J.A. Dunn

On 29 December 1996 the London newspaper The Observer published two articles on Russia under the general headline of 'Russia: Boom or bust?'. As this headline suggests, the articles presented two differing assessments of Russia's present and future. This is what the respective authors of the articles have to say about the Russian media.

The contradictory nature of these statements is in itslf an indication of the difficulties that are likely to be faced in producing an assessment of the Russian mass media. With the possible exception (in least in large cities) of the mass catering industry it is difficult to imagine any branch of activity in Russia that has undergone more far-reaching changes since 1991 than the mass media, but whereas the former is likely to produce only a limited range of assessments (whether positive or negative), the latter appears to prompt reactions which are contradictory not only in terms of value judgements, as might be expected, but also in their descriptions of the basic climate in which the mass media operate. It would not be realistic to attempt a full reconciliation of the two views quoted above, but its hoped that this paper will at least go some way towards explaining how it is possible to come to two such radically different conclusions.

There is one point that can be made at the outset. It is difficult to conduct an examination of the Russian mass media without reference to some sort of comparison, whether this be implicit or explicit, as is the case of Layard and Parker. Inevitably any assessment will be different according to whether the point of comparison is the mass media as they function in the United Kingdom, or Italy or the United States of America, or, alternatively, as they might function in some construct of an ideal free society. While there is no wish here to become immersed in potentially interminable arguments over whether Russia is or is not a part of Europe, one of the principal aims of this paper is to determine which features of the mass media are comparable with what can be found in various countries of Western Europe and which are unique. Attention will be concentrated on television, since it is here that there is the greatest degree both of variation and of controversy, but reference will be made to the print media, wherever this is helpful or appropriate. Sadly perhaps, it will be possible here to consider only the national media: patterns of ownership, finance and control are too varied and available information too sparse to allow any meaningful examination of the the regional and local media.

The television viewer in Moscow has a choice of six major channels controlled by five different companies. The structure of provision can be summed up as follows.

This company took over the first channel from a state company called Ostankino on 1 April 1995. In spite of the name it is owned 51% by the state and 49% by a consortium of commercial interests. Like Channel 4 in United Kingdom, it is essentially a commissioning company; apart from its news bulletins it buys in programmes from independent production companies.

This is now the only state-owned national broadcasting company. It was set up in 1991 and operates on the second channel (RTR). Since November 1997 it has been broadcasting a second service, 'Kultura', which displaced the St Petersburg company from the fifth channel; this latter is the only channel at present not to carry advertising.

Set up in June 1997 on the basis of the former Moscow city broadcasting service and a commercial company 2 x 2. Mostly owned and financed by the Moscow city government.

An independent company which started broadcasting on the St Petersburg (fifth) channel in October 1993 and was switched to the fourth channel with effect from 1 January 1994. It is owned by Media-Most (60%), Gazprom (30%) and Itogi (10%) (though see below). NTV also owns a series of specialised subscription channels broadcast via satellite.

This organisation started broadcasting in the spring of 1993 and was the first independent company to have its own channel. Originally it was a joint venture with CNN, though the latter company later pulled out. Since 1999 it has been controlled by Boris Berezovskii.

In addition there are a number of smaller commercial companies, such as REN-TV (which started out as an independent production company) and CTC (owned by an American company, StoryFirst). There are numerous independent production companies, of which the most important are perhaps ViD (which has close links with ORT) and Avtorskoe televidenie (ATV), which sells its output to all the main channels.

One question on which it is difficult to obtain accurate information is the extent to which these channels can be received throughout Russia (and, indeed, elsewhere in the formner Soviet Union). It would appear, however, that ORT and RTR cover almost the whole of the country (the latter slightly less than the former), and that NTV, although it has the formal status of a national channel, has a rather lesss comprehensive coverage. TV-Tsentr and TV-6 reach cities outside Moscow through a series of franchising arrangements.

