Eastern Awakening

Soviet Collapse Ushers in the Dawn of Public Relations

By Roman Diukarev
President, Willard PR

with Nikita Sekretarev
Senior Associate,
Willard PR Moscow

A dozen years ago, a typical Russian businessman treated public relations managers as servile order-takers: "I don't need your opinion.  I pay, you obey.  It's as simple as that."

Today, the picture is very different: Clients, priorities, demands, the market, the country itself - everything has changed drastically.

While PR in Russia is emulating the development of PR in the United States, it is doing so at an accelerated pace. It has skipped the crawling and walking phases of development, and is sprinting.

Public relations is one product of a democratic society, a phenomenon born as a natural answer to the global need to balance the conflicting interests of autonomous social, political, and economical groups.  The USSR had no need for PR: Soviet society was highly hierarchical and controlled by a huge bureaucratic machine.  This left no place for autonomous decision-making or behavior.

Even today, almost 20 years after the Soviet era ended, Russian society is somehow haunted by the echo of the Soviet G2C scheme. After being exposed to intense propaganda for years, our society had developed an immunity, a social apathy used as a shield. This mindset is evident in the Russian people, though it is more pronounced in far-flung and rural areas, where democratic values still struggle with a deep-rooted submissive/imperious mental dichotomy.

As some researchers have pointed out, this Soviet inheritance still hinders democratic processes in Russia, complicating social dialogue.  It creates a favorable circumstance for developing PR practice as a means of overcoming the apathy, analysts say, as the need to overcome it is still strong, though less obvious than it was in the first post-perestroika years.    

On a macro level, the history of PR in Russia can be divided into two distinct periods associated with the people who have ruled the country: The Yeltsin Era, which was heavily dominated by political PR, and the Putin Era, which is all about business PR.

In 1985, Michael Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and called for the democratization of the Soviet state. A wide array of reforms were launched, and the command economy began to evolve into a market economy. As the USSR hesitantly embraced Western democratic values, the government and society made the first, feeble efforts to engage in public relations.

A new ideology was taking root, and the familiar official censorship relaxed. This was to be the era of glasnost - openness - and as government and businesses became less autocratic, consumerism and public opinion became more important.  It was in this environment that the first public relations departments were created. Governmental bodies and power structures deemed it necessary to establish internal press services, or to at least appoint a press secretary. The key "PR agencies" of the era were the press service of the USSR's Foreign Affairs and state news agencies TASS and APN.

The first true PR agencies appeared a bit later, in 1988.  After a law was adopted that allowed Western companies to form joint ventures with Soviet partners, two major Western communication agencies entered the Soviet market.  Young & Rubicam formed the Young & Rubicam/Sovero joint venture with VneshTorgReklama, and BBDO partnered with MorTekhInformReklama.

In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Boris Yeltsin became president of a new Russian Federation, and a new epoch had begun that allowed PR to crystallize into a separate institution.  During perestroika, Russia had its first taste of PR, and started to absorb some Western experience, but in the 1990s this process intensified.  PR was a Western Thing, and everyone was rushing to embrace Western Things. It was attractive, desirable, exciting, fresh, new and promising.

The nation's first McDonald's restaurant opened on Moscow's Pushkinskaya Square, and was embraced as a Temple Of Western Culture.  Lines of people anxious to take their first bite of a Big Mac queued for three hours on a frosty winter day to pass under the Golden Arches!

In 1991, Young & Rubicam/Sovero was working for Colgate, bringing them to the Amerifashion'91 Expo, the first-ever exhibition of U.S. consumer goods in Russia.  People were lined up at Colgate stand just to receive a small free sample of American toothpaste.  

Next month: Russia's taste for all things Western explodes during the Yeltsin years, and public relations comes into its own as university's begin offering degrees in the discipline.  Meanwhile, companies, still unconvinced of the value PR can offer, were discovering the joys - and dangers - of paying for press.