NewsMax.com
Wednesday, March 7, 2001

Under any circumstances, NTV is a prime target of Russia’s security forces because it is owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, the former oligarch whose arrest and imprisonment stirred international protests. Since his release he has fled Russia and is living in exile. NTV’s bank accounts have been frozen, according to Britain's Sunday Telegraph, which reported that the offices of its parent company, Media-Most, have been raided by armed tax police.

Journalists working for Media-Most, which owns newspapers, magazines and Moscow's only independent news radio station, Ekho Moskvy, report that have been harassed, denied admittance to government press conferences and even given unsolicited assignments from state-owned media groups that somehow have obtained their home telephone numbers.

Most observers say it is only a matter of time before Media-Most and its NTV are seized by the government.

Alexei Venediktov, the chief editor of the radio station, Ekho Moskvy, told the Telegraph that Putin told a recent meeting of Media-Most's journalists: "Your job is to support the state." Venediktov said he was stunned by Putin's "profoundly Soviet worldview."

"I told him, 'We are not an instrument of the state,' " he told the Telegraph. "He didn't know what I was talking about. He thinks that there is state press and anti-state press. He actually doesn't understand that the press might play an independent role in a civil society."

According to the Telegraph, there are "dark rumors" circulating about Gusinsky's behavior. He borrowed large sums from Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas giant whose interests are closely tied to Putin's. It has filed suit for its money, which it wants in the form of controlling interest in Media-Most – a tactic that would spell the end of NTV's independence.

Where financial pressure doesn't work in subduing Russia's free press, Soviet-style terror tactics are being used.

For example, at Novaya Gazeta, a feisty Moscow biweekly newspaper with a circulation of about 100,000, the Telegraph reports that one journalist has been murdered and another unexpectedly arrested last week in Chechnya. Still another journalist, Oleg Lurye, was recently beaten unconscious by thugs, who then carved deep scars in his face with a knife. Lurye had published a series of articles about corruption in high places and, undaunted, says he will continue to do so.

The paper's editor in chief admits that even he has a "feeling of threat" that he never had before. He told the Telegraph that advertisers have begun to drift away. Last year, the journal was subjected to almost 30 "tax inspections," the established method of state harassment in a country where the tax laws are so complex and so contradictory that it is all but impossible for any company to comply with them.

Last summer, the Bashkir authorities laid siege to the region's only independent radio station for nine days, then stormed the offices and led the station's employees away in handcuffs.

"What remains of an independent press elsewhere in Russia is dead or dying, while there is a simultaneous growth in fear of speaking out against the powers-that-be," warns the Sunday Telegraph.

"The Glasnost Defense Foundation, which monitors press and broadcasting, reckons that only about a quarter of the country's media are now nominally in private hands and, even then, many owners are businessmen who front for the state authorities."

With NTV out of the picture, Russia could soon look like "Russia of the 1970s," according to one press freedom advocate. There would be, he speculated, a vast state propaganda machine and a tiny group of barely tolerated "dissidents" opposing it. The Russia of the 1970s is, by the way, Brezhnev's stultifying Russia – in which Vladimir Putin came of age, and upon which he often looks back with nostalgia.

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