Word: putin
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...Vladimir putin wasn't able to rub out the Chechen guerrillas, Viktor Shenderovich remarked ruefully last Saturday, but he sure got us. Shenderovich, whose impishly satirical programs are wildly popular in Moscow, had just resigned from NTV, Russia's only privately owned nationwide network. A few hours earlier NTV as the Russian public knew it - opinionated, strident but often head and shoulders above the competition - had ceased to exist. In the early hours of the morning police and security guards hired by the network's new owners had taken over its studios and installed a new management headed by Boris...
...last prime-time newscast before the raid neatly highlighted the chasm between the smooth theory and the turbulent reality of Putin's Russia. NTV has shone a spotlight on this divide, while state networks feign not to see it. The Kremlin would clearly like to turn NTV's spotlight off. The first news item was the return home from a Swiss jail of Pavel Borodin, the high-ranking Russian official who a few years ago found a Kremlin job for the then out-of-work Vladimir Putin. Borodin, who is being investigated in Switzerland on money-laundering charges, had been...
...Kremlin and its allies have portrayed the campaign to close NTV as purely a financial affair: an aggrieved shareholder, the state natural gas monopoly Gazprom, demanding its money back from a feckless and allegedly dishonest tycoon. In fact the move was born of Putin's deep dislike for that tycoon, NTV's owner and founder Vladimir Gusinsky, who could use his station for vendettas but also created a news operation highly critical of Putin's policies in places like Chechnya. Gazprom, meanwhile, is state-controlled and highly dependent on the Kremlin's graces. Moreover, the seizure was accompanied...
...Immediately after the raid, Putin unexpectedly flew to Chechnya to discuss reconstruction and other issues. The President has commented only sparingly on the NTV case, and he did not deviate from that practice in Chechnya. Indeed, if Putin's past behavior is any guide, the trip was intended to distance him as far as possible from the NTV crisis. Tellingly, a correspondent for the new NTV who accompanied the President did not ask him about...
...station based in Moscow, but there they'll also live under the threat of having their broadcast license taken away. There seems to be little refuge for the survivors of the Gusinsky media empire. The group's radio station, Echo Moscow, which was even more outspokenly critical of President Putin than NTV, hasn't yet been touched, but it may be only a matter of time...