Putin’s PR man Gleb Pavlovsky rued the monster he enabled

Gleb Pavlovsky was the Kremlin’s spinmeister as the baton was passed from Yeltsin to the former KGB agent.

Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky.

OBITUARY
Gleb Pavlovsky Political scientist
Born Odesa, Ukraine, March 5, 1951. Died Moscow, February 26, aged 71.

The poacher-turned-gamekeeper switch Gleb Pavlovsky undertook in 2011 was hardly unique, but then he was keeping the most dangerous game in the world: Vladimir Putin.

Pavlovsky operated a think tank of sorts – the Foundation for Effective Politics – that made its way into the camp of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin. It shaped the public’s perception of the unpredictable alcoholic, understanding that the romantic lie would outrun the brutal truth most days.

An ambitious Putin took notice and brought Pavlovsky into his inner circle. Russians knew during febrile days as the nation counted down to Yeltsin’s succession that anything could happen. And it did.

Pavlovsky navigated those times deftly, managing the image of a man whose public approval rating was 2 per cent, but who, within months, would be the authoritative voice of the nation.

Pavlovsky had studied history at Odesa University and fell in with a dissident crowd of “intellectual Marxists” inspired by the waves of student protests in the US and Europe in 1968.

The renegades were on a KGB watch list. They founded a magazine whose editorial content upset the communist leaders, who convicted Pavlovsky of “dissemination of fabrications known to be false, which defame the Soviet political and social system”. He pleaded guilty and was exiled 1200km north to Komi, where he painted houses, returning to Moscow in 1985 just as the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev took over the fading Soviet Union.

With his think-tank marketing team oper­ating seamlessly by 1995, he became a force in the circles of power radiating from the Kremlin. He was advising Yeltsin’s administration, and when the leader’s health and fortunes slid he was asked to help Putin, a trusted ally Yeltsin knew would not pursue him later over rising claims of corruption.

“He was not very impressive or expressive,” Pavlovsky said of Putin. “He always tried to stay in the shade and was silent most of the time.”

Putin had run the KGB’s successor, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), but was the lesser known of several candidates for president.

“He had to be elected to be president,” said Pavlovsky. “This was our job. I knew the plot. I needed an actor.”

Surveys showed Russian voters were looking for a hard man. Pavlovsky set about presenting the young, strong anointed prime minister in contrast to the enfeebled Yeltsin.

In September 1999 a series of apartment bombings across 12 nights killed 300 in six cities. These were blamed on Chechen rebels. On October 1 Putin declared the Chechnya government illegitimate and invaded, sparking the Second Chechen War.

The new prime minister went from a rating of 2 per cent to 27 per cent in four weeks. Russians admired his immediate and hard response.

Tellingly, those bombings had been predicted by a newspaper that reported they would be blamed on terrorists. On September 13, the speaker of the Russia Duma, Gennadiy Seleznyov, rose to say he had been told there had been another bombing in Volgodonsk, 1200km south of the capital. And there was – three days later. Whoops. Inhabitants of another block saw men loading sacks into their basement and called the police. They turned out to be FSB agents. A few days later it was said to have been a drill to mimic a terror attack. Two members of a Duma committee set up to investigate were assassinated.

At first, Putin had to be coached in hard-man ways. He had displayed the eloquent politeness said to distinguish those from St Petersburg. “They had to ask Putin to act more roughly (compared to) old, weak Yeltsin,” Pavlovsky said.

But, he said, he warned Putin against getting involved in Chechnya. “The decision to start a war was his decision. We had doubt,” he said. The black hole of Chechnya could swallow reputations whole. Putin said: “This is my game. I’m going to the end. I am going to war.” He vowed: “We’ll wipe (the Chechens) out to the shithouse.”

Pavlovsky abandoned Putin in 2011. Last year Pavlovsky said the invasion of Ukraine was also Putin’s personal decision.

“Nobody, including myself, realised just how maniacally obsessed he must have been with Ukraine,” Pavlovsky said. “We underestimated the extent of decay of the Russian government.”

He had concerns for what he helped create. “Putin is a child of this system. Putin will be gone, one way or another, but the system will stay … what I regret is that I switched off my brain as an analyst during that time and, in a way, donated my brain to ‘Kremlin and Putin franchising’.”