On the face of it this structure does not differ in principle from what may be described as the 'European norm', where publicly and privately owned channels operate side by side: in France, for example, the publicly-owned Antenne 2 and FR3 co-exist with the privately owned TF1, Canal + and M6; Germany has three publicly-owned channels operated by the regional affiliates of ARD and by ZDF, as well as commercial channels SatEins (originally transmitted by satellite only, but now also with terrestrial outlets), Vox and RTL, while in Italy the publicly-owned RAI operates on three channels alongside a number of privately-owned channels.

Nor does Russia ostensibly depart from West European patterns when it comes to those parts of mass media that are privately owned, with an increasing tendency for both broadcasting and newspapers to be concentrated in the hands of a small numbers of conglomerates. In Russia the main owners or controllers of media outlets are the following: (1) Boris Berezovskii, who in addition to his involvement in TV-6 and ORT has controlling interests in the Kommersant newspaper group and in the newspaper Nezavisimaia Gazeta; (2) Media-Most, which in addition to NTV also owns the daily newspaper Segodnia and the weeklies Itogi and Sem' dnei; (3) the Interros group which has majority shareholdings in the newspapers Izvestiia and Komsomol'skaia pravda; (4) Gazprom, which in addition to its minority shareholding in NTV has a financial involvement in Media-Most and controls the newspapers Trud and Rabochaia gazeta; (5) LUKOil, which has a substantial minority shareholding in the newspaper Izvestiia and owns the television news company TSN. Although there are important differences to be discussed below, these conglomeratesd can be compared to such organisations as the Murdoch Group, Silvio Berlusoni's Fininvest, the Kirch and Bertelsmann groups based in Germany and the French-based Vivendi.

Given the similarities that exist, it is legitimate to pose the question whether the the changes that have taken place since 1991 have had the effect of creating in Russia a pattern of media ownership, finance and control which can be placed within what may be termed the European paradigm or whether the Russian system contains so many distinctive features that it must be regarded as sui generis. It perhaps should be observed here that to ask this question is not to imply that there is anything peculiarly virtuous about the European paradigm or anything peculiarly vicious about the Russian or, for that matter, vice versa.

The first distinguishing feature of the Russian mass media concerns the nature of public sector involvement. In part this is a consequence of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which had left Russian broadcasting in the hands of two separate state-owned companies: ORT is the successor to a company called Ostankino, which was created out of the old All-Union broadcasting company as part of the wider process of converting state institutions of the Soviet Union into Russian state institutions; its semi-privatised status and the evident conflict between the name of the company and its structure of ownership (even the first Director-General, Sergei Blagovolin, was unhappy with the name) reflect both the debates over how to deal with the anomalous situation that had arisen and the rather messy compromise which was finally reached. The third company belonging partly or wholly to the public sector, TV-Tsentr, presents an unusual combination of municipal ownership and national ambitions; this can be considered a consequence both of the peculiar status of Moscow within Russia and of the presumed political ambitions of its mayor during the 1990s.

The second factor complicating the position Russian publicly-owned television concerns money. Accurate assessments of the tax-payer's contribution to the financing of Russian broadcasting are hard to come by (and impossible in the case of TV-Tsentr), but recent published information indicates that in 1996 the state covered 30% of the operating costs of RTR, though unofficial statements suggest a lower figure [ch]. As for ORT, recent budgets have allocated no public money whatsoever to this company, a circumstance which apparently arise initially out of the Duma's hostility to this particular organisation (on at least two occasions motions have been passed calling for the renationalisation of ORT), though no conspicuous efforts have been noticed on the part of the executive to overcome the Duma's reluctance to release the purse-strings.

The absence of a television licence fee, such as exists in most West European countries, leaves a large short-fall to be met by money obtained from other sources, notably advertising, sponsorship and, in the case of ORT, whatever contribution the private shareholders are prepared to make. Now the carrying of advertisements on publicly-owned television channels is far from unusual in Europe (it is the United Kingdom which is unusual in this respect), but some comparisons may be helpful here. In September 1997 the French Minister of Culture, Catherine Trautmann, determined her budgetary allocations to the two publicly-owned television channels according to the principle that the contribution of the state should not fall below 50%, while in Germany the share of revenue from advertising on the public channels must not exceed one-third; in 1993 the contribution of advertising to the revenue of the Italian public sector broadcasting organisation RAI was 40%.

