It was a situation that required me too to take a stand. In response to a request from the management and staff of NTV, I agreed to chair a public council to advise the television station. Its board included the editor of Obshchaya Gazeta, Yegor Yakovlev, and of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov; Academicians Oleg Bogomolov and a former Russian ambassador to France, Yury Ryzhov; the secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, Mikhail Fedotov, one of the authors of the Russian Federation law ‘On the Media’; the director-general of the Russian PEN Centre, Alexander Tkachenko; the artistic director of the Taganka Theatre, Yury Lyubimov; the writer Chingiz Aitmatov; playwright Alexander Gelman; and the dean of Moscow University’s faculty of journalism, Yasen Zasursky. The response to these efforts to safeguard an independent television channel was the arrest of the head of Media-Most, Vladimir Gusinsky.
In this incident, there was obviously a power struggle going on between groups exerting influence on the president, one of which was eager to grab a profitable news asset. The main aim, though, was clearly to rein in the media and show who was the boss in control of information in Russia. NTV was subjected to a systematic siege using a whole barrage of approaches, from tax inspections and attempts to bankrupt the channel to the rearrest of the previously released Gusinsky in Spain at the request of Russian law-enforcement agencies.
In my public statements, I did not hold Vladimir Putin personally responsible for actions that NTV’s Public Council described as ‘deliberate measures to eliminate not only NTV but also other independent mass media as channels for the expressing of dissent and independent views in society’. I tried to leave the president room to prevent escalation of these moves. We had a meeting in late September at which Putin said he was not intervening in the NTV situation, which he described as a dispute between two commercial players: Media-Most and Gazprom-Media. ‘I am all in favour of independent and objective media’, Putin declared. Who could take issue with that? In talking to journalists, I passed on the president’s assurances that he favoured preserving NTV and its team of journalists. It became clear, however, that events were moving at an increasingly rapid pace in the opposite direction. By the year’s end NTV was unmistakably doomed. It fell victim to predatory business interests that pulverized Media-Most and which, shortly afterwards, were themselves elbowed aside by people even more devious and calculating. The Russian media were dealt a heavy blow and everybody was given a clear signal that if they did not submit and do as they were told, it would be the worse for them.
What is Glasnost?
The struggle over NTV in which I took part was, of course, only one battle in a war over the freedom of Russia’s media. For me, that was at the time, and still is, a matter of fundamental importance. The issue at stake was a crucial legacy of Perestroika – Glasnost, transparency and free speech.
What is Glasnost? Dmitry Medvedev, during his spell some years later as president, said on one occasion that Glasnost was a ‘palliative’: ‘I am opposed to Glasnost. It is a defective term. What is needed is free speech, but Glasnost is a palliative, cooked up in the Soviet period in order to avoid giving the concept its proper name.’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself once said, probably in a fit of pique, because he too was pained by what was happening in Russia: ‘Everything was wrecked by Gorbachev’s Glasnost.’ He had forgotten what he himself said in 1967:
Honest and total Glasnost is a prerequisite for any healthy society, including ours. Anybody who does not desire Glasnost for our country is no patriot and is thinking only of his own self-interest. Anybody who does not wish Glasnost for our fatherland does not want to rid it of its ills but only to drive them inwards and let them fester there.
In the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary, published between 1890 and 1913, the concept is very precisely defined: ‘In a state governed under the rule of law, Glasnost is one of the guarantees of the proper functioning of the institutions of political power and social organizations.’ It is not the only guarantee, but it is essential, and before Perestroika we did not have it in Russia.
To try to set Glasnost against freedom of speech is profoundly misguided. Glasnost, as I understood it from the very outset, includes having the opportunity to express your own opinion, to debate, to criticize the government and demand change, but encompasses more than that. Glasnost is transparency in all society’s doings, transparency in the government itself, its public accountability, its willingness to engage in dialogue with the people. We had none of that before Perestroika. If it had not been for Glasnost, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have been chopping firewood in the state of Vermont for a long time to come and the majority of Russian citizens would have known nothing of his books; Dmitry Medvedev would probably still be giving lectures to university students.
That is why, after standing down from the presidency, I felt duty-bound to fight for the freedom of the media, for Glasnost, for transparency of government. I did it in different ways: not only in speeches, but also by such acts as supporting the NTV team and becoming involved in the future of Novaya Gazeta, which had been started by journalists from Komsomolskaya Pravda who could not stomach its ‘tabloidization’. At the outset, while they were finding their feet, I gave them support, including financial support; and later, when they were in difficulties, I gave them moral support, joining in the debate about the future direction and content of the paper, gave them interviews and published my articles there. The newspaper has become, it can be said without exaggeration, the boldest and most uncompromising of all the Russian press outlets. Its investigative journalism has been fearless and its sense of civic responsibility has not faltered. The newspaper faced difficulties on more than one occasion and found itself on the verge of closure. It was not just the difficulties confronting all the press in new circumstances where people increasingly get their news from television, radio and, particularly, the Internet. The newspaper was subjected to pressure in different ways, and the government did not shun even ‘special operations’.
When the situation was critical and it was clear that we really needed to put our shoulders to the wheel, I and Alexander Lebedev, a well-known businessman, decided to become shareholders of Novaya Gazeta. In the case of Alexander, this involved a serious financial commitment, whereas on my part it was more a matter of moral support. At the same time we agreed not to interfere in the work of the editorial staff. I was very impressed by Alexander’s position on that. He is a strong, concerned individual. Having achieved success in business, he entered politics, stood in the election of the mayor of Moscow, became a deputy of the State Duma and was active in social and charitable projects.
His support made it possible to complete the building and equipping of the Raisa Gorbacheva Centre for Paediatric Oncology and Haematology in St Petersburg. The centre opened in the year of the city’s tercentenary and is working successfully today, saving the lives of hundreds of children.