Most of you have at one time or another heard me talk about the history and structure of post-Soviet Russian television, and so today I will simply give you the necessary outline which I hope will be sufficient to enable you to follow the rest of the seminar. On the face of it, Russia conforms to what may be termed the European norm when it comes to television broadcasting, with the main channels shared between the public and the private sectors. On closer examination, however, there are some significant differences, some of which may become apparent as we progress: two of these are the rather complex nature of public sector involvement and the somewhat uncertain boundaries that exist in places between the public and the private sectors. The television companies with official national status or national aspirations can be summed up as follows:

VGTRK: wholly-owned by the state; operates two channels, the general service RTR and the non-commercial Kul'tura.

ORT ['Russian Public Television']: owned 51% by the state. Who exactly owns the remaining 49% of the company is a mystery that has defeated the brains of several continents, but since the company started operating on 1 April 1995, it has been deemed by common consent to be effectively controlled by Boris Berezovskii, one of Russia's so-called oligarchs.

TV-Tsentr: created in 1997, presumably to further the political ambitions of Mayor Luzhkov of Moscow and, since it is predominantly owned and is controlled by the Moscow city government (i.e. Mayor Luzhkov), it should probably be regarded as part of the public sector.

NTV: mostly owned by Media-Most (controlled by Vladimir Gusinskii, another oligarch), though 30% of the company belongs to Gazprom.

TV-6: since 1999 a majority share-holding has been controlled by Boris Berezovskii.

The whole structure is controlled by the Ministry for the Press, Broadcasting and Mass Communications, headed by Mikhail Lesin.

The pursuit of special agendas by Russian television stations is a much less simple affair now than it was in Soviet times. For much of the time they do not necessarily pursue any particular political agenda; sometimes they pursue an agenda which is not political; at other times their political agendas may be crude or they may possess subtle nuances, reflecting a complicated and often kaleidoscopic political scene.

In 1996 during the presidential election campaign all the central television stations pursued a common agenda, aimed at securing the re-election of President El'tsin. This was not simply a matter of presidential string-pulling, but rather the result of a convenient coincidence of conviction and advantage: though their motivations may have been different, neither the oligarchs controlling the television companies nor the journalists who toiled at their command had any interest in seeing a communist president come to power. This does not mean, however, that the cause could not be advanced by a few sweet deals: there is no reason not to see a generous post-election adjustment of the terms of NTV's broadcasting licence as a quid pro quo for the particular assistance given by that company's Director-General, Igor' Malashenko, a man who ironically ended up at NTV only because he failed to get the top job at one of the state companies on the grounds that he was thought by the El'tsin camp to be too close to Gorbachev. And there was at least one interesting nuance, which seems to have gone largely unnoticed: the support of the Berezovskii and the Gusinskii media for El'tsin was not all-embracing, but explicitly excluded certain members of his entourage, notably Defence Minister Grachev, Head of the FSB Barsukov and Head of the Presidential Security Service Korzhakov. In part this selective support reflects not only NTV's generally sceptical attitude to the conduct of the first Chechen war, but also a long-standing dispute between Korzhakov and the head of Media-Most, Vladimir Gusinskii.

The united front of 1996 lasted only until the following year, though the media war of the summer of 1997 had nothing to do with politics. The casus belli was the partial privatisation of a telecommunications company called Sviazinvest, and the losing party in the auction for the package of shares being sold off was a consortium involving interests linked to Boris Berezovskii and Vladimir Gusinskii. The consequence was that the media controlled by these individuals, including ORT and NTV, waged a campaign against the man held responsible for this unsatisfactory outcome, the then First Deputy Prime Minister, Anatolii Chubais. At the same time Chubais's own interests were defended by the state-owned company RTR, so that on this occasion the two main television companies with state involvement were on opposite sides of the barricades.

During the election campaign RTR naturally supported Putin and TV-Tsentr no less naturally supported Luzhkov, but the main battle was between ORT and NTV. This battle was fought on two separate, but interlocking fronts. On the political front ORT fought an aggressive campaign to promote Putin himself and the pro-Putin forces standing for Parliament. It was for the most part a negative campaign: instead of promoting the virtues of their favoured candidate, possibly because no-one has yet managed to discover any such virtues, the station launched vicious attacks against whoever was deemed to be the most dangerous opponent at the time. During the Parliamentary campaign this was Mayor Luzhkov and his ally Evgenii Primakov; later, during the Presidential election, it was Grigorii Iavlinskii, leader of the liberal Iabloko party and inveterate oppositionist, the only politician to have said 'no' more often than Ian Paisley; there was also a brief flurry of attacks against the so-called 13th candidate, the low-key campaign led by Vladimir Pribylovskii to encourage voters to take advantage of the option on the ballot paper of voting against all 12 official candidates.

