Kremlin pool

Accreditation for meetings with the participation of the President of Russia is handled by the Kremlin press service department. On an ongoing basis, the events of the head of state are covered by about 30 Russian television and radio companies, newspapers, magazines and news agencies. So are invited and Western agencies Reuters , Bloomberg , Associated Press .

The entire Kremlin pool is invited to events with the participation of the president. But journalists and a photographer using pool cards work under the program of the head of state. Usually this is 3-4 pools at one event. The number of cards for journalists: from 3 to 30. In everyday life, this is called "work on the pool." As Igor Shchegolev , a member of the Kremlin pool recalls, sometimes this term is interpreted by stenographers as the surname “Populu”.

"Work on the pool" among agency journalists involves the presence of one information officer at the event, who then passes the information not only to his agency, but also to competitors. This practice is convenient for working on holidays, at field events or when several events need to be highlighted in one day. In this case, the agencies agree on the time for the release of information on the tape, although the final version of the text may vary slightly. Only quotes should remain the same.

90s

In an interview with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, a veteran of the Kremlin pool Vyacheslav Terekhov ^[2] :

The correspondent of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda Alexander Gamov claims that he was also subjected to “excommunication” three times ^[2] .

1999-2012

In the book “Tales of the Kremlin Digger,” Elena Tregubova outlined an unspoken set of rules established for journalists by one of the leaders of the Kremlin’s press service ^[3] :

For violation of unwritten rules, the press service could deprive the journalist of the opportunity to attend events with the participation of the president - both temporarily and forever, which journalists in their jargon call "excommunication" ^{[4] [5]} .

The journalist of the Kommersant newspaper, Elena Tregubova, because of the harsh tone of her articles, was, in her words, deprived of accreditation in the Kremlin in 2001 ^[6] . A year earlier, she was subjected to temporary “excommunication”:

The photographer of Komsomolskaya Pravda Anatoly Zhdanov in 2008 told how he was one of the first to shoot Putin with a naked torso in the locker room after one of the trainings ^[7] :

Since 2012

There were no cases of denial of accreditation during President Putin’s third term. Weaning is used as a short-term “educational” measure. For example, a LifeNews correspondent, after publishing a recording of the closed part of the meeting of the State Council Presidium in Elista, was excommunicated from work in the pool for a week.

Bloggers

September 3, 2009, presidential spokeswoman Natalya Timakova invited a blogger - amateur photographer Rustem Adagamov , speaking in LiveJournal under the nickname Drugoi ^[8] . He prepared an illustrated story for his LiveJournal blog about a meeting between the presidents of India and Russia, noting:

Previously, this blogger criticized the work of presidential personal photographers and argued that they “are not interested in taking pictures of the head of state” ^[9] . After a trip to Sweden at the Russia-EU summit, Adagamov decided to complete the project, as he considered that “they could use it to improve the image of the Kremlin.” Now almost all correspondents of the “Kremlin pool” have accounts on social networks. Facebook has a closed group for correspondents of the RA-96018 pool .

NTV Television made a documentary about the work of journalists covering the activities of President Putin, which was called “The Kremlin Speaks and Shows” (author and host - Dmitry Novikov) ^{[10] [11]} . The film was first aired on December 25, 2004 ^[11] .

• Vyacheslav Kostikov - was the press secretary of Boris Yeltsin in 1992-1994. ^[12]
• Sergey Medvedev - was the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation 1995-1996.
• Sergei Yastrzhembsky (August 1996 - September 1998), with him the permanent composition of the “Kremlin pool” was formed, publications about the president in the media began to be monitored, and the president himself began to receive a digest, the preparation of which used the review of not more than twenty publications, but more than five hundred ^[13] .
• Alexei Gromov is a spokesman for Vladimir Putin from January 2000 until the end of his presidential term.
• Natalia Timakova - press secretary of Dmitry Medvedev from May 2008 to May 2012. In the 1990s, she represented the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper in the Kremlin Pool ^[14] .
• Dmitry Peskov - spokesman for Vladimir Putin since May 2012.

