For the second consecutive year the Russian ministry of Culture has made funding for movies praising Russian foreign intelligence, the SVR, one of its top priorities. Others include works that lauding the heroism of Russian soldiers in the “special military operation”, promoting family values, and portraying Russia as a great country.
Placing such a narrowly defined topic as a central aim for the ministry is quite unusual even for Putin’s Russia, and reflects a more aggressive stance from the intelligence agencies.
Putin’s Russia has a long tradition of government support for movies praising state security in general, but not espionage specifically. In 2006, the FSB reinstated a competition that had existed under the longest serving chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, for the best literary and artistic works about FSB operatives. The FSB spokesperson admitted at the time that the service was openly returning to KGB traditions.
“This is returning to past experience. From 1978 to 1988 there was a KGB award for art. It was also awarded to those who created a positive image of KGB employees,” he said. “Nowadays, whether in the cinema, in TV serials, or in detective series, it’s common for special services to be shown in a negative light, so we have decided to revive this competition, to reward those who do not discredit employees of the secret services, and to create a positive image of our defenders.”
In that year, the revived award went to a movie portraying an exiled oligarch as a mastermind of a bloody terrorist attack in Russia. The script closely resembled the hostage taking in Moscow’s Dubrovka theater in October 2002 (in the film, the theater was replaced by a circus and the FSB did not kill 130 hostages with knockout gas, as in the real event.)
The movie credits included a deputy director of the FSB, and it was filmed with the FSB’s support. It was a clear example of the way the agency handled the tension between past and present in the first decade of Putin in power, using propaganda films that portrayed the security services as they hoped to be seen by the public.
Now the agencies have gone much further, and have become much more ambitious.
Some of the projects are pure propaganda with the aim of promoting a specific SVR narrative. Take, for example, an upcoming film “Guantanamera,” which has secured government funding.
The film is a spy adventure, in which the protagonist, an attractive female blogger, one day finds herself in Cuba caught between rival spy agencies, and with only her grandfather, a general and veteran of the KGB intelligence, able to help her. Yet it also ticks a box for one of the Kremlin’s other favored themes. “The film reflects the history of friendship between Russia and Cuba, but the main thing in it is the relationship between generations, family values,” the producer said.
“The Recruited” is another movie promoting Russian military intelligence.
The protagonist and his friends are young men recruited by GRU, the military intelligence service, for a special mission in enemy territory. The objective is to infiltrate a secret laboratory near the Russian border, where research on a new biological weapon is underway — a favored theme of Kremlin propaganda concerns bioweapons supposedly developed by the Americans in Ukraine. That movie will also hit cinema screens around the country this year.
But some projects about Russian spies go way beyond mere propaganda.
The most ambitious project last year, openly supported by the SVR was “The Main Adversary”, a two-series TV documentary made by Arkady Mamontov, a journalist with a long tradition of cooperating with the Russian security and intelligence agencies.
The film’s title refers to the old KGB term for the United States,and takes viewers on a journey through the CIA’s history until the full-scale war in Ukraine.
In this account, the US, as early as in July 1945, began planning to “stab Russia, an ally, in the back” by striking an agreement with the British to secretly support “Ukrainian nationalists,” most of them former Nazi collaborators. The architect of this backstabbing was apparently Dwight D. Eisenhower, the future US President, according to the head of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin.
According to the Main Adversary, the US was angered by Stalin’s refusal to sign the Bretton Woods agreements on post-war monetary management, therefore preventing the US from taking over the global financial system.
The film outlined the main differences between the CIA and the SVR, in particular what it described as the US agency’s technique of toppling hostile regimes by relying on traitors and former Nazi collaborators for operational but also ideological reasons. “There is a statue of Goebbels in Langley, from the personal collection of Allen Dulles, because the CIA consider him a hero,” the documentary claims. The SVR’s main objective, on the other hand, is to defend the country and Russian people. “We don’t do subversive operations,” Naryshkin says.
To illustrate the point of the CIA’s supposed tentacles for its regime change work, the authors list USAID, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, as key tools in the CIA’s toolkit — both in subversion and recruitment.
The documentary apparently also aimed to serve some tactical purpose. Here and there, the authors drop in the names of active CIA operatives, including a supposed head of the Moscow CIA station, and also a CIA operative in Bulgaria with a hint that he had been a handler of a Russian asset exposed by the FSB. Those names add nothing to the story, but are apparently meant to be a message to the CIA.
The documentary secured SVR head Naryshkin as its chief commentator, and won praise from the agency after its airing on Russian television.
There’s one other tradition the SVR has also revived. Soviet propaganda was notoriously dull and the latest documentary is very much in that tradition. They made it with buttoned-up FSB and KGB veterans complaining, for example, that 1970s Ukrainians had been rude to them.
Boring it may be, but it serves the purpose of reminding Russians that the good old, bad old days are back.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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