Freedoms Found and Lost

In the 1990s, Russia’s media emerged from the dark night of  Soviet censorship.
Yet, over the last six years, the State has been engineering mass-media consolidations and cracking down on independent press outlets. Is the future going dark for a free press in Russia?

Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s most prominent investigative journalist, was murdered on October 7, 2006. Returning from grocery shopping on a grey Saturday afternoon, she walked into her apartment building on Lesnaya street in central Moscow and was shot in the back and in the head by an unidentified assassin who was waiting for her. 

Politkovskaya, 48 and a mother of two, had not finished writing her article for the October 9 edition of Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last truly oppositionist newspaper. In that article she intended to expose the torture of innocent civilians in Chechnya by paramilitary forces loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of the war-torn southern republic. 

“Personally, I only have one dream for Kadyrov’s birthday,” Politkovskaya said on October 5, in her last interview, at the Moscow bureau of the U.S. government funded Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), “I dream of him someday sitting in the dock, in a trial that meets the strictest legal standards, with all of his crimes listed and investigated.

“By the way, no other newspaper writes anything about this, but criminal cases have been launched against the Kadyrovtsy [paramilitary force] and Kadyrov personally on the basis of three articles published by our newspaper. I myself am a witness in one of these cases,” Polikovskaya added. “These cases are about abductions, including one criminal case about the abduction of two people carried out with the participation of Ramzan Akhmedovich Kadyrov.” 

Members of the liberal intelligentsia in Moscow and St. Petersburg were angered that President Vladimir Putin failed to immediately condemn Politkovskaya’s murder, though on the day after the slaying he did congratulate the president of Angola on the 30th anniversary of a Soviet-era Friendship and Cooperation Agreement signed by the two countries. 

It Takes a Bureaucrat

The murder of Politkovskaya – who had received over a dozen Russian and international awards for her groundbreaking coverage of Russia’s second military campaign in Chechnya over the past seven years – drew international attention to a dozen other contract-style killings of Russian journalists, as well as to an overall decline in media freedom during Putin’s six years in office. 

Since Vladimir Putin took office in 1999, the Kremlin has aggressively expanded state control over the independent media, relying on bureaucratic obstruction, politicized lawsuits, hostile corporate takeovers and harassment by the Federal Security Service (FSB) to promote patriotic news reporting and block coverage of the war in Chechnya, government corruption, terrorism and any criticism of the president. Many of the new media restrictions were cleverly cloaked by the Kremlin as disinterested efforts to enforce the “rule of law.” “Putin’s stealth authoritarianism is consciously implemented and constructed so as to be minimal, nearly imperceptible, and thus credibly deniable,” wrote political scientist and Fulbright scholar Gordon Hahn.

Indeed, the State’s actions against the media seem to be part of a broader campaign to crack down on the business community, opposition politicians, human rights activists, voters’ rights and any other potential threat to the president’s public image and political authority. As a result, the government bureaucracy has mushroomed in the Putin era to about 1.5 million officials – compared to some 700,000 bureaucrats during the “era of stagnation” under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. 

At the same time, any checks and balances between various branches of the State and between the State and Society have been diluted. A hobbled judiciary and absence of investigative reporting has contributed to a rise in government corruption: specifically, a tenfold increase since 2001, costing an estimated $316 billion, according to Indem, a Moscow-based anti-corruption think tank. Analysts report government posts being bought and sold according to the potential bribe they can provide: a traffic policeman’s post may cost several thousand U.S. dollars, while senior government posts sell for up to a million dollars. 

Changing Channels 

The Kremlin’s first target after Putin took office was to reign in news reporting on the country’s three most influential national television channels – Channel One (ORT), Rossiya (RTR) and NTV. (Entertainment television stations like MTV Russia, STS and TNT were not affected.) The State already owned RTR, so in 2001 oligarch Boris Berezovsky was allegedly pressured to sell his 49 percent stake in ORT, and the state gas monopoly Gazprom took control of NTV in a hostile corporate takeover.

A group of NTV journalists moved to two smaller stations – first TV-6 and then TVS – in an effort to continue news reporting outside the Kremlin’s control. But neither station proved financially viable. In January 2002, a court closed a bankrupted TV-6 (after a lawsuit by shareholder Lukoil), and TVS was shuttered in June 2003 by a Media Ministry decree. 

“Putin is a television president, he was unknown and his image was created by media technology, that’s how he came to power,” said RFE/RL media analyst Anna Kachkayeva. “He saw [national] television as the most powerful weapon and decided that’s what the government should control.” 

The Kremlin consolidated its control over the three national stations by appointing political loyalists to manage them, issuing editorial “guidelines” to journalists, blacklisting independent-minded commentators and holding regular meetings at the Kremlin with senior television executives to review and plan their news reporting. As a result, domestic news reporting on the three national television channels has become propagandistic and sterile, portraying Putin as a decisive leader and covering his daily meetings with ministers and foreign leaders. 

President Putin received lavish media coverage during the 2004 reelection campaign and was re-elected for a second four-year term with 71% of the vote. Election monitors from the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation said the vote “did not adequately reflect... a healthy democratic election.” Several months after the presidential elections, executives at NTV purged the channel of the few remaining independent current affairs programs at the station, canceling Namedny (Recently), Svoboda Slova (Freedom of Speech) and other programs.

