Renowned Russian political strategist Gleb Pavlovsky dies

Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political strategist and native of Odesa who propagated the Kremlin's ideology in Ukraine, has died at the age of 72.

Source: Vedomosti, a Russian newspaper; Nastoyashee vremya [Current Time]; Meduza, a Latvia-based Russian media outlet; Vaznye Istorii [Important Stories], an independent Russian investigative reporting media outlet

Details: Pavlovsky founded an organisation called the Foundation for Effective Politics. He was known as a key Kremlin political strategist during the first few terms of President Vladimir Putin. His foundation developed Putin's first election campaign.

In the 2000s, Moscow was banking on the pro-Russian fifth column coming to power in Ukraine and on economic expansion. Particular hopes were linked to a victory for Viktor Yanukovych in the presidential elections in the winter of 2004.

Putin demanded that Leonid Kuchma, then president of Ukraine, ensure that Yanukovych was elected by whatever means necessary.

Russian political strategists headed by Pavlovsky, and presumably teams of state security agents, were dispatched to Kyiv.

Viktor Yushchenko [Yanukovych’s rival in the 2004 election – ed.] probably got a hefty dose of dioxin with his dinner. But the Kremlin’s efforts were unsuccessful. Yanukovych lost the elections, and mass protests thwarted attempts to falsify the results.

In 2005, it was announced on Channel 5 that the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine had received a tape recording of a telephone conversation in which employees of the Russian secret services apparently say that poisoning Yushchenko was Pavlovsky’s idea.

Pavlovsky himself rejected the accusations at the time. "This is a rather petty lie perpetrated by a TV channel that operates in the mode of propaganda and counter-propaganda," he said at the time.

Pavlovsky also admitted that he and his colleague Marat Gelman invented the "temniki" ["theme lists", media guidelines that outline the issues to be covered in news reports and provide instructions on how these issues are to be treated - ed.] in the years 2003-2004. On hearing the news that Viktor Medvedchuk was suing the newspaper Tyzhden [The Week] for calling him "the ideologist of the temniki", he responded, "Why sue when it was Marat Gelman and me who came up with the ‘temniki’ (and… some others who won't defend their authorship now)?"

During the 2002 parliamentary elections, the Foundation for Effective Politics worked with Medvedchuk’s Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) "serving the interests of the Kremlin" .

In addition, immediately after Putin's speech at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Russian propaganda began a campaign of intimidation against Ukraine. In particular, Russkyi Zhurnal [Russian Magazine], which was overseen by Pavlovsky, published a war plan against Ukraine entitled "Operation Clockwork Orange".

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