At the beginning of September, Putin gave an interview to Larry King on CNN. Asked what had happened to the Kursk, Putin answered with a half-smile on his face: ‘It sank.’ In the same interview, he likened his former job at the KGB to that of a journalist. ‘Intelligence people are very close in their duties to the staff in mass media. They have the same purpose of gathering information, synthesizing it and presenting it for the consumption of decision-makers.’21 But this time he was the top decision-maker in the country. Controlling the flow of information was the prerequisite of his power.
Gusinsky had his own decisions to make. He held a meeting with his junior partners, including Malashenko and Kiselev, in London to decide whether to honour his deal to sell his shares in NTV. Everyone at that meeting had a sense of déjà vu. Five years earlier, also in London, the same group had met to decide whether or not to give in to pressure and sell NTV. At the time, Malashenko was the only one who said NTV should fight back. This time he was one of the few to argue for the sale of NTV. Kiselev, on the other hand, suggested that NTV should continue to fight back. Gusinsky sided with Kiselev and told Gazprom that he was pulling out of their agreement, that he had signed under pressure. The war was on and it was played out on the screen. Each side used its professional tools. The Kremlin used a mixture of pressure and bribery. The journalists used their cameras.
But while kicking Gusinsky out of the country and stripping him of assets was a fairly straightforward task, changing the ‘software’ of the channel and bringing to heel its ‘unique journalistic team’ was more delicate.
In January 2001, Tatyana Mitkova, a popular NTV presenter, was called in for questioning by prosecutors. Her colleagues went along, filming themselves. Svetlana Sorokina, the host of a popular talk show, looked straight into the camera, and appealed directly to Putin: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, please listen to us, find time to meet with us. We are not the oligarchs, we are journalists, those who make NTV… but if tomorrow we all get summons to the prosecutors’ office, we will also consider it an answer.’22 The same day Sorokina received a friendly telephone call from Putin and an invitation to come to the Kremlin for talks along with ten other journalists, including Kiselev.
The ‘chat’ between Putin and a dozen NTV journalists went on for more than three hours. Putin was clearly well briefed and occasionally quoted from the documents supplied by the prosecutors. After listening to Putin for the first thirty minutes of the general discussion, Sorokina scribbled on a piece of a paper and passed it to her colleagues: ‘It is all useless.’ Putin clearly did not believe that the NTV journalists were speaking for themselves. As a professional KGB man, he believed in conspiracies – not people’s free will. ‘You are getting all your instructions from Gusinsky,’ he told Kiselev, looking straight in his eyes. ‘Don’t deny it. I know all about the hours and hours of conversations with Gusinsky,’ Putin said, effectively admitting that Kiselev’s phone was tapped.23
On 4 April, Gazprom staged a corporate coup, replacing NTV’s management and forcing out Kiselev as general director of the channel. In crushing Gusinsky and NTV, the Kremlin skilfully relied on the television channel’s past by setting off its former ‘victims’ against it. It appointed Alfred Kokh, the former member of Chubais’s team who had been demolished by NTV in 1997, as the head of Gazprom’s media arm which was supposed to take over NTV. Boris Jordan, an American banker of Russian descent, who had helped raise money for Potanin’s winning bid for Svyazinvest, was appointed the general director instead of Kiselev.
While the Kremlin, working through its state television channels, tried to portray its attack on NTV as a business dispute, NTV tried to present it as a fight for freedom of speech and democracy. Neither was true – at least not entirely.
Gusinsky was indeed in a vulnerable position. He owed a total of nearly $500 million to Gazprom, stemming from two loans he had taken on to finance NTV Plus, the satellite television business. The loans could have been converted into Gazprom’s shares in Media Most but the Kremlin ordered Rem Vyakhirev, the Gazprom chairman, who had plenty of reasons to fear for his own past, to dump Gusinsky. But Gusinsky was also in a vulnerable position in terms of his ‘credit history’ with the Russian public. The enormous credit which NTV received in 1993 when it first came on air had been largely used up.
Few people in Russia, including those who defended it, were prepared to think about NTV as a standard-bearer for civil liberties and freedom of speech. NTV journalists tried to draw parallels between their protests and those that had unfolded in the Czech Republic a few months earlier, where journalists from public television had gone on strike against the appointment of new managers, prompting mass demonstrations across the whole country and enlisting the support of Vaclav Havel. But the parallels were not convincing.
Tempting as it may be to portray NTV journalists as altruistic defenders of freedom of speech, it would be as misleading as to present their opponents as stewards of justice and state interests. The Kremlin attacked NTV not for its faults, but because of its merits, yet in doing so it relied on its weaknesses. Many of the journalists, spoiled and compromised by their inflated status, and their own cynicism, which they saw as an asset during the times when they were in power, evoked moral values in their time of need.
NTV’s transformation into a protest movement seemed unnatural. Journalists flew an NTV flag out of the window at the Ostankino television centre. News programmes started coming out with the NTV green logo crossed out by the word ‘protest’ in red. The slogan ‘news is our profession’ turned into ‘protest is our profession’. NTV reduced its programming to news. The rest of the air time was filled with a live feed from inside NTV’s studios and offices. This was a Big Brother reality show before the format even appeared in Russia.
The sight of Kiselev, in a dapper black coat, addressing the crowd at a public rally in his usual respectable television manner, holding hands with other correspondents and waving along to a song, seemed odd. Parfenov cringed at this stylistic clash. He published an open letter to Kiselev in the Kommersant newspaper, offering his resignation. ‘I can no longer hear your preaching in the newsroom – these ten-minute-long outbursts of hatred – and I can’t just ignore them as long as I work here,’ he wrote.24
The same day as his letter was published, Parfenov went to NTV’s studio to participate in the talk show Anthropology, which consisted entirely of NTV staff. ‘You are a traitor!’ NTV’s flamboyant night talk-show presenter, Dmitry Dibrov, shouted at him on air: ‘You have betrayed our battle for the freedom of speech! You have betrayed people who are working here!’ Ever ironic, Parfenov asked his fuming colleague: ‘Do you really think that the words “traitor”, “freedom of speech” and “battle” should be pronounced with three exclamation marks?’25 Parfenov’s stand would have looked more principled had he not accepted a generous pay offer from NTV’s new owners.
In fact, the conflict with NTV was much more about the freedom of speech than people realized. After all, freedom did not automatically imply objectivity or even quality, but merely the right to say something different without the fear of persecution. What NTV provided was not objectivity, but pluralism. Had Russia had ten other powerful private news channels with the same reach as the state ones, the fate of NTV would have mattered less. But Russia had only two state or quasi-state channels whose finances were far murkier than NTV’s. By taking over NTV, the state was not just disposing of a defiant oligarch; it was disposing of competition.