The face and voice of the new channel was its anchor Evgeny Kiselev, who presented the weekly analytical programme, Itogi. He was a symbol of solidity and authority. Dressed in a conservative double-breasted suit, sporting a moustache, often pausing for thought and groping for the right word, he spoke in soft, deep, deliberate tones that inspired confidence. Kiselev did not entertain or lecture the audience – he appealed to its intelligence and common sense.
NTV was sober and serious. Its news and current affairs programmes were devoid of irony or styob. Irony was preserved for the weekly non-political programme presented by Leonid Parfenov, NTV’s bright and style-conscious young journalist who ‘toured’ his ‘advanced’ audience around theatres, exhibitions and fashion shows. While Parfenov’s style was closer to that of Kommersant, Kiselev carried on the line of the Soviet-era liberals such as Alexander Bovin and Yegor Yakovlev. Kiselev was the man the old intelligentsia and the nascent Russian middle class most trusted and identified with.
Kiselev was born in 1956 – the same year as Yegor Gaidar – and was part of the first post-Stalinist generation. Like Gaidar, he belonged to the Soviet nomenclatura. His father was an aviation engineer who worked at one of the closed Soviet institutes, with a ‘postbox’ for an address. He grew up in the most comfortable Soviet milieu with none of the fear or hardship that had shaped the previous generation. The times had not demanded heroes or fighters, but bred softer, more flexible and reflective types, capable of compromise and mindful of creature comforts.
‘I had a happy childhood. And even if it was not quite settled at first – it was not uncomfortable. We had our own apartment. I went to a good school – a five minutes’ walk from home – no thugs, no gangsters,’ Kiselev said.3 Kiselev studied Persian at university and spent a year in pre-revolutionary Iran – where he had access to British and American newspapers and watched Western films. The defining experience for Kiselev’s generation was the war in Afghanistan – pointless and costly, both in terms of money and of human life. Kiselev observed it at first hand.
A few months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Kiselev was sent to Kabul as a military interpreter – a job which involved close cooperation with the military intelligence service and the KGB. He saw how the KGB prepared a coup in Afghanistan, how they staged the storming of President Amin’s palace. The natural thrill of being part of a spy movie plot was mixed with a nudging sense of the stupidity, futility and opportunism on the part of the Soviet government. Unlike the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Afghanistan did not crush any illusions because there were none left.
Kiselev’s stint in Afghanistan was followed by three years in the KGB school where he taught Persian to young spooks. This was not a matter of choice – turning down a proposal from the KGB was not an option. The fact that Kiselev came through the KGB school was not unusual – many of those who enjoyed successful careers had KGB connections one way or another. So did many businessmen.
When he was finally released from service, Kiselev joined Radio Moscow – the Soviet foreign language service that broadcast communist propaganda around the world and which also worked closely with the KGB. None of the people who worked there believed their own propaganda. Nor did they expect it to be heard. ‘It was a common grave for an unknown journalist: a shortwave station that nobody wanted to listen to broadcasting to a foreign audience,’ Kiselev said.4 Yet what the job lacked in terms of professional fulfilment it made up for by providing plenty of free time and access to information. In the late 1980s it supplied readymade cadres for Perestroika television. Kiselev ended up in the foreign department of the Vremya news programme.
It was here that he met Oleg Dobrodeev – a man who was to play a similarly important role in the creation of Russia’s first independent television channel and an even greater one in its subsequent demise. The first head of news and current affairs at NTV, Dobrodeev subsequently climbed to the pinnacle of the Russian propaganda machine – under Vladimir Putin – a journey that passed through the destruction of NTV.
Dobrodeev was part of the same generation as Kiselev, but he grew up in a family of the artistic intelligentsia. Even more than Vladimir Yakovlev, Dobrodeev was a ‘son’ of the shestidesiatniki. His father was a film scriptwriter and secretary of the Film-Makers Union, a mecca of the liberal artistic intelligentsia in the 1960s. Dobrodeev Sr was an author of a documentary film about the early years of Karl Marx and belonged to the same circle as Yegor. The Dobrodeev family lived in a house for writers in the north of Moscow. His co-author shared a flat with Evgeny Primakov, a future head of the Russian intelligence service and prime minister. A fluent French speaker and historian by background, Dobrodeev Jr was erudite, clever and extremely hard-working. He moved to television in 1983, but did not participate in boisterous Perestroika conversations that started a few years later and kept himself to himself, Kiselev recalled.
‘He had a very systematic brain. Facts and quotes were on the right shelves ready to be retrieved,’ said Kiselev. ‘He did not show off, kept a modest appearance, but he appreciated the trappings of power – an office with a secretary, a chauffeur-driven car, a special government telephone line, the ability to talk informally to those in power. We could be having some important meeting and suddenly there would be a call from the Kremlin. Oleg would say: “Sorry old chap – I’m being called to the Kremlin. Got to go. We’ll continue tomorrow.” He savoured it, like one savours wine – its smell, its taste, its aftertaste,’ said Kiselev,5 a connoisseur of good wine himself who was also not indifferent to the trappings of power.
Dobrodeev had an unmistakable sense for news and trends; he sensed the mainstream and knew how to put himself at the head of it. In terms of his intellect and his work ethic, Dobrodeev was way above anyone at Ostankino and he quickly became one of Yegor Yakovlev’s favourites. Malashenko, Dobrodeev’s boss for many years, said he was a workaholic. ‘Nothing interested him apart from work. He read every text, watched every news bulletin. When he went on holidays abroad, he made his secretary put a telephone receiver next to a TV set, so that he could at least listen to the news, if not watch it.’6 On 5 January 1992, ten days after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Dobrodeev and Kiselev went on air with Itogi – a forty-five-minute analytical summary of the week’s news.[1]
In terms of prominence, Itogi filled the place vacated by Vremya as a trend-setting (or trend-explaining) programme. Foreign ambassadors often based their Monday morning dispatches on Itogi which came out on Sunday evenings. Kiselev invited news-makers and experts to ‘try to work out what is going on’. The measure of Itogi’s success became apparent a year later when they decided to celebrate its first anniversary and invited everyone who had featured in Itogi over the past year. ‘To our complete astonishment, they all came, apart from Yeltsin of course.’7