Russian propaganda

Russian propaganda is a term that describes mass media communications that promote views, perceptions or agendas of the government of Russia. The media includes state-run outlets and online technologies. At the end of 2008, Lev Gudkov, based on the Levada Center polling data, pointed out the near-disappearance of public opinion as a socio-political institution in contemporary Russia and its replacement with the still-efficacious state propaganda.

Shortly after Perestroika and the Beslan terror act in September 2004, Putin enhanced a Kremlin-sponsored program aimed at "improving Russia's image" abroad. One of the major projects of the program was the creation in 2005 of Russia Today—an English language TV news channel providing 24-hour news coverage, modeled on CNN. Towards its start-up budget, $30 million of public funds were allocated. A CBS News story on the launch of Russia Today quoted Boris Kagarlitsky as saying it was "very much a continuation of the old Soviet propaganda services".

Russia's deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin said in August 2008, in the context of the Russia-Georgia conflict: "Western media is a well-organized machine, which is showing only those pictures that fit in well with their thoughts. We find it very difficult to squeeze our opinion into the pages of their newspapers." In June 2007, Vedomosti reported that the Kremlin had been intensifying its official lobbying activities in the United States since 2003, among other things hiring such companies as Hannaford Enterprises and Ketchum.

In a 2005 interview with U.S government-owned external broadcaster Voice of America, the Russian-Israeli blogger Anton Nosik () said the creation of RT "smacks of Soviet-style propaganda campaigns." Pascal Bonnamour, the head of the European department of Reporters Without Borders, called the newly announced network "another step of the state to control information." In 2009, Luke Harding (then the Moscow-based, Russia correspondent of The Guardian) described RT's advertising campaign in the United Kingdom as an "ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire."According to Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, Russia’s most well respected polling organization. Putin’s Russia’s propaganda is "aggressive and deceptive... worse than anything I witnessed in the Soviet Union"

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