And That’s All, Folks

The bailiffs came at midnight. they turned off phones, e-mail and broadcasting equipment, and TV-6, the reincarnation of the independent NTV news team that so infuriated Vladimir Putin, went off the air last week in mid-sentence. As usual the government denied that the closure of an independent TV station had anything to do with politics.

The bailiffs were simply executing a court order, said Alexei Volin, a senior government spokesman, so "one should not talk about any change in the freedom of the press in Russia." Opposition politicians expressed the usual outrage, though this time there was a tinge of fatigue in their voices. "For the first time since the Brezhnev years I feel a constant, low-grade sense of shame for my country," said Vladimir Lukin, deputy speaker of the Duma, or lower house of parliament. Few, however, believe the affair will cause more than a ripple of protest inside Russia or beyond.

The move against TV-6 confirmed a pattern that has been taking shape since Putin assumed office just under two years ago. Engaging and even ingratiating overseas, he can be implacable at home, determined to build a political system where you question or embarrass the state at your peril. NTV learned this to its cost last year, and TV-6 became a prime target when it adopted the same stridently critical approach to Kremlin policies. Since Putin endorsed the war against terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks, the West has been mostly silent about Putin's continued crackdown on the media and in Chechnya.

The closure of TV-6 comes just under a year after NTV was taken over by Gazprom, the state-controlled energy monopoly. Its management was gutted, and most of its news staff jumped over to TV-6. Then the country's best news radio station, Ekho Moskvy, staved off a hostile takeover by Gazprom, largely thanks to popular support. But unruly journalists are not the only ones who run afoul of the law. On Christmas Day, after several unsuccessful attempts, the state was finally able to convict Navy captain and military journalist Grigory Pasko on treason charges. Pasko had leaked information to the press about nuclear-waste dumping in the Russian far east. Putin denied any involvement in the case: it was, he said, a "purely juridical affair" and invited Pasko to request a pardon. This was easier said than done, as a few days after the Pasko verdict the President abolished his pardons commission, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev and composed of unreconstructed civil libertarians hopelessly out of touch with the Putin era.

Perhaps the most striking example of how little has changed is Chechnya, where large-scale military operations were once again reported last week. In the past two months the tempo of military operations there has increased sharply, despite official declarations that the anti-insurgency war is all but won. Ironically, most of the sweeps have been directed against some of Chechnya's largest towns and settlements — places Moscow declared free of guerrillas several years ago. The few human-rights observers who have dared visit, mostly from another Gorbachev-era group, Memorial, report a tragic litany of murder, brutality and looting by the military. The Kremlin denies this. There are few independent reports: covering the war has become too dangerous for Russian journalists, and foreign reporters are not allowed to move around the war zone on their own.

TV-6 was far from highbrow. Its news programming was generally acknowledged to be the best on Russian TV, but it boosted ratings dramatically with its reality TV show Za Steklom (Behind the Glass), which sailed close to pornography as it followed the adventures of a group of attractive young people sharing an apartment — and backrubs and showers. This irritated the Orthodox Church, but the Kremlin was more angered by TV-6's majority owner, Boris Berezovsky, a business baron during the Yeltsin era, an early Putin booster and now the President's exiled enemy. The animosity between Putin and Berezovsky is well-known and gave the station's criticism of Putin policies a harder edge. When they left NTV last year, the journalists were ready to fight. Now they sound tired.

Yevgeny Kiselev, the station's director general, says staffers will bid for a new broadcasting license, though he doubts they will obtain it. But "even if we get back on the air, Putin will come after us in six months or so," said a reporter, who now talks of leaving journalism altogether. If he and his colleagues do give up the fight, Russian TV will be a poorer place. But perhaps then Putin will have to turn his attention to the sort of questions that cannot be solved by bailiffs or judges — poverty, corruption, the economy.