The images of devastating military action, blood and destruction provided by NTV’s own correspondent and particularly by its star war reporter, Elen Masyuk, were invariably more powerful than written statements supplied by the Kremlin or even official footage of Russian tanks driving down a dusty road. ‘In Grozny we use no other sources apart from what [our reporters] directly see,’ said Oleg Dobrodeev, NTV’s news director.22 In the winter of 1994–5, the majority of Russians, according to polls, were on the side of NTV against the war. Polls also showed that it was television that commanded attention during the war in Chechnya and it was NTV that was in the lead. Nearly 30 per cent of the television audience chose NTV news for objective coverage of the war, compared with 12 per cent for the pro-Kremlin Ostankino/Channel One news.23 NTV was changing the Kremlin’s agenda.
The beginning of the war in Chechnya also coincided with the launch of NTV’s satirical show Kukly (Puppets). Based on Britain’s Spitting Image, it featured rubber latex puppets of all Russia’s top politicians and was unabashedly irreverent. The idea of the programme came from a Russian producer who lived in France. The scriptwriter was the former actor and satirist Viktor Shenderovich who knew Gusinsky from the days of drama school. Each Kukly skit was based on a famous book or film rewritten to fit in with the reality of the day. One of the first skits stylized Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Times, making the most of the parallels with the nineteenth-century war in the Caucasus. The puppets parodied the voices of Russian politicians. It was decided that Yeltsin should be left out of the show – at least to start with. ‘We thought that would be too much of a shock and we should prepare the audience,’ Malashenko said.24
Russia had a long tradition of political satire, but not of turning its leaders into funny puppets. The Kremlin rulers could be hated or loved, feared or despised, but they had always preserved some mystique of power and were never laughed at in public. It was that mystique that NTV deliberately sought to destroy, de-sacralizing state power at a time when the state was trying to justify its brutal war in Chechnya.
In one of the skits, Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin’s press spokesman, introduced Pavel Grachev, the defence minister, as ‘the brain behind the Chechen operation’. He then knocked on Grachev’s puppet head producing a hollow wooden sound. ‘We have many soldiers here who have experienced defeat in Afghanistan,’ Kostikov said. ‘Yes, and we are using their experience to the fullest.’
As Yeltsin’s bodyguards, Korzhakov and his men saw their task not just in providing physical security but also in dealing with his critics and shielding him from political attack. The first Kukly programme went on air on 19 November 1994. The same day an article appeared in the state newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta, portraying Gusinsky as an evil media mogul from a James Bond film. ‘Now the Most group has its sights set on the pinnacle of power… For this purpose the Most group is gradually “taking over” the most influential media outlets.’25 Gusinsky knew the article was a black mark, a threat from Korzhakov.
Two weeks later Korzhakov’s men, in unmarked fatigues, clashed with Gusinsky’s security guards outside his office in the Moscow mayor’s building. Pointing their guns at Gusinsky’s men, they ordered them to lie on the ground, face down in the snow, while they roughed up the head of security, breaking several of his ribs. This ‘special operation’ became known in Moscow as ‘mugs in the snow’. Malashenko called around the foreign television bureaux and asked them to send their crews which arrived just in time to capture images of Korzhakov’s men forcing Gusinsky’s security guards onto the ground and kicking them even when they were down.
Watching the whole scene from his office at the top of the tower, Gusinsky called in the Moscow KGB, headed by his friend Savostyanov. Soon, a team of Moscow state security agents arrived at the scene and pointed their weapons at Korzhakov’s men whom they mistook for gangsters. After a brief clash, Savostyanov’s men retreated. Korzhakov quickly reported the whole incident to Yeltsin and within two hours Savostyanov – the last man who was hired to work at the security services from outside the KGB – was fired.
Soon after the raid, Gusinsky was summoned to the Kremlin and told that he would lose his television channel unless it stopped its damaging coverage of Chechnya. Gusinsky refused, but thought it would be safer to send his family to London where he soon joined them. In a newspaper interview, Korzhakov boasted that his favourite sport was chasing geese – wordplay on Gusinsky’s nickname ‘Gus’ which means goose in Russian.
After a few months of shuttling between Moscow and London, Gusinsky’s business and media partners, including Malashenko, Kiselev and Dobrodeev, gathered in the dimly lit wine bar in the basement of London’s exclusive Lanesborough Hotel in Park Lane – a favourite hang-out of Russian oligarchs – to discuss the situation. Gusinsky, who presided over the long wooden table, let his partners on the banking side speak first. They told him that NTV was jeopardizing their business and so it had to be either sold or transformed into a non-political channel. Then it was Malashenko’s turn to speak. ‘Your partners are wrong,’ he told Gusinsky. ‘NTV is your only defence.’ Malashenko called it the principle of ‘explosive reactive armour’ used to protect tanks against artillery fire. Reactive armour is stuffed with elements that counter-explode when hit by a charge. ‘So, if you close down NTV, they will consider you a weakling and that will be the end,’ Malashenko said. ‘If they attack you – we will counter-explode.’26 Gusinsky thought for a moment and sided with Malashenko.
What gave Malashenko and his journalists confidence was the knowledge that they and not the military and security services were on the right side of history. They were clever, skilful and Westernized. They held out the promise of a normal life that most people craved. The state was weak, dysfunctional and unattractive. The slogan Malashenko came up with was simple and powerfuclass="underline" ‘News is power. Power is in truth.’ Behind this statement, as armour, was the large and growing empire of one of Russia’s top oligarchs.
As Malashenko predicted, the Kremlin did not shut down NTV, although not for the want of trying. Chernomyrdin’s government considered revoking its licence, but Alexander Yakovlev, who now headed the Federal Commission for Television and Radio – his last official post – came to the rescue. ‘I realized we had to save NTV. To a great extent, it was a question about the fate of democracy.’ Without telling Chernomyrdin, he prolonged NTV’s licence. ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ Chernomyrdin told him that evening. ‘It did not even occur to me that you could do it over the head of the government.’ He demanded that Yakovlev cancelled his decision. ‘It is your error – you correct it.’ But Yakovlev, a former member of the Soviet Politburo, put Chernomyrdin, a junior member of the Central Committee, in his place: ‘Don’t raise your voice to me, Viktor Stepanovich. I had no legal excuse to refuse them a licence.’27 Moreover, in May 1995, Gusinsky decided it was safe enough to return from his London exile. He carefully timed his return to coincide with Bill Clinton’s official visit to Moscow for the Second World War Victory Day celebration. Harassing the owner of an independent television channel while America’s president was in Russia discussing financial aid with Yeltsin would be too daring even for Korzhakov. Shortly after Gusinsky’s return, NTV put out a Kukly skit which he had considered to be risky a few weeks earlier. The skit was called ‘Don Quixote and his Bodyguard’ and portrayed Yeltsin as a drinking knight in a nightcap and Alexander Korzhakov as Sancho Panza.