There is some evidence that in the wake of the financial crisis of August 1998, with its consequences for the advertising industry, the state has been able to strengthen its financial position, particularly with regard to ORT. What seems to have happened is that at the end of that year ORT's creditors were induced to show the company the spectre of financial ruin by initiating proceedings leading to the appearance of court bailiffs who started to inventory its assets, whereupon the state-owned Vneshekonombank leapt to the company's rescue with a timely loan. This exercise was, it is alleged, undertaken to ensure ORT's loyalty during the parliamentary and presidential election campaigns of 1999 and 2000. Interestingly, an attempt seems to have been made in the sumer of 1999 to use Vneshekonombank as a means of securing the loyalty of the private-sector Media-Most group (substantial foreign currency loans were called in), but this was unsuccessful.

A further complication is the at times somewhat uncertain boundary between the public and private sectors of the Russian media world. This is illustrated most clearly by the career and activities of Boris Berezovskii. The full extent of his commercial interests is probably beyond human knowledge, but he is most closely identified with the motor-vehicle concern LogoVAZ and more indirectly with Aeroflot. Within the public sphere he has at different times been Deputy Secretary of the Security Council and Executive Secretary of the CIS; he is or was a member of the 'sem'ia', the coterie of friends and relations who were particularly influential during the later years of the El'tsin regime. His involvement in the mass media also shows an ability to cross sectoral boundaries: he, or concerns in which he has an interest, control the private television channel TV-6, the Kommersant" newspaper group and the daily newspaper Nezavisimaia gazeta; at the same time, however, he is generally recognised as the person who effectively determines the line to be followed by ORT, albeit that he owns or controls only a minority stake and for some time has held no official position in the company. A further contribution to the blurring of the boundaries between the public and private sectors is made by Gazprom and LUKOil, which combine their primary interests in the energy sector with significant holdings in both the print and the broadcast media; both companies are partly owned by the state.

The second respect which distinguishes Russia from other European countries is the uncertain legal climate in which the mass media operate. The main Russian law on the mass media was adopted in 1991 and arguably reflects a state of affairs markedly different from what exists at the present time; in any event it covers only the print media. Any attempt, however, to update the law or to pass a law on the broadcast media have been thwarted by a political configuration that ensured that any bill approved by the Parliament would be vetoed by the President and vice versa. Although the new balance of power arising out the elections in 1999 and 2000 may in due course provide a more favourable climate for legislative action, at the present time the entire structure of Russian television, from the conversion of of the All-Union broadcasting company into Ostankino (and its subsequent displacement from the first channel in favour of ORT) to the subsumption of the different executive bodies responsible for the oversight of the press and the broadcast media into a new Ministry for the Press, Broadcasting and Information Media (MinSMI) in July 1999 has been put in place by a series of Presidential decrees.

The work of the mass media is, however, affected more or less tangentially by various other laws, notably the law on advertising and the laws on the conduct of elections. Though the former has given rise some interesting issues, such as the television advertising campaign conducted by the Belyi orel vodka company, who claimed the right to have their advertisements shown outside the hours set aside for the promotion of spirituous liquors on the somwhat tenuous grounds that they did not actually mention what the company produced, it is the latter which merits the greater attention.

One consequence of the rapid nature of the changes since 1991 and the lack of a clear legal framework is the absence, whether defined by law or by long-standing convention, of a clearly defined public service function for either public-sector or private-sector television. The one exception to this is the electoral law, which requires those television channels in which the state has an interest (ORT and RTR) to show free of charge during parliamentary and presidential election campaigns a specified number of election broadcasts for each of the parties or candidates. In addition all channels are obliged to show such political advertisements as the parties or candidates are willing or able to pay for. In all elections up to and including the presidential election of 1996 the television companies were prohibited from interfering in any way with the style, format or content of these broadcasts, to the evident frustation of many political journalists; in more recent elections the free broadcasts have taken the form of debates, usually between three participants or their representatives.

This public service obligation has been carried out punctiliously by the television companies and in a manner which by the standards of post-Soviet Russian politics has been surprisingly free of controversy. The difficulties have arisen in relation to other aspects of election coverage, above all television news bulletins. The bias shown by the channels with state involvement towards whichever happened to be the 'party of power' in the 1993 and 1995 parliamentary elections has been well documented, as has the support for the incumbent displayed by all main channels, regardless of their ownership status, during the presidential campaign of 1996. In the latter instance, however, there were some interesting nuances: an edition of ORT's popular quiz-show Pole chudes, in which the normal human participants were replaced by the puppet representations of Russian political figures from NTV's Kukly, itself an unusual example of inter-channel co-operation, as well as certain pre-election editions of Kukly itself, indicated that the support offered to El'tsin did not extend to 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 may reflect 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.

This example may have provided a subtle hint that the allegiances of broadcasting companies could not be taken for granted and might in certain circumstances prove a somewhat complicated matter. Certainly, by the time of the parliamentary election campaign of 1999 it was possible to discern the following, rather more complex pattern of commitments: ORT, its loyalty perhaps ensured by the methods outlined above, supported in general those forces backing Prime Minister and putative presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, while more particularly opposing the Otechestvo – Vsia Rossiia party and its leaders, Iurii Luzhkov and Evgenii Primakov, either of whom at that time was a potential future opponent of Putin; NTV, on the other hand, while more sympathetic to Luzhkov and Primakov, pursued a line which in the view of this observer is perhaps most accurately described as anti-anti-Luzhkov/Primakov or even anti-ORT.

The main battleground for what came to be described as an information war (informatsionnaia voina; see below for more on this and other such 'wars') was the news output of the two channels concerned and above all the weekly news analysis programmes: ORT's Vremia s Sergeem Dorenko and NTV's Itogi, presented by Evgenii Kiselev. It was here that the legal uncertainty became an issue. The Chairman of the State Electoral Commission, Aleksandr Veshniakov, considered that the pronouncements of Dorenko in particular contravened those provisions of the electoral law which prohibit the soliciting of support (agitatsiia) by anyone other than a candidate; a riposte came from Mikhail Lesin, Head of MinSMI, who considered that Veshniakov's attempts to stop Dorenko were themselves a contravention of the constitutional provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech. In the event the question remained unresolved, and Dorenko continued unabashed. Indeed, in its post-election edition of Itogi (19 December 1999) NTV showed an extract of film in which Sergei Dorenko appeared to be electioneering on behalf of Boris Berezovskii in Kabardino-Balkaria, where the latter stood as a candidate for a single-member constituency in the Duma.

This issue is, to be fair, not simply one of legal uncertainty. The concept of what the popular newsreader and presenter Svetlana Sorokina described in an interview as 'authored news programmes' ['avtorskie novosti'.], though possibly sounding strange in some West European countries, has become firmly established in Russian television practice. The concept takes on its sharpest form in the weekly news analysis programmes nowto be found on most, if not all channels and of which the most striking examples are Vremia s Sergeem Dorenko and Itogi. These programmes are very closely bound up with the personality of the individual presenter, whose role goes beyond introducing the programme, linking the items and interviewing guests to that of commentator.

