From the vault - the Russian media 3 years ago

My inactivity here in the past couple of weeks has been matched by my activity in real life (v reale, kak govorit'sia) - including a take-home midterm that is due Friday morning. Gah.

A couple of nights ago, I was looking through my personal emails from five years ago, trying to recall what I was writing in response to concerned emails from my friends and family in the US at the time that the Nord-Ost hostage crisis was happening. As it turns out, nothing that seems insightful or non-personal enough to share at the moment - maybe when five more years have passed. But I did find something else interesting - a translation I did of an article in Aktsiia (or, to be more precise, @ktsiia), a free youth-oriented newspaper which used to be available in the racks at the McCafe on Pushkin Square. If I had time, I would go through and insert links to relevant Wikipedia pages or pages of the TV shows mentioned, but hopefully the article is relevant enough as is. Remember what Russian TV used to be like?

"See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil"*
By Vasilii Bereza | Special to @ktsiia
Published on the internet September 7, 2004, and in the September print issue of @ktsiia

During the past few years, all more or less memorable events on Russian TV have been as a rule connected with the removal from the air of journalists or entire channels inconvenient to the Kremlin. The increasing number of topics which are "forbidden" to develop programming or broadcast about has steadily led not only to a crisis of content, but also to a crisis of format. The new television season starting in September visibly (and it can't be otherwise on television) demonstrates the utter stagnation of the domestic television industry.

This fall there will most likely not be any revolutionary changes on channels one and two [ORT and Rossiia/RTR]; these channels are betting on entertainment programs with a strong track record. Channel one will renew its broadcasts of the latest season of "Star Factory" ("Fabrika zviozd") and "The Last Hero" ("Poslednii geroi"). Possibly, the participants of "Hero" will be people who previously appeared on "Factory." On Rossiia, a new project called "People's Performer-2" ("Narodnyi artist-2") will start at the beginning of September and will be hosted by Fekla Tolstaya and Ivan Urgant. A new show by Dmitry Dibrov, originally developed for Channel One, will appear evenings on RTR.

To a large extent, the changes in the programming grids of the major broadcast channels are driven simply by the movement of shows from one channel to another. Thus, "School for Scandal" ("Shkola zlosloviia"), hosted by Tatiana Tolstaya and Dunya Smirnova, which used to run on the Kultura channel, will now appear on NTV. NTV's lineup has undergone the most extensive changes of all, which is linked to the personnel changes at the network. Leonid Parfyonov, fired from NTV in early summer for violating its corporate ethics, decided to dedicate himself to documentary journalism and made a film in Athens called "O, Sport, You Are the World" ("O, sport, ty - mir"). In the halls of Ostankino the former anchorman is now known as "Lyonya Riefenstahl."

A month after the scandalous departure of one of the NTV's leading journalists, the channel got a new general director, as Vladimir Kulistikov assumed that role. Right after his appointment, Kulistikov announced that Savik Shuster's "Freedom of Speech" ("Svoboda Slova") and Alexander Gerasimov's "Personal Input" ("Lichny Vklad") would be cancelled. The "Red Arrow" ("Krasnaya Strela") also left NTV. Stepan Kapusta the rabbit and Khriun Morzhov the pig went off the air supposedly because of either low ratings or flat humor. On the bright side, Tamara Gavrilova, who studied with Vladimir Putin at university, is now deputy general director. It's
not hard to guess who "calls the tune" now at the network.

How NTV's new programming lineup will look is difficult to tell for now. Ever since a ban was imposed on employees talking to the press, a lot of contradictory information has emerged. Some sources at the network say that the changes will first affect news programming, which has traditionally been NTV's strong suit. Starting in the beginning of September there was already a reduction in the number of daily installments of the "Today" ("Segodnya") news program -- instead of every two hours, the program now runs every three hours, and its length has been shortened to 12 minutes.

"The Country and the World" ("Strana i mir") and the 7:00 evening news, anchored by Mikhail Osokin and Olga Belova, have kept their places in the programming schedule. Former anchor Tatiana Mitkova now works on the news department's overall policies in the role of chief editor.

The situation with the Sunday analytical show is less clear. Even the network's journalists themselves say privately that they don't know what sort of format they will be asked to work in. Probably a clearer picture will emerge later, when NTV's new chief producer, Alexander Levin, gets the hang of his new role -- Levin was the progenitor of the first and most successful Russian reality show "Behind the Glass" ("Za steklom" -- a "Big Brother" clone). Most likely, NTV will slowly but surely be transformed into an entertainment-oriented format, which was predicted by observers back in 2001 when the network' ownership changed.

