Over at The New Republic this week, James Kirchick has an intriguing piece on the Kremlin’s public relations campaign in the U.S. In addition to trusty fog machine Russia Today, Moscow's attempts to curry Western favor include placing hilarious inserts in the Washington Post, wining and dining American journalists at annual retreats and, bafflingly, letting the foreign press meet the boorish and decidedly unpresentable Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. All of this is trumped, however, by the Kremlin’s 2005 hiring of a D.C.-based PR firm, Ketchum, Inc., who take credit for making Putin Time’s 2007 “Person of the Year.” Ultimately, Kirchick is at a loss to explain a) why these PR attempts are so poorly and haphazardly executed and b) why the Kremlin bothers with them at all. Our guess is as good as anyone’s about the second question, but maybe we can get somewhere with the first.

We called a source in the Russian PR industry to help put the problem in context. The first problem with most U.S. analysis of the Kremlin’s actions, the source says, is that it views Russia’s executive branch as monolithic, when it’s actually a bunch of bureaucrats competing with one another. In the case of PR, the heads of the various state news outlets — Russia Today, RIA Novosti, Rossisskaya Gazeta — and all are vying to become the leading source of Russian propaganda. Why? “Because in Russia," our source says, "the main game is not who will do the service, but who will take the money for the service.” If your PR efforts are noticed, you get recognition and your agency gets bigger piece of the federal budget (which often doubles as pocket money). And who decides how the federal budget is allocated? Putin, of course!

So the object here is never to make good or effective propaganda, but to impress Putin with your effort. Just as artists in the ’30s strived to create the kind of art they imagined Stalin would like as opposed to good art, state media moguls today are striving to make the kind of propaganda that they imagine Putin likes. And it is this need to grab the prime minister’s attention, our source argues, that causes each PR effort to be more blatant and outrageous than the last. As a result, most of them are doing a miserable job.

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the hiring of Ketchum for the 2005 G8 summit is a perfect example of this principle at work. The firm wasn’t hired by “The Kremlin,” but by one man: then-Deputy Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov. “When Peskov hired Ketchum, everyone saw it as a huge gamble,” the source says, perhaps in part because paying a foreign company $2 million for one PR job when everyone around you is churning it out all the time for free seems absurd. The Russian PR community doubts that Ketchum helped the country’s image. But somebody was apparently impressed with the risk taken: Peskov is now Putin’s press secretary.

Pravda on the Potomac: Russian Propaganda Descends on Washington [The New Republic]