Russia's Liberal Media

Handcuffed but Free

Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315300177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines the challenges and pressures liberal journalists face in Putin's Russia. It presents the findings of an in-depth qualitative study, which included ethnographic observations of editorial meetings during the conflict in Ukraine. It also provides a theoretical framework for evaluating the Russian media system and a historical overview of the development of liberal media in the country. The book focuses on some of Russia's most influential liberal national news outlets: "the deadliest" newspaper Novaya Gazeta, "Russia's last independent radio station" Radio Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy ) and US Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The fieldwork included ethnographic observations of editorial meetings, long interviews with editors and journalists as well as documentary analysis. The monograph makes theoretical contributions to three main areas: 1. Media systems and terms of reference. 2. Journalism: cultures, role conceptions, and relationship with power, culture and society. 3. Mediatisation of conflict and nationhood.

1 The Mass Media in Putin’s Russia

“Shame” and “pride”: these are the two words that Russian journalist and vice president of the European Federation of Journalists Nadezhda Azhgikhina (2007, p. 1249) used to describe the post-perestroika history of Russian journalism. Azhgikhina (2007) claimed that this recent history was “so accelerated and contradictory that it is hard to believe it all happened in such a short space of time” (p. 1249). She summarised the key trends in one sentence:

It is widely thought that freedom of speech was the first and perhaps the only real achievement of perestroika, and that it was only later, during the chaos of the “wild market”, that that freedom was shaken, and then lost.

(Azhgikhina, 2007, p. 1249)

She also argued that the history of the Russian press was a 300-year history of censorship. Is this indeed the case? What are the key trends in the development of Russian media after the demise of communism?

Chapter 1 tackles this question. It provides a historical account of the development of the mass media in post-Soviet Russia. It is split into three main sections: (1) Mass Media Development after Communism and Before Putin, (2) Mass Media in Putin’s Russia, and (3) Russia’s Liberal Media. The first section briefly presents the key trends in the development of free media immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, including the legacy of “perestroika” and Yeltsin’s role. Then, in the second section, the key changes and challenges after President Vladimir Putin came to power are outlined. A distinction is drawn between his first and then his second and third terms as president. Most commentators acknowledge that the grip on Russian media has significantly tightened after Putin’s second term as president commenced. Finally, in the third part, the development of liberal media is investigated through a focus on a few common challenges such as propaganda, financial issues, threats and harassment, legal restrictions, and self-censorship.

Mass Media Development after Communism and before Putin

Sheftelevich (2009) claimed that since 1986 the media in Russia had been in a state of transition from “an ‘administrative bureaucratic’ model toward the market and democratization model” (p. 89). Arutunyan (2009) identified four main stages/models in the development of Russian media in that period. The first stage was the perestroika period of 1986–1990. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika and glasnost resulted in the profound transformation of most, if not all, countries on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. The majority of Russian journalists embraced these new freedoms wholeheartedly (Brenton, 2011), and in many respects, these initial few years were a golden era for Russian journalism. The media in that period were generally free from government and corporate control, and they transformed from an instrument of the propaganda machine into “an instrument of democratization” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 32). Arutunyan (2009) argued that

the exuberant press culture that exploded in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as journalists rushed to unmask the atrocities of the Soviet regime, created an illusion of freedom and independence. But whether or not the press was ever free in Russia, it was hardly ever truly independent.

(p. 29)

In any case, as Becker (2004) argued, President Boris Yeltsin was clearly a supporter of press freedom.

Censorship was officially abolished in Russia when the Mass Media Law was passed in 1991, just two days after the official break-up of the Soviet Union. One “crucial provision” in this new act was that it allowed the establishment of private media (Vartanova, 2012, p. 123). Yeltsin signed the swiftly drafted bill, which was later criticised because despite embodying the essential principles of democracy, the statute’s practical provisions for the implementation of these principles were not that well thought out (Sheftelevich, 2009). The law “established freedom of the press and the right of journalists to refuse to write against their own principles and values” (Azhgikhina, 2007, p. 1255). Freedom of speech was also enshrined in Article 29 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which was adopted in December 1993. Two main challenges hindered the democratisation process of Russian media in practice: the lack of sustainable new business models that did not include state involvement, and the lack of practical legal provisions that would guarantee the implementation of these core freedoms in practice. These two issues were the defining features of the second and third periods of development of Russian media – from 1990 to 1995 when private independent media were established, and then from 1995 to 1999 – a period marked by the rise of the power of the oligarchs (Arutunyan, 2009).