• Vyacheslav Terekhov - covers the work of the heads of state since 1983 , vice president of the Interfax agency
• Alexey Meshkov ^[15] - in the pool since 2001. In 2003, at Camp David and in 2005 in Bratislava, at press conferences at Russian-American summits, he entered into a verbal skirmish with US President George W. Bush ^[16]
• Valery Sanfirov - Mayak radio station
• Mikhail Petrov - member of the Kremlin pool from 2002 to 2014, ITAR-TASS agency
• Elena Glushakova - member of the Kremlin pool since 2004, the agency RIA Novosti
• Irina Chumakova - member of the Kremlin pool since 2006, RIA Novosti agency
• Veronika Romanenkova - member of the Kremlin pool since 2001, TASS news agency
• Natalia Slavina - member of the Kremlin pool from 2001 to 2015, TASS news agency (now working in the USA)
• Georgy Gulia - member of the Kremlin pool since 2000, the Interfax agency
• Oleg Osipov - a member of the Kremlin pool from 2000 to 2014, the agency RIA NEWS
• Andrey Denisov - a member of the Kremlin pool from 2000 to 2011, the newspapers Vremya Novostei, Moscow News
• Inga Yumasheva - a participant in the Kremlin pool from 2010 to 2014, the Mayak radio station, Vesti FM radio station
• Mikhail Kalmykov - a member of the Kremlin pool since 2001, since 2002, Deputy General Director of ITAR-TASS
• Andrey Kolesnikov - a member of the Kremlin pool from 2001 to 2008 , the newspaper Kommersant and the magazine Russian Pioneer ^[17]
• Igor Shchegolev - in 1997 - 1998 he covered the activities of President Boris Yeltsin. Since 2008 - Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation
• Ksenia Kaminskaya - member of the Kremlin pool from 2006 to 2012, the agency "ITAR-TASS"
• Boris Grishchenko is a member of the Kremlin pool from the 1970s to 2004, deputy general director of Interfax news agency ^[18]
• Elena Tregubova - a member of the Kremlin pool from 1997 to 2001 , the newspaper Today, Russian Telegraph, Izvestia, Kommersant ^[19]
• Margarita Simonyan - member of the Kremlin pool from 2002 to 2005 , the Rossiya channel , now the editor-in-chief of the Russia Today television channel ^[20]
• Anton Vernitsky - Channel One
• Vladimir Kondratiev - NTV
• Alexander Zhestkov ^[21] - worked in the Kremlin pool from 2001 to 2013, REN TV broadcaster ^[22]
• Victoria Prikhodko (2006-2016, Moskovsky Komsomolets )
• Alexandra Prokopenko - member of the Kremlin pool from 2009 to 2015, TASS news agency
• Alexander Gamov - “ Komsomolskaya Pravda ” ^[23]
• Larisa Kaftan - Komsomolskaya Pravda
• Alexander Latyshev (until 2010, Izvestia ) ^[24]
• Elena Shishkunova (until 2012, Izvestia )
• Natalia Melikova (until 2008, Nezavisimaya Gazeta )
• Vladimir Chernyshev (2002-2016, NTV ) ^{[25] [26]}
• Andrey Cherkasov (2006-2009, NTV) ^[26]
• Dmitry Novikov (2004-2015, NTV) ^[26]
• Nikita Anisimov (2002-2011, NTV) ^[26]
• Roman Sobol - NTV ^[26]
• Vladimir Nesterov (Shakhbaz) (2006-2012, Channel One )
• Vladislav Vorobyov (2001-2005, Rossiyskaya Gazeta )
• Pavel Pchelkin - member of the Kremlin pool since 2000, Channel One ^[27]
• Olga Denisova - member of the Kremlin pool since 2010, the radio company Voice of Russia

According to Izvestia on May 14, 2008 during the presentation of the photo album Vladimir Putin. Best Photos ”, published by the publishing house“ Fiction ”, a team of professional photographers included in the“ Kremlin pool ”, consisted of a minimum of 33 people ^[28] .