There is a perfectly respectable case to be made out for the 'authored news programme'. A system which admits that the selection and presentation of news is not free from political judgements and which recognises that journalists and commentators have political views and allows these views to be expressed is not inherently less satisfactory than one which assumes a universally accepted agenda and pretends that all journalists and presenters are political eunuchs until such time as they leave their employment to become candidates for one or other of the political parties. In Russia there is an element of transparency about the procedure, since neither the presenters themselves nor their employers make any pretence at hiding their commitment, and it is reasonably safe to assume that most informed viewers understand that when presenters comment, they are essentially representing the interests of there employers. For the system to work, however, there needs to be a reasonable degree of political stability, at least in terms of the system of parties, and sufficient separate channels for at least all mainstream shades of political opinion to be represented, and it is interesting that an explicit attempt to do something similar was made in Italy in the 1970s; in present-day Russia neither condition exists: the system of political parties remains extremely fluid, while the present structure of channels and their owners leaves many strands of opinion unrepresented. The Communists, for example, have had difficulty gaining access to television ever since the present political dispensation came into being in 1993.

The absence of a clear legal framework and of a generally accepted public service function for television means that the executive branch of the state effectively plays two roles, that of participant and that of determining and enforcing the rules, and it does not require a high level of sophistication to work out that in such a situation one of the participants has something of an advantage. In practice the relationship between the state as upholder of the rules and the media operators seems to proceed on the basis of a rather complex combination of blatant political manipulation and scrupulous observance of the legal niceties. The workings of this relationship are illustrated by two incidents which have been prominent in the life of the Russian media in the spring of 2000; these are the competitions for the right to broadcast on the first and third television channels and the raid carried out by masked and armed individuals on premises belonging to Media-Most on 11 May.

The former incident arose when TV-Tsentr applied for a five-year extension to its licence to broadcast on the third channel, as this was due to expire in May 2000. The response of MinSMI was to invite tenders for the licences to broadcast on channels one (held by ORT) and three, claiming that in both cases the regulations precluded an automatic extension of the licence on the grounds that each company had received two official warnings about its conduct. There were three problems with this apparently reasonable response. The first is that in the warnings procedure the Ministry acts as judge and jury, so that there is no external control to ensure that these warnings are issued on a fair and politically impartial basis. The second is that there was some doubt as to when ORT's licence was due to expire, since one interpretation was that it had effectively been renewed in 1998 and therefore had another three years to run. Finally there was a widespread belief that the whole episode was a politically-inspired manoeuvre designed to punish TV-Tsentr for its support for Mayor Luzhkov in the 1999 elections, and that the inclusion of the eminently loyal ORT in the procedure was a fig-leaf intended to create the illusion of political impartiality.

In the event the status of ORT's licence remained untested, the tender procedure took place, and the company's bid for renewal was successful, the only competition coming from what was perhaps a marginally less than totally committed bid submitted from a subsidiary of RTR. TV-Tsentr proved less amenable, however, and went to court to have the warnings annulled, thus suggesting the possibility of judicial review of the executive's decsions; its initial success in the court of first instance obtained an interim extension of its licence and a decision to postpone the tendering process until after the conclusion of all relevant court proceedings. Nonetheless, for all the involvement of the courts, it is by no means impossible that the outcome will be a mutually acceptable solution worked out by Mayor Luzhkov and Minister Lesin over unspecified refreshments in a Moscow cafe.

Many of the circumstances surrounding the second incident remain unclear. Were the participants representing the Tax Police, as their uniforms proclaimed, or the FSB, which also claimed or admitted responsibility? Was the ostensible reason for the raid the investigation of tax evasion, or the search for illegal bugging devices? Was the real reason an attempt to intimidate or to punish Media-Most for its lack of support for President Putin? Be that as it may, Media-Most was able to obtain a court decision declaring the raid illegal, and if the decision is upheld on appeal, it should get back any papers seized in the raid. Nevertheless, one may wonder if there is real benefit to Media-Most from these legal proceedings, just as one does not have to believe some of the more fanciful versions on the Internet suggesting that the incident was provoked by Media-Most's own security service to wonder what real harm there was to the company from the incident itself.