Much of the Kremlin’s efforts also focused on suppressing news reporting on dramatic terrorist attacks in the country, because they contradicted Putin’s message that the police, military and security services were winning the war against Islamic terrorists and Chechen rebels. When groups of terrorists seized hundreds of hostages in Moscow’s Nord-Ost theater in October 2002 and in a school in the southern town of Beslan in September 2004, Russian and international media scrambled to cover the crisis. Meanwhile, police and FSB agents launched multiple operations to detain journalists, obstruct their reporting and retaliate against those who reported honestly after the events were over. In Beslan, government officials at the scene handed out written instructions to journalists on site, informing them how to cover the crisis. Limited coverage of the event by the national television channels led many Russians to seek information on news websites and the independent Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy.

In 2005, Kremlin consolidation of control over broadcast media continued with a restructuring of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Company (VGTRK), which owns Rossiya, the national television channels Kultura and Sport, and regional television stations throughout the country’s 89 regions. 

The results of all of the above are easy to illustrate: on one day at the end of October last year, the main news program Vremya (Time) on Channel One led their evening broadcast with four domestic stories followed by some foreign news stories and a weather forecast – Economic Development Minister German Gref meeting with Putin to report the latest economic growth figures; Putin meeting with a commission of entrepreneurs, trade union officials and government representatives declaring that Russia’s future is improving; Putin meeting with the Atomic Energy Minister discussing positive developments in the nuclear industry; Prince Charles on an official visit to St. Petersburg where he donated a yacht to the navy, the European edition of TIME magazine reported. The broadcast made no mention of several other news stories reported on the news wires: the Russian stock market plunging $5 billion because of new criminal cases against oligarchs; British Petroleum wavering on an $8 billion investment in Russia because of non-transparent regulation of the oil industry; drastic price hikes expected for public transportation in Moscow; serious price inflation for basic food staples like bread and milk. 

The three main channels retain a handful of sterile, political talk shows – like Vladimir Pozner’s Vremena (Time) on Channel One and Vladimir Solovyov’s K Bariyeru (To the Barrier) on NTV – to maintain an image of public political debate. “You can’t say there is no debate, but it’s basically an imitation of a discussion,” said RFE/RL’s Kachkayeva. “They invite people [to talk on news programs] whose backgrounds have been thoroughly checked and cleared with the government and their discussions are pre-recorded, so it’s all become quite boring.” 

What is more, tight restrictions on news reporting have pushed television executives to emphasize politically safe and profitable entertainment programming like soap operas, crime thrillers, game shows and fluffy talk shows. Some media critics believe programs like the Jerry Springer-style talk show TK (“Let Them Talk”) on Channel One provide an illusion of media pluralism in the restrictive climate. “It’s a certain substitute, it’s more about freedom of screaming than freedom of speech,” said Irina Petrovskaya, a media analyst for the newspaper Izvestia, in an interview with The Associated Press. “If there is a goal of distracting the population from their vital problems, of entertaining them [with tragic family crises]…they will think ‘Look, we are not so bad after all, we don’t eat each other [like they do]!’” 

Inside the Fishbowl

During Putin’s first term in office, “Sergei” worked on NTV’s popular Sunday evening current affairs program Namedny (Recently) with television host Leonid Parfyonov (a middle-aged journalist, Sergei asked to remain anonymous, for fear that he could lose his job for speaking publicly about NTV internal politics). At the time, NTV was the crown jewel of oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky’s media-empire and Namedny was the channel’s top-rated program, popular for mixing political, business and entertainment news along with Parfyonov’s ironic tone and reputation for being apolitical. 

After Gazprom took over NTV in 2001, Parfyonov and the Namedny staff decided to stay at the channel and test the new management’s stated commitment to editorial independence. “It was an important question for us journalists at the time,” Sergei explained, “to leave the station or to stay – and many of us really struggled with it… but we felt that despite the new restrictions [of state ownership] we could still do some good work there.” Namedny continued broadcasting and Sergei’s work initially continued more or less as before, though Parfyonov was now required to discuss politically sensitive programs in advance with the station’s new Gazprom-appointed director – Russian-American businessman Boris Jordan – as well as with Media Minister Mikhail Lesin. 

Despite the oversight from NTV executives and government officials, Parfyonov managed to continue producing some interesting and sometimes provocative analyses of current events. One report, “The Country Didn’t Hear It’s President,” was broadcast the week following the October 2002 Nord-Ost hostage crisis, where 50 terrorists and some 120 hostages died after Russian security services pumped a controversial knockout gas into the building. Putin remained publicly silent during and after the crisis, but authorities released a silent short video clip of the president conferring with other government officials. Namedny broadcast the clip along with analysis by a lip reader, who revealed what Putin was telling his colleagues about Nord-Ost. The Kremlin was angered by that edition of Namedny as well as NTV’s live coverage of the storming of Nord-Ost. Gazprom fired NTV director Boris Jordan in January 2003, after Putin publicly criticized the station’s coverage of Nord-Ost. 

