Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 13:25:37 -0400 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Subject: RE: lbo-talk-digest V1 #4196
Chris Doss wrote:
>Incidentally, I can tell you for a fact that 90% of English-language
>reporting on Russia is absolute bullshit. They have gotten this whole NTV
>thing completely wrong.
So what's really going on? We're eager to hear!
Doug
Damn. NTV is a big issue and I'm at work, so I'll limit myself to a relatively brief comment.
As far as I can tell reading US and UK news clippings on Johnson's Russia List (biased in itself -- reading it, you would hardly know that the CP was the most popular party in Russia -- but I rather like it in general. That guy does a good job) and elsewhere, the Anglo-American media seems to be portraying the whole affair as an attempt of the diabolical Vladimir Putin to suppress good and true NTV, which is supposedly a bastion of objective journalism, and independent media in general. This is bullshit.
There is no such thing as "independent media" in Russia (yeah, I know, there's no such thing anywhere, but in Russia it is especially obvious). Media in Russia, especially television media, do not get enough money from advertising to operate -- even NTV gets only 20% of its revenue from advertising, as opposed to I think 80% in big US media organisations, correct me if I'm wrong. There are precisely 2 options if you want to be run a TV station in Russia: Get funding from a) the state or b) business (which in Russia usually means from some rat-bastard oligarch). The oligarch in question in the case of NTV is Vladimir Gusinsky. NTV is (was) Gusinsky's propaganda channel (now it's Ted Turner's and Gazprom's, it looks like).
Don't get me wrong -- I like NTV. They have some good stuff, esp. Kukly on Sunday nights. (If you don't know, Kukly [puppets] is a political satire show using puppets, a la Spitting Image but much cleverer.) They were also providing critical commentary on the Chechen war. Unfortunately, it has of late become the 24-hour "Putin is the Devil" channel, which has reduced it to a laughing stock for most viewers, especially with the journalists using rhetoric like "it's just like 1991!!!" and whatnot.
But what is going on is primarily a battle between two clans of oligarchs -- Gusinsky on the one hand and the guys running Gazprom (Russia's gas monopoly) on the other. The fact of the matter is that Gusinsky swindled Gazprom, its creditor, out of binzillions of rubles. Not unexpectedly, Gazprom wants its money back. That this is actually going on is, I think, a good thing for anybosy who wants anything like accountability of economic actors in the Russian economy.
Though I do think the Kremlin probably is not exactly averse to limiting anti-government voices, I doubt very much that this is the main reason behind what's been going on. As a matter of fact, you can get a lot of anti-government material in the Russian papers (mostly Communist and other left-wing ones). Though few people are willing to take a die-hard anti-Putin line, in part because Putin has an approval rating of something like 80% (compare to Yeltsin's rating, which hovered around 2% for the last several years of his reign). You don't want to piss off your readership or advertisers, after all.
What disgusts me is the way in which Gusinky and Berezovsky are being feted in the West as some kind of great freedom-fighters against the Evil Putin. Gusinsky and Berezovsky are glorified Mafia dons. These are people who helped annihilate the Russian economy by strip-mining the country's industry and shipping it abroad. They should be in jail. Come to think of it, Jeffrey Sachs and Anders Aslund should be in jail. If they took a jaunt through impoverished rural Russia, where I worked for about six months, and the local population knew who they were, they would get a pipe laid across their skulls in about 30 seconds.
PS. Most people I know here in Russia think that Pavel Borodin was set up by the Kremlin -- that, as Borodin was a member of Yeltsin's "Family" (the circle of bottom-feeders around the former, equally bottom-feeding, president, who incidentally is the most hated man in Russia after the leaders of the Chechen rebels), Putin basically had him shipped overseas into the waiting arms of the US and Swiss authorities. Purportedly in an attempt to further add to the impression that Russia is corrupt, believe it or not. (This could result in Western banks closing their doors to Russian businesses, which would help stem capital flight from the Russian economy, or so the reasoning goes. Putin is a supporter of a strong Russian state, and so he views capital flight as bad bad bad. Bravo Putin.) I think they're probably right.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal