Man the Barricades
David Remnick writes about attacks on press freedom in Russia in this article from The New Yorker magazine which is quite measured and well balanced if you ask me.
The first sentence is what really captured my attention - the liberating events surrounding President Gorbachev's new policy of glasnost in the Soviet Union which were embraced with great enthusiasm by people inside and outside the country at the time, including David Remnick.
But less so, I imagine, by figures such as Vladimir Putin who worked for the KGB during that period and now regards the break up of the Soviet Union as one of the greatest disasters of the 20th century - as do some left wing political commentators in the UK, of course.
The irony is that if the press and media were being attacked and manipulated in this way in the UK, then Guardian journalists like Seumas Milne would be calling for the people to rise up and man the barricades against a tyrannical government.
A strange way to behave, if you ask me.
PUTIN MOVES AGAINST THE PRESS
POSTED BY DAVID REMNICK
One of the most riveting and liberating events of postwar life was the Soviet policy of glasnost, the Gorbachev-era explosion of media. The euphoria came not from the means of transmission but, rather, from what was being transmitted—and read, and heard, and seen. After decades of totalist censorship, after art, history, science, journalism, philosophy, and so much else had languished under the state, Gorbachev, particularly in the years from 1987 to 1990, unleashed everything. The thrill of this was unimaginable. After so much gray, color; after so many lies, truth, debate, discussion. And it was glasnost that led to everything else, from a full reckoning with the Soviet past to a debate about the way to go on, to live, to organize society.
Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
The announcement came shortly after an agency called the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service (oh, Orwell!) warned that Lenta.ru was venturing into “extremism.” Lenta.ru had published an interview with Andriy Tarasenko, a leader of a far-right ultra-nationalist group, Right Sector. Part of the Kremlin’s pretext for the invasion of Ukraine has been to “protect” Russians from “fascists.” Tarasenko is an unlovely figure, but Lenta.ru was hardly endorsing him; the editors were guilty of nothing more than committing journalism. And now they are paying for it.
In recent years, when Russian liberals have tried to sound optimistic, they have invariably said, Well, at least they haven’t cracked down on the Internet the way the Chinese have. Lenta.ru is one Web site, not the entire Russian-language Web, to be sure, but today’s firing is still an important and ominous step. Lenta.ru was getting more than thirteen million unique visitors a month, and was far more direct and critically minded than anything on state television or in most print publications. Some staff writers and editors have said that they will leave rather than work with Goreslavsky. They have no doubt that responsibility for today’s firing lay with Putin and his circle.
Seventy-nine staffers at Lenta.ru issued a statement of angry protest, reading, “Over the past couple of years, the space of free journalism in Russia has dramatically decreased. Some publications are directly controlled by the Kremlin, others through curators, and others by editors who fear losing their jobs. Some media outlets have been closed and others will be closed in the coming months. The problem is not that we have nowhere to run. The problem is that you have nothing more to read.”
In addition, according to the Moscow Times, Ilya Krasilshchik, an employee of one of Lenta.ru’s sister companies, wrote a profoundly frustrated, expletive-laden post on Facebook whacking Goreslavsky for being little more than “friends with the Kremlin.” He concluded on a note of despair: “Advice for beginning journalists: pick a new profession.”
This comes shortly after Dozhd (Rain)—an independent television station that dared to cover things from the pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow, two years ago, to the anti-government demonstrations in Kiev, this winter—was dumped by major cable operators. The pretext was that it had issued an offensive poll question about the siege of Leningrad. The Kremlin pressured the leadership of the radio station Ekho Moskvi (the Echo of Moscow), which has an older, liberal audience and an often daring slate of discussion programs, to dump its general director and bring in someone from the conservative Voice of Russia. The leadership of the social-network site VKontakte (In Contact) “switched”; its founder lost control of the site to Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch with ties to the Kremlin.
Last December, Putin dissolved the RIA Novosti news agency and created a new one called Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today). He placed in charge one Dmitry Kiselyov, an odious and unembarrassed reactionary whose contribution to the debate over anti-gay propaganda legislation was to say that the internal organs of homosexuals who die in car accidents should be burned rather than risk their being transplanted into the bodies of the living.