Parfyonov clashed with NTV executives in his efforts to retain editorial control of his program, but increasingly the screws were tightened on him and on news reporting in the channel as a whole. In November 2003, a public scandal erupted when NTV managers pulled a Namedny interview with journalist Yelena Tregubova. The interview was about Tregubova’s work as a Kremlin pool reporter, and it also criticized the Putin administration for aggressively restricting the work of journalists.

The final straw came in June 2004. Parfyonov planned to run an interview with the widow of a man who had been a Chechen rebel commander and who had been assassinated by Russian agents in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. The FSB instructed NTV not to air the program, but Parfyonov refused to censor his story and went public, leading NTV managers to cancel Namedny and fire Parfyonov, “because of his serious breeches of contract... and work ethics,” NTV director Nikolai Senkevich said.

“After it closed, it was like we were in occupied territory and could not do our [basic journalistic] work,” Sergei said, “…many people were leaving the station. No one – not even the managers – hides how bad it is anymore, that you can’t do real news and that is has essentially become Soviet-style television.”

After his dismissal, Parfyonov told the New York Times that, “I have worked as a journalist for 25 years, and all these 25 years I’ve heard, ‘It’s not the right time yet, brother, not the right time.’ It is about time to understand that information has an intrinsic value. It is neither harmful, nor useful, nor useless.” 

Sergei said the stifling environment at the station has hurt morale at NTV, where journalists feel they have lost their sense of mission. “Our programs used to have an influence on society and politics, people wrote newspaper articles about our programs and we had great ratings,” he said “…[then] NTV became like the other channels and we don’t have an independent role in politics anymore. We just transcribe and re-broadcast politics the way the Kremlin wants us to, maybe with a bit more style than the other channels, but we are more or less repeating the same news.” Editors and executives, Sergei said, eventually “stopped talking about an independent editorial policy any more, now it’s about serving the interests of the shareholder [Gazprom].” 

Research by media experts demonstrates the degree to which the three main television channels promote the Kremlin’s interests. An analysis conducted in early 2006 by the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, a Moscow-based press freedom group, found that about 90 percent of the political news coverage on these three channels focuses on the government’s work in a positive or neutral way, while about 4 percent of the coverage focused on the opposition and mainly in a negative way. Other media analysts point to the nearly identical smear campaigns unleashed by news programs against Kremlin’s opponents – most recently Georgia’s reformist president Mikhail Saakashvili. 

Sergei complained that he cannot use certain words anymore (for example, “censorship”), that there are unwritten blacklists of politicians and businessmen the Kremlin does not want seen on the airwaves (Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky and Berezovsky) and that his producer sometimes asks him to prepare “hard” and “soft” versions of reports, so that the station has something to air if an NTV or Kremlin official does not approve of the tougher reports. 

“I could not report that a government medical center required to treat certain illnesses under the Kremlin’s highly touted ‘national projects’ doesn’t have the basic equipment it needs to do that work,” Sergei said. “When I traveled in the media pool of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, I was surprised that all questions for top government officials at press conferences have to be cleared in advance with a press officer, so that the government officials know who will ask what… and the press officers now even ‘assign’ questions for reporters to ask.” 

As a result, Sergei and other creative reporters are forced to use subterfuge to get bits of real news on the air. Sergei reported producing news reports or historical programs that include awkward silences, innuendos or “pithy quotes” that convey what cannot be explicitly said. “For me, even with the restrictions, it’s more interesting to be inside television,” said Sergei. “But the sad thing is that most people who are active and politically conscious no longer watch television.”

A recent survey by TNS Gallup Media supported this observation, reporting that television viewers are becoming older (45+), and are more likely to be women. The Russian edition of Esquire reported that television is becoming a source of entertainment for poor homemakers, workers and pensioners. Younger, well-to-do urban professionals are increasingly turning away from broadcast television to other kinds of media: the Internet, glossy magazines and cable or satellite television. 

Resistance is Futile

Taking their cues from the Kremlin, most of the country’s thousand or so regional television stations are focusing more and more on entertainment programming, because, in addition to being politically safe, it is more profitable. About one hundred stations try to produce some kind of quality local news, but only a handful – ATV in Stavropol; TV2 in Tomsk; Channel 4 in Yekaterinburg; Afontovo TVK in Krasnoyarsk – produce news that is politically independent and professional, according to Manana Aslamazian, director of Internews-Russia, a Moscow-based media training organization. 

“The quality of news reporting really depends on the tolerance of the local authorities, the amount of local advertising revenue, the availability of good journalists and how much the television station’s management really values objective news,” Aslamazian said. “This is very different in every city… which means that people living in Tomsk see a very different picture of the country on their local television station from what people in Kaliningrad see.” 

A rare exception to the country’s declining broadcast news industry is Ekho Moskvy, a Moscow-based radio station acquired by Gazprom in 2001 that has managed to retain its editorial independence due to its popularity, profitability and the fact that journalists at the station own a significant minority stake in the station (see Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2005). The station was founded in 1990 by a group of frustrated journalists fleeing government restrictions at Soviet Gosteleradio and has kept Moscow residents informed on some of the country’s most important political crises – from the attempted coup of August 1991 to the Beslan hostage crisis in 2004. 