Economically, the process of privatisation and commercialisation of the media market followed suit. New business models were being developed in the country with a strong reliance on advertising. Vartanova (2012) even claimed that Russia “has become one of the four most rapidly growing advertising markets in the world” (p. 123), with an annual growth of about 30%. The number of media outlets burgeoned with the development of FM radio, tabloids, and private entertainment TV channels (Vartanova, 2012). The structure of the media market was transformed. While the number of newspapers increased from 4,863 in 1991 to 5,758 in 2000, their circulation drastically decreased – from 160.2 million to 108.8 million (Vartanova, 2012). Vartanova (2012) wrote that TV had become “the leading mass medium” since the mid-1990s (p. 125). As she put it, “with the dramatic decline in newspaper circulation has come the replacement of the print media by TV at the top of the media hierarchy” (Vartanova, 2012, p. 125). Lots of media fell in the hands of oligarchs in the early 1990s, who in turn played an active part in the power struggles that plagued Yeltsin’s time in office (Brenton, 2011). The state’s formal and informal control over TV gradually increased over the next few years (Vartanova, 2012, p. 125). A key problem during Yeltsin’s presidency was that media outlets were plunged into “free market conditions in which many were simply not prepared to survive”, and as a result they were soon “bought out or taken over by polarized capital” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 9). The lack of economic infrastructure was a key issue, closely linked to the ownership problems (Arutunyan, 2009). While there were a few media outlets owned by the journalists who worked for them (I discuss this scheme in the empirical chapters), most media organisations were either in private hands or in the grip of the state. Arutunyan (2009) argued that “the Russian media, incidentally, has suffered through the worst that both systems have to offer” (p. 29).

Politically, the situation was very complicated even in the first few years since the passing of the new press law. Sheftelevich (2009) enlisted a range of practical challenges that the law posed, and in her view, one of its most significant flaws was the lack of provisions specifying exactly how power should be allocated among the authorities, most notably the president and parliament. As a result, the passage of the law led to a lengthy battle for control over the media, especially TV (Sheftelevich, 2009). This battle between President Yeltsin and the Russian Duma culminated in the events of the autumn of 1993 when Yeltsin suspended Parliament and forced the mass media to submit their publications for pre-publication approval. As a result of the conflict, 62 journalists and TV staff lost their lives during the bloody battle at the Russian state TV channel Ostankino. Nearly a dozen Moscow newspapers were also closed down at the time (Sheftelevich, 2009).

The power for control and the “information wars” during the 1990s election campaigns were the result of Yeltsin’s “polycentric” regime and the state’s attempts to “restructure its relationship with the media” (Vartanova, 2012, p. 132). The power centres included not just the presidency and the State Duma, but also oligarchs, regional state organisations, and business elites (Vartanova, 2012). Media were pulled in different directions, and some of the informal deals drawn in the process were rather shoddy. Initially, Yeltsin was “tolerant of pluralism on Russian television”, but pluralism “did not take the form of objectivity or balance within a single news report, program or even channel. Rather, the national channels rapidly devolved into champions for their sponsors” (Oates, 2006, p. 14). As Brenton (2011) argued, “black propaganda, much of it paid for, became regular fare even in Russia’s most respected newspapers” (p. 34).

The 1993 crisis, however, put an end to the plurality period (Oates, 2006). State involvement in the media was often indirect via economic pressures and/or incentives. Vartanova (2012) labelled the 1990s as “the decade of intensive integration of the Russian state and business” – a period in which “political sponsorship and manipulative use of newspapers” was common, because the state bureaucracy was “a major agent of economic life” (p. 126). The result was “‘the creation of a hybrid (hyper) capitalism’…, having a clear statist color” (Vartanova, 2012, p. 126). A key aspect of this process was “the rise of the ‘media-industrial complex’ comprised of several influential clans and driven by new integrated political and business elites backed by the state” (Vartanova, 2012, pp. 126–127). What this meant in practice was that for lots of big media companies, political interests were more important than profit-making (Vartanova, 2012).

