The people who realized this were not NTV’s young audience, but the very same ‘relics’ of the Soviet intelligentsia who had seen it all before. A group of Russian intellectuals – poets, artists and journalists – published a letter in defence of NTV under the headline: ‘IT IS TIME TO GET WORRIED’. ‘The political motive of the persecution [of NTV] is clear: suppression of dissent in the country… Meantime, Russian society watches everything that is going on with cold detachment, creating the impression that defending freedom of speech is a private problem for NTV. This is a dangerous misconception. We have no doubt that the political consequences of NTV passing over to state control will affect everyone.’26
The letter, both in its language and its arguments, firmly belonged to the tradition of the 1960s generation. It was signed, among others, by Yegor Yakovlev and published in Obshchaya gazeta, which he edited. A decade after its first emergency issues in August 1991, it printed 300,000 copies of another ‘emergency’ issue entirely dedicated to the takeover of NTV.[2]
In his own article, Yegor blasted Putin’s cynicism. ‘First of all Vladimir Putin is not a man of his word. He swore his sympathy for an independent media and he has blessed its crucifixion… There are many people of my profession – not to mention members of the Duma – who would prefer to stand aside. Believe me – I have witnessed this more than once: you think you are just washing your hands of something and then you end up to your ears in shit.’27
The paper was distributed freely among some 20,000 people who came to protest against NTV’s takeover in Moscow and St Petersburg. The atmosphere of those demonstrations was reminiscent of the democratic marches of the late Perestroika years held in front of Moskovskie novosti.
The 1960s generation which NTV came to replace was the one that rushed to its defence, while its target audience – the young, smart, energetic, self-sufficient capitalist crowd – ‘kept their cool’ and watched the conflict over NTV as though it was a reality show. This is what NTV had taught them to do over the years. After all it was ‘normal television’ for a ‘normal country’ that propagated the idea of a calm, private, bourgeois life.
The television drama culminated in a showdown at 4 a.m. on 14 April 2001 and resembled a military takeover. The eighth floor of the Ostankino television centre, where NTV’s studios were based, was sealed off by tough private security men. Some members of Kiselev’s team were barred from entering the studios, but the cameras kept rolling, capturing Oleg Dobrodeev, one of the founders of NTV, and now head of state television, trying to calm down his former colleagues. Most refused to speak to him or shake his hand. After a sleepless night, the team of NTV journalists, including Sorokina and Shenderovich, walked out, taking with them their own photographic portraits that had hung in the corridors. They crossed the street and reported the night’s drama from a borrowed studio. NTV itself came out with the usual, calm morning bulletin. The takeover of NTV was just one of the news items.
One could end the narrative of NTV here, blaming its destruction purely on Putin and leaving the few last honest NTV journalists as noble knights fighting for their freedom, but the picture would be incomplete. ‘The unique journalistic team’ first took refuge at a small cable channel owned by Berezovsky and then migrated to TSN, a channel that was owned by the Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich. Kiselev, who became its editor-in-chief, trod the line carefully this time. When the channel folded a few months later through a lack of financing nobody batted an eyelid. The ‘unique journalistic team’ expired with a whimper. The Kremlin broke NTV not just financially, but morally. The victory had been shockingly easy to achieve. Grilled by foreign journalists about the freedom of speech in Russia, Putin answered crudely: ‘A real man always tries. A real woman always resists.’28 To extend the metaphor, many Russian television journalists did not resist the embraces of the new powers.
The attraction of highly paid jobs, celebrity status and influence turned out to be stronger than the desire for free expression. ‘Ten years ago Russian journalists thought they were the fourth estate, but they have now been told by the president that they are the world’s oldest profession,’ Petrovskaya said at the time.29 Many of those who stormed out of NTV’s studios in 2001 soon flocked back, offering their services to the new powers and ultimately turned NTV into one of the most malicious channels even by the standards of state television.
It was NTV that in the 2010s harassed opposition leaders and foreign diplomats, slinging mud at liberals such as Boris Nemtsov. It was NTV’s Andrei Norkin – one of those who had stormed out of NTV’s studio in 2001 – who just hours after Nemtsov was killed in February 2015 hosted a twisted talk show that portrayed him as a source of all evil. But that was later.
Dolce Vita and Blood, Sweat and Tears
In 2001 the transition was not immediately visible. In fact, if anything, the channel became livelier, more entertaining and sleek. NTV continued its critical coverage of the Chechnya war and showed no more reverence for the Kremlin than any Western television channel did at the time. It even launched a talk show called Freedom of Speech. Parfenov returned to the channel, replacing Kiselev as its main political anchorman.
The protest rhetoric and moralizing vanished. Namedni replaced Kiselev’s Itogi as the main political programme of the week. Where Kiselev had preached, Parfenov informed and entertained. Where Kiselev had used meaningful pauses to underscore the gravity of his subject, Parfenov used half-squinting irony and sarcasm to show that no subject was too grave for a good pun.
The makers of Namedni put together a written set of rules which they referred to as the ‘bible’. The programme, it prescribed, should keep a balance between ‘dolce vita’ and ‘blood, sweat and tears’. It must not look too rich: ‘Yes, we are urban and well-to-do, but we also know how others live.’ However, the element of ‘dolce vita’ dominated and when Namedni’s correspondents travelled to the depths of Russia, it seemed like an exotic travelogue feature about the life of an indigenous population.
A dull business story about Putin and Silvio Berlusconi opening a new factory line of Italian washing machines in Russia was illustrated with the washing machine itself brought into the studio. Speaking to the camera next to the washing machine, Parfenov looked like he was advertising it (advertising became one of Parfenov’s main trades after he left television). The main object of Parfenov’s ‘advertisements’, however, was Russian liberalism and its middle-class lifestyle. And like any advertisement it made it look far more attractive than the reality. ‘We portrayed Russia as more liberal than it really was,’ he said later.30
In his contract with NTV Parfenov’s official job description had been mistyped as ‘chief programmer’ (instead of ‘programme chief’) and in many ways Namedni did programme Russia as the liberal country he wished it to be – one where people don’t climb barricades and talk about politics but enjoy individual freedoms to consume and to travel. Liberalism, he used to say, was not in political slogans, but on the Internet, in coffee shops, in fashion boutiques, in trips abroad and pedestrianized streets. In this sense, Russia was certainly getting more liberal. NTV fitted perfectly into this picture, showcasing Russian capitalists, praising their initiative and individual talents.