Forget glasnost and perestroika. Russia's harsh
crackdown on the media is an unhappy echo of the Iron Curtain era.
By Sherry Ricchiardi From AJR, May 2001
POLICE AND SHARPSHOOTERS crouched
on rooftops, their high-powered rifles aimed at a building that harbored
"enemies of the state." Inside, a group of journalists huddled behind
locked doors, mustering courage for a final stand to save the lone
independent radio station in a remote, oil-rich region of Russia.
Earlier that week, Radio Titan's water
supply, phones, electricity and transmitter had been switched off at the
command of its tormentors. When orders to vacate the premises were issued,
Altaf Galeyev, the station's founder, owner and president, and five
veteran staffers refused to abandon their posts.
Instead, they turned to cellular
telephones and loudspeakers mounted on top of their rented offices to
continue reporting on "the government's heinous activities." For nine days
they ate and slept in the newsroom, issuing appeals for listeners to help
rescue the station. At one point, 100
supporters responded to Radio Titan's SOS, keeping 'round-the-clock vigils
and forming a human chain around a broadcast outlet that brought the Voice
of America and Radio Liberty into their homes in the mountainous Russian
heartland. In the eerie still of his
office, Galeyev fingered a handgun that he kept locked in a safe,
protection against death threats that had become as routine as delivering
news reports of government corruption.
At dusk, a cadre of 50 local police,
militia and agents of the FSB (formerly known as the KGB) stormed the
station, clubbing and arresting protesters, and herding Galeyev and his
staff to jail. The silencing of Radio Titan signaled a death knell for
independent media in Bashkortostan, a province where brutish oil barons
rule with an iron hand. The attack occurred on May 27, 1998.
To Kremlin watchers, there was a larger
and more foreboding message. Despite democratic reforms being the official
dictum since the demise of the Soviet empire, independent journalism has
remained high on the hit list, with media institutions being battered on
three fronts. Regardless of where the attacks originate, this muzzling of
dissenting voices has led to grim forecasts.
Some Russia experts predict that freedom
of information could face extinction under President Vladimir Putin, a
former KGB official who is said to prize loyalty above all else. They
point to an escalation in the use of "legal" weapons, such as tax police,
to silence a dissident press; to changes in media doctrines that give the
Kremlin stricter control; and to a sinister tolerance for the maiming or
killing of media professionals. However, not all intimidation emanates
from Putin's quarters. In Russia, an
investigative series on money laundering might draw fire from federal or
local political powerbrokers, from Russian Mafia crime lords or members of
the ruling elite, called oligarchs, who control vast fortunes built on
"bandit capitalism." Outspoken entities like Radio Titan are forced to
skirt the lethal triangle if they have any chance of surviving. Over the
past three years, the situation has worsened.
"No matter how terrible it was for us
[in May 1998], it is much worse for the media in Russia today," says
Titan's founder, Galeyev, 46, who lives in self-imposed exile in Georgia
in the United States. "There are too many powerful enemies."
Emma Gray investigates attacks on press
freedom in Europe and Central Asia for the New York-based Committee to
Protect Journalists. She agrees that conditions are deteriorating. Members
of the independent press "are being harassed and persecuted far more than
any time since the Soviet era. There's a whole barrage of weaponry being
used to silence critical voices," says Gray, who has worked in Moscow for
Christian Science Monitor TV and Britain's ITN. Media haters, she says,
are bringing the hammer down in more ominous ways.
DURING THE COMMUNIST ERA, it
was no secret that the KGB bugged phones, tailed reporters and imprisoned
some they deemed "a danger to the state." Today, news accounts describe
how units of commandos in black ski masks and camouflage burst into
newsrooms, brandishing automatic weapons. The "tax police" have the power
to confiscate equipment, rifle through documents and make arrests.
Tax-enforcement invasions and heavy-handed audits have become common
punishment for media that criticize government policy.
Computer espionage is the tool du jour
as professional hackers break into newsroom systems to spy on story
content, delete "offensive" sections of the newspaper or transmit viruses
designed to wipe out hard drives. Reminiscent of George Orwell's Big
Brother, the state has created seven law-enforcement bodies to monitor
e-mail and Internet use. Service providers are required to link their
computers to the FSB, providing 'round-the-clock surveillance potential.