A powerful example of the extent to which power wars dominated the 1990s was the role two oligarchs – Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky – played at the time. Gusinsky founded the first private TV channel in Russia – NTV – and a number of other media outlets, while Berezovsky controlled Channel One – the leading TV channel. Brenton (2011) claimed that the two oligarchs drew a deal with Yeltsin in which they offered their support during the presidential elections in exchange for “lucrative State assets thereafter” (p. 34). He argued that their role was so powerful that they “probably won” the election for Yeltsin. As a whole, Yeltsin’s era was characterised by constant power battles in which Russian oligarchs “used their media assets – which included leading newspaper and television stations – as their primary weapons in vicious muckraking campaigns against each other and against Yeltsin’s ailing government” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 9). The most worrying consequence was the dwindling belief among journalists and the public that “the media was finally free in Russia and could go on to forge a meaningful and lasting fourth estate” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 10). As a result, the “‘golden age’ of post-perestroika media freedom” ended in 1994–1995 (Arutunyan, 2009).

The economic and political pressures were not the only problems journalists faced in the 1990s. Brenton (2011) argued that murders of journalists were also common in that period, and at least 30 journalists were killed because of their job. As a whole, journalists faced a range of security issues, including “an abundance of threats … not necessarily because of any direct government clampdown, but due to issues of corruption and crime” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 10). Corruption was widespread in Russian society at all levels, and the judicial system was so weak that journalists did not have proper protection. Moreover, both pre- and during Putin’s regime, the legal system has been “habitually used to limit rather than protect both the ability of journalists to disseminate information and the rights of citizens to receive it” (Oates, 2006, p. 24).

Not all was doom and gloom in that first era of post-Soviet journalism. Becker (2004) wrote that “the press under Gorbachev and Yeltsin made substantial gains compared with the pre-glasnost era” (p. 148). In his view, at that time there was pluralism, examples of investigative journalism and critical reporting of the government. McNair (2000) even claimed that prior to Putin’s coming into power, Russia had “a real public sphere through which ordinary people can learn about and participate in political debate” (p. 81). Vartanova (2012) argued that this era also brought about new professional values and practices for journalists, driven by the core belief in freedom of speech. Investigative journalism gained momentum. Arutunyan (2009) wrote that in the period between 1990 and 1995, “the Russian media briefly became the fourth estate, in the sense that as a free institution it had the power to mould politics and society, arguably reflecting the will of the people” (p. 43). The new legal framework allowed editorial staff to gain ownership of their publications, but this process was accompanied by a range of teething problems, most notably the development of new business models and the power struggles of the 1990s.

The Mass Media in Putin’s Russia

Putin’s inauguration as president in 2000 led to a number of significant changes for Russian media and marked the beginning of the fourth period in the development of contemporary Russian media – “the ‘return to a government’ model” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 33), or what Koltsova (2006) labelled “the period of State consolidation” (p. 40). A key principle for Putin and his administration was the belief that the state was “a core of national identity” (Vartanova, 2012, p. 127), and the mass media had a major role to play in that process. A much heavier emphasis was placed on TV, and both state funding (formal and informal) and tightened control were streamlined in the direction of TV. TV played a key role in Putin’s rising to power, and Putin quickly seized control over it because he clearly acknowledged the medium’s potential (Mickiewicz, 2008; Pomerantsev, 2014). TV was used as a medium for political propaganda, but the nation-building efforts were also accompanied by a process of de-politicisation of Russian journalism and a heavier emphasis on entertainment (Vartanova, 2012). Pomerantsev (2014) summed up the Kremlin’s approach:

The new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty‑first century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the center of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a gray fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare‑chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman. ‘The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,’ TV producers and political technologists liked to say.

