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Moscow Times
December 6, 2002
It's All About Free Speech for Shuster
By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
Staff Writer
As if to confirm television people's fabled addiction to ratings, the first thing Savik Shuster did when he came to his office for an interview this week was to switch on his computer and look at that day's graphs of how many people watched NTV's news programs, which he helps run as deputy chief of news.
"I don't know why, but the best day for news is Thursday," said Shuster, who turned 50 two weeks ago and was congratulated by guests in the middle of his live political talk show "Svoboda Slova," or "Free Speech."
Yet Shuster is not your average Russian television star. And not only because at the age of 50 he sticks to the diminutive version of his name, Savely, or because of the controversies that have accompanied him throughout his career.
Most recently, it was President Vladimir Putin's apparent fury at NTV's coverage of the Moscow hostage crisis, particularly at Shuster's Oct. 25 show featuring passionate pleas by hostages' relatives to end the war in Chechnya and not storm the theater. Afterward, several newspapers reported that the NTV leadership was under pressure to fire Shuster.
"Thank God someone can make money, but not at any cost, not on the blood of your own citizens, if, of course, those who do this consider these citizens to be their own," Putin said at a meeting with media managers late last month, in remarks that were widely perceived as directed at NTV and its head, Boris Jordan, a U.S.-born descendant of White Russian emigres.
Speculation was rife in Moscow media circles that Putin was directly referring to Shuster, a Lithuanian-born Canadian citizen.
"If he indeed meant NTV, this has nothing to with Jordan, because it is hard to imagine blood more Russian than Jordan's," Shuster said. "Therefore, he meant me or people like me. As for me, there is no such thing as foreign blood.
"And the very way in which the question is raised is wrong. If we say that terrorism has no borders, it means that blood has no borders."
Shuster is married to an Italian, and his family lives in Florence. His parents emigrated from their native Vilnius via Israel in 1971 when Shuster was 19. A distant uncle who was vice president of Shell Canada intervened with Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin on their behalf. Shuster got a medical degree in Canada and then moved to Florence to continue his studies. There, he began writing for a local newspaper after realizing that he "did not like sick people."
But the real change came in 1980, when he ventured to Afghanistan for three months with a French humanitarian organization that worked on the side of the anti-Soviet mujahedin. In a shop in Islamabad, where he went to buy a saddle for a mujahedin commander, Shuster met Newsweek's Asia editor and was offered a chance to write an article. A few days after he left Afghanistan, his story appeared in the magazine. "That was entering journalism through the front door," Shuster said.
After a stint with Newsweek, he wrote for the French newspaper Liberation and the Italian magazine Frigider.
Shuster spoke little Russian in his childhood and perfected it only when he began working full-time for U.S. government-funded Radio Liberty in 1988. He was offered a job at its Munich headquarters -- after producing reports on the Afghan War for the station.
Russian is his fifth language after Lithuanian, English, Italian and French. Shuster said he began to speak French fluently in Chad, where he covered the Sudanese occupation in 1982. "My Parisian friends still poke fun at me for having an African accent," he said.
Shuster described his move to Radio Liberty as a turning point. "I fell into Gorbachev's glasnost and put my body and soul into Russia," he said.
He went on to build up a network of local reporters around the Soviet Union for Radio Liberty, often against the wishes of the emigre dissidents who dominated the station in Munich. They tended to perceive all nondissident Russians as KGB agents, Shuster said. That was an uphill battle that he managed to win, albeit "balancing on the verge of getting fired." Shuster set up the station's Moscow bureau of several dozen staff in 1992 and led it for nine years.
Radio Liberty, which never particularly liked Shuster's independent attitude, ended up firing him over a perceived conflict of interest during Gazprom's takeover of NTV from Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST in April 2001. The incident was perhaps the biggest controversy of Shuster's career, costing him a number of friends in political and journalistic circles.
Shuster, who had firmly backed Yevgeny Kiselyov's team of journalists at NTV and fiercely criticized the takeover bid, resumed hosting a soccer show on NTV just days after Gazprom seized the station. He had begun producing the show, "The Third Half," a couple of years earlier. Radio Liberty said Shuster had violated its professional code and policy over conflict of interests.
"There was nothing like this in the contract," Shuster said Wednesday. "I began doing 'The Third Half' in 1998, and there was no conflict of interest. It emerged only during the conflict between Gusinsky and Jordan. After the night of the takeover, of course, my decision to do soccer [on NTV] was perceived in a purely political way."
That decision, particularly in the light of a dramatic appearance by Shuster in NTV corridors on the night of April 4, 2001, when the takeover took place, is well remembered in Russia's highly divided and politicized media circles.
The pro-Western liberal camp of journalists appears to view Shuster as a defector, while the more patriotic conservative camp has never accepted him as their own. At the same time, Radio Liberty's decision to fire a well-known journalist over a clearly political situation was perceived by many in Russia as proof of hypocrisy by a West that had lectured Russia on free speech.
One thing that no one disputes is that Shuster, whose father was a soccer coach, knows his sports. "He knows his way around soccer," said Alexei Gridnev, editor of the Futbolnoye Obozreniye weekly.
Vladimir Radionov, the general secretary of the Russian Football Union, agreed, but said he was not a fan of Shuster's political programs. "I'm not always sure that I'm right, but Shuster always knows he's right," Radionov said.
Shuster's tiny office -- which contains a photograph of his father in a Soviet World War II military uniform, books in several languages and posters of Tuscan wines -- is on NTV's eighth floor in the Ostankino television center.
It was to these corridors Shuster came on the night of the takeover. In footage that NTV managed to broadcast before its programming was switched to that of its sister station THT, Shuster appeared to be scolding the journalists who chose to stay at NTV.
Shuster insisted he has never compromised his principles. He said he came to NTV's offices as a Radio Liberty reporter and was let in by the new management's guards because "there is no such thing as a guard who doesn't like soccer."
He said that after reporting for Radio Liberty via his cellphone, he entered the newsroom where the morning news team were working.
"I asked [newscaster Olga Belova] 'Are you going to cover this? And how are you going to cover this?'" he said. ("I don't know," Belova replied.) "Later on, it was perceived as an ideological question," Shuster said. "But what kind of ideological question was it? I would have asked the same question today."
Just weeks after the takeover, Shuster began anchoring NTV's "Hero of the Day" interview show and then "Svoboda Slova."
Asked whether he regrets what happened, he paused.
"You know, it's always better to be a big fish in a small pond," he said. "But then, of course, I don't regret it because television work is a new challenge. And now I can say that from print journalism through radio journalism, I have come to television journalism. And professionally, it gives me a special satisfaction."
As for the hostage-crisis show that sparkled the latest debate, Shuster said it is one of the few programs he regrets doing.
"If the clock could be turned back, I would probably not have done it -- not because I would be concerned about what the hostages' relatives would say, but because it is not a subject of discussion for a large [studio] audience. It's a subject to be discussed by a few people who know what they are talking about and can measure their words."
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