• Dmitry Azarov - photojournalist, Kommersant Publishing House ^[29] .
• Alexander Astafiev - photojournalist, member of the Kremlin pool since 2004 , the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets .
• Dmitry Astakhov - photojournalist, member of the Kremlin pool since 2000, Izvestia newspaper. Since 2007 - a personal photographer of the President of the Russian Federation.
• Denis Grishkin - the newspaper " Vedomosti ", since 2011, a personal photographer of the mayor of Moscow.
• Sergei Guneev - the oldest of the current Kremlin photojournalists, has been filming top officials since 1978 , RIA Novosti , Time magazine.
• Alexey Dityakin - deputy chief editor of the newspaper Today, since 2001 - deputy chief editor of Itogi magazine, photo reporter.
• Anatoly Zhdanov - photojournalist, newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda , newspaper Izvestia .
• Konstantin Zavrazhin - photojournalist, member of the Kremlin pool since 1999 .
• Alexander Zemlyanichenko ^[30] - chief photographer of the AP bureau in Moscow.
• Mikhail Klimentyev - as of March 2009 - personal photographer of President D. A. Medvedev ^[31] .
• Alexander Miridonov - photojournalist, member of the Kremlin pool since 2008, Kommersant Publishing House.
• Alexey Panov ^[32] .
• Vladimir Rodionov - as of March 2009 - personal photographer of President D. A. Medvedev ^[33] .
• Smirnov Sergey - Izvestia newspaper, shot all the country's leaders, starting with Nikita Khrushchev and ending with Boris Yeltsin.
• Alexander Shalgin - photojournalist, Nezavisimaya Gazeta ^[34] , LifeNews .
• Ekaterina Shtukina - photojournalist, Izvestia newspaper, since September 2011, personal photographer of the President of the Russian Federation.
• Natalia Kolesnikova is a France-Press photojournalist ^[35] .
• Gleb Shchelkunov - photojournalist, Izvestia newspaper, Kommersant publishing house.
• Ilya Vorobyov - Newsweek .
• Ivan Sekretaryov is a photographer at the AP bureau in Moscow.

• Victor Semin - Channel One
• Oleg Makarov - Channel "Russia"
• Evgeny Kostin - TV Channel "Russia"

• Boris Grishchenko - “Outsider in the Kremlin, reporting from a special zone” ^[36]
• Elena Tregubova - “Tales of the Kremlin Digger”
• “Vladimir Putin. Best Photos ”- a photo album of the best works of Kremlin pool photographers and personalities who covered the work of the President of Russia from 2000 to 2008 ^[37] .

• In 2007, during the visit of Vladimir Putin to Saudi Arabia, all the female journalists of the Kremlin pool, despite the 37-degree heat, had to wear black hijabs ^[38] .
• As stated in an interview on the eve of his 70th birthday in August 2009, one of the oldest journalists of the pool, Vyacheslav Terekhov ^[2] :

• In 2006, the Belarusian authorities did not let the officially accredited two photographers and the journalist, who arrived with the delegation of the Russian president, enter the building where the CIS summit was held in Minsk , as Alexander Lukashenko did not like the photographs and articles in these publications. In protest, all the other journalists and photographers of the “Kremlin pool” left the summit ^[39] .

• The newspaper Stringer wrote that before admitting the journalist to the “real Kremlin pool”, the deputy head of the presidential administration Vladislav Surkov listened for a long time to how skillfully the journalist swears at the opposition. Then Surkov made corrections to the journalist’s vocabulary and issued a numbered dictionary containing turns and epithets addressed to opposition politicians. The journalist was obliged to hand over the dictionary to the FSO special archive after switching to another job, but for special services the book was handed over to him for permanent use ^[40] .

Separation of pools into "Putin" and "Medvedev".

• On December 3, 2009, Nezavisimaya Gazeta correspondents reported on new unwritten rules for the press services of the president and the government, according to which journalists from the Kremlin pool will be invited to continue to not participate in events and trips of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin , but to journalists who regularly cover the work government - do not attend events with the participation of Dmitry Medvedev . The newspaper referred to its source in the State Duma, which claimed that such an order had allegedly already been received by the heads of the largest television channels and in the near future would also concern newspaper reporters. The authors cited the words of the press secretary of Vladimir Putin Dmitry Peskov , who argued that the separation of journalists into “prime” and “presidential” will help restore order in the pools.

According to the publication, the innovation will reduce the level of government transparency and hide possible disagreements between the president and the prime minister ^{[41] [42]} .

• Interview with the old-timer of the Kremlin Pool Vyacheslav Terekhov , No. 40, 10/04/2004.
• Personnel Putin. The presentation of the photo album “Vladimir Putin. The best photos ” ,“ Rossiyskaya Gazeta ”, 05/15/2008.
• The Kremlin pool, or the life of the presidential convoy abroad , AIF Saturday-Sunday, No. 45 (106), 06.112000.