COULD IABLOKO SURVIVE IN THE NATIONWIDE LEAGUE? RUSSIAN TELEVISION IN A EUROPEAN CONTEXT

The period that has intervened since the election of President Putin in March 2000 has seen what is usually perceived as a significant restructuring of national television in Russia. In particular of the two main privately-owned stations, one, NTV, was subject to an involuntary take-over, while the other, TV-6, was forced into liquidation and off the air.

It is true that the extent of this restructuring should not be overstated: the number of national channels remains unchanged, and there has no increase in direct state control over the medium; only one prominent broadcaster has been forced to abandon his career, and he was associated with neither of the two channels mentioned above; few, if any programmes have disappeared, and if a number of programmes and presenters have migrated from one channel to another, the history of Russian television since 1991 suggests that this phenomenon is hardly restricted to periods of post-election re structuring. Nevertheless, the events in question have, at least among Russia's 'chattering classes', been extremely controversial, and they have been examined and discussed at length in newspaper columns, television talk-shows, Internet sites and even a cademic conferences and papers. They have, or are capable of being interpreted as having considerable implications for the extent of freedom of speech and for the existence of civil society in Putin's Russia. The purpose of this paper is not to examine the events themselves, but to see what light is shown on the events and their significance for the Russian mass media system and perhaps even for Russian society by placing them in a wider, and in particular a European context.

Before going on to examine this wider context it may be helpful to provide a brief summary of the restructuring process itself, for which the starting point can be taken to be the Duma election campaign of 1999 and the subsequent presidential election of March 2000. If in the 1996 presidential campaign all the national television channels had for one reason or another supported the re-election of Boris El'tsin, three or four years later the principal broadcast medium was less monolithic. Those channels owned partly or wholly by the state, and above all ORT, provided enthusiastic support for Vladimir Putin and for parliamentary candidates allied to his cause, while NTV, the main channel owned by private business interests adopted what might best be termed a 'Putin-sceptic position. To some extent this could and sometimes was depicted as 'a war of the oligarchs' \endash between on the one hand Boris Berezovskii, to whom the state had ceded effective control over ORT (in return for his taking care of the station's finances), and on the other Vladimir Gusinskii, founder and controller of NTV.

After Putin was safely elected, both NTV and Gusinskii himself were the victims of a series of quasi-legal actions. Most notable among these were a visitation from masked men in camouflage uniforms representing either the FSB or the Tax Police, an event which by now has become the traditional sign of official disapproval, and the arrest and brief detention in custody of Gusinskii, who was accused of fraud in connection with a totally unrelated to NTV. When he was freed, Gusinskii departed for Spain, where he was pursued by Interpol, though the attempt to have him extradited to Russia failed.

These measures not surprisingly sharpened NTV's hostility towards the new President, an attitude that was expressed in the news analysis programme Itogi and in the weekly satire programmes Itogo and Kukly. They did not, however, lead directly to 'regime change' at the station; when this came, it was effected by rather different methods. In the second half of the 1990s Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly, started to invest in various media outlets and in due course acquired 30% of the shares in NTV. After the economic crisis of August 1998 Gusinskii borrowed large sums of money from Gazprom, using further blocks of shares in the television company as collateral. After the presidential elections Gazprom started to intimate that it was now time for the debts to be repaid and if the money could not be found, it would take the shares instead. Eventually, as a result of a court decision in March 2001, Gazprom gained effective control over a majority of voting shares in NTV, thereby allowing it to stage a shareholders' meeting, which duly changed the Board of Directors and the senior management of the company.

Though NTV continued to broadcast for a few days as if nothing had happened, the new management did in due course take physical control of the station, whereupon some broadcasters left, while others decided they could thole the new management, and a third group took a long holiday. Those who left were given a new home on another privately-owned channel, TV-6. This was then controlled by Boris Berezovskii, who for reasons that will be explained below was no longer a supporter of President Putin.

Unfortunately TV-6 proved somewhat inadequate as a safe haven. Towards the end of 2001 a minority shareholder, a subsidiary of the oil giant, LUKOil, invoked an obscure and hitherto unused piece of legislation to press for the winding-up of the company that owned the station. Though the law was due to become a dead letter on 31 December 2001, the minority shareholder squeezed under the deadline to obtain a judgement in its favour, and TV-6 ceased broadcasting at the end of January 2002. Its disappearance meant the necessity of a competition to fill the space, and after a tendering process which in the end had all the openness and unpredictability of the election of a Dean in a British university the frequency was occupied by a new station, TVS, which is owned by a consortium of business and political interests.

