Black Square

The television set in my Moscow apartment has turned into Kasimir Malevich’s black square. You don’t have to flip the channels anymore: there’s nothing on the screen anyway. The only joy you get is when you manage to tune in to TNT. I simply did not know before the Ostankino tower fire where this channel was to be found. Living in the Moscow of 2000 with one channel! I don’t think any of my peers will recall anything like this: when we only began to watch the tube, we had a choice of Central Television, Ukrainian Television, and the Kyiv Channel. However, all channels switched over at nine p.m. to the “Vremia” newscast. Now, too, I have only one source of televised news, the NTV news program relayed by the fortunate TNT.

The aim of telling all these impressions is not to make the reader envy me, now free of soap operas, pop kitsch, and information wars. The simple truth is that only one blaze — but what a blaze! — caused a city of ten million to lose one of the most important rights of our time, the right to choose information. While the Kursk submarine tragedy showed Russians that their country had long ceased to be a naval superpower, the Ostankino fire proved that Russia lags far behind the civilized world in terms of information technologies. The antediluvian telephone lines by which Muscovites enter the Internet, the limited range of FM radio stations due to military demands, television transmitters mounted on a tower that burned like a gigantic candle over the Russian capital. The day after the fire, a press conference was held in Berlin, where, years ago, Comrade Walter Ulbricht decided to have an Ostankino tower of his own. The conference was told how the authorities, after the reunification of Germany, replaced the broadcasting equipment, purchased new fire-fighting devices, and held a special exercise of a fire brigade stationed next to the Berlin television tower.

Russia did not reunite with anybody. The tower has been standing for all these years until it burst into flame. It could have stood another twenty years, or it could have burned down a decade ago. There is such thing as exhausting one’s resources. When nothing changes, something has got to give — without fail. And the Ostankino tower became one more sad symbol of this exhaustion. Perhaps there are enough such symbols already.