#6043
[Second Issue of the Day]
#5
Baltimore Sun
January 27, 2002
Russia turns up heat on media
Repression: Threats against reporters and the government's closure of a
television network are the latest actions to frighten and frustrate journalists.
By Douglas Birch
MOSCOW - For many of this nation's best journalists, it's becoming increasingly difficult to practice their craft.
A popular news anchor, who stood up to the Kremlin in the Soviet era, says the government's closure of the nation's last independent television network is the last straw: She's calling it quits. A radio journalist who covered both of Russia's brutal wars in Chechnya lives in exile in Prague because he says official hostility makes it impossible for him to work in Russia. A newspaper reporter renowned for her work in Chechnya has been receiving death threats for months, and no arrests have been made.
And in newsrooms and broadcast studios around Russia, reporters are reluctant to pursue stories that they know will draw the wrath of the government.
"Journalism has turned into a profession of scared people," says Sergei Parkhomenko, the 37-year- old editor in chief of Zhurnal, a new weekly newsmagazine. "At the majority of editorial offices working in Russia, there is no need to put pressure on them. They are ready to obey commands that have not even been given."
'Crude, totally unnecessary'
Last week, government officials abruptly switched off the signal on TV6, a television network owned by Boris A. Berezovsky, a tycoon critical of President Vladimir V. Putin. The Press Ministry revoked the network's license after another company with close Kremlin ties sued under a never-before-invoked law to force TV6 to sell its assets and close its doors.
The move outraged many intellectuals. "It was an ax that struck you straight on the head," says Yasen Zasursky, professor of journalism at Moscow State University. "It was unprofessional, very crude and totally unnecessary."
'Threats are increasing'
But the fate of TV6 is only the most blatant example of what some see as a growing government effort to silence criticism.
A year ago, Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta newspaper reporter, wrote an article about the torture, mutilation and disappearance of a 26-year-old Chechen man while in the custody of Russian Interior Ministry military officers. Prosecutors ordered three arrests in the case, including that of an officer known as "Kadet." But no arrests were ever made.
In the fall, the Moscow newspaper began receiving warnings that "Kadet" was in the city armed with a sniper's rifle.
At the urging of her editors, Politkovskaya fled to Vienna, Austria. But she returned a few weeks ago, she says, because she didn't want to surrender to what she calls "The Power" - the Kremlin, the Russian military and its allies. Today, she is followed everywhere by bodyguards, uses a special secure phone for interviews and leaves for interviews only at night - so it is more difficult to follow her.
Government officials say they are trying to catch whoever is threatening her, but nothing has happened. "The investigation is moving extremely slowly," she says, "and the threats are increasing."
Ready to quit
Svetlana Sorokina, 45, was a young television radical in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union teetered on the edge of collapse. She was among 350 journalists who fled NTV in April for TV6 after the NTV network was taken over by the state-controlled natural gas company, Gazprom, led by Putin's chief of staff.
Sorokina is known for her passionate delivery of the news and occasional acid asides. (She once ridiculed a tape of former President Boris N. Yeltsin's goonish dancing.) And she has repeatedly suffered the wrath of public officials and network executives, undaunted.
But the morning after the closure of TV6 last week, she stood at the Ostankino television complex looking defeated. She told reporters she is ready to quit journalism. There is no place left for her to work, she says.
Andrei Babitsky of Radio Free Europe, who has reported extensively on human rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya, may have been the first victim of the shadowy war on the media. Two years ago, Russian troops in Chechnya arrested him and then claimed that they swapped him with rebels for three Russian soldiers. (The implication was that Babitsky was biased toward the Chechens and valuable to them.)
After Babitsky's release a few weeks later, he said he suspected that he was simply handed over to Chechens allied with Moscow to intimidate and discredit him.
Part of trend
Babitsky sees a parallel between his ordeal and TV6's demise. "These are just different stages of the same course of action," he says. "I was probably there in the most painful period, when the authorities were just starting to get control of information."
Today, the 37-year-old broadcaster lives in self-imposed exile in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, where he delivers commentaries for Radio Free Europe. He is trying to get permission from Russian authorities to return to Chechnya and work as a reporter again. But that may be impossible. Putin called him a "traitor" in one newspaper interview.
Parkhomenko, the Zhurnal editor, is troubled by the absence of public outrage over the erosion of media freedoms. A poll taken shortly before the Kremlin pulled the plug on TV6 found that two-thirds of Russians weren't paying attention to the battle over the network. Neither was there much reaction last year when Parkhomenko and 80 other staff members of the newsmagazine Itogi were forced out, as part of Gazprom's takeover of NTV.
The journalists launched the glossy Zhurnal this year. But the 35,000-circulation weekly - like all other independent publications in Russia - is highly vulnerable to government pressure, the editor says. The advertising industry is controlled by a few big agencies with government ties. The nation's corporate tax laws are constantly changing and selectively enforced. Zhurnal is printed in Finland, and customs officials could easily block distribution.
'No exaggeration'
When NTV was seized, some said it sounded the death knell for independent media in Russia. Those claims seemed exaggerated at the time, Parkhomenko says. But the government's brazen cutoff of TV6's signal is proof of how far it will go to silence critics. "At the end of this conflict," he says, "it became clear that this was no exaggeration at all."
Perhaps out of fear, many journalists seem all too eager to cooperate with the Kremlin. A week ago, the Moscow Union of Journalists awarded Putin a prize for "Openness to the Press," noting his "sincere aspiration to inform each Russian citizen about reforms being carried out within the state."
Many journalists found the award appalling, but not surprising. "There are a huge number of journalists who are cheating themselves, who are eagerly singing hosannas to Putin," sighs Viktor Shenderovich, a TV6 commentator and satirist whose work regularly skewered Putin.
As former chief scriptwriter for NTV's Kukly, which features life-size rubber puppets molded to resemble Russian leaders, Shenderovich reportedly earned Putin's wrath. He has portrayed the Russian president, a martial-arts enthusiast, losing a brawl over trade policy with former President Bill Clinton and as a medieval monk appealing for guidance to the spirit of "St. Felix," meaning Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.
'Throw away the essence'
Shenderovich, 44, whose humorous program of political commentary, Itogo, had been on NTV and then TV6, says other networks have offered him work. But strings are attached. "They would like to keep the famous face," he says, "but to throw away the essence."
Some think that the Kremlin campaign is doomed because Russian society has changed drastically since the fall of the Soviet Union. The abrupt closure of TV6, says Zasursky, of Moscow State University, "was a propaganda blow against the government better than any enemy of the state could have invented." Sooner or later, he says, another network will realize it can attract viewers with independent news.
Shenderovich agrees that the era of absolute state control is over. "Now, they can't take us all to psychiatric clinics," he says, joking, "because they are on friendly terms with Tony Blair and George Bush."
Still, there is a lingering fear - even among some of the optimists here - that things could get much, much worse. "In some sense," says Shenderovich, "it's too late for us to be scared."
Yelena Ilingina of The Sun's Moscow bureau contributed to this article.
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