Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

On Sunday night, May 30, 1999, Yeltsin was stunned as he watched TV in his mansion in Barvikha, a village filled with walled-off mansions of top-level Russian officials, thirteen miles from the Kremlin in the lush green forests outside of Moscow. The influential journalist Yevgeny Kiselev displayed a chart of the president’s family, suggesting they had engaged in corruption and had spirited their illicit gains abroad. This appeared on NTV’s widely respected show Itogi , then the most popular political broadcast in Russia.

Kiselev, then forty-two, the most prominent and respectable political host on television, specifically raised questions about the integrity of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana; her husband, Valentin Yumashev, both of whom worked in the presidential administration; as well as Alexander Voloshin, the chief of the administration; and billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich. “The photographs on TV reminded me of wanted posters I used to see at factories, bus stations, or moving theatres in Sverdlovsk,” Yeltsin later wrote. “The posters usually depicted the faces of drunks, thieves, murderers and rapists. Now the ‘police,’ in the person of NTV, was talking about my so-called Family—myself, Tanya, Voloshin, and Yumashev. All of these people were accused of everything under the sun—bribery, corruption, the hoarding of wealth in Swiss bank accounts, and the purchase of villas and castles in Italy and France. The NTV show put me in a state of shock.” [2] Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 289–298.

Every night the power struggle played out on television. The wealthy oligarch and wheeler-dealer Boris Berezovsky, who was close to Yeltsin’s team, controlled the first channel, ORT, with a massive audience across Russia’s eleven time zones, a legacy of Soviet state television. A second force was Gusinsky’s NTV, a channel that earned its reputation for professionalism in the first Chechen war. Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor, also had his own television channel, popular only in the capital. All of them—Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and Luzhkov—had supported Yeltsin in the 1996 reelection effort, but now, in the twilight of Yeltsin’s second term, they were jockeying for power, anticipating the moment when Yeltsin would leave the scene.

While Yeltsin endured the criticism from Luzhkov’s media outlets, he was stunned at the NTV broadside, which he called “a stab in the back from people I had thought were of my mind.” Gusinsky’s media empire, called Media-Most, consisting of NTV, the newspaper Segodnya , and the weekly Itogi , had placed their bets on Luzhkov and Primakov in the great power struggle. Like the other oligarchs, Gusinsky wielded power through his media holdings. Investigations of corruption targeting the Kremlin were exposed by NTV, then commented on in Segodnya , and then picked up by other printed media.

For the Yeltsin circle it was a very serious and direct personal threat. Following Kiselev’s program, Voloshin summoned journalists in the Kremlin pool to a meeting and told them, rather melodramatically, of Gusinsky’s Media-Most. “Either we break Most,” he said, “or Most breaks the state.” Elena Tregubova, a correspondent of Kommersant , present at the meeting, was certain that Voloshin meant the Kremlin when he was speaking of the “state.” [3] Elena Tregubova, Baiki kremlevskogo diggera [Tales of a Kremlin Digger] (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 197. And the Kremlin decided to retaliate. In July the state-owned Vnesheconombank refused to extend a previously agreed-upon loan to Gusinsky’s Media-Most, then announced that Media-Most had failed to repay the loan. [4] On the loan, the bank refused to accept the domestic currency bonds, known as OVVZs. OVVZ bonds were issued by Vnesheconombank, so the bank in fact refused to accept its own securities. Andrei Zolotov Jr., “Media Say Aides Keep Yeltsin in Dark,” Moscow Times , July 29, 1999, www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/1999/7/article/media-say-aides-keep-yeltsin-in-dark/274376.html . Later Media-Most’s accounts at the bank were seized, journalists who worked in Media-Most outlets were denied access to the Kremlin, and their accreditations for briefings by Voloshin were annulled. [5] Tregubova, Baiki kremlevskogo diggera , 196–197. Sergei Parkhomenko, the journalist who had earlier exposed reasons to fear the security services in “Merlin’s Tower” articles, recalled that one day his chief political correspondent, Dmitry Pinsker, came to him with bad news. “The Kremlin decided to end my access to information,” he said. “My sources refuse to talk to me and be quoted, so please understand why in my stories there will be more anonymous sources and commentators.” Parkhomenko added, “It happened not only with information from the Kremlin. When the war in Chechnya started in September, our correspondents were not given access to the military nor provided help in getting to the troops. It was a well-defined strategy.” [6] Sergei Parkhomenko, interview with authors, November 2014. In the view of the Kremlin the journalists working for Gusinsky’s media were the enemy’s soldiers.

Yeltsin and his entourage desperately looked for someone to whom they could entrust their fate after his presidency ended. On August 9 Yeltsin named Putin, then forty-six years old and a protégé of Berezovsky, as the new prime minister. Yeltsin also made clear that he considered Putin his successor. Putin then appeared on television after the appointment and declared, “The main problem—I repeat, I have already spoken about this—what we have is the lack of political stability.” It was a remark aimed directly at preserving the status quo. [7] NTV, “Geroi Dnya” [Hero of the Day], interview with Vladimir Putin, August 9, 1999, http://tvoygolos.forum-tvs.ru/elita/elitatext/1999.08.09.htm .

In 1999 Putin was not a public figure accustomed to journalists and the free exchange of information. In the perestroika years Putin had been stationed in Germany as a KGB officer, and he missed everything that happened, including Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost —or openness—when newspapers were competing to expose Stalinist crimes; Soviet apparatchiks argued with dissidents like Andrei Sakharov at Congress of People’s Deputies, broadcast in real-time on television; and the pages of democratic Moskovskie Novosti were read aloud by Muscovites on Pushkin Square. Putin had little idea of how the West functioned from his posting in East Germany, which was under total control of the secret services. He missed even the fall of the Berlin Wall, because he was serving in Dresden, 125 miles south of Berlin.

Upon his return to St. Petersburg in 1990, Putin was hesitant. He later said he didn’t want to remain with the KGB and refused a transfer to the central headquarters in Moscow. “I understood this system had no future,” he recalled. [8] Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 83. But he was afraid to leave it entirely, so he chose instead a “safe” option, asking to be attached to Leningrad University, as a KGB officer, to get a doctorate, which he later abandoned. The following year Putin went to work for Anatoly Sobchak, a prominent democrat who led the Leningrad City Council and became the first post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg, the city’s imperial name, restored after the Soviet collapse. But Putin formally retired from the KGB on August 20, 1991, when it was crystal clear the coup had failed in Moscow.

In the 1990s Putin hewed to the methods he had been taught at the KGB, especially when he dealt with journalists. He sought to flatter and recruit.