The talk radio station hosts lively call-in programs on car repair and Russian grammar, but its main focus is current affairs programs with liberal commentators like Yevgenia Albats and Yulia Latynina, known for their sharp criticism of President Putin and the FSB. The station draws some 140,000 daily listeners in Moscow, about 600,000 in another 43 cities and is rumored to have survived because some influential Kremlin officials continue to rely on the station for news, The Moscow Times reported. 

The Kremlin largely left Moscow-based national newspapers untouched through 2004, because of its focus on national television. But there were exceptions. When Gazprom forcefully acquired Gusinsky’s Media-Most holding company in April 2001, the state gas monopoly also gained control of the daily Sevodnya and the magazine Itogi. The concern proceeded to close the newspaper and fire the entire staff of the magazine. In the meantime, publishers focused more on profitable and politically safe niche markets, producing increasingly professional business publications and glossy gossip and fashion magazines. 

After the embarrassing Beslan hostage crisis in 2004, various Kremlin-friendly companies and businessmen began restricting the national print media by purchasing influential newspapers and ensuring that they praised the government. In 2005, Gazprom purchased the daily Izvestiya, Deputy Trade Minister Konstantin Remchukov bought the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Israeli businessman Arkady Gaidamak purchased the weekly Moskovskiye Novosti. A number of the country’s most popular newspapers were already in the hands of Kremlin-friendly companies: oligarch Vladimir Potanin owns the most popular daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda; the Russian government owns the daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta; journalist Pavel Gusev is the director and co-owner of the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets; oligarch brothers Alexei and Dmitry Ananayev of Promsvyazbank own the weekly Argumenty i Fakty; aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska bought Expert magazine. In 2006, metal magnate and Gazprom executive Alisher Usmanov purchased the daily Kommersant, but thus far the newspaper appears to have retained its relatively independent editorial policy. 

The purchases have been followed by predictable changes in editorial policies. The November 2006 poisoning of Aleksei Litvinenko – a former FSB officer who was an ally of Boris Berezovsky and a staunch critic of Putin – was reported by Kommersant but initially ignored by the more popular newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestiya. 

Second-tier television stations have also been absorbed into the Kremlin’s media orbit. The steel and automotive group Severstal and the oil company Surgutneftegaz each bought a 35 percent stake in the Moscow-based Ren-TV during the summer of 2005 and installed Kremlin-friendly executives in October. The following month, Ren-TV managers abruptly cancelled news anchor Olga Romanova’s program after she publicly complained that editors had censored her show, not allowing her to report that Moscow authorities chose not to prosecute the son of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov for a fatal car accident earlier in 2005 (station management denied that any reports were censored). That same year, three new pro-Kremlin television channels went on the air; the state-funded Russia Today broadcasts abroad in English, while domestic audiences could now watch patriotic films on the Defense Ministry’s television channel Zvezda and religious programming on the Russian Orthodox Church’s satellite-TV channel Spas.

While such mergers, acquisitions and launches often reveal media allegiances, in most cases the boundaries between state and private media are quite difficult to delineate. Some 85% of the country’s media – be they state- or privately-owned – receive some type of state subsidies: office space, printing presses, newspaper distributors, broadcasting facilities. This cannot but influence their editorial independence. What is more, confusing and contradictory copyright and taxation legislation leave many media organizations vulnerable to politicized inspections. 

Meanwhile, increasing state control over the media would seem to be of little concern to Russians. In 2003, a ROMIR survey found that 76 percent of the public supports censorship of the media. Yet attitudes towards the media are more complex. While the public often has negative reactions to phrases like “freedom of speech” – based on negative associations with perestroika, glasnost and a disappointment with the reforms of the 1990s – most Russians (53 percent) actually believe that the media is improperly restricted in their ability to work freely, the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) reported in 2005. A lot may have to do with how survey questions are worded: when Russians say they want more censorship, they may merely be expressing a desire to see less sex or violence on their television screens. 

Safe Haven

The one media realm that remains largely loosed from state restrictions is the Internet, but that may change as the size and influence of this sector grows. Presently, approximately 8 million Russians (9.1% of the population) go online daily, the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) reported this summer. Most users are young, educated working professionals and students concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other large cities. 

While most Internet users rely on the Web for entertainment and work, a growing percentage of users are increasingly getting their news from websites. The most popular  oppositionist sites include gazeta.ru, which was rumored to be owned by an associate of jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (and was reportedly, at press time, being sold to oil tycoon Alisher Usmanov for $30 million), grani.ru – owned by the London-based exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky – and newsru.com – owned by the Israel-based exiled oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. Kremlin-friendly news websites like strana.ru, regnum.ru and lenta.ru also compete for Russia’s educated, urban audience. 

Blogging sites like livejournal.com and others with liberal, nationalist, communist and pro-Kremlin leanings, provide tech-savvy Russians with outlets for their political views, leading some to call them modern equivalents of the Soviet kitchen – a sanctuary where politics and gossip can be discussed relatively openly. Internet users, nonetheless, remain cautious, since government regulations require all Internet Service Providers to install devices that allow law enforcement agencies to monitor all traffic passing through their server. 

Dmitry Vinogradov – a 28-year old journalist originally from Novosibirsk – has been working for gazeta.ru in Moscow since February of last year and reports on the media, regional politics, the Central Election Commission and nationalist and communist political parties. 

