One of the most riveting and liberating events of postwar life was the Soviet policy of glasnost, the Gorbachev-era explosion of media. The euphoria came not from the means of transmission but, rather, from what was being transmitted—and read, and heard, and seen. After decades of totalist censorship, after art, history, science, journalism, philosophy, and so much else had languished under the state, Gorbachev, particularly in the years from 1987 to 1990, unleashed everything. The thrill of this was unimaginable. After so much gray, color; after so many lies, truth, debate, discussion. And it was glasnost that led to everything else, from a full reckoning with the Soviet past to a debate about the way to go on, to live, to organize society.
Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
The announcement came shortly after an agency called the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service (oh, Orwell!) warned that Lenta.ru was venturing into “extremism.” Lenta.ru had published an interview with Andriy Tarasenko, a leader of a far-right ultra-nationalist group, Right Sector. Part of the Kremlin’s pretext for the invasion of Ukraine has been to “protect” Russians from “fascists.” Tarasenko is an unlovely figure, but Lenta.ru was hardly endorsing him; the editors were guilty of nothing more than committing journalism. And now they are paying for it.
In recent years, when Russian liberals have tried to sound optimistic, they have invariably said, Well, at least they haven’t cracked down on the Internet the way the Chinese have. Lenta.ru is one Web site, not the entire Russian-language Web, to be sure, but today’s firing is still an important and ominous step. Lenta.ru was getting more than thirteen million unique visitors a month, and was far more direct and critically minded than anything on state television or in most print publications. Some staff writers and editors have said that they will leave rather than work with Goreslavsky. They have no doubt that responsibility for today’s firing lay with Putin and his circle.
Seventy-nine staffers at Lenta.ru issued a statement of angry protest, reading, “Over the past couple of years, the space of free journalism in Russia has dramatically decreased. Some publications are directly controlled by the Kremlin, others through curators, and others by editors who fear losing their jobs. Some media outlets have been closed and others will be closed in the coming months. The problem is not that we have nowhere to run. The problem is that you have nothing more to read.”
In addition, according to the Moscow Times, Ilya Krasilshchik, an employee of one of Lenta.ru’s sister companies, wrote a profoundly frustrated, expletive-laden post on Facebook whacking Goreslavsky for being little more than “friends with the Kremlin.” He concluded on a note of despair: “Advice for beginning journalists: pick a new profession.”
This comes shortly after Dozhd (Rain)—an independent television station that dared to cover things from the pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow, two years ago, to the anti-government demonstrations in Kiev, this winter—was dumped by major cable operators. The pretext was that it had issued an offensive poll question about the siege of Leningrad. The Kremlin pressured the leadership of the radio station Ekho Moskvi (the Echo of Moscow), which has an older, liberal audience and an often daring slate of discussion programs, to dump its general director and bring in someone from the conservative Voice of Russia. The leadership of the social-network site VKontakte (In Contact) “switched”; its founder lost control of the site to Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch with ties to the Kremlin.
Last December, Putin dissolved the RIA Novosti news agency and created a new one called Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today). He placed in charge one Dmitry Kiselyov, an odious and unembarrassed reactionary whose contribution to the debate over anti-gay propaganda legislation was to say that the internal organs of homosexuals who die in car accidents should be burned rather than risk their being transplanted into the bodies of the living.
In each individual case, the degree of censorship and pressure is hardly Stalinist in degree. Putin’s media strategy is more sophisticated than that. (The book-publishing industry has remained quite free and unchanged in recent years.) The sophistication of it is that Putin exerts just enough control (blacklisting certain known dissident voices from state television, for example), and punishes just enough of his opponents, to set markers—boundaries of the permissible. Sometimes those boundaries are crossed, but a general tone has been set.
And the tone, now that Putin is cracking down more at home and exerting military strength in Ukraine, is ever darker. Putin will not undo glasnost. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. But his notion of what constitutes the proper control of media is expanding, it seems, week by week.
Above: Galina Timchenko, the former editor of Lenta.ru. Photograph by Stanislav Krasilnikov/ITAR-TASS.