In each individual case, the degree of censorship and pressure is hardly Stalinist in degree. Putin’s media strategy is more sophisticated than that. (The book-publishing industry has remained quite free and unchanged in recent years.) The sophistication of it is that Putin exerts just enough control (blacklisting certain known dissident voices from state television, for example), and punishes just enough of his opponents, to set markers—boundaries of the permissible. Sometimes those boundaries are crossed, but a general tone has been set.
And the tone, now that Putin is cracking down more at home and exerting military strength in Ukraine, is ever darker. Putin will not undo glasnost. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. But his notion of what constitutes the proper control of media is expanding, it seems, week by week.
Above: Galina Timchenko, the former editor of Lenta.ru. Photograph by Stanislav Krasilnikov/ITAR-TASS.
Here's an interesting article on the background to events in Ukraine by the Pullitzer Prize winning author David Remnick who writes on a regular basis for The New Yorker magazine.
PUTIN’S PIQUE
One of the most riveting and liberating events of postwar life was the Soviet policy of glasnost, the Gorbachev-era explosion of media. The euphoria came not from the means of transmission but, rather, from what was being transmitted—and read, and heard, and seen. After decades of totalist censorship, after art, history, science, journalism, philosophy, and so much else had languished under the state, Gorbachev, particularly in the years from 1987 to 1990, unleashed everything. The thrill of this was unimaginable. After so much gray, color; after so many lies, truth, debate, discussion. And it was glasnost that led to everything else, from a full reckoning with the Soviet past to a debate about the way to go on, to live, to organize society.
Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
The announcement came shortly after an agency called the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service (oh, Orwell!) warned that Lenta.ru was venturing into “extremism.” Lenta.ru had published an interview with Andriy Tarasenko, a leader of a far-right ultra-nationalist group, Right Sector. Part of the Kremlin’s pretext for the invasion of Ukraine has been to “protect” Russians from “fascists.” Tarasenko is an unlovely figure, but Lenta.ru was hardly endorsing him; the editors were guilty of nothing more than committing journalism. And now they are paying for it.
In recent years, when Russian liberals have tried to sound optimistic, they have invariably said, Well, at least they haven’t cracked down on the Internet the way the Chinese have. Lenta.ru is one Web site, not the entire Russian-language Web, to be sure, but today’s firing is still an important and ominous step. Lenta.ru was getting more than thirteen million unique visitors a month, and was far more direct and critically minded than anything on state television or in most print publications. Some staff writers and editors have said that they will leave rather than work with Goreslavsky. They have no doubt that responsibility for today’s firing lay with Putin and his circle.
Seventy-nine staffers at Lenta.ru issued a statement of angry protest, reading, “Over the past couple of years, the space of free journalism in Russia has dramatically decreased. Some publications are directly controlled by the Kremlin, others through curators, and others by editors who fear losing their jobs. Some media outlets have been closed and others will be closed in the coming months. The problem is not that we have nowhere to run. The problem is that you have nothing more to read.”
In addition, according to the Moscow Times, Ilya Krasilshchik, an employee of one of Lenta.ru’s sister companies, wrote a profoundly frustrated, expletive-laden post on Facebook whacking Goreslavsky for being little more than “friends with the Kremlin.” He concluded on a note of despair: “Advice for beginning journalists: pick a new profession.”
This comes shortly after Dozhd (Rain)—an independent television station that dared to cover things from the pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow, two years ago, to the anti-government demonstrations in Kiev, this winter—was dumped by major cable operators. The pretext was that it had issued an offensive poll question about the siege of Leningrad. The Kremlin pressured the leadership of the radio station Ekho Moskvi (the Echo of Moscow), which has an older, liberal audience and an often daring slate of discussion programs, to dump its general director and bring in someone from the conservative Voice of Russia. The leadership of the social-network site VKontakte (In Contact) “switched”; its founder lost control of the site to Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch with ties to the Kremlin.
Last December, Putin dissolved the RIA Novosti news agency and created a new one called Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today). He placed in charge one Dmitry Kiselyov, an odious and unembarrassed reactionary whose contribution to the debate over anti-gay propaganda legislation was to say that the internal organs of homosexuals who die in car accidents should be burned rather than risk their being transplanted into the bodies of the living.
