By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — As campaigning for Russia's parliamentary elections gathered pace in the final days of October, two of the country's main opposition newspapers remained suspended. Another national daily was under heavy government pressure, threatened with denial of a re-registration application.
No-one in official circles, however, seemed ready to accept responsibility for the bans, and leading state figures issued conflicting statements on when, or whether, the country's print media would be allowed to report the news unmolested.
Aides to President Boris Yeltsin did their best to insulate their chief from a spreading controversy over violations of press freedom. But Yeltsin himself appeared strangely incapable of restoring the suspended journals, or of allowing more than token television air time to his political opponents.
So seedy was the spectacle that Western journalists were having trouble depicting the triumph of democracy and openness that had been supposed to vindicate Yeltsin's overthrow of the Russian constitution and parliament five weeks before.
Of the four national opposition daily newspapers operating in Russia during the past few years only one, the cautiously social democratic Rabochaya Tribuna, is now being published. The parliament's Rossiyskaya Gazeta was shut down soon after Yeltsin's September 21 coup, reopening a few days later with a new editor and a pro-government line.
Pravda, which is loosely associated with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and Sovetskaya Rossiya, which combines nostalgia for Soviet-era institutions with a strong dose of Russian nationalism, were among a broad swathe of opposition journals suppressed after the armed clashes of October 3 and 4. On October 14 the suspension of 15 of these publications was hardened to a permanent ban.
Pravda and Sovetskaya Rossiya were required by the Press and Information Ministry to be re-registered. It was made clear that re-registration would be granted only if the newspapers changed their names, replaced their editors and undertook to soften their editorial lines. Objections that these demands were illegal — the recently adopted press law makes clear that news publications can be shut down or required to re-register only for strictly defined reasons under a court order — were ignored.
If many of Yeltsin's officials have a taste for pinochetismo, it is less certain that the regime has the strength to sustain such methods. By the final days of October, charges of having initiated serious violations of civil and political rights were figuring in bitter exchanges between leaders of the Yeltsin camp, now openly split as its members sensed the unattractiveness to voters of the regime's "reforms".
On October 25 Mikhail Poltoranin, who is in charge of Yeltsin's Federal Information Centre, criticised government ministers for using "bolshevik tactics". Poltoranin, a close presidential aide and himself an experienced head-kicker, argued that the orders to ban newspapers had been issued without consulting Yeltsin. Pravda and Sovetskaya Rossiya, Poltoranin promised, would be allowed to reopen "in a matter of days".
On October 29, however, Pravda was not being delivered to subscribers. Spokespeople for the Press and Information Ministry denied that the paper would be allowed to reappear without being re-registered. An edition of the paper finally appeared on November 1.
On October 27 Yeltsin himself weighed in with an astonishing attack on his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. The president's press office issued a statement accusing Chernomyrdin of trying to seize control of the media and to create his own "ministry of propaganda".
"The president of Russia ... is concerned about the tendency toward monopolisation of the mass media", Yeltsin's press secretary was quoted as saying. The previous week, Chernomyrdin had expanded his own press office to include the former parliament's television studio, and had ordered the regular broadcasting of a one-hour program of government news.
Earlier, Yeltsin had promised that all parties running for parliament would be granted equal rights and access to the mass media. And indeed, on October 27 leaders of major political blocs, including Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, were each given several minutes of television time to state their views. But amid the massive and studiously favourable exposure given to the president, his officials and the regime's policies, the concession was almost an insult.
Of the moves to prevent effective criticism of the regime, those that have caused most unease among the Moscow intelligentsia include the threats and harassment against Nezavisimaya Gazeta ("Independent Newspaper"). Established in 1990 under the sponsorship of the Moscow City Council, Nezavisimaya Gazeta until recently followed a broadly pro-Yeltsin editorial path, while publishing articles reflecting an unusually wide range of viewpoints.
Since Yeltsin's September 21 coup, however, Nezavisimaya Gazeta has emerged as a sharp and persistent critic of the regime. Alone among liberal journals in Russia, it has intimated that democracy cannot be created through methods such as forcing crises, overthrowing parliaments and constitutions and holding elections at breakneck pace for legislative bodies without meaningful powers.
In the Yeltsin camp, the criticisms voiced by Nezavisimaya Gazeta have obviously hit home. The English-language Moscow Times reported on October 23:
"The editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Vitaly Tretyakov, said he had been told that Press Ministry officials wanted to remove him as editor and re-register the newspaper as a government organ because of its excessively independent stance."
With the abolition of its official sponsor, the Moscow City Council, Nezavisimaya Gazeta was required to seek re-registration in any case. This has given the regime the chance to place maximum pressure on the paper's editors and journalists.
In the October 27 issue of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a front-page editorial noted that 10 days had elapsed since an application was lodged to register the paper as an independent company. There had been no reply from the press ministry. Meanwhile, the shrill pro-Yeltsin tabloid Kuranty, which had also been sponsored by the Moscow City Council, was re-registered within three days.
The editorial also described systematic and clearly deliberate efforts to deter people from subscribing to Nezavisimaya Gazeta. In Russia, newspaper subscriptions are handled by the post offices, whose employees are easily pressured to deny information and obstruct subscription applications.
The regime's message to Nezavisimaya Gazeta has been unmistakable: conform or, one way or another, face closure.
For opposition forces in the Russian elections, equal rights and access to the mass media are a myth. The question thus arises: where is Yeltsin, the professed foe of media monopolism? The answer is simple: when the president is not making demagogic statements, he is contentedly allowing the denial of freedom of the press and airwaves to continue.