While news and sports departments operate 24 hours a day, Vinogradov said that he and most journalists work an 11 am to 8 pm shift at the website, writing more comprehensive and analytical news articles. “News agencies play a big role in determining what news we cover here in Moscow,” Vinogradov said. “They are our first source of information that something important is happening and then we try to find out more by calling experts, politicians and other sources for more detailed information for our articles.” 

Of the three main news agencies, ITAR-TASS and RIA-Novosti are state-owned and, Vinogradov said, tend to avoid reporting any criticism of the Kremlin. The privately-owned Interfax, Vinogradov said, is more aggressive and professional in reporting the news. “When Politkovskaya was murdered, journalists at RIA and TASS didn’t quote Berezovsky in their stories because he’s considered ‘anti-Kremlin’ and ‘scandalous.’ Interfax did quote Berezovsky because he perhaps may have been involved in the murder.” 

Russia’s few remaining independent-minded national newspapers, like Vedomosti and Kommersant, retain more authority and respect with their elite audiences than do news websites or television, Vinogradov said. “Newspapers still have more influence on politics, but there are also more laws to regulate them and many more lawsuits against them. Novaya Gazeta writes more freely about politics and corruption, but they have also lost three of their journalists in the last couple of years – Politkovskaya, Yuri Shchekhochikhin and Igor Domnikov – so criminals respond more seriously to their reporting as well.” 

Yet the public is skeptical about all media outlets, due to low professional and ethical standards among journalists. The prevalence of zakazukha – underpaid journalists accepting bribes to write articles promoting politicians or businessmen – turns into a feeding frenzy during election campaigns when “black PR” is used to smear political opponents in the media and “white PR” is used to promote the image of a political candidate. 

“We’re more free because of less government scrutiny,” said Vinogradov, “so you don’t have to worry as much about a politician ‘settling scores’ with you for criticism in an article. But sometimes we get an angry call from someone we’ve written something incorrectly about... so we go online and change it. But when you know you can correct an error that way, you’re not always as careful.” 

Inadequate training of journalists may be a big part of current problems. Most universities – even the prestigious Moscow State University (MGU) – still have journalism professors who have never worked in the media, outdated Soviet-era curricula emphasizing theory over practical experience, and rarely have classes on important topics like media law, journalistic ethics, media management or marketing and advertising, according to assessments conducted by IREX, an American NGO. Some 80 percent of the curricula at journalism faculties are still determined by the government. 

And journalists themselves contribute to the problem by resisting attempts to introduce ethical or professional standards. “The BBC and PBS have had internal ethics councils for decades that helped them develop some standards of professional conduct,” said Internews’ Aslamazian. “Journalists here are so afraid of a council and that it will be hijacked by politicians and government officials, that anything we build will be used to control them.” 

The growing popularity of news websites has attracted the attention of the Kremlin, which has recently taken steps to set clearer boundaries for political discourse on the Web. In March, the Federal Agency for the Oversight of Media and Culture (Rosokhrankultura) issued an official warning to gazeta.ru for publishing an article on February 2 about the anti-Muhammad cartoons that were hotly debated in Europe and the Middle East. Yevgeny Strelchik, a senior adviser at Rosokhrankultura, accused gazeta.ru of “extremism” for republishing the cartoons in the article. The website immediately removed the cartoons, but it faces closure if it receives another official warning before the end of 2006. “There’s an unspoken agreement that the Kremlin won’t shut down news websites so long as they don’t publish very strong or hysterical criticism of them,” Vinogradov said. 

Recent calls by Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Prosecutor-General Yuri Chayka for more regulation of the Internet have frightened journalists and human rights activists because restrictive laws have already been used to silence politically inconvenient information in the media. On February 3, prosecutors in Nizhny Novgorod convicted Stanislav Dmitriyevsky – director of the human rights organization Russian-Chechen Friendship Society and editor of its newspaper Pravo-Zashchita (Rights Defender) – for “inciting hatred.” Dmitriyevsky was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and four years probation for publishing statements by Chechen rebel leaders calling for peace talks in the March 2004 and April 2004 editions of the newspaper. 

“The Kremlin now has more Internet news projects to attract readers; they are developing new laws on regulating the Internet and you are just starting to see the first  lawsuits against news websites,” Vinogradov said. “So you get the feeling the Kremlin is more focused on this, but at the same time it won’t become as bad as it is in China... it doesn’t make sense to establish full censorship…[and also politicians and bureaucrats] still have to worry about their image in the West, because that’s were they keep their money and buy apartments and yachts. They don’t see a need to suffocate everything, because the Internet is like a small breathing hole that allows the middle class to feel some freedom and the Kremlin to have access to useful ideas produced by opposition-style media. There’s no need for the Kremlin to shut down Ekho Moskvy, Kommersant and gazeta.ru, because they no longer represent a political threat and it would only push dissatisfied people and politics into the kitchen.” 

The Case of Chechnya

The Kremlin may be little-concerned with restricting online journalism, but it has invested tremendous resources to aggressively obstruct news reporting in or about Chechnya. The Kremlin’s information war has relied on nearly a dozen government agencies operating locally, regionally, nationally and abroad to deny or obstruct independent-minded journalists access (and to threaten, harass, obstruct or assault those who have gained access) to the region. The main goal seems to be to ensure that the media do not influence public opinion as they did during the first Chechen war (1994-96), when broadcasts from NTV and reports from independent newspapers reported the enormous human losses to a national audience and turned the public against the war. 

