‘How could I live without your simple wisdom, Sancho?’ (Yeltsin/Don Quixote asks.)
‘I know a lot of things. Do you want me to tell you how to trade oil? I will write you a memo.’
‘I did not know you could write.’
‘Yes, although I can’t read yet.’
‘Well, that is not necessary.’
Astride a donkey, Korzhakov/Sancho shouts down a radio to his officers: ‘I am an ass, I am an ass, receive.’ Towards the end, Sancho falls asleep, dreaming of turning into Yeltsin’s master and Yeltsin turning into his servant. Yeltsin/Don Quixote tries to wake him up. ‘Was that a dream?’ Sancho asks. ‘No, that was a nightmare,’ Yeltsin replies.28
Seeing that NTV not only got away with its coverage, but was actually getting stronger, other television channels started to follow its critical reporting of the war. NTV doubled its number of viewers. In Moscow the share of NTV’s audience was nearly 50 per cent, shaping the public perception of the war and eventually leading to an anti-war sentiment. Malashenko’s party was winning. Not only was NTV setting its own agenda, it was also changing the behaviour of the government, as the first major terrorist attack by Chechen fighters made apparent.
When, on 14 June 1995, one of Chechnya’s most notorious field commanders, Shamil Basayev, with 200 men, bribed his way through various Russian checkpoints and took 1,600 people hostage in a hospital in the small town of Buddenovsk, demanding an end to the war, the Russian government initially responded with a familiar mix of cover-ups and heavy-handedness. With Yeltsin on his way to a G7 meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chernomyrdin, who was left in charge, dispatched the heads of police security agencies to Buddenovsk.
Their first step was to ban journalists from attending a news conference called by Basayev. Furious, Basayev executed five of the hostages. On the fourth day of the crisis, Russian special forces attempted to storm the hospital which resulted in total mayhem. Basayev was interviewed live by NTV, defending his position: ‘We don’t need anything – not ammunition, not clothes, not food – only to stop the war in Chechnya… If [Russia’s war in Chechnya] over the past six months is not terrorism, then this is not terrorism either. I am not a terrorist, I am a saboteur.’29 Gaidar called on Chernomyrdin to start immediate negotiations. After a couple of botched attempts to storm the hospital, with more than 100 people already dead, Chernomyrdin agreed to negotiate with Basayev.
If Basayev used television cameras, so did Chernomyrdin. He invited journalists into his office and let them film his telephone conversation with Basayev. Chernomyrdin looked composed and resolute, taking responsibility for the lives of people in front of the cameras. The country watched an extraordinary scene: the prime minister talking on the phone to the prime terrorist: ‘Shamil Basayev, can you hear me? I am at work and I am responsible for everything that is happening in the country at the moment. I am ready. Tell me how much time you need…’ Chernomyrdin promised a ceasefire in Chechnya from 8 p.m. that day and safe passage for the terrorists back to Chechnya. His agreement was broadcast on television, along with footage of the burials of the hostages who had died in the attack.
Buddenovsk was a turning point in the war. For the first time since the start of the war, the Kremlin bowed to public pressure and began serious talks. Television and NTV in particular helped to break the pattern of lies and cover-ups by the Kremlin. It was, arguably, NTV’s finest hour.
In the mid-1990s, any attempt to ‘do something with NTV’ invariably failed. When prosecutors launched a case against Kukly for ‘the conscious and public humiliation of the honour and dignity of high officials, expressed in an indecent way’ they only boosted Kukly’s fame. Malashenko and Kiselev, flanked by the puppets of Chernomyrdin and Yeltsin, held a press conference which was as embarrassing for the Kremlin as it was helpful to NTV’s rating.
When they realized that they could not beat NTV, the smartest members of the government decided to join them. Chernomyrdin came to the channel’s studios to meet his own puppet. To the disbelieving laughter and applause of NTV journalists, Chernomyrdin joked with his ‘double’, showing himself once again to be a real person and winning the sympathies of journalists and viewers alike. ‘Why have you got such a fat mug?’ he laughed to the cameras, in the way that any Western politician would do. For a second, Russia seemed almost like a normal country where the ability to criticize and ridicule politicians is a sign of a healthy democracy.
Yet, there was one fundamental problem. In contrast to ‘normal’ countries where freedom of expression is guaranteed by institutions such as parliament, civil society, the media itself and, above all, by the consensus of the population, in Russia freedom of speech rested on the goodwill of just one man – Yeltsin – who, for some reason, believed it to be a valuable thing. As Alexander Yakovlev testified, ‘Not once did he complain about a single programme, although he had plenty of reasons to do so… His tolerance towards criticism… went beyond any measure.’30
Whether Yeltsin needed to be unequivocally supported or unequivocally criticized simply because it was ‘healthier’ for democracy was at the heart of the debate which unravelled among the Russian intelligentsia as soon as Yeltsin became Russia’s president.
Back in October 1991, in a heated exchange with a scholar of the Renaissance, Leonid Batkin, in the pages of the Literary Gazette, Marietta Chudakova, scholar and Yeltsin supporter, argued against those who thought it was the job of the intellectual to attack any government. ‘There are plenty of reasons to be disappointed [in the government] but I insist that it is the democratically oriented journalists and publicists who are shaping this disappointment, putting it into talented formulations, without much thought about the aims and consequences.’
Of course Yeltsin and his government made plenty of mistakes – how could they not – but one must not lose sight of the historic circumstances in which they were acting, Chudakova argued:
Is it not too early for us to copy the tough grip of Western journalists? They have a long tradition of keeping a vigilant control over people in power, catching them out on anything, including their private lives. They don’t have to deal with such nerve-racked politicians who did not go to public schools to learn how to run a democratic system and with an exhausted nation. There people reading a morning paper over coffee can have a good laugh and forget all about it by lunchtime. Here, people pore over a newspaper, finding in it an expression of their own frustration and anger.31
The paradox was that programmes such as Kukly and the media more generally took an easy swipe at Yeltsin and helped to drive down his rating, which, by the end of 1995, was in single digits, but they also owed their existence to him. Journalists were not only protected, but empowered by Yeltsin who saw them as his natural allies against nationalists and communists, retained a Soviet-era relationship with the intelligentsia that allowed it to bite a feeding hand and considered it his role to patronize it. When television talked about his health or poked fun at him, Yeltsin preferred to switch it off, rather than call its owners. Never before or after did journalists in Russia have such a high status and command as much power as they did in the 1990s.