Russia. A History

The Khodorkovskii case also seemed to substantiate fears that Putin wanted not only to silence oligarchs but to muzzle the media. In the Yeltsin era, as oligarchs acquired television channels and prominent newspapers, the result was not so much a free press as a media dominated by special interests, kompromat,

and scurrilous gossip. That kind of journalism, especially when directed against those in power, did little to endear the media to authorities. Putin himself was incensed by negative coverage of the Chechnya war and criticism of his failure to respond personally to the sinking of the submarine

Kursk

in August 2000; he also took exception to the caricature of his persona in a popular TV show ‘The Puppets’ (Kukly). He gave vent to his vexation in a public speech where he said that ‘sometimes [the media] turn into means of mass disinformation and tools of struggle against the state’. His government deliberately acted to bring the media under control. That was dramatically evident in May 2000 when masked security officers raided the media giant owned by Vladimir Gusinskii; state pressure (and debts) forced Gusinskii to relinquish his media assets (most importantly, an influential TV channel); Gazprom, the state natural gas monopoly, gained control of Gusinskii’s holdings and, in short order, virtually all other television stations. Putin’s government also dealt harshly with individual journalists, such as Andrei Babitskii, who worked for the American-financed Radio Liberty and dispatched highly critical accounts of events in Chechnya. Nor did the regime do much to protect investigative journalists; the murder of Anna Politkovskaia in October 2006 (which Putin dismissed as ‘insignificant’) was but one of eighty-eight journalists slain between 1996 and 2006. The annual ‘World Press Freedom Index’, compiled by Reporters without Borders, placed Russia in the bottom quintal of surveyed countries (141st of 173 countries, just above Ethiopia and Tunisia).

Equally controversial—and fodder for charges of ‘authoritarianism’—was the government’s decision to regulate and restrict the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which had proliferated in post-Soviet Russia. By 2001 the government had registered some 400,000 NGOs; that number swelled to 500,000 by 2006. In the view of many Westerners, the NGO gives voice to civil society, performs essential services, and lobbies states and international organizations for ‘good causes’. But the murky legal status of the NGO in international law invites abuses, especially by ‘GONGOs’—‘government-organized NGOs’, funded by states and only masquerading as representatives of civil society. Russian sensitivity to foreign-funded NGOs intensified when these played a salient, sometimes decisive role in the ‘colour’ revolutions—in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), all the more when (as in Georgia and Ukraine) they brought to power regimes seeking ties with the West, not Russia. Moscow’s suspicions were not unfounded; in 2005, for example, the US government awarded 85 million dollars to a variety of organizations in Russia with the goal of promoting ‘democratization’. Private organizations, such as George Soros’s ‘Open Society’, also provided financial support for Russian NGOs. Putin complained about the subversive role of foreign-funded NGOs and in 2006 initiated legislation requiring NGOs to register, indicate the source of funding, and refrain from activities detrimental to Russian interests. Western observers, especially in the United States, denounced these measures as an attempt to throttle a burgeoning civil society and democratic forces. Increasingly, the Western media and specialists discerned a resurgence of authoritarianism; the Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, ranked Russia 107th of 167 states in terms of its democratization.