The question prompted by these events seems perfectly simple: were they a straightforward business matter, disputes between shareholders caused by financial under-performance, as was claimed by Gazprom and LUKOil, as well as by those representatives of the executive branch of Russian state who saw fit to express an opinion on the matter? Or were they the manifestations of a crude campaign waged by the authorities through obedient intermediaries in the notionally private sector to silence Russia's independent national television channels and to abolish freedom of speech in the mass media, as was claimed by the management and journalists of the affected stations, by western commentators and even by some journalists sympathetic to the Putin administration, albeit that the last group preferred to talk in terms of 'guided democracy' upravliaemaia demokratiia?

A clue to the answer can be found in another piece of restructuring, which received rather less attention in Russia and which seems to have been ignored outside the country. Boris Berezovskii's reward for his endeavours in securing the election of Vladimir Putin was to find himself persuaded, forced or blackmailed - the details remain obscure - into selling the 49% holding in ORT which he owned or controlled to another oligarch, Roman Abramovich. Berezovskii, like Gusinskii, was then forced into exile under threat of legal proceedings, while, rather oddly, the subsequent fate of the shareholding and the precise identity of who has assumed the burden of financing ORT continue to be a mystery. Interestingly, the displacement of Berezovskii has produced the one significant broadcasting casualty of the restructuring: while Evegenii Kiselev Itogi and Viktor Shenderovich Itogo, Kukly continue to ply their trade and to criticise Putin on TVS, Berezovskii's own 'telekiller', Sergei Dorenko, whose spectacularly one-sided programmes during the 1999-2000 election campaigns did much to damage Putin's opponents, has disappeared from Russia's television screens.

A further clue was provided in a comment made by President Putin during a press conference held, significantly, in Paris during the events leading up to the closure of TV-6. Repeating the claim that the state would never interfere in a business dispute and phrasing his remarks in a way that would maximise their acceptability to a western audience, he drew attention to those who had allegedly stolen millions of dollars during the transition to a market economy and who in order to maintain their influence over society had taken control of certain mass media outlets of national significance; where this process had affected the interests of the state, the state had attempted to claw something back.

Putin's comments are a little cryptic and arguably contradictory, but the inference which they seem to invite, namely that the restructuring of Russian television was an exercise in freeing the national channels from the control of the so-called oligarchs (in particular Boris Berezovskii and Vladimir Gusinskii), does have the merit of fitting the facts: the one result of the process is that Berezovskii and Gusinskii no longer have any direct interests in national television. The Kremlin has evidently decided that powerful oligarchs, or at least these particular powerful oligarchs should not be allowed to control national television channels. To answer the question why it is necessary to look at the election campaigns, in which NTV had assumed the right to determine which candidate it could support, while ORT had supported Putin not because the Kremlin willed it, but because Berezovskii deigned for reasons of his own to put his media outlets at the disposal of incoming President. These channels had to be dealt with not because of anything specific that they had done, but because of what they had demonstrated themselves capable of doing if they wanted. Two individuals possessed both the financial independence and the independence of mind to place their media outlets beyond the normal means of control and influence, which was unacceptable to a system which might not want to exercise control and which, indeed, often does not exercise control, but which needs to know that it can exercise control if the situation ever demands it. In other words this is less an exercise in political micro-management than a rejection of a particular concept for national television (the 'oligarchic' concept which prevailed throughout El'tsin second term of office), coupled with an attempt to redress the balance between the state and the oligarchs in the media market.

So far, so Russian, and in the way the Kremlin has gone about achieving its aim it is arguably easy discern a reflection of the uniquely dysfunctional nature of the post-Soviet Russian economy, as well as the re-assertion of atavistic attitudes of the state towards potentially competing centres of power and influence that can, no doubt, be traced back to the times of Ivan the Terrible. The problem is that, while there are aspects of the matter which may well be specifically Russian, an examination of the wider European context suggests some interesting parallels which place the events in a somewhat different light.

Another European country where the outcome of a recent election has had significant consequences for television broadcasting is Italy, where in 2001 the former centre-left government lost power to a centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. It is at this point a tempting diversion to contemplate the parallels between Berlusconi and Boris Berezovskii, who appear to have rather more in common than a tetra-syllabic name beginning with 'B': both built up important business empires, but by methods which have led to accusations of having acted illegally; both acquired substantial mass media holdings, which they then used to further political ambitions. More specifically Berezovskii went into the 1999/2000 as the controller of two national television channels and several newspapers; Berlusconi campaigned to become Prime Minister as the owner of a national newspaper and of a national network of three television channels.