Selective criminal prosecution and libel
suits, aimed at draining media coffers through heavy fines and exorbitant
lawyers' fees, are used regularly to silence critics. "Troublesome"
publications might draw bogus inspections by fire or sanitary departments
as an excuse to shut them down. In the
most hideous form, attacks against journalists are carried out by hit men,
who maim or assassinate those who expose "corporate banditry" or penetrate
the fiefdoms of crime lords and autocrats. Some of the worst horrors have
been recorded in the hinterlands, in places like Vladivostok, Smolensk and
Ufa, the home of Radio Titan. There is
another disturbing sign. Human-rights activists warn that "spy-mania" once
again may be taking hold in Russia. In a story for London's Guardian in
February, correspondent Ian Traynor described a "series of alarming
signals suggesting that the secret police are clawing back power and
influence after a decade of disgrace and demoralization." The hunt is on,
wrote Traynor, for enemies of the state. Recent developments bear him out.
In July, a Moscow newspaper reported
that Putin's Security Council was considering "planting loyal people" in
top administrative positions at influential publications. A 46-page
"information security doctrine," adopted in June, has been widely
interpreted as a tool for a Kremlin crackdown. In 1999, Mikhail Lesin,
director of a newly created Ministry for the Press, Radio and Television
Broadcasting, announced to reporters, "We [federal officials] have to
protect the state from the media." Lesin has continued to demonize the
press and was declared "enemy No. 1" in a survey of Russian journalists
last year. In January, Putin signed a
new law transferring control of government subsidies for regional
newspapers from local politicians to the press ministry in Moscow. A CPJ
report noted that the law affects 2000 subsidized newspapers across Russia
and will facilitate further central government control. This is
particularly true in the provinces, where papers and broadcast stations
are often dependent on local administrators for everything from floor
space to computers, according to CPJ.
These telltale signs have led some to
predict a return to the tyranny of a police state. Robert Coalson, a
program director of Russia's National Press Institute, told Radio Free
Europe that he sees the silencing of critical voices as a push to "bring
the whole country‹including the media‹under greater central control." What
he is witnessing, Coalson says, "seemed very much a return to a Soviet
model." In stronger language, Yelena
Bonner, widow of Nobel Prize-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, warned
that "under Putin, we see a new stage in the introduction of modernized
Stalinism." She cited control of the press by the state and by corrupt
powerbrokers as evidence in an open letter to the media a year ago.
At a March conference in St. Petersburg
sponsored by the Freedom Forum, speakers noted that Russian authorities
have begun to equate independent journalism with espionage. Andrei
Richter, director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Center, described an
"enemy within" atmosphere taking hold in Russia.
CPJ's Gray describes the escalation in
violence she has seen against journalists as "absolutely frightening. It
is an extremely serious situation," she says, reeling off examples from
Moscow to the Caspian Sea. A few of
these incidents, especially those directly involving Putin, have grabbed
international headlines. But most of the heroic journalism is being
carried out in relative obscurity in poorly equipped newsrooms with little
or no safety net.
MOST VISIBLE ARE NTV, until
recently Russia's only independent national television network, and its
flamboyant founder, Moscow tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. Gusinsky has been
charged with fraud, including failure to make good on millions of dollars
of loans from Gazprom, a state-owned gas company. For months, critics have
warned that if NTV, labeled the "crown jewel" of Gusinsky's vast
Media-Most empire, is taken over by Gazprom, it would give the politicos
in the Kremlin de facto control over editorial content and strike a lethal
blow to press freedom. In April,
front-page headlines told the grim story: Kremlin moves in on independent
TV. Gazprom officials took over the network, installing their own
management team despite protests from the station's leading journalists
and some 20,000 supporters who had gathered in Moscow earlier in the week.
The takeover came after a year of financial and legal struggle over the
ownership of the Western-style NTV founded by Gusinsky seven years ago.
At times, the government's harassment
was staggering. Tax police conducted 28 raids on NTV last year, some of
them carried out by black-masked commandos brandishing automatic weapons.
