Each week, the ferocity of the media wars in Russia increases to a new, previously unimaginable crescendo. During the week of November 8-12, viewers of Russia's prime-time broadcast channels were treated to a sublime piece of news reporting. We could not get to the remote control fast enough, before our children witnessed a Russian prisoner of war's Chechen captors blowing his finger off, then waving the bloody stump before the camera. A week earlier, a man resembling the embattled Chief Prosecutor of Russia, Yuri Skuratov, was shown on national TV having sex with two prostitutes. Every word of their intimate conversation was spelled out in subtitles. President Yeltsin tried to fire Skuratov, who has uncovered evidence that Yeltsin's family took millions of dollars in bribes. Whether the man on the video tape is really Skuratov or not is a matter of widespread debate. He denies it, and Yeltsin's dismissal order was reversed by the Parliament's higher chamber, the Federation Council, who voted to reinstate the Prosecutor.
The media in Russia today play a decidedly political role, as opposed to the propagandistic role they played under Soviet power. In the West, the media are more ideological, but are run as a business. In the Russian media, there are practices and structures that could never be openly sustained in the West. For example, the Russian federal government is blatantly trying to shut down the main opposition media empire, Media MOST Holding. A week ago, NTV, Media MOST's flagship TV network, reported that Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin's Chief of Staff, offered Media MOST president Goussinsky $100 million if he would quietly leave the country for one year, till after the elections. Goussinsky declined, or we'd never have heard of it. Another example: The biggest media owner in the country, Boris Berezovsky, appears regularly on his own channel, ORT, editorializing at great length during the national news report, abusing his control of the channel, blurring the distinction between news and commentary.
In Russia, the media molds popular opinion with an efficiency any war-making government would envy---as seen by the current popular support of Russia's genocidal war against Chechnya. Western reports are kept out, and when they do leak in, the fact that the West criticizes the war is dismissed and explained away. The general mood of TV commentators today is that Russia has taken enough advice from the West already. With the high world prices of oil today, Russia is seeing a windfall of about $2 billion more than it expected---enough to pay its debt service for 1999 without help from the IMF. Russians are tempted to thumb their noses at Western creditors, if only temporarily.
Forced to utter obvious lies and bizarre accusations with a straight face, Russian TV commentators, many of them veterans of the Soviet era, show little finesse. How the viewing audience reacts is hard to imagine; perhaps with dismay and disgust. There is widespread support for the war today, because the media have blithely laid blame for the bombings of large apartment buildings in Moscow on "Chechen terrorists," although there's no proof that Chechens were involved in any of the attacks. It's more likely that the media have tapped into Russians' latent racism toward darker-skinned peoples. Also, Russian casualties in the war are still holding at a relatively low number: about 130 per month. If more Russian soldiers start coming home in body bags, as they did in the 1994-1996 Chechen War, support may wane.
On Russian TV, ads for cheap products like chewing gum are run, ad nauseam, at bargain-basement rates. The highest ad rates are charged during news broadcasts, which hold their own against Brazilian soap operas, Hollywood shoot-em-up's and saccharine Russian music videos. Russian TV programming is heavily news-oriented: the main networks transmit the evening news successively at 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 P.M., rather than simultaneously, as in the United States. Russian news junkies watch back-to-back broadcasts throughout the evening.
At the same time, onscreen battles between obnoxious political oligarchs and their mouthpieces are of little concern to the deeply suffering Russian masses. Russia today is a bleeding (but still kicking) mountain of roadkill on the highway to globalization. The zillion-ton gorilla, whose every twitch still makes smaller countries jump, is no longer Super Power No. 2. Even so, it still has 30,000 nuclear weapons, tremendously talented people and a great, vibrant culture. Nonetheless, the current population of about 146 million is predicted to drop to 131 million by 2015 and to 80 million in 2050, according to demographer Murray Feshbach, a professor at Georgetown University. In addition, the IMF's policies have obliterated the national GDP and deflated the local currency (as in other countries suffering similar fates, such as Indonesia and Brazil). Consequently, half the population has been reduced to outright poverty; the ultra-rich top 2% now own the country.
Oligarchs own the media, too.
• Boris Berezovsky owns 49% of the stock of Channel 1 ORT television (the government owns 51%) and 60% of TV6. A close confidant of Yeltsin's, Berezovsky owns Aeroflot Airlines, car dealer LogoVaz, many newspapers and magazines.
• Vladimir Goussinsky's Media-MOST Holding, owner of NTV, the "independent" channel, is also owner of MOST-Bank, NTV-Plus Cable TV, many magazines and Radio Echo Moscow. NTV, slightly more liberal than its competitors, favors the Kremlin's rivals, Yuri Luzhkov and Evgeny Primakov. Media MOST is negotiating with an undisclosed Western investor over the sale of 15% of NTV. At the same time, the company is in furious pre-election wars with the Kremlin.
• Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has his own television channel, TV Tsenter. He is backed by a widely diversified telecom investment conglomerate called Sistema. Now teamed with Primakov in the Fatherland-All Russia Movement, a coalition of local governors and Soviet-era bureaucrats, Luzhkov and his backers pose a threat to Kremlin insiders. The most rapacious "compromat" (mudslinging) comes from the Kremlin "family," directed against Luzhkov and Primakov. Why is the Kremlin scared? Rumor has it that if Primakov becomes President, he may instigate reversals of the sleaziest privatization deals of the mid-1990's. (A glaring example is the Norilsk nickel plant in Siberia, responsible for about a quarter of world production. Although it earned over $2 billion in profits in 1995, it was sold in 1997 for $170 million to Uneximbank, in a rigged insider deal.)
Other owners of Russian media include:
• Gazprom, gas producer, owner of 30% of NTV.
• LukOil, the petroleum giant, owner of 75% of REN-TV and 15% of TV6.
• Uneximbank, owner of important newspapers.
• Alfa Bank, owner of 25% of STS.
The power of the oligarchs in Russia won't be diminished by Yeltsin's departure. The oligarchs are here to stay and they control the media. They are the essence of the New Russia.
- Dimitri Devyatkin is an independent TV/video producer from New York. A video producer since 1971, he has produced widely broadcast programs about Russia. His "Video From Russia" was shown on French, British and U.S. (ABC) TV, and was nominated for an Emmy. Today, after five years with the Russian division of the American TV company Metromedia, he is working in Moscow as an independent producer.