In each individual case, the degree of censorship and pressure is hardly Stalinist in degree. Putin’s media strategy is more sophisticated than that. (The book-publishing industry has remained quite free and unchanged in recent years.) The sophistication of it is that Putin exerts just enough control (blacklisting certain known dissident voices from state television, for example), and punishes just enough of his opponents, to set markers—boundaries of the permissible. Sometimes those boundaries are crossed, but a general tone has been set.
And the tone, now that Putin is cracking down more at home and exerting military strength in Ukraine, is ever darker. Putin will not undo glasnost. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. But his notion of what constitutes the proper control of media is expanding, it seems, week by week.
Above: Galina Timchenko, the former editor of Lenta.ru. Photograph by Stanislav Krasilnikov/ITAR-TASS.
Putin's Pique (9 March 2014)
Here's an interesting article on the background to events in Ukraine by the Pullitzer Prize winning author David Remnick who writes on a regular basis for The New Yorker magazine.
As a former Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post newspaper in 1988 Remnick was well placed to observe the political collapse of the Soviet Union first hand and I have read his excellent book about the life and times of Muhammad Ali - 'King of the World'.
Not a title I imagine Remnick using if he ever writes a no holds barred biography of Vladimir Putin.
Not a title I imagine Remnick using if he ever writes a no holds barred biography of Vladimir Putin.
PUTIN’S PIQUE
In 1990, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from his isolation in Cavendish, Vermont, and issued a vatic manifesto entitled “How to Revitalize Russia.” Published at great length inKomsomolskaya Pravda, it was a document out of time, written in a prophetic nineteenth-century voice, with archaic diction and priestly cadences. Solzhenitsyn, a heroic dissident, was always at the nationalist end of the spectrum, but he was not calling for some sort of tsarist revival and imperial maintenance. Rather, he endorsed a hyper-local, Swiss-style democratic politics, a transition to private property, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “We do not have the energy to run an Empire!” he wrote. “Let us shrug it off. It is crushing us, it is draining us, and it is accelerating our demise.” Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, along with the Caucasian republics, were to make their own way. But on the question of Ukraine he had a different view. Russia must be at the center of a “Russian union,” he declared, and Ukraine was integral to it.
At the time, Ukrainian nationalists, particularly in the western part of the republic, were joining the Baltic states in their bold drive for independence, and had formed a “people’s movement” called Rukh. Leonid Kravchuk, a dreary Communist Party hack who had previously shown nothing but indifference to Ukrainian nationalism, won the Presidency, in 1991, by deciding to stand with Rukh. This was a trend that Solzhenitsyn, in the woods of New England, and so many Russians throughout the Soviet Union, could not easily abide. It defied their sense of history. To them, Ukraine was no more a real nation than Glubbdubdrib or Freedonia. Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the K.G.B., was the first post-Soviet leader to deliver a state prize to Solzhenitsyn, who had spent a lifetime in a death struggle with the K.G.B.; a large part of their common ground was a rough notion of what Russia encompassed. As Putin told the second President Bush, “You have to understand, George. Ukraine is not even a country.”
Solzhenitsyn, one of the great truth-tellers of the twentieth century, harbored an exceedingly benign view of one of the more ominous figures of the twenty-first. Putin is an unabashed authoritarian. He masks the Pharaonic enrichment of his political circle by projecting an austere image of shrewd bluster and manly bravado. He is also the sum of his resentments. His outrage over the uprising in Kiev, like his subsequent decision to invade Crimea, is stoked by a powerful suspicion of Western motives and hypocrisies. Putin absorbed the eastward expansion of nato; attacks on his abysmal record on human rights and civil society; and the “color” revolutions in Tbilisi and Kiev—even the revolts in Tehran, Tunis, Cairo, Manama, and Damascus—as intimations of his own political mortality. He sees everything from the National Endowment for Democracy to the American Embassy in Moscow as an outpost of a plot against him. And the U.S. clearly does want to curb his influence; we can’t pretend that he’s entirely crazy to think so. The Olympics was his multi-billion-ruble reassertion of Russian power on the level of pop culture; the invasion of Crimea is a reassertion of Russian power in the harsher currency of arms and intimidation.