During that same period, the network was receiving praise in the West. A
story by Agence France Presse called the network "one of the most
independent and authoritative news sources in Russia."
"Its reports have focused on corruption
in Russia's security services, have been more critical in its reports of
the 10-month campaign in Chechnya, and are believed to have irritated
President Vladimir Putin through NTV's satirical programs," AFP reporter
Francoise Dehove wrote last July. After
the takeover, the international media spotlight continued to follow the
plight of NTV's journalists. Across town
in Moscow, another media power struggle is playing out.
Less heralded than their NTV comrades is
a cadre of chain-smoking reporters in rumpled suits who pound out exposés
in the cramped offices of Novaya Gazeta, a biweekly, Moscow-based
newspaper with shallow coffers and a recently bloodied past. Last summer,
a giant portrait of a fallen colleague, ringed in black and decorated with
red carnations, hung outside the newsroom, underscoring the danger.
In what some argue may have been a case
of mistaken identity, special-projects editor Igor Domnikov, 42, died on
July 16, weeks after being beaten by a hammer-wielding assailant. The
paper's editors speculate that the killer really was after reporter Oleg
Sultanov, who had received numerous death threats for his crusading
stories. The two lived in the same apartment building and bore a
resemblance to each other. Since then,
Sultanov has filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General's office
charging LUKOIL, Russia's largest oil company and the target of his
hard-hitting investigations, with making threats against him. Sultanov
believes his phone is tapped and that he is under constant surveillance.
A few months after Domnikov's death,
another investigative reporter, Oleg Lurye, 37, was jumped by four men as
he returned home in the middle of the night. He was beaten and his face
slashed with a razor. Earlier that day, Lurye had appeared on NTV to
discuss his investigations of high-ranking Kremlin officials.
"The whole system is corrupt; everything
can be bought and sold. We have no clean bureaucrats. That means every
journalist who is writing the truth about Russia is at risk, and the
corruption we had under [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin has
simply continued under Putin," Lurye told AJR through a translator.
Novaya Gazeta stands as a beacon in a
country where it is estimated that 80 percent of the newspapers are under
state control, with many of the remaining 20 percent devoted to
specialties, such as sports. About 90 percent of all TV and radio
transmitters are under the thumb of the government, as are most printing
houses. There is reason for guarded
optimism. Novaya Gazeta's circulation has risen to around 1.6 million
nationwide. A staff of 100 covers Moscow; another 100 journalists work in
outlying regions. The feisty publication, printed in 15 locations
throughout the federation, has drawn the attention of the Freedom Forum,
CPJ and other high-profile media advocates.
There also are harsh realities. Since
the paper, which is largely employee owned, opened in 1993, libel suits
and other charges have resulted in 40 trials and exorbitant legal fees.
There have been seven major tax inspections in 24 months. Once, hackers
broke into the computer system and destroyed an edition detailing the
sources of Putin's and Yeltsin's campaign financing. At times, advertisers
have been intimidated into withdrawing support.
Last year, editors received a written
warning from the Ministry of Press and Information after publishing an
interview with Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov. In Russia, two such
hand-slappings and a newspaper can be shut down. Editor in Chief Dmitry
Muravov says the attacks do not surprise him, given the provocative topics
his reporters cover. In a profile of
Novaya Gazeta earlier this year, Kathy Lally of the Baltimore Sun told how
reporter Anna Politkovskaya was documenting the mistreatment and misery of
Chechen refugees when other reporters considered it too dangerous; how
Vyacheslav Izmailov had managed to free numerous hostages from Chechnya
through his coverage; how the paper was first to report that the Yeltsin
administration had given the Russian Orthodox Church the right to sell
alcohol and tobacco without paying taxes.
Why do journalists continue under such
dire circumstances? "Why do people continue to breathe?" Muravov responds.
"That is the reason that we continue this work. This is our profession;
this is what we must do." The danger may
be greater in the provinces and ethnic regions, where persecution of
critical voices tends to draw little attention from public, police or
international media. There were few accounts, for instance, of the
gangland-style murder of Sergei Novikov, 36, the director of the only
independent radio station in Smolensk. Novikov had been digging into
alleged corruption of state officials and had aired some of his findings
on NTV just before a gunman pumped four bullets into his body on July 26.
