Last week, we informed readers about aggressive efforts by and on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to punish Internet scribes who dare to criticize the Moscow regime with brutal personal attacks. In other words, demand-side pressure on Kremlin critics. The ultimate expression of this strategy was the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, though for sheer malignant, bloodthirsty sadism nothing can match the killing of strident Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London — a killing which MSNBC reported last week has been confirmed by British authorities to have been a state-sponsored Kremlin whack job (as the Conjecturer blog reminded us recently, there are dozens of relatively unknown victims of this burgeoning holocaust, and shame on us if we let them be anonymous). No sooner had the MSNBC report gone public than, terrifyingly, one of the main sources, Paul Joyal, was shot near his home in Maryland. It’s not known yet whether the incident was a random street crime, but the timing is truly terrifying.

Now, this week, let’s look at the supply side element of the Kremlin’s strategy.

It must be acknowledged that the Kremlin is not one-dimensional, and doesn’t try to solve all its problems with the use of brute force. Just like Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” (award-winning pundit Charles Krauthammer recently said “President” Putin’s “more accurate title would be godfather”), before the Kremlin kills you it will leave the head of a dead horse in your bed, and before it does that it will offer to buy your soul. If you won’t sell, they figure, that’s your problem.

If the killing of Anna Politkovskaya was the ultimate expression of the demand-side strategy, then surely the grandest manifestation of the supply-side approach was when the Kremlin went out and bought itself a German Chancellor, namely Gerhard Schr????der (shown literally at Master Putin’s beck and call in the cartoon above). The cost was a $300,000 annual salary as head of a Russian energy consortium, and ever since then Schr????der has proved a loyal minion of the Kremlin. His response to the Litvinenko killing was this: “Unfortunately, journalists die quite often in other countries, but why doesn’t anybody try to accuse the government Äof wrongdoingÅ in those situations? In Russia , no matter what happens, it’s Putin.” Herr Schr????der apparently has not heard that, according to the Paris-based international organization Reporters without Borders, Russia isn’t just like lots of other countries where this kind of brutality is concerned. Rather, it is among the world’s very most most dangerous countries for the media, along with Iraq and Mexico. At least 20 reporters have been killed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin took office in March 2000, including three last year. The International Federation of Journalists puts the figure at 40.

And just as is the case with the supply-side strategy, there are many grass-roots level events that fly low under our radar. Let’s review a few of them.

The story begins with the Kremlin’s creation of its own satellite TV station for the projection of propaganda across the world in English, a station known as “Russia Today.” Aggressively engaged in an effort to “rebrand” Russia in the West, with the help of gun-for-hire Western PR firms, Russia Today first bought itself a nucleus of Russian journalists and then starting putting out the good word on Russia. Naturally, it doesn’t let pesky little things like facts get in the way of its reporting. For instance, as Radio Free Europe recently reported a particularly flagrant example of neo-Soviet “journalism”:

Following the killings of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security services officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, the FSB has also been in dire need of an image makeover. And, like the Kremlin and Gazprom, it too has initiated a public-relations campaign, although its effort has a more unorthodox flavor. At the center of its campaign has been an expedition to Antarctica, the declared purpose of which was to reinforce Russia’s claim to that frozen wasteland, undermining the United States’ “monopoly” over the South Pole.

The purpose was twofold. To show that the FSB is at the frontline of Russia’s national interests and revive the Soviet-era “heroic” image of the KGB. In 2003, FSB head Nikolai Patrushev made similar efforts and erected, with a group of FSB officers, a Russian flag at the North Pole, and, in 2004, an elite FSB force led by Patrushev put a Russian flag at the peak of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe. So on January 3, two FSB MI-8 helicopters flew from Punta Arena in Chile with Patrushev, First Deputy Director and Federal Boarder Guard Service head Vladimir Pronichev, and other assorted FSB officers on board. The expedition landed at the South Pole on January 7, where Patrushev telephoned Putin to extend his best wishes for the Russian Orthodox Christmas. Russian television channels covered the FSB expedition extensively, noting that the trip was wholly supported by private sponsors and that the Russian flag planted at the South Pole symbolizes the restoration of Russia’s superpower status.