If one examines the conglomerates that own the mass media in Russia, certain unusual features come to light. The first is the absence of foreign media companies. Though there appears to be no formal legal impediment to the involvement of foreign companies in Russian media operations, examples are few and far between. Some international groups (for example, Storyfirst Communications) have set up minor networks of local radio and television stations, and there has been foreign involvement in the publication of English-language newspapers or Russian-language versions of international magazines, but these remain the exception, and can be considered fairly peripheral. Of possible long-term significance is the purchase of a 4.5% stake in NTV by a subsidiary of the American Funds Group. In some instances foreign companies that have become involved in the Russian media have later withdrawn: most notably Ted Turner's organisation was a founding partner in TV-6, but subsequently pulled out. Presumably the Russian media market is not seen as a good investment, though the fact that that most existing outlets are part of Russian conglomerates could make it harder for foreign companies to buy their way in, should this perception at some time in the future change. By the same token it may be noted that Russian media owners have not for the most part extended their interests abroad; an intriguing exception is Vladimir Gusinskii's purchase of 17.3% of the U.S.-based Central European Media Enterprises, an event which might have occasioned more comment than it did, given that at the time Media-Most appeared to be in some financial difficulty (see above).

A further difference concerns the type of company involved in the ownership of the mass media. In western Europe there is a tendency for the media to be owned by specialised media groups: prominent examples at international level include the Murdoch, Bertelsmann and Kirch groups, while in the United Kingdom there are Trinity Mirror, United News and Media and the Guardian Media Group. In Russia, however, the media have tended to fall into the hands of companies whose primary interests lie elsewhere: Boris Berezovskii seems to have started his career in motor trading; Media-Most began as an off-shoot of Most-bank; the main element of Interrros is Oneksimbank, and the secondary nature of the media interests of the likes of Gazprom and LUKOil is evident from the titles of the companies.

There are, it must be said, exceptions to the rule described above: on the one hand the political ambitions of Silvio Berlusconi, together with the combination of industrial and media interests of his Fininvest group make comparisons between him and Boris Berezovskii irresistible, even if the former has acheived two distinctions that have hitherto eluded the latter, in that he has been Prime Minister of his country and has faced criminal charges. On the other hand Media-Most has been hived off from Most-bank, so that it now forms what is probably Russia's only major specialised media group.

The question why this pattern of media ownership has evolved in Russia is an interesting one, and two cases arre worth looking at a little detail. The first is the takeover of Izvestiia by Oneksimbank and LUKoil: having survived an attempt to take possession from the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1992-93, the newspaper retained its hard-won independence until the spring of 1997, when a large oil company, LUKoil started to buy up the shares in the newspaper, which were owned by the journalists. Some of the latter group (among them the editor, Igor' Golembiovskii), fearing for the newspaper's independence under the control of LUKoil, turned to what they thought was a 'white knight' in the form of Oneksimbank. As described, not without a certain degree of Schadenfreude, by NTV's 'Rejting pressy', matters seem to have taken a farcical turn when each of the two companies found itself with about 49% of the shares and lay in wait for the one remaining journalist-shareholder, a correspondent working abroad. The person in question eventually returned to Moscow and sold his shares to Oneksimbank, allegedly receiving a sum which would enable him to retire in some comfort, after which the 'white knight' joined forces with the predator to restructure the board of directors and dismiss the editor.

The circumstances of the take-over and the unceremonious treatment of Golembiovskii caused something of a scandal in Russian media circles, but there are some points worth noting here. The first is that no-one forced the journalists to sell their shares to either company; they presumably were able to calculate for themselves the balance between loss of editorial independence and financial input, both to their own pockets and to the newspaper. Indeed, the need to obtain a secure financial base for the newspaper seems to have been one of the main motives for the sale. It also seems that whatever the journalists might have believed, neither company wished to have a notoriously independently-minded editor in charge of their newspaper. Finally, for all Golembiovskii's merits as an editor, he is hardly the first editor to lose his job as the result of a take-over, and he and those of his colleagues who left with him were able quickly to found a new paper, Novye Izvestiia. This may or may not be a beacon of independence; it was, however, reputed to be financed by Boris Berezovskii.

