizens," said Randy DeCleene, an executive at the firm. He declined to further discuss the relationship, which began with the Group of Eight summit that Russia hosted in St. Petersburg in 2006.

The campaign is part of a resurgent self-confidence in Russian government and society and a conviction that the country is a global player with diplomatic, military and economic heft.

"It's all about influence," said Vyacheslav Nikonov, a longtime Kremlin adviser and the head of Russki Mir, a new grant-dispensing organization that gets $20 million a year from the Russian government to champion the Russian language. Russians are studying how U.S. nongovernmental organizations operate globally to project points of view, he said, but added: "We are far, far from what the Americans are doing. . . . We are students, freshmen."

The effort has its skeptics, who argue that no amount of image-buffing can reverse, or even temper, deep-rooted concerns about the centralization of power under Putin and the withering of political competition here.

"If you had the PR account to improve Russia's image in the West, then your first recommendation would be: not to arrest Garry Kasparov, and allow Mikhail Kasyanov to participate in the presidential vote," said Michael A. McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution and the principal adviser on Russia in the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Kasparov, a former world chess champion, is a fierce opponent of Putin. Kasyanov, a former prime minister, was barred from running in the March 2 presidential election.