PR Emerges in the Wild East

By Roman Diukarev
President, Willard PR

with Nikita Sekretarev
Senior Associate,
Willard PR Moscow

(Second in a four-part series)

With the iron curtain gone, Russia reached for every bit of knowledge that had previously been restricted or unavailable.  The country drank in western culture as though parched, and public relations was part of that culture.

In the early 1990s, the first Russian edition of Sam Black's cornerstone text Practical Public Relations was published. At the same time, the first professional education opportunity appeared: the School of International Information at Moscow State Institute for International Relations began offering a degree in public relations. Alexander Borisov, the dean, promoted PR as "counterpoise" to state propaganda, as a democratic practice fully in line with the needs and the spirit of the present day.

The carriers of western knowledge were greeted with open arms. Western communications pros was begin teaching, rather than doing business.  Most people had no idea what PR was; most confused it with advertising.

"Obviously, there cannot be a truly free market without advertising, without communication in general, but the trick was that Russian society wasn't ready yet to digest the complex concept of 'communications' - the concept of PR. Advertising was much more linear, much easier to understand," says Roman Diukarev. "Russian companies were asking us to come and discuss business, but what we really did was to spend the entire meeting explaining what we do, and talking about our credentials.  We were just teaching people, and our business meetings turned into school lessons."

"Young & Rubicam Sovero General Manager Mike Adams went even further.  In 1993, he was invited to teach a yearlong course in public relations at Moscow State Institute for International Relations."

By 1993, a number of PR networks, including Burson-Marsteller and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, began opening Russian offices.  Early 1994 saw the first crop of local agencies struggling for a place in the sun.  Imageland, RIM, Mikhailov & Partners, and Maslov, Sokur & Partners were among the most prominent.

Still, the demand for business PR was limited.  Russian companies didn't yet understand the real benefits, and those who dared to contact a PR agency usually only wanted the agency to pay media to print favorable articles.  Generally, though, Russian business was too preoccupied with redistributing ownership of former state enterprises to pay attention to PR.

The early 1990s deserved its description as the "Wild Capitalist Era."  Russian businessmen were preoccupied with conquering and carving up spheres of influence, and fighting to grab the choicest factories or mines.

Russian business was all about its own version of mergers and acquisitions - sometimes accomplished neatly and legally, but often accomplished through the threat of violence and violence itself. 

That left only a few western companies as potential clients for the nation's growing PR industry.  For the most part, large foreign companies were visibly hesitant and, to a degree, afraid to expand into this savage land, yet there were a brave few.

"I remember working with Danone in 1992 or 1993, when we were organizing the opening ceremony of the first Danone shop in Moscow," Diukarev recalls.  "Later - I think, it was 1993 - we were organizing the grand opening of the first Baskin-Robbins outlet on Arbat. However, Moscow wasn't the only city in which clients were interested. They were headquartered in Moscow, but their interests reached across the former Soviet Union."

"I spent at least a week each month away from home," he says. "Let's say that we were requested to organize a press conference in Kyiv.  We had to take everything we needed with us:  Video equipment, audio equipment, press kit folders, even Coca-Cola and cookies.  We couldn't be assured of finding these items outside Moscow, so we loaded up a rented van and drove from Moscow to Ukraine.  It was like a traveling circus!  There was no other way to get it done.  The western companies had high standards, which almost no one was prepared to meet. But we did it, and we were very excited to do it."

Though business PR was still in its infancy, political PR had taken the driver's seat.

Following the trend started with perestroika, government structures were opening and expanding their PR departments, and they were doing it in a big way.  The President, Prime Minister, Duma speaker and almost every big city mayor or local ruler was harnessing the power of PR, employing at least a personal press secretary or PR advisor.  At the same time, political parties began to pop up all over the county as the multi-party system was introduced.  The parties also employed a decent number of aspiring PRshiki. 

This came at a time when Russian society was, for the first time in decades, incredibly interested in politics.  The power struggle was a great free-for-all.  In the early 1990s, Russian political life savagely resembled The Wild West: victors were not judged, and the end justified the means.

Political PR fell in line with the spirit of the day.  The local PR specialist didn't wear kid gloves:  There was nothing sophisticated about the image-making, manipulation and myth-building that was being undertaken.

The country was enjoying the freedom to speak, and the PR industry was enjoying the freedom to abuse the power of information.  The planting of untrue and biased articles was commonplace.

Through all this mayhem, the Russian government was trying hard to keep up appearances in the eyes of the west.  In the 1990s, it was important to demonstrate the new nation's resiliency to the west, while showing its own citizens how much the west trusted and admired the great new Russian democracy.

In a way, this aided the development of public relations agencies.  As western money entered Russia, creditors demanded that informational campaigns supporting these western-funded reforms be supervised by foreign PR firms that were well-known to and trusted by western financial institutions.