The invasion demands condemnation: Ukraine is a sovereign state; it has been for a generation. Its cultural, linguistic, and historical affinities with Russia do not make it a Russian vassal. Putin’s pretext—that frightened masses of Russian-speakers in Crimea and eastern Ukraine were under physical threat from “fascists,” and were crying out for “fraternal assistance” from Russia—is a fiction generated by his intelligence services and propagated by Russian state television. (Pro-Russian Cossacks in Crimea are no less anti-Semitic than the racists among the Ukrainian nationalists—something you are not likely to learn on Channel One, in Moscow.)
Putin’s aggression took Western leaders—especially Barack Obama and Angela Merkel—too much by surprise, but they have acted since with clarity and prudence. The decision to forgo martial threats and to concentrate on strong economic sanctions and diplomatic exertions is, in a world of radically limited options, wise. But not all those most directly involved in this crisis evince an understanding of the complicated politics of Ukraine. It is worth remembering that, in the back-and-forth of Ukrainian governments since 1991, both the pro-Russian leaders, like Viktor Yanukovych, and the pro-Europeans, like Yulia Tymoshenko, have been brazen thieves, enriching themselves at fantastical rates. Both sides have played one half of the country against the other. And the fact that the protests in Kiev were not, as Moscow claims, dominated by fascists and ultra-nationalists does not mean that such elements are absent from the scene. Ukraine has yet to develop the politicians that its fragile condition and its dire economy demand. In December, when John McCain spoke to demonstrators in Kiev’s Independence Square, he stood side by side with Oleh Tyahnybok, who was once expelled from his parliamentary faction after demanding battle with “the Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” Perhaps this was bad advance work from team McCain—much like the advance work on the Sarah Palin nomination—but it did manage to fuel Moscow’s bonfire of suspicion.
McCain’s allies in the Senate have shared his propensity for incautious grandstanding. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who is facing a Republican primary challenge from his right, says that the invasion of Crimea “started with Benghazi.” He tweeted, “When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression.” And McCain, who alternates with Graham as the voice of the G.O.P. in foreign affairs, told aipac that the invasion was “the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.” Soon Hillary Clinton, who should know better, pitched in with an unhelpful analogy to Hitler.
Right now, Putin retains his familiar strut and disdain. His opposition at home is on tenterhooks, fearing a comprehensive crackdown, and the West, which dreams of his coöperation in Syria and Iran, is reluctant to press him too hard. But it may be that his adventure in Crimea—and not the American Embassy in Moscow—will undo him. Last month, a Kremlin-sponsored poll showed that seventy-three per cent of Russians opposed interfering in the political confrontations in Kiev. The Kremlin has proved since that it has the means, and the media, to gin up support for Putin’s folly—but that won’t last indefinitely.
In other words, Putin risks alienating himself not only from the West and Ukraine, to say nothing of the global economy he dearly wants to join, but from Russia itself. His dreams of staying in office until 2024, of being the most formidable state-builder in Russian history since Peter the Great, may yet founder on the peninsula of Crimea. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL
At the time, Ukrainian nationalists, particularly in the western part of the republic, were joining the Baltic states in their bold drive for independence, and had formed a “people’s movement” called Rukh. Leonid Kravchuk, a dreary Communist Party hack who had previously shown nothing but indifference to Ukrainian nationalism, won the Presidency, in 1991, by deciding to stand with Rukh. This was a trend that Solzhenitsyn, in the woods of New England, and so many Russians throughout the Soviet Union, could not easily abide. It defied their sense of history. To them, Ukraine was no more a real nation than Glubbdubdrib or Freedonia. Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the K.G.B., was the first post-Soviet leader to deliver a state prize to Solzhenitsyn, who had spent a lifetime in a death struggle with the K.G.B.; a large part of their common ground was a rough notion of what Russia encompassed. As Putin told the second President Bush, “You have to understand, George. Ukraine is not even a country.”