(p. 6)

As Vartanova (2012) explained, some researchers (e.g. Butterfield & Levintova, 2011) labelled this era as the period of (re-)etatization, including in relation to media ownership. Estimations (Fossato, 2003, as quoted in Vartanova, 2012) showed that 70% of electronic media, 80% of the regional press, and 20% of the national press fell into state hands in the early 2000s. Putin’s relationship with the media was best summarised by him during a press conference in the Kremlin in 2004. “There is a phrase in a famous Italian film – ‘a real man should always try, while a real woman should always resist’” (Arutunyan, 2009, pp. 5–6). As Arutunyan (2009) pointed out, “Putin did not indicate which role the press should take”, but the widespread interpretation was that “the government, as a man should try, while the press, as a woman, should resist” (p. 6). She even claimed that Putin’s media policy was “a form of revenge” (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 49). The overall result, however, was that “television, viewed as a societal institution that could spread the ideas of democracy and civil society in the new Russian state, has become once again a very effective tool for repression and authoritarianism” (Oates, 2006, p. 20).

One of the first battles Putin fought was against “the threat of oligarchic capital” (Brenton, 2011, p. 34). Brenton (2011) argued that he put an end to the “liberal moment”, and “the first target was broadcast media” (p. 34). Both Berezovsky and Gusinsky were forced into exile, and their TV stations were appropriated by the state/state-controlled companies, thus “bringing all three national TV networks under State control” (Brenton, 2011, p. 35). Becker (2004) claimed that the attack on Gusinsky’s Media-Most empire “reeked of revenge for the editorial views expressed by Media-Most entities”, and “few would argue that the government would have taken such an uncompromising approach had Media-Most supported Putin in the 2000 presidential elections and taken a less critical view of Russian military actions in Chechnya” (p. 151). The fate of other critical media outlets was similar. Becker (2004) also wrote that there were instances of journalists sent to psychiatric institutions, detained, or arrested for their critical stance of the government.

Lipman and McFaul (2001) pointed out that “the Kremlin’s successful campaign to eliminate critical content from the Media Most media outlets without actually eliminating the media outlets themselves represents the latest and perhaps most consequential phase of consolidating managed democracy in Russia” (p. 116). Under this system, all essential institutions of democracy continued to exist, but they were so stripped of their actual powers that their proper functioning was severely restricted. Lipman (2014) argued that during “Putin’s leadership the concentration of media properties significantly exceeded that of Gusinsky’s or Berezovsky’s holdings in the 1990s”, but the main difference was that the new “media magnates … are fully loyal to Putin” (p. 183). Becker (2004) also acknowledged that similar to Eastern Europe, there was an “interpenetration of politics and economics” as well (p. 152). However, in Russia, “the state clearly rests on top of the food chain” also because all businesses were created in “illegal circumstances” (Becker, 2004, p. 152).

A new ministry was created – the Ministry of Press, Broadcasting and Mass Communication – and a range of administrative measures were used to exert pressure on the few remaining private broadcasters. Vartanova (2012) described a number of state pressures: legal sanctions, libel lawsuits, political appointments of key media executives, a denial of access to information, including a ban on press conference attendance, acquisition of regional media that were then used by local authorities, and informal barter and exchange arrangements.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that “all TV stations now carefully adhere to the official line, and hear very quickly from the Kremlin if they wander off message, particularly at election times”, Brenton (2011) argued that “this does not mean that broadcast politics has the dreary consistency it had under Communism” (p. 35). He gave Ekho Moskvy as an example of “a free radio station”, which was “allowed to survive as a glorious reminder of the openness and disputatiousness that Russian broadcasting enjoyed at its zenith” (Brenton, 2011, p. 35). The challenges Ekho Moskvy experiences and the role it plays in Russian society are explored in subsequent chapters. Brenton (2011) also said that print media had considerably more latitude and freedom than they were given credit for in the West, and there were numerous examples of investigative reports, criticism of the authorities, and the use of sarcasm.

Part of the reason for this lower degree of control of print media as o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Mass Media in Putin’s Russia
• 2 Conceptualising Russian Media and Journalism: A Theoretical Framework
• 3 Russia’s Deadliest Newspaper: The History of Novaya Gazeta
• 4 Novaya Gazeta Today: Challenges, Practices, and Role Perceptions
• 5 Russia’s “Last Independent Radio”: The History of Radio Ekho Moskvy
• 6 Radio Ekho Moskvy Today: Challenges, Practices, and Role Perceptions
• 7 From behind the Iron Curtain: Brief History of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• 8 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Today: Challenges, Practices, and Role Perceptions
• Conclusion: Russia’s Liberal Media – Handcuffed but Free
• Bibliography
• Index