Towards the end of his life, those around the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who was frail and recovering from a stroke, kept him insulated from knowing the true economic and social situation inside the newly born Soviet Union.
The information was withheld from him on the orders of Joseph Stalin – as it was “for the good of Comrade Lenin’s health”.
Tu-160 Bomber from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
One of the measures considered at the time was the printing of a single, “special” edition of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda.
It was to be a completely filtered publication filled with fictional good news to ease Lenin’s state of mind. It was “fake news” before the world even invented that term.
Looking at today’s Russia and how the people around Russian President Vladimir Putin are trying to keep the bad news from him in the digital age, you are reminded of one of Harry Truman’s famous sayings: “The only thing new in the world is the history you have not read yet.”
It has been conventional wisdom for some time now that Putin is kept in a situation where his staff tells him what he wants to hear and he is unaware of the devastating effects the war in Ukraine is having on Russia internally.
Kirov-Class Russian Navy Cleaned Up. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
But it is not just the war causing this internal dysfunctionality. This has been the case for some years now.
As far back as 2014, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly told US President Barack Obama that, based on her interactions with him, Putin was “out of touch with reality.”
But spoofing the news given to Putin is not as easy as owning your own printing press.
In the present day, not many people read newspapers anyway – at least not the kind printed on newsprint-grade paper. They receive much of their news over the airwaves and internet, which is harder to hide from the boss.
The Main Viewer
What we learned last month was that the Russian leader is fed a doctored version of the news every night – a current-day electronic version of the special edition of Pravda that Stalin wanted to use for Lenin’s consumption.
The story comes from one of the many notable Russian figures who have been forced to leave the country in recent years and broke cover on the subject.
According to him, Putin is now kept in a nearly analogous, but modern-day cocoon of information – data that has been sanitized and curated by the people around him to a degree that is extraordinary.
Just like the “special edition” of Pravda that was proposed for Lenin, what the Russian President is treated to every day has no connection with reality.
The details became known when a former Russian TV executive, Dmitri Skorobutov, claimed to UK media outlets that any news that might upset or antagonize Putin is, first of all, filtered out of the update bulletins on the main TV channel, Rossiya-1.
But then there is a second-order cover-up. According to his account, the Channel 1 news broadcast producers stay behind after hours in the Moscow news studio every day after the end of the evening news broadcast.
Once the studio staff has departed, the editors then assemble a tailored version of the news broadcast – a special report made solely for the man they refer to euphemistically as the “Main Viewer.”
Skorobutov, who now lives in Switzerland under political asylum, stated the practice of putting together the “Putin Eyes Only” program was then later intensified after the Ukraine war began.
According to Skorobutov’s account, the extent to which Putin’s sycophants took up this practice indicates how little he knows about how badly his war is going for Russia.
No Alternative Information Channels
Putin is known as a “hands-on” dictator who at times receives information directly from his senior military and intelligence staff, but the veracity of that information has become increasingly suspect.
When the Ukraine war began in 2022, he had relied heavily on reports of the Ukraine situation prepared by Colonel General Sergei Beseda, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Fifth Service.
This is the section of the FSB also known as the Service for Operational Information and International Relations with all the former Soviet republics as their assigned territory.
Beseda had personally assured Putin that Ukrainian resistance would be little more than a speed bump to the Russian invasion and would be overrun in no time.
His projection may go down in history as some of the worst intelligence reporting in Russian history.
Beseda was subsequently removed, and there were rumors that he had also been placed under arrest.
He eventually officially resigned from his post, but today still serves as an advisor to FSB Head Aleksandr Bortnikov. All Beseda was guilty of in the end was telling Putin what he knew the former KGB Lt. Col. wanted to believe.
These revelations come at a time when Putin is reportedly struggling to maintain his control of the situation around him.
The key to that control is his making sure the Russian public has no chance to receive information from any alternative news sources.
This is behind the highly unpopular internet blackouts and the blocking of popular messaging platforms like Telegram.
But this shell game seems to be running out of time. As a recent piece written by a Russian journalist now exiled in the EU reads:
“The Kremlin has broken a longstanding compact with the Russian people. Only a grandpa like Mr. Putin could fail to see that in destroying what remained of a relatively free internet, he was destroying a central foundation of his own power.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
