The Opinion Pages|OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
By ROBERT SERVICE APRIL 6, 2014
MOSCOW — A Kremlin-controlled research organization that Western critics accuse of subversive propaganda in other countries, including possible election meddling, is known in Russia as a semiretirement refuge for former intelligence officers.
The organization, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies in Moscow, says its main purpose is preparing policy papers and other analytical materials for the country’s leading government agencies.
At the top of its website, the institute says in capital letters that it was founded by “the president,” a reference to President Vladimir V. Putin. Some political commentators in Russia regard it as a place where ex-intelligence officials can work with dignity.
Nonetheless, Kremlin opponents have linked the institute to such efforts as trying to dissuade Sweden from closer ties to NATO and subvert Montenegro’s impending membership in the alliance.
Attention was focused on the institute this week when Reuters, quoting what it described as seven former and current American officials, reported on Wednesday that the institute had provided the “framework and rationale” to interfere in the Nov. 8 United States presidential election to help Donald J. Trump win.
Russian officials, who have repeatedly denied accusations by American intelligence officials of election interference, called the Reuters report nonsense. Mikhail Fradkov, the institute’s recently appointed director, described the report as a product of a “conspiratorial mind-set.”
Mr. Fradkov, appointed to lead the institute last October, described the institute as “an authoritative analytical organization with high-skilled professionals.”
Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said Thursday during his regular news briefing that he had not read the Reuters report but he asserted that “seven anonymous sources are not worth one real one.”
The institute’s publicly released documents are relatively tame compared with the ulterior motives that Russia’s adversaries ascribe to it. Some of the well-known materials prepared by the institute include a report that ranked countries, media outlets and individual authors in terms of their anti-Russian bias.
Another of its publications, a report about the spread of H.I.V. in large urban areas, argued against sex education and advocated the promotion of traditional Russian Orthodox values as a way to stop the spread of infection.
In Moscow, foreign affairs experts expressed some amused cynicism about the true extent of the research group’s influence on Russia’s foreign policy.
“Everyone, please chill,” Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist known for his efforts to debunk propaganda stories, wrote on Twitter. “These guys (average age: 70) couldn’t have possibly game-planned making a sandwich, let alone rigging U.S. elex”
Mark Galeotti, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in Russia’s security affairs and organized crime, described the Russian institute as fitting “the stereotype some Westerners want to find so well.” In a Twitter exchange with Mr. Kovalev, Mr. Galeotti said the institute’s members “also appreciate being regarded as being so important.”
Mr. Fradkov previously led Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. His predecessor at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Leonid P. Reshetnikov, also a former spy, was famous for his conservative, anti-American statements.
“World War II was orchestrated by the same forces now trying to rule the world, forces located in the United States,” Mr. Reshetnikov said in a February 2016 interview. “I’m talking about international companies and the upper crust of the Anglo-Saxon elite.”
In Montenegro, the institute and other Russian organizations have faced scrutiny for what critics call their attempts to reverse the Balkan nation’s tilt toward the West and to derail its entry into NATO.
Officials in Montenegro say Mr. Reshetnikov played an important role in preparing the ground for a coup attempt timed to coincide with parliamentary elections last October. The coup plot reportedly fizzled after a wave of arrests, and voting went ahead without incident.
Mr. Reshetnikov was abruptly dismissed by Mr. Putin after news of the Election Day plot broke. A follower of the Russian Orthodox Church, Mr. Reshetnikov had close ties to senior Orthodox priests in the Balkans and to pro-Russian political groups that led street protests last year against Montenegro’s NATO membership.
The institute took an aggressively critical view of Milo Djukanovic, the longtime leader of Montenegro, who infuriated Moscow by abandoning Pan-Slavic loyalties to embrace the West. Mr. Reshetnikov once described him as a “traitor who will answer for his treachery to Russia on Judgment Day.”
