Word: putin
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...Fetisov, who says he was privately recruited by President Vladimir Putin, took the job, and he now has to struggle with both the past and the present problems of Russian hockey. He must negotiate with the same hockey authorities who tried to derail him--and who still hate him for opening the floodgates out of Russia to the riches of the NHL for many players after him. Those players are now millionaire hockey stars, and although they owe their careers to Fetisov's bravery, he has nothing with which to recruit them for the Russian Olympic team...
Four years ago, when NHL players entered the Olympics for the first time, many Russian players refused to play for the motherland. This year Florida Panthers player Pavel Bure, with the support of other Russian NHL players, lobbied for Fetisov to coach in a closed meeting with Putin. Soon after, Russian hockey execs buckled. So there's nothing they would like to see more than Fetisov coming home without a medal. "I don't want to get into details, but everything I try to do, they try to sabotage," he says. "I was fighting for freedom and democracy...
...smell of Old World multilateralism--and might alienate new coalition ally Vladimir Putin...
...pornography as it followed the adventures of a group of attractive young people sharing an apartment - and backrubs and showers. This irritated the Orthodox Church, but the Kremlin was more angered by TV-6's majority owner, Boris Berezovsky, a business baron during the Yeltsin era, an early Putin booster and now the President's exiled enemy. The animosity between Putin and Berezovsky is well-known and gave the station's criticism of Putin policies a harder edge. When they left NTV last year, the journalists were ready to fight. Now they sound tired...
Yevgeny Kiselev, the station's director general, says staffers will bid for a new broadcasting license, though he doubts they will obtain it. But "even if we get back on the air, Putin will come after us in six months or so," said a reporter, who now talks of leaving journalism altogether. If he and his colleagues do give up the fight, Russian TV will be a poorer place. But perhaps then Putin will have to turn his attention to the sort of questions that cannot be solved by bailiffs or judges - poverty, corruption, the economy...