THEIR PRESIDENT:

In his telling, it was the 2011-2012 protests in Moscow that changed everything. Those protests, which Putin blamed on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, spooked the Russian President, according to Skorobutov. "People were imprisoned. Media were taken under control of the State. Censorship introduced," he said. "It was a point of reflection for me. The state was against its people. Human freedoms, including freedom of speech, were gradually eliminated." (Others would note that this is a self-serving chronology, as Putin's dismantling of democracy began long before 2011, and that Skorobutov remained at state TV through the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, when Russian media propaganda was especially noxious.)

After the suppression of the 2012 protests, Skorobutov said, he became increasingly disturbed by his role in "helping the state to create this new and unpleasant reality," resigned his job as the press secretary at the Russian Geographical Society, and began looking for a new job, but without any luck.

As is often the case with state censorship, the workings of Kremlin-controlled media, as Skorobutov described them, were far more subtle than is popularly imagined. He described a system that depended on a news staff that knew what issues to avoid and what issues to highlight rather than one that had every decision dictated to it. "We knew what is allowed or forbidden to broadcast," he explained. Any event that included Putin or the Russian Prime Minister "must be broadcast," while events such as "terroristic attacks, airplane crashes, arrests of politicians and officials" had to be approved by the news director or his deputy. He offered a list of embargoed subjects: "critique of the State, coming from inside or outside of Russia; all kinds of social protests, strikes, discontent of people and so on; political protests and opposition leaders, especially Alexey Navalny," an anti-corruption figure despised by the Kremlin. Skorobutov said that he overcame censorship rules and convinced his network to cover stories only twice: for a story about a protest against the construction of a Siberian chemical plant and for one about the food poisoning of children at a kindergarten.

During the 2016 election, the directions from the Kremlin were less subtle than usual. "Me and my colleagues, we were given a clear instruction: to show Donald Trump in a positive way, and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in a negative way," he said in his speech. In a later interview, he explained to me how the instructions were relayed. "Sometimes it was a phone call. Sometimes it was a conversation," he told me. "If Donald Trump has a successful press conference, we broadcast it for sure. And if something goes wrong with Clinton, we underline it."

Skorobutov said in his speech that the pro-Trump perspective extended from Kremlin-controlled media to the Moscow élite.

"There was even a slogan among Russian political élite," he said. " 'Trump is our president.' 

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