There is, however, one significant difference between the two men: Berezovskii preferred the role of kingmaker, with the (for him) unfo rtunate and presumably unpredicted results described above; Berlusconi's arrival in the Palazzo Chigi meant that he not only kept effective control of his existing network, but also, thanks to the Italian system of lottizzazione (a complex system, not unli ke that of pre-civil war governments in Lebanon, for allocating posts in public service television according to political allegiance), acquired a significant degree of albeit indirect control over the public service broadcaster, RAI. There has subsequently been a series of controversial incidents, which include: the banishment from RAI of two well-known broadcasters, Enzo Biagi and Michele Santoro, after they were severely criticised by Berlusconi at a press conference; the censoring of or failure to show certain programmes (most notably a specially commissioned film of the events that took place in Genoa in July 2001); and, most recently, the proposal by the Prime Minister (though the appointment is not in his gift) that Mario Resca, head of McDonalds in Italy and a director of one of Berlusconi's companies, should become the new President of RAI.

The cases of Berezovskii and Berlusconi illustrate two approaches to resolving the questions surrounding the relationship between the state and private media interests. A third way is, appropriately enough, offered by the present British government. There has been a certain amount of comment about Tony Blair's friendship with President Putin, but whatever unites them, there is one significant difference between them: Blair honed his political skills climbing up the greasy pole of the Labour Party; Putin learned his in the KGB. This difference is clearly visible in the way each deals with the controllers of powerful media empires, and in particular if one compares the way Blair appears to behave towards Rupert Murdoch with Putin's handling, as described above, of Berezovskii and Gusinskii. Tony Blair is no less interested than Putin in ensuring that influential media outlets (in this case newspapers, rather than television, since Sky-TV is relatively insignificant) are, if not sympathetic, at least not actively hostile, but his chosen methods are rather more emollient. Before the 1997 election campaign the Labour Party changed its policy on media ownership in a way that made it more favourable to Murdoch; this is perceived as helping to persuade the latter that his hitherto staunchly pro-Conservative newspapers should switch their allegiance to Labour. Interestingly, the Communications Bill at present being considered by Parliament, would for the first time allow Murdoch to acquire control of a British terrestrial television channel; notwithstanding official denials this is widely seen as a quid pro quo for support (or at least absence of opposition) during the expected referendum campaign on the question of Britain's accession to the Euro.

The parallels considered above relate principally to the political aspects of the restructuring, but there is also a financial aspect. Whatever degree of manipulation may or may not have been involved in the take-over of NTV and the liquidation of the company owning TV-6, the first event was possible only because Vladimir Gusinskii was unable to redeem shares held a security against a loan by Gazprom, while the second was brought about under a law which applied to a company which had failed to make a profit for two years in succession. In other words an important element of the post-2000 crisis in Russian television is related to the financial difficulties experienced especially after the economic collapse of August 1998 by the whole of Russian national television, and in particular by NTV and TV-6.

Here too it is possible to find parallels, other instances during the same period of broadcasting companies experiencing serious f inancial problems: these include the Kirch group, which owns a number of commercial television channels in Germany, the Cecchi Gori group, which owned a national television in Italy and the Vivendi-Universal conglomerate, which among other things is responsible for an international chain of encrypted television channels which use the Canal Plus name. Closest to home has been the collapse of ITV Digital, which has threatened both the development of digital television in the United Kingdom and the futures of several Nationwide League association football clubs.

Lord Thomson of Fleet is supposed to have opined that owning a commercial television station in the United Kingdom is like having a licence to print money, but this would seem no longer to be the case . Although it is by no means certain that all the cases of financial difficulty listed above are to be attributed to the same cause, taken together they do indicate that there is a degree of financial disequilibrium to be observed in the television systems of Europe. It thus seems possible to conclude that however important the role played by the serious problems peculiar to the Russian economy, the financial difficulties of its national television service are rather less sui generis than may at first sight appear to be the case.

What all this seems to indicate is that notwithstanding the features specific to each individual country there are elements, if not of crisis, then of instability within the mixed system of public/private television that has grown up virtually in every country of Europe, including Russia. These elements of instability centre around such issues as the difficulty of finding secure sources of finance at a time of technological change, the future of public service broadcasting in a multi-channel environment and the relationship between on the one hand governments and on the other powerful media owners with multi-national resources and their own political agendas.