The second example is Gazprom, which at the beginning of 1998 created a special subsidiary, Gazprom-Media, to take charge of its holdings in the media. When the subsidiary was set up, it was suggested that reason was to enable Gazprom to work out exactly what it owned in the media, though when this question was put, not entirely frivolously, to the then Chairman, Viktor Iliushin, he replied that Gazprom had a reasonably good idea ('dostatochno polnoe predstavlenie') what it owned, but not always how ('kakim obrazom') it owned it. In fact, according to NTV's commentator it is difficult to work out what media outlets Gazprom finances either on a regular or a one-off basis, though she went on to mention that the company owned 100% of Prometej, a television production company, had a controlling interest in the newspaper Rabochaia tribuna, financed Trud, had minority share-holdings in ORT and NTV and interests in 32 regional publications and thirteen local broadcasting companies, as well as being responsible for publications relating to the gas industry. Whether Gazprom-media has been successful in clarifying questions of ownership is perhaps doubtful: even in June 2000 it remained uncertain what proportion of shares in Media-Most it owned or controlled, and figures touted varied between 0 and 94%.

Mr Iliushin's answer to the question why Gazprom needed to own or finance all these media outlets was fairly circumspect, but revealing. He observed that the time had come for the company to explain to the Russian public what it did and why it had to exist in the form in which it did. And while he did not rise to the questioner's bait over whether Gazprom would use its media outlets to support an attempt by Prime-Minister Chernomyrdin to run for president in 2000, he did point out that it was not a matter of indifference to the company who was running the country. Revealingly, at no point in the interview did he suggest that one of the aims of his organisations was to make money for his parent company. The true financial position of any Russian media enterprise is unlikely ever to enter the public domain, but the evidence of Mr Iliushin's answers and the circumstances surrounding the take-over of Izvestiia both suggest that investment in the Russian media is undertaken not for profit, but for other corporate ends, most notably the protection of the public image and the promotion of the business interests of the owners.

It is, however, possible to discern a process of convergence taking place, in so far as some West European media groups have in recent years started to expand their sphere of interests. One striking example is the way in which a number of media groups have been buying into football clubs: the Murdoch group has bought holdings of just under 10% in Manchester United and Leeds United, NTL (which has an extensive cable operation in the United Kingdom) owns a similar share of Newcastle United, while the Scotish Media Group has invested in Heart of Midlothian. What is interesting here is a sort of mirror-image effect in comparison with Russian media groups: these investments, which may or may not be profitable, are undertaken in order to promote the core interests of the companies concerned, usually with respect to obtaining the rights to televise football matches. A rather different case is that of Vivendi, formerly known as Société générale des eaux. In some ways it can be seen as a Western equivalent of Gazprom: having started out as a utilities company, it has expanded into various areas, including transport and the mass media, where among its interests are Canal Plus and a minority holding in BSkyB; it is at present engaged in merger discussions with the American film and media company Universal.

Mention of the competition for the rights to show football matches provides a link to the final question to be examined here, namely the question of the so-called 'media wars' (informatsionnye voiny). These have been a prominent feature of the Russian mass media during the second half of the 1990s, the the main outbreaks having been the following: disagreements between the media supporting and those opposed to Anatolii Chubais during the summer of 1997, after a privatisation auction in which Messrs Berezovskii and Gusinskii took the view that they had been badly treated by the then Deputy Prime Minister; a dispute between the Berezovskii and the Gusinskii media, and more specifically between the television channels ORT and NTV in the summer of 1999, and then the continuation of this dispute during the period of the Duma election campaign at the end of 1999, when the two channels mentioned devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to attacking each other's coverage.