A day later, in Vladivostok, Irina
Grebneva, editor of the weekly Arsenyevskiye Vesti, was arrested and held
for five days in one of the region's seediest prisons. Denied visits from
her lawyer, the veteran reporter refused to eat or drink until she was
released. Her colleagues believed the arrest was retaliation for
publishing telephone transcripts that linked top officials in Russia's Far
East to vote rigging. Over the past eight years, Arsenyevskiye Vesti has
been sued about 30 times and repeatedly denied access to state printing
services. There was little notice, too,
when Iskandr Khatloni, a journalist who worked for the Tajik service of
Radio Liberty, was killed by blows from an ax in Moscow last September.
Radio Liberty noted that Khatloni had been transmitting stories about the
Russian military's human-rights abuses in Chechnya when he was murdered.
It is not surprising that these attacks
would spark more outrage from international media watchdogs than from
Russia's state-subsidized press. Editors at these hometown newspapers and
broadcast outlets could argue, with some validity, that Russian audiences
have little interest in the plight of dissenting journalists, making
coverage a low priority. Until recently.
In early April, a crowd of protesters,
estimated at about 20,000 by police, demonstrated in Pushkin Square to
support freedom of the press and NTV. News reports call it the "largest
public display of support for democratic liberties [in Russia] in the
post-Communist era." Before the Moscow rally, little had been heard from a
public accustomed to having their freedom trampled on.
SOME RESEARCHERS TURN TO the
history of the former U.S.S.R. for insight into why there has been so
little public outcry over the bullying of independent media, especially in
the afterglow of glasnost and perestroika. Yuri Vdovin, vice president of
Citizen Watch, a human-rights organization in St. Petersburg, points out
that there has been no tradition of a free press in Russia.
Rather, "Citizens, the politicians and
some journalists themselves still regard and accept reporting as a
propaganda tool for the state. It is a mysterious phenomenon, but the
majority of people do seem to respect the present authorities," says
Vdovin, who has chaired commissions on media freedom. "They do not
understand the role of free expression here."
That, he believes, could explain why
average citizens tend to be suspicious, hostile or indifferent to the
plight of a fledgling Fourth Estate. A
report by the Moscow-based Glasnost Defense Foundation speculates that
since the democracy movement was born in the process of perestroika and
based on models borrowed from the West after the fall of the Iron Curtain,
Russia's freedoms have never been recognized by the public as necessary
conditions for pro-democracy reform.
Russia was defined in the report as a
country where the historical and political environment never has been
conducive to the development of an unfettered information system.
In a piece titled "Managing the
Messenger," Robert Coalson explored another explanation for public apathy.
Putin's drive to centralize control of political life and the media has
met with little opposition because the Russian people "are largely fed up
with the irresponsibility and corruption that permeated Yeltsin-era
Russia. Neither oligarchs nor local autocrats are very popular, so there
is little public resistance to having Putin take them down a notch."
Coalson cited surveys that show Russians
trusting state-controlled newspapers more than private. A national poll
taken right after the Kursk disaster found that 38 percent of Russians
believe "increased state control of media would be good for Russia."
Another 25 percent said such control would not matter either way.
During interviews in Russia last
September, local journalists often pointed to two high-profile news
events--the sinking in August of the nuclear submarine Kursk with the loss
of all 118 men on board (see "Smoke Screen") and
the information blockade of the bloody Chechen conflict--as symbols of the
government's ongoing closed-door secrecy and public tolerance of it.
The disinformation and stall-tactics
surrounding the Kursk drew ire from relatives who demanded to know the
fate of those trapped on board, and there was some public outrage over the
government's mishandling of the situation. But the majority of Russians,
contends Vdovin, merely threw up their hands and said, "We are being lied
to. So what?" To them, he adds, it was not that unusual, and they saw
little they could do about it.
ANNA SHAROGRADSKAYA OF RUSSIA'S
National Press Institute praises native journalists for their frontline
coverage of the first Chechen war from 1994 to '96. The press has been
widely credited with turning public opinion against the conflict through
gripping accounts of the destruction, death and human misery.