Russian television broadcasts, however, failed to inform viewers that Patrushev was calling from the permanent U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole station, staffed by almost 100 U.S. citizens. Patrushev’s team was bivouacked there waiting for suitable flight weather. And the phone he used to call Putin? That was actually borrowed from a U.S. explorer, according to NTV.

Then Russia Today started branching out. It bought itself a Western “journalist,” one Peter Lavelle, to write a blog on its website. In the first entry on that blog, written January 12th, Lavelle wrote of Russia’s efforts to weaponize its energy resources and terrorize the former Russian slave states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: “Russia is correct to maintain its position that all its customers pay world prices for energy. If that causes pain for the former republics of the Soviet Union, so be it.” It formed a nexus with a blog published by the nefarious Discovery Institute, whose main reason for existing is to ban the teaching of evolution in schools in favor of intelligent design and which is mired in ethical controversies, and this promptly turned into “The Real Russia Project.” And it established its own blog, Russia Profile, seeking to make insidious connections with the well-known e-mail newsletter published by David Johnson of the Center for Defense Information and the publisher of the Moscow Times newspaper, Independent Media — all of whom are affiliated with the project. Russia Profile’s advisory board includes Konstantin Kosachev, a sitting member of the Russian Duma and a Kremlin henchman, and Yuri Fokine, a Kremlin apparatchik. Shockingly, Russia Profile also lists Leon Aron of the prestigious and conservative American Enterprise Institute as a member of its advisory board, the only member of the group who might be expected to have critical views of the Kremlin. Whether Aron even knows what Russia Profile is doing under his name is anyone’s guess; if he doesn’t, somebody should tell him — if he does, somebody should let him have it.

A few weeks ago, Russia Profile had a banner advertising campaign running on various websites touting a conference it was sponsoring and at which Schr????der and Kremlin insider Igor Shuvalov were to lecture anyone who would listen about how Russia is a “reliable partner” in the energy field. In other words, RP was acting as the direct agent for Kremlin-sponsored PR campaign. So much for “journalism.” RP maintains an “Experts Panel” feature that provides a token Russophobe voice surrounded by a sea of Russophiles and Russian nationalists. In the most recent installment, entitled “Friendless in Moscow: Does Russia Need Allies?” the lead entry is from the lunatic Russophile Eric Kraus, a stockbroker who spends most of his time convincing hapless foreigners that Russia is a great place to plop down their money. It maintains a blog by one Dmitry Babich, which offers such posts as “Whose Double Standards: Far from showing Russia????????s unreliability as an energy supplier, Gazprom????????s recent threats to suspend natural gas exports to Belarus have only exposed the hypocrisy of the West” and one claiming that since Yegor Gaidar stated publicly that the Kremlin didn’t try to kill him, that made it a fact and Gaidar man “worthy of respect.” No mention of the possibility that Gaidar might have caved in to Kremlin threats.

A recent article from the International Herald Tribune points out that the Kremlin is plying the supply-side tactic in the Russian blogosphere as well. The article states: “Some bloggers close to the government admitted that in order to insure that certain news is spun a certain way, or that certain items get leaked, money does change hands. Ivan Zassoursky, a marketing director at SUP-Fabrik and a media expert, says, ‘Can you give someone money to organize a demonstration? Sure you can. So why can’t you give someone money to write something on Äthe Russian blogosphereÅ?”

Russia Today is only in its infancy, yet it already has a handful of Western bloggers in its pocket and a pocketful of cash to buy more. How many Western journalists is it seeking out furtively, with offers of money in return for positive coverage? How many secret threats is it dispatching? Are we watching closely enough to make sure we aren’t taken in by these neo-Soviet snakeoil purveyors?

Time will tell.