The events of the summer of 1999 provoked a very strong reaction from several quarters, including open letters to the President and a statement from the newly-appointed Minister for the Mass Media; it even allowed former prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to add to his contribution to post-Soviet folk-lore with an outrageously racist comment concerning the presumed ethnic origins of the two main participants. For all that, however, it was difficult for an outside oberver to understand what the fuss was about. Notwithstanding the dictum about dog not eating dog, 'media wars' of this type are not exactly unusual elsewhere: the media belonging to the Murdoch group are constantly criticising the BBC, and during the first half of 2000 the inhabitants of Glasgow and Edinburgh have been entertained by a dispute between the Scottish Media Group and Scotsman Publications which has been no less obscure or vicious than that between Gusinskii and Berezovskii.

There are perhaps two reasons why the 'media wars' of the 1997-1999 have provoked strong reactions. The first is historical: up to the late 1980s the Soviet media were essentially monolithic; from 1991 onwards with the exception of a few newspapers associated with the communist-nationalist opposition they tended to be essentially pro--El'tsin; with the breaking up of the El'tsin coalition after 1996 the discovery that different media outlets and especially different television channels might support different politicians has came as something of a shock to the Russians. The second is the relative ferocity with which the arguments have been conducted in a country with a very strong recent tradition of public seemliness; this applies especially to the use of kompromat against politicians and other public figures. It appears to have escaped public notice in Russia that the weapon of kompromat has been used routinely in many Western countries to disrupt or to destroy the careers of many politicians and that if public figures did not misbehave themselves in the first place there would be no kompromat to use against them anyway.

There is, however, a further aspect to this problem. In general media disputes in Western Europe tend not to be directly related to politics, but are concerned with economic issues, more specifically with attempts to increase the number or readers or viewers. In many instances these attempts find their expression in the competition for the rights to cover sporting events, especially national football championships. In Russia the 'media wars' might have had an economic sub-text, albeit that this might be not so much the search for more readers or viewers as the wider economic interests of the respective owners (as was clearly the case in 1997), but they have always had first and foremost a political dimension. This includes the incident of summer 1999, which to a large extent revolved round the support that Media-Most was perceived to be giving to Iurii Luzhkov and Evgenii Primakov, political opponents of Boris Berezovskii. What seems to be the case is that in Russia those areas of civil society which stand outside politics are not yet sufficiently developed to provide fertile ground for competition between the different mass media groups. Even here, however, there may be the first signs that things are changing: a recent argument over a restructuring of the Russian film industry was thought by some observers to be in essence a competition to acquire the lucrative television rights to an enormous number of Soviet films.

It is the contention of this paper is that the partial privatisation and almost total commercialisation the Russian mass media have created a situation where these media can be placed in the general European paradigm, albeit that there will be more similarities with the Italian system than with that of, say, the United Kingdom. Although there are sometimes quite significant differences of detail, the combination of public and private ownership within the television sector and the tendency of the privately-owned media to belong to large conglomerates are common to both systems. Moreover, even if there were initially important differences between the types of companies owning media outlets, a series of parallel and of converging developments is tending to reduce these differences, a development which should not necessarily be regarded with complacency in Western Europe. It also appears to be the case that the behaviour of the Russian mass media does not necessarily depart from West European norms, albeit that the unfamiliarity within Russia of certain forms of conduct leads to different reactions from audience and observers.

Where the key differences lie is in the background in which the media operate. This relates to the financial possibilities of the public sector, but above all perhaps to the absence of a secure legal framework and of established conventions which can protect media companies from arbitrary action on the part of state bodies and can provide generally accepted rules for the coverage of elections by the broadcast media. Even here, however, the picture is somewhat mixed: the law is sometimes more effective than it may seem at first sight, while Vladimir Gusinskii's status as a tax resident of Gibraltar is oddly reminiscent of the elaborate attempts made by the Murdoch group to minimalise their tax liabilities.

The creation of a system of reasonably free and reasonably pluralist mass media can and has been regarded as on of the most significant achievements of post-Soviet Russia. The extent to which the new political dispensation intends to build on this achievement is as yet unclear, but whatever happens it is probable that the problems to be faced will in many respects not be different from those encountered throughout Europe.