By: Emily Tatum, Matthew Palla, and Joe Komlanc
Note: This is the second installment in our ongoing “Five Questions with” series where students enrolled in the Spring 2019 Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies’ Colloquium on “Russian Media Strategies at Home and Abroad.” In this series, students pose questions to the Colloquium’s guest lecturers. Today’s five questions were posed to Dr. Leonid Volkov, prominent Russian politician, member of Russia’s Progress Party, and campaign manager and chief of staff for Alexei Navalny. The interview has been edited for clarity.
Emily Tatum: Our first question is in regard to your work as Navalny’s Chief of Staff for his campaigns for mayor and for the presidency. How did state-sponsored media affect the campaigns? What was the process in trying to run an effective opposition campaign under the state-run media system, especially in regards to the state-run television networks?
Leonid Volkov: They usually just ignore us. During a political campaign, you can’t build an increase in polling without name recognition. If no one knows about you, you can’t have high approval numbers…. We asked people to reach out to their friends, relatives, and colleagues on the social media or [go] door to door. If you have access to television, you can make millions of people see you immediately. It costs an enormous amount of money to print millions of leaflets, and you have to organize logistics, which takes a lot of time given the size of the country—even the size of Moscow. The state sponsors realize that they don’t want to give us attention. Yeltsin was subjected to highly public criticism from the media, which increased his name recognition dramatically across the country. So they didn’t repeat this mistake with us. They were quite critical [of us] and threw dirt on Navalny before the campaign. During the campaign they always just ignored him.
Matt Palla: You mentioned this grassroots campaign you have conducted. Given your interaction with people in Russia, do you think that liberal rule of law can be established in Russia after Putin is gone. Do they people even want that sort of system?
Volkov: Yes of course, I have no doubt at all. When things happen in Russia and when I need a source of inspiration I go to any Baltic state. They have a common history; they are all the same. You see the same types of houses—the typical five-story houses or Soviet style high-rises; you see the same faces. They are absolutely the same. In Riga or Tallinn…you could hardly hear anyone speaking any other language but Russian. They left [the Soviet Union] and have become perfectly European countries with rule of law, working institutions, independent courts and journalists, freedom of speech, fair elections, very competitive political systems, and so on and so on and so on. They are no different from us, yet they are definitely European countries. There is no reason why we should think that Russia couldn’t become a European country as well in terms of institutions and relations. Even if Putin is still able to fool people about the elections (like he is able to conduct completely fake elections), people think that these elections and the candidates are real and people still participate thinking they are making a choice, while in reality they are not making a choice. People consider elections to be an important value because they feel that their voice matters, their happiness matters; they want to be asked, and they don’t want Putin to crown himself as an emperor.
Palla: You discuss the of a more liberal system, but in the western media there have been accusations of [Russian] interference in European countries and the United States in terms of trolls, bots, and disinformation. You have a lot of experience with these tactics in Russia. Do you see the same strategies implemented in the EU and the United States?
Volkov: Putin experts talk a lot about corruption and media influence. But a very important thing that people have to understand, that pretty much most people don’t understand, is that all the troll farms were created and intended for internal use. Firstly, because that is what is important for the regime—to keep the message under control and to keep the internet under control in Russia. Secondly, because of technical and logistical reasons, they cannot hire enough English speakers or [anyone who speaks a European language] to really put the message through.
Allegedly, they did some sandbox experiments with American markets before the 2016 election. I am absolutely sure this didn’t happen [nor did it] have any influence on the outcome of the election. For me all this accusation of Russian Facebook ad campaigns and troll comments influencing people is insulting towards the American voters. I’ve never seen a person who changed their mind because of troll comments. The products that these troll farms produce are intended to spoil the internet and spoil the discussion internally.
It makes a lot of sense because for them, it’s meant to distract people from the internet while also bringing them back to television. Television is under their control and gives [the regime] a very simple and straightforward [means to influence individuals’ interpretation of events] and [understanding of] politics. The internet is so very unclear, very foggy, and very dirty. If you wanted to read something, you will face hundreds of comments with all sorts of dirty words, hate speech…It will cost you so much time and effort to actually understand what is going on. That’s their model. Almost 80% of the Russian population is on the internet and on social media. But less than 10% of the people consider the internet as a primary source for political news. So that’s why troll farms exist, because the rest of the population uses the internet for sports news and Tinder but not for political information. It is not meant to influence the way people think politically.
Tatum: Let’s turn back to the domestic Russian media landscape. The current legislation regarding the Digital Economy National Programme (DENP), where Russian internet providers would have to temporarily disconnect from the internet, is currently still under discussion. Do you see the DENP passing, and if so how would the DENP affect the Russian media system presently but also in the future?
Volkov: Oh I see, the supervision of the internet. Every new law introduced in the Russian parliament since 2011…always has [one primary] objective: Someone wants to steal some money. Then there may be a second objective: To [influence] something around the world. But the first priority is…to steal money. And this also appears to be the case with this reorganization of the internet. First of all, they want to get ahold of 20 billion rubles, which will be allocated for this program. I, on the technical level, [believe that it is] unfeasible.… They will not manage to build this system. But 20 billion rubles will change [hands].
Tatum: Our final question goes back to Navalny. How do you see his current role in shaping the Russian media system? His online advocacy obviously has given him an initial foundation of a platform to run for different offices. But why does the Russian government allow his current YouTube presence and other online channels to continue in spite his popularity and how does this reflect the Kremlin’s overall media strategy?
Volkov: Navalny is one of two independent [political] sources that exist in Russia. There are no more. [The sources of political information] are the Kremlin, the President’s administration, national television channels, and us. There is no…other influential [group] generating an independent agenda. That is why we are able to build what we have achieved. We reach around 4 million people daily; state-sponsored may reach around 20 million. So we use our many channels to stream our agenda online, and they use their online channels to push their agenda and somehow we coexist. We are already too large for them to do something to us. They can’t shut us down; they wish to shut us down but it’s impossible. If they wanted to shut us down they would have to shut down YouTube, which has 40 million users, most of them young people. They can’t really block it. Moreover, it pretty much restricts [the administration] in their ability to disseminate fake news and information about us. With us, the situation is more complicated because they know that we are able to fire back. So when they distribute fake news about us, they know we possess an independent media channel reaching 2 million and that we have the ability to go viral.