Abstract
Journalists from independent Russian media start-up Meduza meet in their newsroom. Meduza has been publishing from Riga, Latvia, since October 2014
Credit: Ints Kalnins/ Reuters
The General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (Glavlit) was the institution of direct state censorship in the Soviet Union. This body was attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and was responsible for the pre-censoring of all books, magazines and movies. No piece of literature or journalism could be published without its authorisation. Its aim was to “fight anti-Soviet propaganda” and provide the population with the right – the one and only – point of view on events.
Direct censorship is now forbidden by the constitutions of post-Soviet countries – but censorship still exists, in different forms.
Journalists at Meduza, one of the most popular Russian-language online news websites, now based in Riga, Latvia, managed to find only two instances when censorship was officially admitted in modern Russia. In 2006 an official in the Altay region was sentenced to a suspended term of 10 months in prison for making the local press write only positive things about the governor and forbidding critical publications. Six years later, a court overruled a decision by the head of a local administration in the same region, which had created a special commission to check articles in local newspapers before publication.
No other cases of direct official censorship have been noted – yet still Russia is regarded as having one of the worst press freedom environments in the world (180th place out of 199 countries in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2015 ranking).
The most brutal way journalists are silenced in Russia is physical violence and assassinations. According to Reporters Without Borders, 27 journalists have been killed in Russia since 2002. Impunity is still a huge issue. The most famous cases, like the murders of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, Natalya Estemirova in 2009 or Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev in 2013, were never truly investigated; the instigators of their murders were never found.
The state finds other ways to control what is being said on the main TV channels.
“Television has been under total control of the state for quite a while. All major channels belong to the state,” said Pavel Sheremet, an award-winning TV journalist with experience of work in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. “Fifteen years ago editors-in-chief of main TV channels were invited for weekly meeting to Kremlin to discuss the most important topics and events. Now all newsrooms work under constant direct supervision from Kremlin. All big media holdings either belong to the state or to oligarchs from Putin’s close circle. So, it is easy for the authorities to control their editorial policies and make them say whatever they need to be transmitted to the society.”
“The topics for television are being dictated directly,” confirmed Andrei Soldatov, editor of the Agentura.ru website. “This diktat is more indirect in radio, newspapers and online media, where an opinion on how to cover events is being transmitted through editors and owners. As a result we face the most awful kind of censorship – self-censorship, when journalists try to guess how to do a story and put [emphasis] in a way to please his or her editor and owner.”
The new media environment, with the increasing importance of internet and social networks, has given rise to new modes of censorship. The past year saw the introduction of a series of restrictive laws controlling the flow of information online in Russia. For instance, a law tackling “harmful information” on the internet makes it possible to block websites without a court decision, if the authorities find its content to be “potentially harmful for children”. Other laws ban “propaganda of homosexuality” or “extremist information” – with definitions and provisions set so broadly and in general terms that they easily allow arbitrary usage.
But some people say censorship in Russia is not about legal restrictions or pressure on journalists. Irada Guseynova, an independent media expert, does not believe the level of censorship in today’s Russia is significant.
“If you pop into a bookshop in Moscow, you will find books about Khodorkovsky, one of the main critics of Putin, or other publications that can be seen as critical to the authorities. You can still watch Dozhd TV, or listen to radio station Echo of Moscow, or read Novaya Gazeta. The most awful problem is that we lost journalism in Russia almost entirely. The society does not want true journalism – and journalists easily gave in. You know, in 1954 a famous Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov said: ‘Our enemies from abroad blame us for writing on orders from the communist party. But the thing is that each of us write on orders of our heart – and our hearts belong to the party’. I guess this is the problem – journalists’ hearts nowadays still ‘belong to the party’. If we do not have a market for quality critical journalism, and do not have people who could teach young journalists to think critically and report professionally, the only way is to ‘sell their hearts to the party’, to listen to what that ‘party’ tells you is right – and finally to start believing it is the only correct opinion and go on reporting according to that opinion. In such a situation you do not really have to censor such reporting. We lost journalism in Russia. We have propaganda and campaigning instead.”
© Andrei Aliaksandrau
Case Study
The way you spin it
Soviet citizens were cautious but keen to meet me when I first went to Moscow in 1985. They adopted false names and scrambled their telephone numbers when they gave me their contact details, lest my maid, who we assumed worked for the KGB, go through my address book.
Gorbachev was in power but glasnost (openness) was yet to be introduced. There was censorship and propaganda, and my Soviet friends took the news with a heavy pinch of salt. They were hungry for information from the West.
I particularly remember one evening, when they showed me a samizdat (self-published) copy of George Orwell’s 1984. It wasn’t even typed but written out by hand in a school exercise book. The “publisher”, who risked jail for his work, had illustrated the dystopian novel with maps of Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania. Readers could borrow the book for one night before they were expected to pass it on.
Now my Russian friends, some of whom have stayed with me since that time, still love me – but Russians in general are less excited to meet me. There is no censorship – you can find any information, although you may have to search the net for it – but there is heavy propaganda, which the population seems to swallow uncritically. And fewer people read books.
It is hard to say what changes are global and generational and what are down to the policies of President Vladimir Putin. Recently an extremist Russian website declared me a “pathological Russophobe”. In a move that may or may not be connected and political, the Russian Foreign Ministry has found fault with my paperwork and I am no longer able to operate in Moscow as a freelance journalist.
After the love affair comes disillusion. I date Russians’ resentment towards the West to the 1999 Nato bombing of Belgrade, but it has got much worse since the row over Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Recently, two Russian journalists were taken hostage in eastern Ukraine. Pro-Kremlin LifeNews rang me up and asked if I would speak in a televised panel discussion “in defence of my colleagues”. I agreed, and expressed my concern for the two Russians, while pointing out that Ukrainian journalists and OSCE observers had also been taken hostage.
But I was outgunned on the programme by a barrage of pro-Kremlin voices and realised I had been used as a “useful idiot” to give the show a semblance of balance. I started to question whether I could call such propagandists my colleagues.
Western publications also fail to meet the standards of balance in which I was trained and still believe. I wrote a nuanced piece for The Times, describing belligerent attitudes in Moscow but doubting that Russians seriously want war with the West, only to find the headline writers have come up with: “Russia’s young and poor crave war with the West”.
It’s all in the way you spin it. My heart sinks. Perhaps it is a good thing that I am now out of Russia, in exile in Budapest. I love Russia too much to be part of this ugly information war.
© Helen Womack