The position of NTV was more complicated: its opponents have depicted it as favouring the Luzhkov-Primakov camp, while NTV's own version is that was merely trying report objectively and to give all sides a hearing, but was frustrated by the refusal of the Putin camp to co-operate, which meant that its election-related broadcasts perforce gave a platform only to certain sides. There is probably some truth in both versions, but the matter is further complicated by the fact that NTV seems to have particularly close relations with certain individual, more peripheral politicians, notably Iavlinskii and Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Rightist Forces, both of whom make regular appearances on the station's political programmes.

NTV was perhaps more involved on the second front, a media war in the narrower sense between the Berezovskii and the Gusinskii empires. The first shots in this war were fired in the summer of 1999, just before the political campaign proper opened, when ORT's Vremia carried an attack on the workings of the Media-Most company, to which NTV replied in kind the following week. This battle rumbled on throughout the election period, and certainly during the Parliamentary campaign NTV's news broadcasts, where the excuse of non-co-operation wears a little thin, can be described not much as pro-Luzhkov/Primakov, as anti-anti-Luzhkov/Primakov, in that they contained not so much defences of their political programme, as attacks on ORT's own anti-Luzhkov/Primakov stance.

The main standard-bearers in this series of media wars were the presenters of the respective news analysis programmes of the two stations, ORT's Sergei Dorenko and NTV's Evgenii Kiselev, both of whom have become celebrities, not to say major political figures in their own right. Neither man has problems with low self-esteem: Dorenko, whose relaxed charm and easy-going manner has earned him the nick-names of Terminator and Telekiller, publishes the text of his programmes on his own web-site; Kiselev, who was also Director-General of NTV, allowed his weekly programme to meander on long past the scheduled finishing time, in the manner of the old Vremia news bulletin in Soviet days, presumably because no-one has either the authority or the courage to tell him to shut up.

As we all know, Putin and his supporters were victorious in both elections, though the continuing debate over the famous headline after the 1992 election in the U.K., 'It was the Sun wot won it', suggests that we should be cautious about ascribing too much influence over the result to Dorenko and his colleagues. In any event there is a growing body of evidence that those who watch Russian television know perfectly well what is going on, who is pulling strings for what reason and on that account are fully able to interpret what they see and hear, though what conclusions they draw from that may be another matter. What is certain is that however the election was won, there were accounts to present and scores to settle.

Before looking at how these scores were settled, it is necessary to digress for a moment to talk about money. Lord Thomson, the first proprietor of STV, memorably observed that owning a commercial television in Britain was like having a licence to print money; in post-Soviet Russia, however, it may be a licence to employ your own terminator or telekiller, but you have to pay for the privilege: television is not, and probably never has been a profitable business. So how is Russian television financed? If I knew the exact answer to that question, I would either be travelling round in a large Mercedes with blue flashing lights on the roof or would be lying dead at the bottom of the Moscow river, but some information is available. ORT, we are told, has received no money directly from the state budget since an initial injection of funds when it was set up in 1995. Berezovskii recently claimed that at the present time about half its income came from advertising, with the rest of its operations being financed by a source identified by the speaker using the first person plural pronoun; whether this was an example of the pluralis majestatis or whether there really is more than one individual involved is obscure, since Berezovskii rarely speaks about his business affairs in anything other than an oblique fashion. Media-Most has been helped through the difficult financial climate since the crisis of August 1998 by loans that either have come directly from Gazprom or are guaranteed by that company; it will also be remembered that Gazprom has invested directly in NTV and owns 30% of the Media-Most's television subsidiary. It may be worth noting here that after the 1998 crisis both ORT and Media-Most were bailed out by loans from the state-owned Vneshekonombank, less, it seems, from generosity than from a desire to have a lever to use for putting political pressure on the two companies. If that judgement is correct, then it was successful in the case of ORT, but not in the case of Media-Most.

