Europe
Russia
Anti-Press Pressure
Since President Vladimir Putin came to power, the relationship between the Kremlin and the media has ranged from uneasy to openly contentious. The detention of Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky in Chechnya last January and the raid on the offices of the Media-Most’s Moscow headquarters last June, followed by the brief arrest of its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, have been the most notorious instances of state intolerance of critical journalism.
Since June, the Kremlin campaign to reign in the unruly fourth estate has continued unabated, although in a less headline-grabbing manner. The criminal case against Gusinsky was reopened in September, and the bank accounts of his publications and television stations have been frozen.
New pressure was brought to bear on another media mogul, Boris Berezovsky, to force him to relinquish his 49-percent stake in the ORT television network (the other 51 percent belongs to the government). The weekly show of Sergei Dorenko, ORT’s gadfly anchor, was terminated on Sept. 9, because he was about to dislose new information on the Kursk submarine disaster published in the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung. Dorenko revealed that he had declined Putin’s offer to “play with the team” during a private audience with the Russian president in July.
The Putin government’s distaste for independent opinion deepened in the wake of the barrage of indignant comments in the Russian press follwing the Kursk disaster last August. This time, it was Putin himself who lashed out at the critics. “They are destroying the country and the military and manipulating public opinion,” he charged. On Sept. 12, Putin signed Russia’s new “information doctrine,” which provides the basis for tightening state control of the media.
While official spokesmen and newspapers asserted that the main goal of the doctrine was to streamline the chaotic information market, liberal publications and journalists took a much less sanguine view of its significance.
“The concerns expressed by some members of the media in connection with the signing of the new information doctrine are totally unfounded,” professor Anatoly Streltsov, one of the architects of the policy, told the centrist weekly Vek (Sept.15-21). “We don’t want to play by the old rules….The age of propaganda is over. A new information age is beginning in the country,” declared Gleb Pavlovsky, the chief Kremlin information wizard, as reported in the liberal weekly Obshchaya Gazeta (Oct. 5-12).
But most commentators rejected the official rationale. “The government is abandoning the principle of support for all media as codified in the 1995 law in favor of support for state-owned media only,” observed the reformist business-oriented Kommersant on Sept. 13. “This contravenes the constitutional principle of equality of all forms of property and freedom of enterprise.”
Sergey Yushenkov, a liberal politician, warned of the inherent hazards of the doctrine. “One single paragraph that endorses state control of the media invalidates all the unquestionably sound general provisions of this document,” he told the reformist Izvestia (Sept. 16).
Dorenko, the dismissed ORT anchor, condemned the new doctrine. “In my view,” he confided to the liberal Sevodnya (Sept. 14), “this is a hypocritical KGB memo, whose political lingo is meant to camouflage the idea of total surveillance and suppression of the undesirables. The government will graciously allow us to wake up in the morning so that we can go and serve it. All the rest would be considered ‘informational hazard.’ ”
For the independent journalist Evgenia Albats, writing in the English-language weekly Moscow Times (Sept. 14), the new information doctrine reeks of the old Soviet practice of muzzling dissent.
“The Kremlin is erecting another inevitably leaky wall between the authorities and society,” she reflected. “There is nothing new about this. Soviet bosses also demonstrated a similar fear of the media and its ability to distribute information unpleasant to the Kremlin.”
In the opinion of Igor Golembiovsky, editor in chief of the reformist weekly Novye Izvestia, the new doctrine “causes very great concern,” he said in an interview published in Vek (Sept. 15-21).
“The invention of this document reflects the desire [of the government] to take all media under [its] control. It contains, among other things, an extraordinary statement about the necessity to bring all media-related legislation in conjunction with the doctrine of national security….An all-out control of the media is being created.”
In the meantime, some judicious voices expressed doubts about the long-term effectiveness of such government policies toward the media. “The policy of labeling journalists as ‘government’s own’ and ‘enemies of the people,’ the policy of equating information security and information blackout ceased to be feasible some 30 years ago,” Igor Yakovenko commented in Obshchaya Gazeta (Sept. 7-13). “I wonder if they understand it in the Kremlin.”
