Putin Won’t Trust the Press

All of you will face the destiny of Andrei Babitsky is what a fortune-teller prophesied to journalists at the Central Electoral Commission information center on election night. This soothsayer was none other than Vladimir Zhirinovsky who must have understood before others did that his candidacy would not make it, and he needed to convert himself into a soothsayer. Very few take seriously the words of this master of political buffoonery. And the number of such people is becoming smaller and smaller. But this time, the Russian press would do good to listen to Zhirinovsky’s forewarning. “You’ll have it hardest. You will be stifled more and more. No criticism of Putin. Three prohibited topics will be: criticizing Russia, the army, and other armed structures.” The former candidate said nothing new. Many of his colleagues also spoke about such prospects but only with one purpose: to embellish their own promises of total freedom of the press. The president-elect himself has said nothing so far, especially about the press, but most knowledgeable people have concluded they are heading for dark times. But did they ever have bright days? Yes, Boris Yeltsin knew how to find a key to the press to secure its support, and simultaneously criticism of him was sometimes scathing. The press was respected and was also a weapon against enemies. The freedom reached its acme in heat of the struggle between the two parties of power, the Kremlin’s and the OVR’s (Fatherland — All Russia) parliamentary election campaign. But it was a license to kill. Some took advantage of this freedom more brilliantly than others, for example, Sergei Dorenko and the ORT channel. But, during the presidential campaign, the genius of negative advertising was in fact left without his favorite occupation. Vladimir Putin used the press differently. He had prepared for this very carefully, as if he were a KGB agent preparing for a new mission. The well-known Internet site KOMPROMAT (compromising materials), which the law-enforcement bodies tried to close more than once, writes that, when still premier, Mr. Putin instructed the SBRF (Russian security service) to collect information on the political leanings of media editors-in-chief in order to put in motion covert operations with journalists and to publish information about Boris Yeltsin’s early resignation. The press, in blissful ignorance, tried hard for the new President. The gray PR, so apt in the role of gray eminence, has done his business. The whole point is that the news- breakers could not avoid talking about the chief Russian newsmaker’s steps. So the calculation of Mr. Putin’s political technicians was simple: not to deal directly with the election campaign, not to play down to the press, but simply to run the country. What was left to do now was to fill this governance with public relations content. Thus, Dagestan has been imprinted in Russian minds with the words “we punched the bandits in the face,” Chechnya with such a masterpiece of oratory as “kill ‘em on the crapper,” and the flight on a warplane, while appointment as acting president is associated with going to visit soldiers on New Year’s Eve. Do the common folk recall that Putin has no program, do they want to know what kind of a team he will put together if they see on television somebody just like them: judo adept, downhill skier, pilot, patriot, and just a good guy? The press dropped an ironic hint that criminal jargon and the presidency are incompatible. The Russian saw he was a man like them, who could speak simply and clearly (like Lenin). While the press said Putin was a non-entity and a dark horse, the Russians thought that at last there is someone who has forced his way through the closed ranks of former Communist Party bosses. What won his victory was not Mr. Putin but his myth created by television and calculated for the gray sector of the electorate, which already hated Mr. Yeltsin before the former spook’s advent to the Kremlin’s Olympus but saw no fitting replacement among the pretenders for the Russian throne. What is more, all those challengers would only give traditional promises, and their unwillingness to criticize the acting president betrayed their uncertainty about winning. Meanwhile, the acting president was “in presidential basic training.” The people never understood who Mr. Putin is in fact. The press never managed to fulfill its important task of breaking through this aureole of mystery. So neither the people, nor the leading channels and newspapers, nor their media patrons know what awaits them. They can only guess that Russia is going to see a new carving up of the media market, what can be called a media Time of Troubles. Igor Malashenko, a Media-Most top executive, believes that Mr. Putin will not trust the press. And if he continues only to use it as a means of propaganda, he will have, sooner or later, to destroy the independent press, one of the NTV founders warns. This channel did not support Mr. Putin in the presidential campaign but then it became much more cautious and friendly in its references to the former, perhaps hoping for a compromise with the winner. In general, the NTV situation could be the acid test for the degree of freedom in Russia under Mr. Putin. If the programs “Puppets” and “Summing-Up” go off the air or become toothless, the Russian press will undoubtedly be in for hard times. To demonstrate their fair attitude toward all the leading channels, the authorities can well sacrifice ORT, their strongest broadcast bulwark. The more so that they already have a new favorite, Russian Television, which can replace Berezovsky’s channel on the No. 1 push-button. ORT’s license expired on March 29. The Press Ministry is not going to renew the license, saying that the channel should compete for a new one in a tender. People close to television say that the time when the Kremlin needed Boris Berezovsky is drawing a close, so the biggest reward he can hope for is the Culture channel. Yuri Luzhkov’s TVC channel will also have to compete for a license after the present one runs out in May. This is only one of the reasons why this opponent of the Kremlin hastened to shake hands with Russia’s new top official.

Mr. Zhirinovsky said on the election night he had personally seen a blacklist of well-known oligarchs and journalists. Whether or not he saw one, many politicians, entrepreneurs and press people say that Mr. Putin would indeed file such dossiers in the places he used to work. Some of them are already recalling another example of the winged words of Russia’s master: “Whoever hurts us will not live three days.”