The Real Lessons of RT’s Foreign Agent Registration

The Russian television channel RT has at last registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), complying with a Department of Justice request after loud public protest.

Well, almost.

In fact, there is no single legal entity known as RT operating in the United States. Instead, RT’s television content is produced by T&R Productions LLC, which has registered as a foreign agent of the Moscow-based ANO TV-Novosti.

The general manager and sole member of T&R is Mikhail Solodovnikov. A former Moscow reporter, Solodovnikov receives an annual salary of $670,000. According to the FARA filing, RT’s two-month spending for August and September 2017 totaled roughly $6.6 million. If we project those figures outward for the whole year, we can assume an annual budget of roughly $40 million for RT’s American operations.

RT was known for its enormous budgets long before its registration under FARA, but the freshly disclosed documents confirm what I had previously written at TAI.

The simple fact that huge amounts of money are being poured into Russian media projects, however, is no guarantee of their effectiveness, because some of that money is inevitably skimmed off the top, or “absorbed” by the managers, as we say in Russian. I would estimate that roughly 95 percent of all the projects started in Russia are initiated with the sole purpose of “absorbing” the financing. And the scale of corruption in Russia is such that money is routinely stolen not only from governmental projects, but from privately financed ones, too.

This is precisely what happened to the stillborn television channel Kommersant TV. Alisher Usmanov, a Putin ally and media magnate who privately owns the Kommersant media holding, decided to launch the channel in 2011 after the successful rollout of a radio station, Kommersant FM. The money was allocated for the new project, and ten editors and two managers started their work. Four months later, it was all over: no television channel was ever launched, and the money was gone. The general manager of Usmanov’s media projects resigned.

Money vanished in a similarly mysterious fashion at another Russian media outlet, the New-York based RTVi television channel. The former Russian media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky had founded the channel in 1997, before selling it in 2012 to the former CEO of Zvezda, a channel owned and operated by the Russian Ministry of Defense. RTVi has always positioned itself as an independent channel, and in late 2016, it announced a major relaunch after claiming that it had received new financing. The channel never disclosed the name of the investor, though rumors say it could be Sergey Chemezov, the head of the Russian state corporation Rostech. In any case, the channel was relaunched this spring—but by October, production of two of its major programs, including a political talk show broadcast online from its Moscow studio, was suspended indefinitely due to lack of financing.

If you look at RT’s newly disclosed budget, its major expenses fall under the categories of salaries and construction/improvements: at $1.7 million and $2.7 million, respectively, for the two months reported. The only well-known television star employed by RT is Larry King, whose compensation is presumably quite high. As for general manager Mikhail Solodovnikov, his salary looks absurdly generous, and it remains a mystery what the money allotted for construction/improvements is really going towards.

In theory, such line items could provide perfect cover for legally transferring money from Russia to the United States, to spend on agents and cooperators, or to bribe politicians, officials and think tankers. The expenses would appear officially on paper allocated to employees or vaguely defined budget items, while being deployed for far more nefarious and subversive purposes.

RT’s registration under FARA primarily suggests two lessons. First, its huge budgets don’t correlate to its effectiveness. From previous reporting we know that RT lies about its viewership, probably in order to please the investor: the Kremlin needs to see good numbers to justify its generous budget allocations, after all, and we know that Vladimir Putin relies heavily on the information that Russian state-controlled media send him. Second, the money RT receives from the Russian state might well be spent on much more than high-end television shows.

So yes, RT must be recognized and confronted as a foreign agent—but the primary danger it poses is not in the realm of television.

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