How exactly Media-Most escaped from that noose is not entirely clear, but when the time came for the settling of scores, it, and NTV in particular, was clearly a prime target, though the prime offence may not have been a failure to support the winning candidate, but, as one commentator has observed, assuming it had the right to decide for itself who to support or not to support. Whatever the exact nature of the offence, Media-Most was subject to a series of unpleasant incidents over the spring and early summer of this year. First a group of sinister-looking people in camouflage uniforms occupied the offices of the company, though whether these were representatives of the tax police looking for evidence of tax evasion, or men from the FSB looking for illegal bugging devices is something they did not even bother to sort among themselves before launching the raid. A few days later Vladimir Gusinskii, owner of Media-Most, was arrested and spent an uncomfortable few days in Butyrki prison, supposedly under investigation for alleged offences committed in connection with a privatisation deal several years earlier. If the aim of these indignities was to frighten NTV into adopting a more pliant line, then they were spectacularly counter-productive: NTV simply stepped up the ferocity of its attacks on Putin and those of his entourage who were considered responsible for the outrages.

The fate of Media-Most was not perhaps surprising; what was not expected was the rapid termination of what should have been a beautiful friendship between Putin and Berezovskii. Indeed when the latter started criticising the President and talking about constructive opposition, there were those who made what I suppose for Russia is the natural assumption that these moves had all been choreographed in advance and were part of an attempt to boost Putin's democratic credentials. Subsequent events have tended not to confirm that assumption.

That is where the story should have ended. Two months ago there were signs of a tri-partite system emerging in Russian television: the state channel, RTR, promoting the executive, i.e. the President and the Government, and in turn given certain privileges in terms of access, as happened after the Kursk incident; a channel of moderate opposition, ORT, and a channel of more implacable opposition, NTV. It was a system that could be seen to parallel what had happened in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, when the different channels of RAI had been parcelled out among the three main political forces; it was a system that also seemed about to reproduce itself in the various news and political sites on the Russian Internet.

What has happened in the meantime is a series of moves against both ORT and NTV. In the case of the former it appears that the state has wrested control over the channel's information policy by a series of personnel changes and, perhaps more spectacularly, by demanding and obtaining the removal of Sergei Dorenko, who was simply told by the Director-General that his programme would not be coming back after the summer break. Berezovskii's response has been an offer to place the shares he owns or controls into some sort of trust, which would be controlled by selected figures from the media world. This offer has so far provoked only cool reactions from the nominated recipients, partly because no-one can quite fathom Berezovskii's motives and partly because no-one can quite work out the legal implications of the proposed move.

The weapon used against Media-Most has been Gazprom, a company in which the state retains a substantial, though not a majority share-holding. Gazprom has taken to reminding Media-Most that it is owed a substantial sum of money for which there no arrangements have been made for repayment and that if it cannot get its money back, it will take the company instead, thank you very much. Gazprom claims that this is simply a normal commercial procedure for dealing with a company that cannot pay its debts, that it has a voluntary agreement signed by Gusinskii agreeing to surrender Media-Most for a certain sum of money and that since it doesn't want to divert its attention from the more obviously profitable business of unearthing and selling gas, when it gets control of Media--Most it will sell it to a strategic investor, probably from abroad. Media-Most claims that Gazprom has been put up to this by the government and the presidential administration, that Gusinskii signed the agreement under duress, as a condition for allowed out of jail and then out of Russia, and that it can find its own strategic investor. The President and his side-kicks look the other way and insist that it has nothing to do with them, a position slightly undermined by the fact that the Minister for the mass media, Mikhail Lesin, somehow ended up putting his signature to a document that appears to guarantee Gusinskii's person and his freedom if he agrees to sell his company to Gazprom. Since the Gazprom and the Media-Most accounts of how the agreements came into being flatly contradict one another, somebody is clearly lying; perhaps, and this is my preferred solution, no-one is telling truth, or at least the whole truth.

What we are left with after all this is a series of questions. Will RTR really become the executive's preferred channel? Well, probably not, if they can get and keep control over ORT.

But will the executive keep control over ORT? And if it does, will Berezovskii continue financing it? If he does continue financing it, why, what's in it for him? If he doesn't, who else will? Answers on a postcard, please, though the continuing absence of a clear answer does once more raise the question of the conspiracy theory of collusion between Berezovskii and the executive.