Unlike in the first war, the public and the media largely supported Putin’s military incursion into Chechnya in late 1999 because of a series of mysterious apartment bombings in Moscow that were never solved. The government imposed restrictive accreditation rules on journalists, requiring them to travel with military escorts, banned reporting of interviews with rebels and aggressively harassed journalists who chose to travel and report on the war independently. 

Along with the threat of being kidnapped by Chechen rebels, journalists working independently endured intense persecution from the FSB and other authorities. In February 2001, FSB officers in Chechnya detained Anna Politkovskaya while she was traveling on her own in the region to investigate Russian military abuses against Chechen civilians. The FSB accused her of entering the region without proper accreditation, of not registering her local residence with the military and threatened to kill her during the three-day detention. Politkovskaya received several death threats related to her articles about Russian military abuses in Chechnya and temporarily fled to Austria. In March 2003, local officials in the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk failed to prosecute the military officer accused of sending her those death threats. 

The Foreign Ministry blocked some international news coverage of the war by denying visas and accreditation to journalists working for international media outlets. The ministry has refused to issue credentials to journalists from the North Caucasus service of RFE/RL and in February 2004 refused to issue a visa to Vibeke Sperling, a Danish correspondent for the independent Copenhagen daily Politiken. 

During 2005, the Foreign Ministry escalated pressure on foreign broadcasters, criticizing the London-based independent television broadcaster Channel 4 and Stockholm’s independent news agency TT for reporting their interviews with Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev in February and March, respectively. In August, the ministry banned reporters with the New York-based television network ABC from meeting with government officials and said it would not renew their accreditation after the network broadcast an interview with Basayev. 

Even in 2006, the Kremlin maintains a tight information blockade by restricting journalists’ access to Chechnya while insisting that life in the war-torn region is once again becoming normal. 

One journalist who has felt the full weight of these restrictions is Yuri Bagrov. He was a 23-year-old journalist in the fall of 1999 when the second war began in Chechnya. He had studied genetics in a local college in the North Caucasus city of Vladikavkaz and was working for a local radio station and newspaper when Russian and foreign journalists began rushing into the town, using it as a staging point for covering the war in neighboring Chechnya. 

Bagrov began traveling to Chechnya with  visiting journalists, trying to break through the Russian military cordon that walled off the war zone. At first Bagrov was valued for his local knowledge, but he proved himself as a reporter in his own right and was hired by The Associated Press and RFE/RL. “A Reuters stringer and [RFE/RL reporter] Andrei Babitsky and I dressed up as locals, snuck passed the Russian military checkpoint and found a local guide who spent two weeks taking us to Grozny, traveling by foot and only at night to avoid capture,” Bagrov said. 

That first visit in November 1999 to what was already a surrounded and nearly demolished city strewn with corpses proved to be a life changing experience for Bagrov. “The Russian media were all saying that only rebels were left in the city, but I saw people – including children and grandparents – who were cold and hungry and being shelled by Russian artillery,” Bagrov said. “For the first time in my life I felt a strong duty to inform the public that a city full of civilians is being carpet-bombed.” 

In the coming weeks, Bagrov continued to confront cases where Russian authorities distributed misinformation and lies through the Russian media. “In November, I was traveling with Babitsky and a Czech journalist through Grozny when we came across the corpses of about 20 Russian soldiers in a part of the city where a battle had just taken place,” said Bagrov. “Later that evening we heard news reports in the media citing TASS and Interfax that the only casualties in that battle were one dead and two or three wounded Chechen rebels.” 

Bagrov filed his first live, on-air news report for RFE/RL about that battle, which also came to define his future journalistic career. He took on the role of personally witnessing the brutal reality of the war on the ground in Chechnya and trying to help Russians understand what the Putin administration was doing in their name but also hiding from them. “I saw my role as an intermediary, to see the corpses, the grandmothers dying from hunger and artillery shells, and to tell people about it… someone needed to say something about it,” he said. “At that time you still had a feeling that your words could influence the conditions…” 

It was precisely that influence that concerned the Kremlin, and Russian forces on the ground in Chechnya began to target journalists perceived as disloyal. Russian soldiers abducted Babitsky in mid-January 2000. For two weeks they denied they had knowledge of his whereabouts, then on February 3 handed him over to a group of Chechen rebels loyal to Moscow. Three weeks later, Babitsky was dropped off in the neighboring Dagestani capital of Makhachkala and immediately arrested for possessing a forged Azerbaijani passport that had been planted on him. Babitsky was transferred to Moscow and in October convicted of possessing false documents.

The Babitsky affair was a chilling reminder to Bagrov of the risks involved in his work, yet he persisted. His next big story focused on one of the by-products of the war: the tens of thousands of Chechen civilians who had fled to the neighboring republic of Ingushetia during the second Chechen war and who lived in squalid refugee camps, in tents without regular access to running water, electricity or heat in the frigid winters. After Russian forces re-entered Chechnya in 1999, the Kremlin and the state media proclaimed that a process of “normalization” had begun in Chechnya, that law and order were being re-established and reconstruction was underway. 

