Yegor saw the role of television in helping people adjust to the disappearance of the country that they were born in. He tried to save a common information space – a union in the ether – when the actual union had fallen apart and conflicts erupted on the periphery. As Igor Malashenko, who worked as Yegor’s deputy, explained:
The army was falling apart, flights were getting cancelled, trains were grinding to a halt, the rouble zone was shrinking, former Soviet republics were fencing themselves off with borders and customs… but television in Moscow continued to broadcast across the entire former Soviet Union… The very knowledge that people in Russia, Georgia, the Baltic States and Central Asia were watching the same programmes helped many people feel part of one historic entity – even though it had lost its name.36
As a print journalist, Yegor neither understood nor particularly liked television and tried to turn it into a version of Moskovskie novosti, appealing to the same audience of liberal intelligentsia, said Malashenko. But above all Yegor was hoping to turn television from a means of propaganda and mobilization into a private activity. As he told his staff: ‘My generation lived by the hope of bringing politics and morality together. All the lessons I learned from 1956 persuaded me that this is impossible… Television must help an individual to go back to his own world, to find values other than politics. Our task is to make politics occupy as little space in our lives as possible.’37 The politics kept bursting in, though, and television soon turned into a battleground.
On 12 June 1992 – the first anniversary of Russia’s independence – a hysterical and xenophobic mob of diehard communists beseiged the television centre situated in Ostankino, in the north of Moscow. They were led by Viktor Anpilov, the hot-tempered, foaming-at-the-mouth leader of the radical left-wing Working Moscow and Communist Workers’ Party. Anpilov, who started as a journalist, understood the importance of television well. ‘I was an ideal Soviet journalist – from the working class,’ he said.38 He was trained to broadcast Soviet propaganda in Spanish to Latin America. Unusually for the time when he graduated – the early 1970s – he was an orthodox Leninist. After university he went to Cuba to work as an interpreter. In a book of memoirs, poignantly called Our Struggle, he described how Fidel Castro addressed a vast crowd with the words: ‘A revolution is worth something only if it knows how to defend itself.’39 A decade later, reportedly recruited by the KGB, he was posted to Nicaragua during the war between the Soviet-backed Sandinista and the American-backed Contras. He informed on his cameraman for his ‘anti-Soviet’ views.
In August 1991, he was on the side of the coup leaders. As a true communist and a tireless speaker he never shunned the basic forms of propaganda. He agitated workers at factories and could always rally a few thousand hard-core supporters to come onto the streets.
In June 1992, Anpilov’s thugs blocked entrances and exits to the television centre for seven days, demanding access to the air waves. Anpilov called it ‘A Siege of the Empire of Lies’. ‘Television has become a tank which is killing the fragile soul of the Russian people,’ he shouted. His followers spat and hurled abuse at journalists – ‘Zionists’ and ‘agents of American influence’ – demanding ‘Russian television for Russian people’. Anpilov tried to storm Ostankino and clashed with the police who showed little resistance. ‘It was a dark and ugly mob: the twisted, hateful faces, saliva in the corner of a mouth, the openly fascist slogans,’ the liberal Izvestia wrote. ‘A movement that makes pogroms their main goal cannot have any future,’ it added hopefully.40
Trying to deflate the situation, Yegor invited Anpilov and a few others inside the television centre to negotiate and even offered Anpilov a chance to come on air and comment on the siege. Anpilov demanded a daily prime-time slot on television and Yegor’s resignation, and threatened a sit-in hunger strike if his conditions were not met. After a five-hour-long discussion, Yegor gave his own ultimatum, both to Anpilov and to the government: if the situation around Ostankino was not restored to normal, the centre would stop broadcasting. ‘And I will be the first to make an appeal to all staff to go on strike,’ said Yegor. With that, he left his ‘guests’ in the company of government officials and the police. ‘I don’t know why Anpilov and his people have not taken over the television centre yet. I can’t imagine a more impotent executive power,’ Yegor told Moskovskie novosti, his former paper, a few days later.41
Anpilov’s siege and Yegor’s response made a strong impression on Yeltsin. ‘I realized,’ Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, ‘that “Ostankino” is almost like a nuclear button… and that in charge of this button should not be a reflective intellectual, but a different kind of person.’42 Not only did Yeltsin see Yegor as Gorbachev’s man, but he also saw him as being too independent. In early December 1992 Yeltsin fired Yegor, replacing him two months later with Vyacheslav Bragin, a former party apparatchik from Tver. A mediocre and slavishly obedient man with no experience in television, Bragin saw his job as simply providing free air time to the Kremlin whenever it needed it, even if this meant interrupting scheduled programming and cancelling the Latin American soap operas. Yeltsin’s unceremonious and unjustified firing of Yegor looked ugly and outraged the liberals. Yeltsin knew the dismissal was unfair, but his main concern was not the quality of programming, but the use of television as a weapon.
With parliament paralysing the governance of the country, a direct televised appeal to the people was the only way of conducting power and he needed an obedient loyalist in charge of the television button. Most institutions in the country were malfunctioning, the economy was in free fall and television had turned from a fourth estate into the first one.
In December 1992 Khasbulatov out-manoeuvred Yeltsin, forcing him to surrender Gaidar as his prime minister in exchange for holding a referendum on the constitution the following year. Gaidar was replaced with Viktor Chernomyrdin – the former minister for the gas industry who was (mistakenly) seen by the communists as their man. In fact, giving up Gaidar made things worse for Yeltsin, not just economically, but politically. The parliament took Gaidar’s removal as a sign of Yeltsin’s weakness rather than as a compromise, and within a few months reneged on the agreement to hold a constitutional referendum and stripped Yeltsin of his powers to rule by decree.
The nationalists smelled blood. At the beginning of February Prokhanov’s Den’ declared: ‘A new clash is fast approaching. It will peak in March–April when the regrouping of political forces will be completed, when the economy will be ruined, food reserves exhausted… The opposition will have to carry the burden of power in a ruined, disintegrating country engulfed by chaos.’43 Yeltsin, too, was ready for a fight. On 20 March 1993 he went on television to announce that he had signed a decree introducing a period of ‘special rule’ in the lead-up to a nationwide referendum to be held on 25 April. In fact, when the decree was published four days later, it was couched in much more careful terms with no mention of the ‘special rule’. The real event, however, was not the decree – that never came into force – but its announcement on television.