This is not to say, however, that the restructuring of Russia's television has proved successful. For all that oligarchic television tends to be regarded with suspicion both in Russia and in the West, it does in the Russian context have its advantages, and in a climate when television is a loss-making activity, it is not necessarily an act of unalloyed wisdom to go out of one's way to take channels out of the hands of two of the relatively few individuals who have both the money and the inclination to provide the funding required. Nor, if the intention is to attract strategic investors into Russian television, is it necessarily a good idea for the state to behave in a way that creates the impression that investments might be less than totally safe.

There is another point to note here. There is much talk of the freedom of speech which existed in the El'tsin era, but it remains unclear how much this was a matter of policy and how much a consequence of the ramshackle nature of the state: not only was it too disorganised to enforce any restrictions, but different factions within the state apparatus exploited the freedom to use different media outlets to promote sectional interests. Moreover, the business interests of oligarchs are often in conflict, as they were during the 1999-2000 election campaign. It would seem that not only does putting television in the hands of those with deep pockets provide some guarantee of financial stability, but it is also a way of providing some degree of pluralism. Oligarchic television may never reflect the interests of those who totally reject the changes of perestroika and later, but it is unlikely that any system of commercial mass media could, and in other respects it offers a system which can be considered as a semi-privatised form of the Italian lottizzazione.

The difficulty, which is by no means unique to Russia, but which has in consequence of recent events taken on a particularly acute form in that country, is one of developing a concept for a stable multi-channel national television system. The Kremlin know s that it cannot afford a wholly state-owned system and it knows that it does not want an oligarchic system, but it shows no signs of knowing what it does want or how to achieve it. Now with no-one available to provide the necessary financial support apart from individuals or companies with the same power to declare their independence from the President and his immediate coterie as had Gusinskii and Berezovskii, with no new strategic investors, be they Russian or foreign, in sight and with NTV and TVS apparently in a state of constant crisis, it is not clear what structure can and will be created.

One potential, but missing element in the structure is public service television, something which in spite of periodic, but desultory discussions on the topic has never existed in Russia. This absence is to a large extent due to the difficulty in persuading the state to disengage itself from an important medium which it owns and can so easily influence, but is also in part to be attributed to a difficulty in negotiating between the U.S. and the British/German models. As, however, we have seen, these are not the only models on offer, and it may well be that a robust system that offers many of the virtues of public service television can best be achieved by a variant of lottizzazione. Such a system would grow organically from the system which had developed through the 1990s with different channels tending to be associated with different political forces, and with a degree of formalisation it might open up areas of television to parties which at present have limited or no access to the medium: if the Deputy Head of news on RAI3 can be a supporter of Lega Nord, perhaps the equivalent post on, say, TV-Tsentr could be filled by a supporter of the LDPR or the KPRF. Wh ether the political or financial means to (re-)create such a system can be found is unclear, but it might offer part of the answer to the problem of creating a concept for Russian national television.

It only remains to explain the link between Iabloko and the Nationwide League. ITV Digital and the Kirch group came to their sad ends largely because of miscalculations over what they should pay for the rights to show certain football games; Gusinskii and Berezovskii came to grief because of their political miscalculations. This parallel reinforces an observation that the present writer has made before, but that may be worth repeating: one of the problems with the media in Russia is that politics plays in relation to television the same role as is played by football in Western Europe. What this means is that whereas West European television stations fight their battles to establish who will obtain the rights to show particular football matches or competitions, in Russia conflicts between television stations take place only in the political arena. Similarly, it seems from viewing figures, especially for news bulletins, that politics has the same hold on viewers' affections as football in Western Europe. This means that any dispute involving television inevitably becomes a political event, raising questions of freedom of speech, even when fundamentally it is a dispute over property in the same way that a dispute over the rights to show Champions' League football matches is a dispute over property. The problem here is that post-Soviet Russia has failed to develop alternative spheres of activity, not necessarily sport, to the level of importance that they can supplant politics as the main focus of media attention. Only in the last few months have there been the first signs that the absence of a credible opposition to Putin and the associated tempering of political passions, together with the emergence of certain new television genres have allowed the process of the 'normalisation' of Russian television to begin. It is, however, not unambiguously reassuring that among the new events contributing to this development is the arrival in that country of 'reality television'.

page editor: L.Boyle@slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
last update: 23 March 2004