As Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to consolidate his hold on power, it appears he is reviving a Cold War classic: the state propaganda organization. Under the Soviet Union, there was an International Information Bureau that had the sole duty of promoting Soviet and Communist propaganda abroad. STRATFOR has learned that Putin is reviving the concept and mission of the Bureau — now calling it the National Information Center (NIC) — with plans to launch it sometime this spring or summer. The new NIC will have two official jobs. One will be the oversight of Western journalists inside Russia — further escalating a Kremlin campaign to restrict foreign media and influence in the country. The Kremlin has already consolidated its hold over Russian media quite a bit, with government figures and Kremlin-controlled businessmen buying up the major media outlets. Western journalists have started to see more limits placed on their ability to attend opposition rallies and interview opposition figures — but now the state will be officially monitoring the activities and works of foreign journalists. The NIC's second mandate is to promote internationally what the Kremlin considers Russia's true image. Putin argues that the West has unfairly portrayed Russia as an aggressor or enemy on the international stage, and the Center's role will be to "correct these misconceptions." The idea, apparently, is not only to promote the Kremlin's agenda, but also to provide an alternative (read, non-Western) point of view on the world. In this, the NIC would be following in the footsteps of China's state news agency Xinhua or the Arab world's Al Jazeera in shaping an alternative to Western propaganda and media. The comparison to Xinhua raises an interesting question. We can't help but wonder whether, in addition to its official roles, the NIC might not also be intended to serve another Russian need: intelligence collection. The Russian model of collecting intelligence has always been based on getting hold of tightly held secrets, usually in some elaborate or devious way. (The American model is based on the Russian model, but with more expensive gadgetry.) But the Chinese model is quite different. Beijing focuses on gathering open-source material from every part of the globe. The Chinese — using myriad tools, of which Xinhua is one — have put people in every nook and cranny of the world, no matter how insignificant or unpleasant. These agents send every piece of information they hear on the streets or observe in the media back to a massive central processing unit in China, where it is sifted in search of useful patterns and valuable nuggets. It is a colossal undertaking requiring enormous manpower — but China has plenty of that. Alongside their elaborate networks of sources and listening posts, Moscow and Washington have small and dysfunctional open-source intelligence shops, but neither has ever truly focused its intelligence community in this way. Could the NIC be an attempt by the Kremlin to move in that direction? If so, it would represent a complete transformation of the Russian intelligence model. Even after eight years of Russian resurgence, the resources of the Federal Security Service (FSB) are still a pale shadow of what they were during the Cold War. It could be that the Russians have realized they simply cannot pull their capabilities back up to that level, and are shifting tactics instead. Even if it didn't ultimately work, this kind of shift would be likely to throw the Americans off balance — the game has been played the same way for a long, long time.