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https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323611604578398493366755234
Alexander Nefyodov hears it every Thursday when he tunes in from the Arctic port city of Murmansk. "It's so interesting to hear from an American about how America really works," he says.
It isn't quite the radio of days past. Soviet-era beacons like Radio Liberty and the BBC have lost their place on Russian airwaves, and now the Kremlin is offering a fresher voice: Tim Kirby, an expatriate from the suburbs of Cleveland, who says he wants Russian citizenship and says Joseph Stalin was a better leader than he has been portrayed in history books.
On radio shows on Moscow's state-controlled Radio Mayak and in frequent appearances on state television, Mr. Kirby is making a name for himself inside Russia as a kind of Kremlin-appointed Joe the Plumber who explains a broken America to Russian listeners.
"We Russians think that whenever something goes bad here that it must be better in America," says Mr. Nefyodov, 25, who works in a small family wholesale grocery business. Now he says he knows "that things are worse or the same over there."
As the Kremlin rallied support for its ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans imposed late last year, Mr. Kirby, who is 31, appeared on prime-time talk shows to say that one quarter of American children take pills that affect their brains, and that they are endangered by religious sects whose members oppose medical care or dance around poisonous snakes. "Every 6 or 10 years a snake bites a child, the child dies and that's the news of the day and the process repeats itself," he told a national television audience in February.
Controversial American-expatriate radio host Tim Kirby is making a name for himself in Russia as a kind of Kremlin-appointed "Joe The Plumber" on why America is broken. Excerpts from his appearances on Russian television shows. Photo: Omar Lesnikov
When demonstrations erupted around the country over Vladimir Putin's plan to return to the Kremlin in late 2011, Mr. Kirby took to the airwaves to say that Mr. Putin was just taking a page from Washington's playbook. "In America there is a tendency for whoever is sitting in power to be the winner," he said. "In Russia it's the same: Putin is there, we understand it's best not to risk anything."
Mr. Kirby's career is flowering as the Kremlin ramps up a campaign against U.S. influence in Russia, warning that Western-paid agents are trying to undermine the country's stability under the guise of civic action and human rights campaigns.
He has a regular show on RT, the Kremlin's lavishly funded international broadcast channel, whose boss calls it a weapon for "information war." Last month the channel aired a report calling America one of the worst places to live, with quality-of-life indicators down there with Papua New Guinea. A state-run newspaper quoted a top Russian veterinary official saying American milk is laced with hormones that sprout whiskers on women.
TIM KIRBY
Since the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has been a magnet for Americans disillusioned with the American dream. In the 1920s, socialist labor leader Big Bill Haywood fled to Moscow to escape espionage charges, and today his ashes are buried behind a plaque in the Kremlin wall. In the 1970s and 1980s, singer and songwriter Dean Reed toured here and gave the Soviet Union moral support for the war in Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Kirby disputes comparisons to Soviet-era American ideologues, and says Russia simply isn't suited for Western-style democracy. That has gotten him hate mail from some Russians, including a message from one who warned he "may one day be found facedown in a swamp." (That was an apparent reference to Mr. Reed, who was discovered dead in a lake near his East Berlin home six weeks after an appearance on CBS's "60 Minutes" when he compared Ronald Reagan to Stalin.)
He urges Russians to take pride in their past, and stop looking west for role models. He often appears on television in a flannel shirt, and his message is simple: The American dream is a myth for most Americans, and better realized in Russia. "Maybe the American dream does exist somewhere, but not where I'm from," he said in a video interview.
Mr. Kirby humbly offers his own travails in America to exemplify the dream's crackup.
He grew up in a rundown suburb of Cleveland, where his father struggled with deadbeat clients in the furniture-refinishing business and saw their house plummet in value when the neighborhood was hit by white flight, he says. Mr. Kirby says his upbringing as a white minority in his neighborhood left him "uncomfortable" in polite society and hostile to authority. In high school, he says, he was forced by school administrators to pay weekly visits to a psychologist after he was identified by fellow students as someone "who would pull off a Columbine shooting."
Mr. Kirby decided to explore his Slavic roots—he says his grandparents were Polish—and after college he joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
He ended up in Moscow in 2007, where he found work designing videogames. His media debut came that year as a guest on an adult podcast where the hosts quizzed him on American sexual attitudes, asked him to say swear words in Russian and giggled at his accent.
The show wasn't successful, but Mr. Kirby performed well and soon moved on to offbeat video reports promoting tourism in Russia. He was hired by RT, the Kremlin-financed television station, after giving an impressive presentation on a cucumber festival in the provincial city of Kirov, he says.
He also made acquaintances close to the Kremlin. Leaders of a Kremlin-financed youth group invited him to join a handpicked group of students meeting former President Dmitry Medvedev, he says.
Mr. Kirby got his own talk show on the state-controlled Radio Mayak, a station founded by the Soviet Communist Party to counterbalance Western influence. For an hour on Sundays he invited guests to talk politics. Some of his guests were Russian ideologues who praise Stalin as an effective manager who forged Russia into a superpower.
Radio Mayak says it doesn't know precisely how many listeners tuned into Mr. Kirby's shows, but they say he's a hit. Russia's Ministry of Communications rated it the best political talk show in Russia in 2012, but the format was abruptly changed last summer after Mr. Kirby got an on-air tongue-lashing from a Kremlin critic for suggesting fascism needn't be outlawed. Now he appears on Thursdays, as a regular guest of another talk show host. The station said the move was a promotion, so more listeners could hear him as they drive to work.
Mr. Kirby also shoots English-language opinion pieces on the Kremlin cable channel, RT. "I always wanted to affect society in a positive way, and now I can," he says.
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