Moscow's News Blackout

Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2002
Stalin saw Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski as the potential leader of a military coup. What's more, Tukhachevski publicly accused Stalin of losing the Polish campaign of 1920. Stripped of his office and appointed to command the obscure Volzhski military district in Kuibyshev, Tukhachevski was doomed — but Stalin never acted openly. On May 13, 1937, he invited Tukhachevski to the Kremlin. The Party, said Stalin, still had confidence in the Marshal, and wished him success in his new command. On May 22, they arrested Tukhachevski in Kuibyshev and brought him to Moscow to be shot.

On January 15 of this year, Russian President Putin and French President Chirac were giving a joint press conference in Paris. When asked about the fate of TV-6 — the last independent national TV station in Russia ordered to be shut down a few days earlier by the courts — Putin answered: "I know many of those journalists personally and deeply respect them. We'll do everything we can to support that working collective." On the night of January 22, TV-6 was silenced — it was cut off the air, and all telephones and electricity lines to the studios were cut as well. Now, the TV-6 frequency carries sport programs by NTV-PLUS, a station that lost its independence last year.

Putin has become a good friend of Russian sportsmen. Last week Alexander Sablin, President of Russia's Ice Hokey Federation, presented Putin with a National team jersey with the number 1. "No one on the team will ever carry that number again," said Sablin. The gesture was in line with a long tradition: back in the 1970s, the Communist Party launched a campaign to exchange membership cards. Brezhnev ceremoniously signed card number 1 as issued to Vladimir Lenin. "We have one-and-a-half leaders," one joke went at the time: "One eternally alive, the other half-dead." The new joke goes: "From now on, our sportsmen will be entitled to silver and bronze Olympic medals only. The gold ones are reserved for Putin."

Russians are trying to figure out who's next: the Echo of Moscow radio station, which welcomed the TV-6 journalists? The popular Kommersant daily, owned by the self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovski? Or the two or three other newspapers that are still openly critical of Putin? One thing they don't doubt, though, is that there will be more victims.

But do the Russians really care? Do they see the link between the untimely demise of the media and the threat to democracy? "I don't care for democracy at all; it doesn't work anyway," says one Russian colleague. Still, he does care about his right to have the job of his choice rather than one assigned by the state, and the right to speak freely. Will we retain even those limited freedoms we have while the state is taking over the media?

And what about the media people themselves? Last year I wrote a string of stories about Olga Kitova, a journalist in the provincial town of Belgorod who was given a suspended sentence of two-and-a-half years and disbarred from running in local elections for three years — just for doing her duty as a journalist. Why were Kitova's Moscow colleagues so indifferent to her fate? Or the fate of Ivan Gusev, a young journalist in the province of Karelia who dared question the actions of the local legal system and now faces up to two years in prison? If you ignore such cases, one day they will come for you — as they came for TV-6.

To paraphrase O. Henry, it is good enough that our present rulers restrict their whims to liquidating TV stations and newspapers rather than people. But the question has to be asked: who's next?