Russian Presswatch /Muzzling Through
Young, Cathy
Muzzling Through by Cathy Young / n this latest Russian revolution, both liberal and conservative American commentators—with the unappealing exception of Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, and the...
...Without due process, the journalists wrote, "the absurd and pernicious order to close the opposition press . . . makes it immoral for us to support the present government...
...On October 7, after the censorship was lifted, Aleksei Zuichenko wrote in Sevodnya, "At an editorial board meeting, the appearance on our pages of white spots stamped 'censored' was unanimousCathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow and a forthcoming book on American feminism...
...At the same time, not only were a total of fifteen "red-andbrown" (Communist and fascist) newspapers forbidden to publish, but democratic ones, such as Sevodnya (Today), found themselves under the censor's knife...
...slot...
...Bragin further raised eyebrows by proposing that the blocks around the TV tower be surrounded by an impenetrable wall to prevent future assaults, provoking sarcastic remarks about the "Great Wall of Ostankino" and about turning the broadcast center into an armed fortress...
...Our man in Moscow isn't making it easy, though...
...For their heresy, the two were formally censured by the Journalists' Union—a move that, one TV viewer said in a supportive telegram to Lyubimov, "returns us to the Brezhnev era...
...Meanwhile, one of the shows was eventually allowed back on the air, but in a 2 a.m...
...In the same edition, the staff of Sevodnya took on the ban on "opposition newspapers" such as Pravda, Rabochaya Tribuna (Workers' Tribune), and the virulently anti-Semitic Den (Day), though intimating that legal procedures against such papers for violating Russia's press laws would not be seen as problematic...
...In a front-page statement on October 27, Nezavisimaya charged that covert attempts were being made to deprive the paper of new subscribers...
...Denis Gorelov in Sevodnya says it was the only thing to do...
...Meanwhile, on October 25, appearing at the International Press Center in Moscow with Gannett newspapers head Al Neuharth, Yeltsin protégé Mikhail Poltoranin, head of the Federal Information Center (and recently exonerated of charges regarding the sale of ex-Soviet property in Berlin to a German firm), boldly stated that neither Yeltsin nor the Ministry of Press had issued censorship orders on October 4. He had no idea, he said, who had banned the fifteen hardline newspapers or killed articles scheduled for publication in democratic ones, and that indeed the Russian prosecutor's office was investigating the entire matter...
...The Ostankino board of directors severed the contracts of two unquestionably pro-democracy but insufficiently zealous hosts of the political analysis programs Krasny Kvadrat (The Red Quadrangle) and Politburo, Aleksandr Politkovsky and Aleksandr Lyubimov...
...It should be noted that back in June, the weekly Stolitsa had warned that Poltoranin, for many years a loyal servant to the Soviet regime, was inclined to regard the media as an ideological instrument of the government and to threaten to deny subsidies to media outlets that had criticized him personally...
...Valery Tsvik, writing in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, smells a reversion to the old Soviet habit of shielding people from exposure to "bad" information and sees it as evidence of "a Bolshevist faith in the overwhelming strength of political propaganda and agitation...
...At least in his public stance, Poltoranin has called for the expansion of independent, private media outlets...
...A sarcastic editorial note in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Gazette) remarked that the easiest thing would be to ask the censors who gave them their orders...
...At some post offices, where subscriptions to periodicals are filed in Russia, would-be subscribers were told that the newspaper would soon be banned...
...Due to the "heroic efforts of the liberal intelligentsia" to avert Yeltsiniteauthoritarianism, Sokolov says, "calls for the forcible overthrow of the government became routine" and "armed national socialist squads were free to form," leading straight to the carnage of October 3. This time around, Sokolov predicts, "fighting against witch hunts will be more difficult—in part because the liberals have already once successfully saved the witches, who went on to display their extremely witchy proclivities in Ostankino and elsewhere...
...Another original Mossoviet offspring, the rambunctiouslypro-Yeltsin daily Kuranty (Chimes), had its registration renewed in three days...
...Most of the Russian media remain government-subsidized...
...And as far as other (non-media) civil liberties are concerned, Yeltsin refused last October to sign a decree prepared by some cabinet members that would have abridged civil rights and restored old restrictions on Moscow residency...
...At others, the available catalogue of periodicals did not include Nezavisimaya, and the complete catalogue, which could be wangled from the postmaster, omitted the price of subscription...
...Most ominous was the apparent attempt to muzzle Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the non-government daily launched in 1991...
...In today's circumstances, only guaranteed freedom of speech can save the regime from degeneration and tyranny...
...Who's right...
...It would have been too much of a scandal," a Moscow friend of mine said about a shut-down...
...the re-registration of Nezavisimaya was stalled for more than two weeks while the authorities apparently considered possible ways to close it down altogether or turn it over to the office of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov (which would mean Tretyakov's replacement...
