“National traitors on national TV”

In the course of the last month, Russian state-controlled national television channels have broadcast a series of so-called “documentaries”, all of which throw negative light on Russian opposition leaders, mainly through exposing their involvement in what are presented as Western-led, sometimes clandestine operations.

An EU and US leading an “information war”
One such documentary titled “The Information War against Russia” was broadcast on 30 March by the state-owned TV national channel Rossiya.

The programme was embedded into the popular talk show “Special Correspondent”, which is broadcast every week by “Rossiya”, and presented a compilation of different stories which all built up to the claim that Russia is the target of an EU and US led “information war”.

For example, the programme showed how Russian opposition politicians had appeared at recent hearings about Russia and media propaganda in the European Parliament and in the OSCE in Vienna, where they expressed critical views of the Russian government.

Many of the recordings, even those from public hearings, were deliberately blurred and the sound quality poor; an attempt to make the events appear dubious and covert.

Among many different aspects of what the programme labelled “the information war” it found time to mention the East Stratcom’s Disinformation Review, which [watch from 29.05] was presented as “the EU’s instruction manual” providing “correct” political views to Russia’s opposition.

Navalny and the British security service
The latest example in this genre is a production which was broadcast this Wednesday (13 April), also on Rossiya and, again, embedded into Evgeny Popov’s “Special Correspondent” talk show.

This time the focus was moved from media to alleged covert cooperation between the prominent opposition leader Alexey Navalny and the British security service, MI6.

However, already before the full programme was broadcast, Russian critical media, among them The Insider, scrutinized material from the production that had already been made available, and showed that documents and letters, which the documentary claimed had been written by native speakers of British and American English, had mistakes that were typical of native Russian speakers. For an analysis of some examples, see also this BBC’s article.

Opposition is a threat to national security
With the September Duma elections appearing in the horizon, these documentaries send a clear message to Russian voters: opposition to the Government and its policies is the result of interference of foreign states and therefore a fundamental threat to national security.

The message often repeatedly refers to the fundamental narrative about an alleged American led conspiracy, which undermines the strategic aim of political continuity. Also, the narrative is in line with Putin’s identification of what he labelled called “national traitors” in his often-quoted speech on the occasion of the annexation of Crimea from March 2014.