Solzhenitsyn, one of the great truth-tellers of the twentieth century, harbored an exceedingly benign view of one of the more ominous figures of the twenty-first. Putin is an unabashed authoritarian. He masks the Pharaonic enrichment of his political circle by projecting an austere image of shrewd bluster and manly bravado. He is also the sum of his resentments. His outrage over the uprising in Kiev, like his subsequent decision to invade Crimea, is stoked by a powerful suspicion of Western motives and hypocrisies. Putin absorbed the eastward expansion of nato; attacks on his abysmal record on human rights and civil society; and the “color” revolutions in Tbilisi and Kiev—even the revolts in Tehran, Tunis, Cairo, Manama, and Damascus—as intimations of his own political mortality. He sees everything from the National Endowment for Democracy to the American Embassy in Moscow as an outpost of a plot against him. And the U.S. clearly does want to curb his influence; we can’t pretend that he’s entirely crazy to think so. The Olympics was his multi-billion-ruble reassertion of Russian power on the level of pop culture; the invasion of Crimea is a reassertion of Russian power in the harsher currency of arms and intimidation.
The invasion demands condemnation: Ukraine is a sovereign state; it has been for a generation. Its cultural, linguistic, and historical affinities with Russia do not make it a Russian vassal. Putin’s pretext—that frightened masses of Russian-speakers in Crimea and eastern Ukraine were under physical threat from “fascists,” and were crying out for “fraternal assistance” from Russia—is a fiction generated by his intelligence services and propagated by Russian state television. (Pro-Russian Cossacks in Crimea are no less anti-Semitic than the racists among the Ukrainian nationalists—something you are not likely to learn on Channel One, in Moscow.)
Putin’s aggression took Western leaders—especially Barack Obama and Angela Merkel—too much by surprise, but they have acted since with clarity and prudence. The decision to forgo martial threats and to concentrate on strong economic sanctions and diplomatic exertions is, in a world of radically limited options, wise. But not all those most directly involved in this crisis evince an understanding of the complicated politics of Ukraine. It is worth remembering that, in the back-and-forth of Ukrainian governments since 1991, both the pro-Russian leaders, like Viktor Yanukovych, and the pro-Europeans, like Yulia Tymoshenko, have been brazen thieves, enriching themselves at fantastical rates. Both sides have played one half of the country against the other. And the fact that the protests in Kiev were not, as Moscow claims, dominated by fascists and ultra-nationalists does not mean that such elements are absent from the scene. Ukraine has yet to develop the politicians that its fragile condition and its dire economy demand. In December, when John McCain spoke to demonstrators in Kiev’s Independence Square, he stood side by side with Oleh Tyahnybok, who was once expelled from his parliamentary faction after demanding battle with “the Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” Perhaps this was bad advance work from team McCain—much like the advance work on the Sarah Palin nomination—but it did manage to fuel Moscow’s bonfire of suspicion.
McCain’s allies in the Senate have shared his propensity for incautious grandstanding. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who is facing a Republican primary challenge from his right, says that the invasion of Crimea “started with Benghazi.” He tweeted, “When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression.” And McCain, who alternates with Graham as the voice of the G.O.P. in foreign affairs, told aipac that the invasion was “the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.” Soon Hillary Clinton, who should know better, pitched in with an unhelpful analogy to Hitler.
Right now, Putin retains his familiar strut and disdain. His opposition at home is on tenterhooks, fearing a comprehensive crackdown, and the West, which dreams of his coöperation in Syria and Iran, is reluctant to press him too hard. But it may be that his adventure in Crimea—and not the American Embassy in Moscow—will undo him. Last month, a Kremlin-sponsored poll showed that seventy-three per cent of Russians opposed interfering in the political confrontations in Kiev. The Kremlin has proved since that it has the means, and the media, to gin up support for Putin’s folly—but that won’t last indefinitely.
In other words, Putin risks alienating himself not only from the West and Ukraine, to say nothing of the global economy he dearly wants to join, but from Russia itself. His dreams of staying in office until 2024, of being the most formidable state-builder in Russian history since Peter the Great, may yet founder on the peninsula of Crimea. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL
