This agenda matched that of the Kremlin. Boris Jordan’s appointment had been supposed to appease the Kremlin’s critics at home and abroad, and reassure Russia’s middle class that it had been right to keep its cool during the conflict. Regardless of what people thought of Gusinsky, public opinion was not ready for an overt clampdown on the media and the Kremlin did not try to force it. On the contrary, it used NTV as its calling card that was meant to prove its economic liberalism, safe in the knowledge that it had ultimate control over it.
The limits of the Kremlin’s licence started to show a year later, during a theatre siege in Moscow. On 23 October 2002 a group of Chechen terrorists took more than 900 people hostage during the performance of a musical called Nord-Ost. There was a macabre theatricality in the siege itself. When the first terrorist clad in military camouflage and a ski mask walked on stage, fired in the air and declared everyone hostages, the audience thought it was part of the show. That Chechen fighters who were part of a different reality could burst into the comfortable life of the Moscow middle class seemed incomprehensible.
As in 1995, during the hostage-taking in Budennovsk, terrorists demanded an immediate end to the war in Chechnya. But this time nobody was willing to put the lives of hostages above the interest of the state. While negotiations with the terrorists were still going on, Channel One, now firmly under Kremlin control, poured oil onto the flames. Its commentary programme showed the old footage of Chernomyrdin negotiating with Basayev. ‘For all these seven years we have been paying a price for Budennovsk, for the unprecedented shame of political negotiations with bandits and degenerates,’ the programme said. ‘We have no intention of telling the Russian government and security services how and what should be done, because we have no reason to doubt that they are doing everything right…’31 The camera cut to Putin.
At the end of day three of the siege, the Russian security services pumped a mysterious narcotic gas into the auditorium and stormed the building, killing all the terrorists and poisoning to death more than 120 hostages. The security services then released a video of the dead terrorists. It showed some still sitting in their chairs, others lying on the floor, their faces covered in blood. The camera zoomed in and paused on their dead, disfigured faces; it showed the leader of the terrorists lying dead on the floor in a corridor with a bottle of Hennessy which had been apparently planted next to him by a journalist from Russia Channel who had previously worked at NTV. Television was changing reality even after death. State television kept showing the explosives which the terrorists could have used. Its central message was – thank God (and the Kremlin) for a successful operation. In fact, the evacuation took more than four hours. By the time the ambulances reached the hospital, many hostages, including children, were dead. Doctors did not know what they were dealing with because the security services refused to name of the gas they had used, claiming it was a state secret.
NTV’s reporting stood out. It showed the crisis unfold in real time, providing blanket coverage that included the storming of the theatre. It was the only channel that was allowed – in fact, demanded – by the hostage-takers to film inside the theatre. It aired an interview with the defiant terrorists’ leader Movsar Barayev who, as NTV pointed out, had been reported as dead only two weeks earlier by the state news agencies. It showed the protests of the hostages’ relatives, demanding an end to the Chechnya war. It hired a lip-reader to transcribe the soundless video of Putin provided by the Kremlin press service. It questioned the official line: had everything possible been done to avoid the storming of the theatre and to save the lives of the hostages?
As the death toll of hostages climbed, Putin made a televised statement – asking forgiveness for not having been able to save everyone. The terrorists, he said, had no future, ‘but we have’. None of those who planned or executed the rescue operation was reprimanded. As in the Kursk disaster, he shifted the blame onto television, accusing NTV of endangering the lives of hostages by showing the preparations for the storming of the theatre. Putin summoned news executives to the Kremlin and angrily told them that ‘journalists should not ply their trade on the blood of their own citizens – if, of course, those who do this consider these citizens to be their own’. The remark was clearly addressed to NTV’s general director Boris Jordan, who was poignantly not invited to the meeting. A pragmatic investment banker, Jordan resigned with a handsome pay-off from Gazprom.
The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, held regular meetings with media chiefs. ‘The meetings which we have had before have yielded results: we have a mutual understanding and a certain trust. At the end of the day we are doing one job: working for society, working for the state,’ he declared.32
Parfenov stayed on at NTV for another couple of years. ‘I knew it was a matter of time before Namedni would get shut down. But I continued to chirrup for as long as I could,’ he said.33 Parfenov’s ‘chirruping’ was entertaining and ultimately projected optimism. However serious or grim the subject matter was, his style was playful and ironic. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest tycoon and Putin’s opponent, was arrested in 2003, Parfenov called it ‘Khodorkost’ and invited a popular stand-up comedian to come on the programme to parody Putin’s angry speech in which he had told his ministers ‘to stop the hysteria and speculations and not to interfere in the case’. The comedian mimicked the speech and commented on Putin’s psychological state. Namedni called the item ‘Starting Hysteria’.
The last straw, perhaps, was Namedni’s coverage of Putin’s inauguration in 2004 that mixed images of the actual ceremony with scenes from The Barber of Siberia, a kitsch fiction film set in the time of Tsar Alexander III. Putin’s arrival at the Kremlin in a black limousine was mixed with the arrival of Alexander III on a white horse; when Putin addressed the Kremlin guards, he got a reply from Alexander III’s soldiers. Playfully, Namedni was putting across a serious message: Putin’s ceremony was a coronation of a new monarch, rather than the inauguration of a president.
Yet, however ‘clever’ this interchange between documentary and fiction was, it was a very postmodernist attitude to reality – not as something fixed, but as something that could be constructed and deconstructed, cut and pasted. Parfenov used the device to deliver a true message. But there was nothing to stop his followers from using it to deliver a fake one. It was all relative. In June 2004 Parfenov was sacked and Namedni was shut down. Parfenov’s ‘chirruping’ was out of tune with the new order that started to emerge in Putin’s second presidential term. The time for jokes and jokers was over. The events that were taking place in the country, including the arrest of Khodorkovsky, the destruction of the Yukos oil company and the occasional of acts of terror, were too serious and complex to be described through the wordplay and sarcasm that Parfenov had turned into his house style. Parfenov admitted that much, but not until six years later, when he delivered an explosive speech which was filled with sincere civic pathos.
He spoke at an elegant black-tie ceremony, where he received an award set up in memory of Vladislav Listyev, an iconic Russian journalist and showman, who was murdered in 1995. Standing in front of Russia’s powerful TV executives, Parfenov told them what he thought about the state of their industry. ‘Our television is getting more sophisticated at exciting, enticing, entertaining and making [the audience] laugh, but it can hardly be called a civic or public political institution.’ For a reporter on Russian state television, said a visibly nervous Parfenov, ‘top bureaucrats are not newsmakers, but his boss’s bosses’. This means that ‘journalists are not journalists at all but bureaucrats, following the logic of service and submission’.34