Today, that kind of eyewitness reporting
would be impossible. "They [journalists] would be killed, arrested or just
disappear, usually not at the hands of the Chechens, but of the Russian
military," contends Sharogradskaya. When the second round of fighting
ignited in the fall of 1999, the government labeled it an "anti-terrorist
action" and provided limited access almost exclusively to state-controlled
media. All independent travel in Chechnya was banned.
"Now the information we get [about
Chechnya] is filtered and untrustworthy. Journalists are being
manipulated," says Sharogradskaya. The strict control has had one obvious
effect--opinion polls show solid support for the second conflict.
Without official credentials or military
help, many independent voices have been scared off, especially after 21
media professionals were held for ransom by Chechens in 1997. For Kremlin
propagandists, it was fodder for exploiting fears and keeping journalists
from recording what some human-rights workers have labeled the Russian
military's "reign of terror." Andrei
Babitsky was among those who would not be intimidated. The correspondent
for Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. government, slipped behind
front lines for highly detailed accounts of the carnage. He also filed
reports on military setbacks for Russian troops. In January 2000, as he
left the Chechen capital of Grozny, he was arrested, beaten and held in
prison for six weeks incommunicado, fueling rumors that he had been
murdered. Putin branded the
correspondent "unpatriotic" for reporting from the rebel side and told
reporters, "What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than shooting a gun."
The high pitch of international protest has been credited with speeding
his release. Chechnya still remains forbidden territory.
Radio Liberty was a key factor for
another Russian journalist who risked his life for press freedom.
Decades earlier, with the Iron Curtain
locked in place, an 11-year-old boy was stirred by broadcasts from Voice
of America, the BBC and Radio Liberty delivered by Cold War "enemies" to
his home in the southern Ural mountains. The democratic values he embraced
secretly as a child would lead Altaf Galeyev to face off with gun-toting
thugs in Bashkortostan, a region of Russia rated by the Glasnost Defense
Foundation as one of the harshest climates for independent media.
"My love for freedom was formed by the
programs of these Western radio stations," Galeyev said in a recent
interview. That passion led him in 1991 to start Radio Titan, a station
that for seven years was under fire from local strongmen who controlled a
fiefdom in the oil-rich region.
Mouthpieces for the state labeled Radio
Titan's staff "psychologically unfit" and accused them of crimes, like
drug trafficking and "organizing mass disorder." Once, a fake video was
aired on state TV of police finding packets of white powder in the
station's offices. When Titan broadcast public opinion about the Chechen
war in 1994, its transmitter, located in a state radio center, was
switched off for three-and-a-half months. Another time, phones went dead
because, according to authorities, underground cables had been
"accidentally" cut. After the May 1998
assault, Galeyev, who had been accused of being a CIA collaborator, spent
11 months in prison, sharing cellblocks with murderers and facing threats
of commitment to an asylum. Once, he said, guards raped an inmate in front
of him, promising that if he did not renounce his beliefs, he would suffer
the same. Galeyev credits outcries from
the Glasnost Defense Foundation, CPJ and other high-profile media
advocates with securing his release while he was awaiting trial. Without
the international spotlight, "I would have died in prison," he says. After
being freed, he planned a daring escape from Russia to avoid facing a
court system he didn't trust. Problems
for him and his loved ones continue. After the VOA broadcast an interview
with him in the U.S., security agents in Ufa pounded on his mother's
apartment door at 2 a.m. and demanded to search the premises. The next day
they ransacked the apartment of his 18-year-old son, who reports to his
father that he is regularly harassed by the police. "By terrorizing them,
it's a sign for me to stop speaking out," Galeyev says.
He agonizes over how to get his son to
this country and worries that he will never again work as a journalist.
Given the chance, would he reopen Radio Titan?
"Yes, and once more yes," he gushes in
halting English. "All my life I have been against a system that suppresses
and humiliates people. Radio Titan did all it could to promote democratic
values in that region." Then Galeyev
pauses. There is a deep sigh and a recognition of the jolting reality. His
name remains on a wanted list. He is a fugitive in his homeland with
little hope of return.
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