But the Ingushetian refugees knew the score and were reluctant to move back to their largely demolished and lawless republic. For the Kremlin, this obstinacy against the backdrop of an otherwise mainly popular war became an inconvenience. “The authorities began pushing the refugees to go home – essentially cutting off their food aid – so that they could demonstrate that Chechnya was returning to normal and people were going home,” Bagrov said. 

Reporting on the dirty, impoverished and hopelessness in the camps was often morally agonizing for Bagrov, who was confronted with the reality of the refugee’s lives but felt frustrated that he could not do more to help them. “It was a terrible situation, because you know that you can’t help them, you feel helpless and you know that later in the evening you’ll return to your warm home and to a warm meal,” he said. “For them, even just getting electricity for a short while was an event to celebrate… they had a totally different standard of living.” 

Despite the efforts by Bagrov and some of his colleagues to report the war accurately, most Russian journalists followed the government lead by putting a positive spin on events. As a result, journalists as a whole were despised by the refugees. “Because so many of the journalists are loyal to the government, the image of journalists in the region is very bad,” Bagrov said. “Some people even believe that it’s better to have a daughter who is a prostitute than a son who is a journalist.” 

Over time, Bagrov’s hard work and growing list of contacts throughout the war-torn region made him one of the best-informed and top-respected journalists in the North Caucasus. Russian and foreign reporters based in Moscow periodically visited him in Vladikavkaz, seeking his advice and insight on the conflict in Chechnya. 

In an effort to be objective, Bagrov spent time with Chechen rebels as well as Russian soldiers. He was disturbed by what he saw. “The Russian forces would launch a barrage of Uragan/Grad rockets at a town and the military guys really thought each missile would only kill a rebel and not kill civilians,” Bagrov said. “And the permanent drunkenness of the army – from the soldiers up through the officers – was scary, though understandable, considering how scared and stressed-out they were by the war.” 

In the summer of 2004, Bagrov’s tether was finally reeled in. Over the previous five years, Bagrov had regularly run into FSB officers during his work as they tried to disrupt his research, but in 2004 something started to change, he said. “Government officials I knew who were loyal to the FSB had already started hinting to me [that my work was ‘not right’], asking why I work for the Americans.” 

Two particular investigative stories he wrote in 2004 caught the attention of the authorities: a February 10 story on the radicalization of Chechen rebels and a May 24 story implicating the FSB in a wave of mysterious abductions in Ingushetia. “I think those stories were the last drops in the bucket,” he said. Soon after the article on abductions appeared, a friend of Bagrov’s who worked at a local government agency said the FSB came to their office to collect information about Bagrov. 

At 8 am on August 25, Lt. Col. Sergei Leonidov of the FSB’s counter-intelligence department led a team of 10 agents in a raid of Bagrov’s apartment, office and car, claiming they were seeking weapons, ammunition, drugs, and forgery-related items. “I was afraid during the search, really afraid that they could plant something like drugs in my apartment,” Bagrov said. 

The agents spent five and a half hours going through Bagrov’s possessions and confiscated all of his personal identity documents, his personal and work computers as well as computer discs, camera film, video tapes and his wife’s diaries. Later in the afternoon he was called into the FSB office for further questioning. “I understood right away that my only protection was to go public with all of this,” he said. He informed his editors and started giving interviews to the media and human rights researchers about the raid. Meanwhile, since his identity papers had been confiscated, he had become a prisoner in his own city, unable to pass though military and police checkpoints. 

Three weeks later, a local prosecutor charged Bagrov with knowingly using forged documents to obtain Russian citizenship. Bagrov denied the charges and provided documents proving that he was an ethnic Russian born in Georgia, where his father served in the Soviet military, and that he had legally moved to his mother’s hometown of Vladikavkaz in 1992 and properly obtained citizenship. A local court nonetheless convicted Bagrov in December 2004 and ordered him to pay a R15,000 ($500) fine, leaving him a stateless person in Russia who was unable to work or travel locally without identity documents. 

Bagrov paid the fine and said he tried to continue reporting for Radio Liberty as much as he could from Vladikavkaz by conducting interviews over the phone. But he said he was followed by FSB agents and prevented from attending press conferences, political rallies or court trials. In February 2005, the FSB briefly tried to deport him and the following month he reapplied for Russian citizenship. 

He was also beginning to worry about his personal safety. His wife Marina was pregnant and began receiving threatening phone calls where an unidentified caller would ask to speak with “the widow of Mr. Bagrov.” In July, Marina gave birth to their son, Danil, whom Bagrov will have to adopt because authorities refused to register him as the father. When his request for Russian citizenship was denied in August 2005, he became depressed about his prospects of working and living in Vladikavkaz. Then, after months of requests and inquiries, authorities finally issued Bagrov a document – a Russian Federation identity card for stateless people – that would at least allow him to travel within Russia. 

In April 2006, Bagrov moved to Moscow and began working for the Moscow bureau of RFE/RL. He feels safer now and can earn money for his family, but he misses them and visits Vladikavkaz regularly. “I think they [FSB] just wanted to scare me… and I understand they succeeded because I had to leave my work in a region I knew very well,” he said. “But I’m happy it finished this way because I’m not in jail…and my conscience is clear, I didn’t lie to my audience.” 