As for NTV, will Gazprom seize control, and if they do, will Gusinskii, who is allegedly a tax resident of Gibraltar and who has extensive business interests in Israel and elsewhere, some of them bought when he was supposedly in financial difficulties, abandon Russia altogether? If Gazprom do acquire Media-Most, will they, as they have said, sell the company to a strategic investor from abroad? On the one hand, this might be a shrewd move: a foreign owner, such as Murdoch or Bertelsmann, will want above all to protect his investment and may well see the best way to do this as being firstly to avoid offending the President and secondly to remove all the serious political programmes in favour of light entertainment. On the other hand, this might just be the wrong strategy for NTV, whose core audience consists of the aspiring urban middle-classes. These are precisely the people that any advertiser is going to want to target, but they are also people who watch this channel precisely for its political programmes and who might well desert it if these disappear. What is more, the President has recently put his signature to a bizarre document setting out what it describes as Russia's doctrine on information security; one striking feature of this document is its call to protect the Russian media market from penetration by foreign companies. In this context it is perhaps not surprising that recent reports have suggested that Media-Most and Gazprom might after all reach some amicable agreement and even that this agreement might not necessarily have too drastic an effect on NTV's political stance.

But the final questions concern the state. What sort of television system does Putin's state want, what sort of television system is it prepared to put up with if it cannot get what it wants, how much freedom of speech is it prepared to tolerate on television? Certainly various steps, some of them of dubious legality, have been taken with the apparent aim of reducing pluralism on television (I didn't have time to go into the various steps taken to bring TV-Tsentr into line, which began with an attempt to remove its licence and ended with a cosy meal for two for Messrs Luzhkov and Lesin in a Moscow restaurant). In some case, ORT, TV-Tsentr, presumably, these appear to have had some success; in the case of NTV, they have so far been disastrously counter-productive. The moderate opposition has been silenced more effectively than the more implacable opposition.

This raises questions not only of competence, but also whether there is a coherent policy. The mass media under El'tsin were surprisingly free and pluralistic, partly because El'tsin was himself relaxed about criticism, but partly because the ramshackle nature of the state made effective control problematic. At the one point in 1997 part of the media were supporting the Deputy Prime Ministers against the Prime Minister, while other media displayed reverse loyalties. One answer to the question 'Who is Mr Putin' which I personally find appealing is that he is a non-entity, an empty space that various interest groups are competing to fill. I don't think that Putin was necessarily being disingenuous when he responded to questions about, say, the arrest of Gusinskii by looking blank and saying that he didn't know what was going on. Indeed, it is arguable that the whole Putin project, as dreamed up by the El'tsin entourage, depended on his being a non-entity.

The confusion over whether Media-Most should be sold off to a foreign company suggests difficulty in working out a consistent policy. Yet there are undoubtedly people around Putin who consider that the state should pursue an aggressive information policy. One of these is Gleb Pavlovskii, whose Fond Effektivnoi politiki runs a number of web-sites devoted to putting that policy into action. On the Internet, however, a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand of schools of thought contend, and even the FEP sites contain links to other sites with different agendas; Berezovskii and Media-Most are also building up their Internet interests, so that there is scope for the battle to continue.

Ultimately, however, the answer may well lie not in who wins the battle to control Putin and his information policy; it will, as it so often does, come down to money. The state can afford to finance at the most one channel; advertising cannot under present conditions make up any shortfall, and anyway too strong an advertising market will itself weaken the control of the state. If the state decides not to allow any significant degree of foreign ownership, then it will have to find the necessary money from wealthy individuals or corporations within Russia, which in turn seems impossible to achieve without making compromises. In any case globalisation of information and the spread of the Internet may make any attempt to achieve total control of terrestrial television futile. No doubt many strange things are going to happen over the next few years, but I expect the Russian media scene to continue to be messy and by virtue of that be reasonably free and pluralistic in the foreseeable future.

Since the above was written, there have been a number of significant developments: in particular, Berezovskii has been ousted from ORT, though he retains control of TV6, and Gazprom finally succeeded in gaining control over NTV; both oligarchs have spent the last few months outside Russia. The 49% holding in ORT which was previously controlled by Berezovskii was sold to another oligarch, Roman Abramovich; their subsequent fate and the medium- to long-term arrangements for the financing of ORT's remain obscure. The take-over of NTV split the company, with the more implacable opponents (such as Evgenii Kiselev and Viktor Shenderovich), along with some popular programmes being found an alternative home on TV-6. In the meantime no foreign (or, indeed, domestic) buyer has found for what is left of NTV, so that it exists as a drain on Gazprom's only moderately healthy finances. Messiness continues to prevail.