...In an October 13 conversation, the eminent Russian scholar and political commentator Leonid Batkin acknowledged that the "very strong anti-repressive mindset" of the Russian intelligentsia was a good bulwark against the revival of dictatorship, yet grumbled that the anti-censorship zeal was being taken too far—"even against the absolutely necessary two-week state of emergency...
...The camera lingered on the door as the president was about to enter, and then showed him walking to the podium in a reverent shot reminiscent, some said, of old coverage of Soviet leaden' public appearances...
...Perhaps the president and his team should put their investigators on the trail of whoever tried to strangle Nezavisimaya Gazeta...
...He gets himself a made-to-order constitution...
...That's a tough one: nothing in America's political landscape parallels the issues in Russia, where the "harm" caused by some speech is of an altogether different sort than the affronts to the sensibilities of the oppressed cited by aspiring censors over here...
...Nezavisimaya has been able to reregister after all, and Tretyakov remains editor in chief...
...hence, both the thesis that witches don't exist at all and the theory that witches have a sacred right to practice their craft have become hard to prove...
...Their crime was to have appeared on the only functioning channel of Russian TV on the night of October 3 and discouraged Muscovites from heeding the earlier appeal of deputy prime minister Yegor Gaidar to take to the streets, unarmed, and oppose the Communist rebel mobs...
...Let's say there were reasons to prevent a press conference by nationalist politician Sergei Baburin under emergency regulations...
...N of everyone agreed...
...In an interview in Novaya Yezhednevnaya Gazeta (The New Daily Gazette) in late October, the Russian president reiterated his aversion to dictatorship and authoritarianism, and said, "As long as freedom of the press is preserved, there is assurance that democracy will survive too...
...He noted that in the two days of revived censorship, the editors "waited gleefully to see which article the esteemed bureaucrats would kill next," and that "being censored became a matter of honor, prestige, and, quite frankly, profit: not one foreign media outlet accredited in Moscow, it seemed, would reject an editor's offer of an article axed by a censor...
...Still, a total of seventy journalists, including reporters for such liberal, pro-Yeltsin periodicals as Ogonyok and Moscow News, were roughed up by police while the state of emergency was in force...
...Under the stewardship of former Moscow News journalist Vitaly Tretyakov, the paper has published editorials often critical of Yeltsin and of the new loyalist media establishment...
...He reverses himself on early presidential elections...
...Legal penalties could apply for inciting violence or ethnic hate...
...Petersburg channel—also available in Moscow—on October 10...
...Petersburg TV todeny air time to Independent Television (NTV), the first independent television company in Russia to produce its own newscasts, which started airing on the St...
...Comparisons to Soviet-era censorship are still largely unwarranted...
...E ven after the emergency rules had been lifted, the troubles of the press were not over...
...A couple of days after the quashed hard-line revolt, Yeltsin did look a tad too regal on Russian TV as he handed out awards to journalists who had exhibited bravery during the unrest, particularly during the storming of the Ostankino television tower by the "national Communist" mobs...
...Russian journalists aren't easily cowed these days, and, on the whole, critics of the government and of Boris Yeltsin, such as economist and probable presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky, still have broad opportunities to speak their minds...
...ly recognized as the best advertising campaign in the newspaper's existence...
...Muzzling Through by Cathy Young / n this latest Russian revolution, both liberal and conservative American commentators—with the unappealing exception of Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, and the Nation—have sided overwhelmingly with Boris Yeltsin...
...He bullies the press, not only closing down some publications but telling others (Pravda anct Sovetskaya Rossiya) that they can reopen if they sack their editors and change their names...
...In Sevodnya (October 9), columnist Maksim Sokolov—a sort of meaner, nastier Russian George Will—admits that he too urged tolerance for the vanquished Commies after August 1991, and repents...
...We regard the uncensored press as a natural condition...
...In October, Nezavisimaya was told to re-register with the Ministry of Press because one of the paper's official cofounders, the Moscow City Council, no longer existed...
...For one thing, censors who allow their victims to trumpet their plight with blank spots on their pages are censors with dull knives...
...And yet the picture has some disturbing elements...
...While the newspaper's politics are staunchly pro-democracy (the paper played a leading role in the Russian media's resistance to the August 1991 hard-liners' coup), Nezavisimaya has made a point of maintaining a truly independent stance and giving a forum to critics—liberal and not—of Russia's new regime...
...Furthermore, on October 29 Kommersant Daily published a report according to which Poltoranin's Federal Information Center was leaning on the management of St...
...N of all is bleak...
...II The American Spectator January 1994 53...
...Let's say it was acceptable for TV broadcasting chief Viktor Bragin to have the transmitters shut off when 52 The American Spectator January 1994 Ostankino was under siege to make sure the rebel leaders wouldn't get on the air...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
