MOSCOW (AP) - This was the year the Russian government aimed to brighten its image overseas. A Kremlin-backed satellite TV channel went into full operation, the government newspaper began putting inserts in major foreign papers, and President Vladimir Putin hosted the G-8 summit of big industrialized democracies. Yet Russia's image has been clouded all year—by a gas dispute that shocked European customers, by the Kremlin's sanctions against its diminutive neighbor Georgia, by the gunning-down of a prominent investigative journalist and Kremlin critic.
Now speculation that Russia may have been behind the radioactive poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent who was looking into the journalist Anna Politkovskaya's murder, has deepened the impression that Moscow is reviving the brutal tactics of the Soviet era.
Litvinenko's death in a London hospital was followed within days by news that former Premier Yegor Gaidar, another Kremlin critic, had fallen severely ill in neighboring Ireland and was taken back to Moscow. His doctors think he, too, was poisoned, according to his spokesman. And on Friday came news that one of Litvinenko's contacts in London had tested positive for radioactivity.
"Obviously, all of this doesn't improve the image of Russia," said Sergei Kolushev, a Russian who heads the London-based public relations company Eventica. The company's activities include arranging trips to Russia for foreign journalists and putting on an annual Russian winter festival in Trafalgar Square.
Many Russian professionals believe that Western media reflexively disparage the country.
"It is a fact that Russia lots of times gets quite an unbalanced and even inaccurate coverage," Margarita Simonyan, news director of the Russia Today satellite TV channel, told The Associated Press.
Russia, which over generations has been tagged with pejorative phrases such as "The Evil Empire" and "The Wild East," tends to take criticism as contempt. TV stations and most national newspapers have concentrated on suggestions that the poisoning is the work of forces trying to discredit the Russian government, rather than on the possibility that Russia committed the poisoning.
Among officials and analysts there's a widespread contention that Western countries are seeking to destabilize Russia and encroach on its traditional sphere of influence by absorbing Eastern European countries into NATO.
The Kremlin-backed TV station, with a $30 million annual budget and broadcasting in English to about 100 countries, is a key element of Russia's image-buffing program. Moscow also hired the US-based PR firm Ketchum to work on foreign media coverage of the G-8 summit, and the official newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta has begun placing a monthly supplement about Russia called "Trendlines" in newspapers in up to a dozen countries.
While there's nothing unusual about countries promoting themselves overseas, many analysts suggest Russia would be better off behaving differently.
"I'm just flabbergasted at the money Russia is spending" on PR efforts while committing actions "that help fuel suspicious stereotypes," said Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institute.
But another analyst suggested that if the Kremlin was behind Litvinenko's poisoning, as many suspect, it could have been a dark variant of image control.
If it was an assassination, said George Friedman, director of the U.S.-based Strategic Forecasting think-tank, it could have been meant as a message to other nations not to give asylum to "renegade agents."
Asked whether it would be in Russia's interests to risk worldwide denunciation, Friedman cited Machiavelli: "It is better to be feared than to be loved."
Despite Russia's growing PR savvy, the country remains substantially opaque to foreign journalists. Ministries frequently issue only a "no comment" or demand that questions be submitted in writing—meaning the response won't come for days, if ever.
"Unfortunately, in Russia by the time the relevant people have responded to a story like Litvinenko's death, it's often too late, opinion has already been formed," said Simonyan. "It happens partly because for us Russians it's only natural not to invent excuses."
Kolushev, the PR man in London, said the Kremlin still has a long way to go.
"Russia needs to have a good dialogue with powerful world television channels," he said.
