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

At noon on January 29 the NTV journalists gathered at Red Square. They were ushered into the Kremlin through the gates of the Spasskaya Tower and directed to the Kremlin Senate building, an ornate, neoclassical structure with a dome visible from Red Square. Since the Bolshevik Revolution this stood as the very symbol of the state and the seat of power for Soviet leaders: Lenin lived here, and Stalin had kept a small apartment in the building. The journalists were escorted to the presidential library on the third floor. The round hall housing the library had recently been renovated: the expensive wooden shelves held beautiful volumes, but all of them were stored behind glass, mostly brand-new encyclopedias, books on Russian history, or gifts from foreign leaders.

Suddenly Sorokina was called to a private meeting with Putin while others waited at the library. Putin spoke to Sorokina for forty minutes. Only after that did Putin proceed to the library, accompanied by Vladislav Surkov, a backroom political strategist, and Alexey Gromov, an official from the presidential administration.

Putin walked around the group of journalists, shaking hands.

Viktor Shenderovich, a famous television presenter and political satirist, was in a gloomy mood. “I didn’t like the idea of asking the president for help, as if we were his slaves. I didn’t believe it would end well,” he recalled. He already knew that the Kremlin had quietly hand-carried a proposal to NTV with three demands: stop an anticorruption investigation of Yeltsin’s family, stop criticism of the Chechen war, and remove the puppet portraying Putin on Shenderovich’s satirical television show known as Kukly , or puppets. The show had been poking fun at Russian politicians for five years by creating skits with puppet characters. It was wildly popular and had skewered Yeltsin and other politicians, but Putin disliked being mocked. Shenderovich had recently portrayed Putin as a character from German author E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Klein Zaches —an ugly dwarf who got magic powers over people. [2] Shenderovich, interview with authors, December 2014. See also Victor Shenderovich, Zdes bylo NTV [ Here Was NTV ] (Moscow: Zakharov, 2004).

Shenderovich decided to speak first. He thought that, as a satirist, he had more freedom to speak out about uncomfortable truths. He asked whether Putin was ready to talk honestly, or would they talk on PR terms. “What PR?” asked Putin, “I don’t understand a thing about it!” And his blue eyes zeroed in on Shenderovich. Then Shenderovich asked Putin to make a call to the general prosecutor and ask why Titov, the NTV financial director, was still in prison. Putin said that as president he couldn’t interfere with the general prosecutor’s activities.

The meeting was a disaster. At the very beginning Sorokina wrote two words on a sheet of paper and handed it over to Shenderovich: “All useless.” But Shenderovich kept trying, as did his colleagues. To every question the journalists posed, Putin answered with bland formalities. He said he could not talk to the general prosecutor because the office was an independent institution in Russia. He claimed he did not appoint the general prosecutor because it was the right of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of parliament; the president could only propose. And so it went on. But the journalists knew that Putin’s answers were a far stretch from the truth. “What should one do when faced with a bald-faced lie over and over again?” Shenderovich said. “The most silent protest is to get up and leave. Maybe we should have done that, but nobody dared. He was a president, after all. And we had been sitting there for three and a half hours.” Yevgeny Kiselev believed that Putin wanted to recruit them, promising a bright future if they stopped criticizing the Kremlin. “When he understood we were not ready for this, he became hostile and turned to threats. He told me: ‘And you, Mr. Kiselev, we know everything about your hour-long phone conversations with Gusinsky.’” Kiselev asked, “Does it mean you are listening to my conversations?” Putin pretended that he didn’t hear the question.

For the next three months NTV was left twisting slowly in the wind. Then on the night of April 14 journalists were thrown out of the NTV offices located on the eighth floor of the Ostankino television building. The old NTV was over. Two days later the newspaper Segodnya was shut down, and the seventy-four people staffing Parkhomenko’s Itogi newsweekly were ejected from their offices. The largest media empire independent of the Kremlin was brought to heel.

The journalists of Media-Most fought desperately, and they fought almost alone. Others in Russia’s journalistic community did not support them. We then worked at Izvestia , and although Irina was able to write critical stories about the government pressure on Media-Most, the newspaper office was filled with a mood of indifference if not quiet pleasure at the downfall of the Media-Most empire. The NTV journalists were regarded as very professional in news, but they were also seen as arrogant. They were well paid in a field where others were not. Many Russian journalists also rejected the argument offered by NTV that the Kremlin attack was aimed at silencing the only independent television channel in the country; they thought Gusinsky had just made a bid for power and lost. They did not see the attack on Gusinsky as an attack on them or press freedom generally.

What was missing from this picture was the fact that the public began to slowly turn against journalists. During the kompromat battles of the late 1990s and the television wars between the channels, the very idea of investigative journalism was seriously compromised. A number of famous reporters who made their reputation in the early 1990s turned out to be fairly corrupt, ready to publish all kinds of stories if paid properly. [3] Oleg Lurie was a good example of such journalism. He became famous in 1999 by exposing corruption in the Kremlin’s renovations. In the early 2000s his “investigations” were published by Versiya and Novaya Gazeta , and he liked to drive a shining new BMW 7. In 2008 he was convicted and imprisoned for extortion; he had requested $50,000 from a senator in exchange for removing kompromat about him from the Internet. He was released in 2011 and immediately launched the journal Jins (slang, a paid journalistic story). The profession of journalism was thrown off the pedestal it had occupied since the perestroika years in the late 1980s. Perhaps even more salient was that to many people in Russian society, journalists and the free press symbolized the liberal values that flooded in after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A large segment of society still felt embittered and betrayed by the West, especially since the Russian economic crisis of 1998, when it seemed that markets and democracy, ideas imported from the West, had produced nothing but chaos. The very ideas of journalism and the free press suffered a loss of credibility.

Journalists in traditional media were losing not just the trust of the public but also their jobs. Over seven years the authors held positions at five publications: the political department at Izvestia was dispersed, the editor of Versiya weekly was fired, Moskovskie Novosti was closed down along with two subsequent attempts of the Moskovskie Novosti team to launch a political magazine, and a political website came to nothing. We then joined Novaya Gazeta , but after two years it let us go when the management decided to reduce its coverage of the secret services. In the early and mid-2000s Moscow’s newspapers and magazines often changed hands, most of them ending up at the hands of oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin, which helped Putin dampen any hostile reporting. This trend went almost unnoticed by the public. On October 6, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, the most famous independent investigative journalist in Russia, was killed by hired assassins in the center of Moscow. More people went to the streets to honor her in Paris than in Moscow. Those who ordered this crime were never found.