Bagrov’s journalistic work and experience of government harassment have left him pessimistic about the current state of Russia. “When I read newspapers and the Internet every day,” he said, “…when I see how deeply corrupt the system is and how passive people in this country are, I feel sad. I want Russia to become democratic in the real sense where human life is valued, which is completely not the case now. I hope this happens, but I’m not hopeful… we need at least another generation to pass for people to see that what we have now is not democracy and freedom.” 

Sounds of Silence

The conflict in Chechnya represents perhaps the most intense and aggressive effort by the Kremlin to get uncomfortable issues off the airwaves and printing presses. But, overall, limited access to independent news reporting means that most of the country’s citizens rarely hear criticism of the Kremlin or regional politicians in the media and that journalists simply do not report on important but politically embarrassing issues. Media analysts are concerned that this is distorting the development of Russian society, leaving citizens to fend for themselves – unprepared to deal with emerging problems in a more modern, interconnected world. 

“Not enough news means that, for a lot of Russians, this is an increasingly closed, isolated country that doesn’t know much about neighboring countries, that thinks it’s surrounded by enemies and is becoming increasingly nationalistic,” said Internews’ Aslamazian. “Unless you read news on the Internet or several remaining independent newspapers, it seems like only the people in the Kremlin exist, like there is no other alternative political elite that can rule the country.” 

Upbeat news reports about Putin’s successful policies re-establishing Russia as a diplomatic power and the country’s rapid economic growth stand in stark contrast to rampant crime and corruption – in bureaucracies, schools, hospitals and the military – and have unforeseen consequences on society. “When people see on television that no one in the government is dealing with these serious problems and paying attention to the daily lives of ordinary people, they become hopeless and consider journalists sellouts,” Aslamazian said. “People end up struggling just to survive, paying bribes, not paying taxes and in effect not becoming citizens because they feel they have no stake in the system.” 

Many journalists agree that the quality of news reporting has fallen significantly since the Yeltsin era. But some journalists also warn against equating the Kremlin’s expanding control over the media with the total control over the media which existed in the Soviet state, saying such simplifications obscure a deeper understanding of the situation. “What is particular is that the limitations are not stable,” said NTV’s Sergei, “they are expanding and growing like a living organism, so there is no clear list of what is not allowed. It is also clear that there are different standards for different media in Russia and journalists have different attitudes towards it. At NTV, we produce the ‘news’ the Kremlin wants us to, but we don’t believe in it… journalists at Channel One and Rossiya are convinced they’re doing the country a service by producing what we laughingly refer to as ‘Putin TV.’“ 

Rossiya’s pro-Putin news anchors wear their loyalty on their sleeves. “If there’s no obvious breaking news, we start with the president,” said Vesti (News) anchor Mikhail Antonov in an interview with the New York Times. “It’s not our job to discuss or draw judgments about the actions of our president.” 

Sergei also emphasized that, while Putin’s authoritarian restrictions appeared unified and coherent from a distance, from a closer vantage point it is clear that the media controls are at times the outcome of conflicts and compromises arising out of intense factionalism within Putin’s entourage. “It’s also not really unified, I’m convinced that there are lots of senior officials like [Presidential Aide Igor] Sechin and [Defense Minister Sergei] Ivanov who have different channels of influence and different levels of influence on the channels,” Sergei said. “These channels of influence sometimes clash over how television should report on a conflict between [state controlled gas and oil companies] Gazprom and Rosneft.” 

Journalists are in agreement, however, that media restrictions will remain and likely intensify in the coming two years, as the Kremlin prepares a “managed” presidential election in 2008, when Putin will likely hand the reigns of power to an anointed successor. Indeed, the intense political controls on opposition parties, journalists, non-profit organizations and businessmen has provided the Kremlin and bureaucrats with a strong sense of security that has led some analysts to compare Putin’s presidency with the stability and stagnation of the Brezhnev era. “People start feeling like politics cannot be any other way and it stunts the development of the political class because there is no more political competition anymore,” said RFE/RL’s Kachkayeva. “The combination of almost no real news and lots of Kremlin propaganda leads to isolationism and paranoia, the feeling that Russia is surrounded by enemies and there are no voices on television challenging this picture.” 

As a result, many place their hopes in the continuing independence of the Internet as a way to circumvent media controls and provide a growing – though limited – audience with independent news and information. Others are skeptical, pointing out that, even as Internet use grows in Russia, most people use the Internet for entertainment and personal communication, rather than to read news.

Aside from all this, a stunting of the media’s role means that journalists cannot play their important corrective role, drawing attention to corruption and abuses of power that are eating away at Russian society. “In Russia, the effect of what you publish is different from the West: [here] nothing happens,” said Derk Sauer, the Dutch founder of the successful Independent Media publishing house, in an interview with London’s Financial Times. “The role of the press works if it is followed up on,” Sauer added, referring to news reports published in the Moscow Times, which he co-owns. “But we reveal something every week: that someone is corrupt, that the justice system has made a mistake, we reveal the craziest things. And nothing happens. Deathly silence.”  RL