He was unwilling to participate in the corrupt schemes that permeated Central Television, not because he was indifferent to money, or because he had high morals, but because he considered it beneath his sense of self-worth. His state job as the deputy head of Ostankino offered a choice: ‘Either you steal and take bribes, or you live in relative poverty.’ He wished for neither, but when his former journalists pitched the idea of launching a private television channel, he jumped at it.
Malashenko was much more than the general director of NTV. He was its main ideologue and creator, a man who, to a large degree, inherited the role played by Alexander Yakovlev in the Soviet Union – albeit for a much shorter period and with very different results. However, unlike Alexander Yakovlev, who believed in social democracy as a way of transforming Russia into a normal, free and Westernized country, Malashenko believed that the way to political freedom and the West lay through laissez-faire, individual freedom and private ownership.
Both Alexander Yakovlev and Malashenko agreed on the essential power of free information flow. News was not what the state wanted its citizens to believe, but what NTV decided it was. Malashenko’s slogan was ‘News is Our Profession’ – a variation on the motto of General Curtis LeMay, the legendary head of America’s Strategic Air Command, whose B-52 bombers carried on their tails the words: ‘Peace is Our Profession’. The combative origin of NTV’s slogan was fully justified by the battles that accompanied its birth and which it waged for much of its existence for as long as it stayed independent of the state.
NTV did not have a full licence and was considered an ‘experiment’. Security men, better known as ‘siloviki’, tried to thwart it from the very start, rightly seeing in it a threat to their own power. But every time, throughout the 1990s, NTV came out the winner. The battles varied in subject and in pretext, but they were invariably part of the same conflict between the private and the state, between competition – however imperfect – and restriction, between individual rights and statism, and, in the end, between war and peace.
NTV made its name at a pivotal and, as it later turned out, ill-fated point in Russia’s history – the war in Chechnya. The first Chechen war (1994–6) was partly the result of the December 1993 parliamentary elections that brought up Zhirinovsky with his ultra-nationalist rhetoric and a shift in the balance of power within the Kremlin.
As was always the case with Yeltsin, he thrived in a crisis, mobilizing himself in the face of a threat, and flagged when the danger passed. Periods of high concentration were followed by periods of depression and drinking. This happened when he disappeared from sight after the defeat of the August 1991 coup and again after October 1993. ‘Yeltsin had become more isolated, angry and vengeful,’ Sergei Shakrai, Yeltsin’s close aide, recalled.18 In his memoirs, Gaidar called the chapter about the period that followed the October 1993 crisis ‘The Time of Lost Opportunities’.
In early 1994, Yeltsin was absent for five weeks and when he was around, he was almost invariably in an awful mood and often drunk. After the December elections, Gaidar lost his influence and, three months after being reappointed to the government, had to resign. Yeltsin allowed himself to be surrounded and influenced by scheming, crude and thuggish lackeys who played up to his worst habits. His inner circle included Alexander Korzhakov, his bodyguard, and Mikhail Barsukov, the head of the security services – ‘toadies’ and ‘half-brains’ as Gaidar called them. By the summer of 1994, the changes in Yeltsin’s entourage started to show.
Yeltsin was obviously drunk when he attempted to conduct an orchestra during an official ceremony in Berlin marking the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany. He failed to emerge from the presidential plane when it landed in Ireland on the way back from America. In the minds of many ordinary Russians, this was far worse than shelling the White House. Not only was Russia withdrawing its troops, but it also had a drunkard for president. And the perception of Russia by the outside world often mattered more than the conditions the Russians were prepared to put up with at home. Hardship was one thing – humiliation, quite another.
Korzhakov, who had always stood behind Yeltsin’s back as his bodyguard, was suddenly sitting next to him at Security Council meetings in the Kremlin. Kiselev spotted the change while watching the Kremlin footage and turned it into news. ‘The rumours about the growing influence of Korzhakov have been confirmed,’ he explained on Itogi. ‘The head of presidential security is taking part in important and confidential state affairs.’ This would have been alarming in any event, but in the autumn of 1994 it became lethal. Trouble in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya was brewing and Yeltsin’s advisers, Korzhakov and Barsukov, saw it as a perfect opportunity for a small victorious war that could steal Zhirinovsky’s thunder, boost Yeltsin’s rating that had been falling as the result of economic difficulties and strengthen their own positions. Chechen separatism was part of a chain reaction set off by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin decided to end it by force.
NTV seized on Chechnya several months before the war actually started. ‘Starting from June, there was hardly an Itogi programme that did not mention Chechnya,’ Kiselev recalled.19 In September, NTV’s future war reporter, Elena Masyuk, reported from a southern Russian region neighbouring Chechnya that field hospitals were being set up. In November 1994, Malashenko ran into Evgeny Savostyanov, the soft-spoken head of the Moscow KGB whom he knew from his days at the Central Committee. ‘He told me in his carefree way: “Igor, listen, forget about Chechnya for a couple of weeks. We will finish it all off and then I will tell you all about it.” I realized that they really didn’t understand what they were doing.’20
At the time of this encounter, Savostyanov had signed a contract with forty-seven tank crews, behind their commander’s back, to lend President Dudaev’s disparate and weak opponents in Chechnya a helping hand. But when the Russian-contract soldiers reached Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, they came under intense fire from Dudaev’s army. Most of them fled and some were captured. Chechen ‘opposition forces’ broke ranks and started to loot Grozny. While the state media peddled the official line that Dudaev was fleeing and that there were no Russian soldiers on the ground, NTV exposed the operation for what it was – a humiliating debacle.
Malashenko had no sympathy for Dudaev – a paranoid and narcissistic dictator. In fact, his biggest problem with the war was not what it might do to Chechnya, but what it would almost certainly do to Russia. The war was not just an assault on separatists, it was an assault on everything that NTV stood for: professionalism, respect for individual rights, normal life and common sense. ‘I realized that the war in Chechnya would inflate the role of the army and security services and that it would change the rules of the game in Russia, because once you start shooting people in Chechnya, you can shoot them anywhere, the hand almost involuntarily reaches for the gun or a truncheon,’ Malashenko said.21 So Malashenko and Dobrodeev decided that NTV would show the war in its full and gruesome details. Its correspondents reported it from both sides. They went behind the Russian lines and interviewed Chechen commanders, inciting the outrage of the Russian army chiefs.
When the government said there were no prisoners, NTV showed a line-up of captured young conscripts, disarmed and helpless. When the government kept silent about its losses, NTV showed a downed Russian helicopter and bodies of Russian soldiers. When state TV channels said that civilians had left Grozny, NTV showed wounded civilians bombed out of their houses, old people desperately looking for cover, a woman whose face was just a bloody wound. The Kremlin was not only losing militarily; it was also losing the information war to NTV.