A state-held monopoly on the news is the market situation at the start of the 2004-05 television season. This leads, on the one hand, to a lack of competition between news bureaus, and as a result socio-political programming is steadily losing ground to entertainment shows and movies. On the other hand, a whole genre -- political discussion -- has left our TV screens, but as everyone knows, nature abhors a vaccuum, and the discussion will continue, it's just a question of what forms it will take.

The mass media are no longer fulfilling their main responsibility -- enabling a dialogue between society and the authorities. The impossibility of open, public debate has the potential to foster the marginalization of political movements, especially youth movements. Young activists have already thrown paint-filled balloons at the building on Lubyanka and seized ministerial offices to call attention to their issues.

Apparently, the authorities are determined not to notice the effect on Russian society of a total informational vacuum. This determination could potentially lead to dramatic consequences, first of all for the government.

"The hysteria surrounding this issue must stop" (V. Putin on the Yukos case). And sure enough, we are stopping the hysteria, not only about Yukos and freedom of speech, but also about the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya, which is yet again entering its final phase. Soon we will no
longer get hysterical about explosions in the center of the city and about passenger planes crashing. Well, no, actually we will, but only in our kitchens. However, Mr. President will not notice this and will "bless" us with the doubling or perhaps even tripling of the GDP. Not just the
president -- soon we ourselves won't notice any hysterical people, or more precisely, they're all gone already. That which is meant to inform us (forgive the impersonal construction) has turned into a mix of Verka Serdiuchka and the infamous doubling of the GDP.


What do you watch on Russian TV?
[from a sidebar on the same page of the same issue of @ktsiia]

Dmitry Itskovich, president of the "OGI" group of companies, publisher of Polit.ru:

Television is not really my way of life, I watch TV pretty rarely, and when I do watch it's usually movies, which after all aren't really television. I don't think people watch TV in order to get information or news -- for that purpose there are many other sources -- but in order to experience certain emotions, so as to relate their thoughts and feelings to standards and images which they trust.

With respect to the changes which have taken place recently and the disappearance of many independent projects from the programming schedules, I think this is entirely logical. My friend Kolya Pobol' told me once about a type of fish called the taimen, or actually he told me about why you can't find this fish wherever there are people. Taimen live in pairs in which the strongest individual fish unite. So a pair like this occupies the best spot in the river and holds onto it for some time. And then along comes a person and catches those leaders, and their place is rather quickly taken by weaker fish, which are also caught, and so on. That sort of degradation is taking place currently in television.

Bright people come on the scene, like Parfyonov, they work hard and create a personal brand. Then they get pulled out, each time for different reasons, but the general reason is nonetheless the same: to show "who's in charge of the river." And so space is created for accidental, or perhaps just the opposite, absolutely non-accidental, people.

Today, one can clearly see a tendency toward the weakening of public opinion, toward the disappearance of its leaders. The leaders are being forced out to the tributaries and backwaters, where they have little influence on the general mood. But there is no such thing as a silent society, that would violate the laws of social nature; of course, sometimes it does happen that there is no society, and such situations have their own rules and consequences.


Vladimir Kara-Murza, journalist, TV presenter:

You know, I like to watch the old shows from our channel ­ TVS. I have them on videotape, so anytime I want I can watch old editions of "Sum Total" ("Itogo"), "Free Cheese" ("Besplatnyi syr"), or "V nashu gavan' zakhodili korabli"...those are the kind of shows I like.

What have I watched recently? The miniseries based on "The Idiot" on RTR. Lately I find myself terribly irritated by the so-called analytical programs. In particular, I've found I can't stand watching "News of the Week" ("Vesti nedeli"), whether it's anchored by Revenko or Brilev. I started watching Lyonya Parfyonov less right before his program was shut down, after he started to give in to the pressure.

The same thing with Marianna Maksimovskaya and Sasha Gerasimov -- I can't forgive them for being live on the air as Khodorkovsky was being arrested and not saying a word about what was happening. They just continued to run their show as scheduled, when their choice of topics had a real chance to change the situation.

Overall, of course, it's sad to watch Russian ("nashe") television...although I still buy the TV schedule, and I try to pretend everything is the way it used to be (laughs).

Yes, I just remembered ­- there was a good show on STS, "Public People" ("Publichnye liudi"), now it's called "Istoriia v detaliakh." And I totally boycott the Sport channel, since they took over our frequency. Since I was directly involved with television production, I am, of course, an atypical viewer. But I think that I've been able to keep the ability to look at things freshly from the viewer's point of view and that I can realistically assess my own work and the work of others.


*I don't have the original of this article anymore, and it's not online anymore either, but for some reason I originally translated the title as "I see nothing, I hear nothing, I won't tell anyone anything." The revised translation seems more likely to be correct, plus it sounds better!