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Comments

• [1] jjlev from nj June 14, 2007 - 09:23AM

  Re: The role of photography among truth-tellers there -- changing?

  While working as a journalist in a communist country in recent years, I was informed that the scrutiny of print journalism by authorities is so complete, that photography instead served as the more potent medium of expression. For an obvious example relating to the former USSR, so-called Kremlin watchers were able to assemble entire narratives from a single Prada front page photograph without drawing on a single printed word.

  Given that there seems to be a renaissance of photography in the former USSR (as any relevant google search will quickly report), coinciding with a reduction in press freedom, I'm wondering if you have noticed any switch in the most effective medium of truth tellers, from the written word back to the photographed image.

  
  
• [2] jjlev from nj June 14, 2007 - 09:25AM

  PS -- I assume it *is* Prada now and not PRAVDA!

  Chrs

  
  
• [3] Mig Greengard from Windsor Place, Brooklyn June 14, 2007 - 10:41AM

  I'm the editor of theotherrussia.org, the official site of the Other Russia opposition coalition in Russia. I've worked with Garry Kasparov for many years. Some items (and you can see our website for more details):

  1) Putin's popularity is an illusion. He has total control over the media. If Bush had such control plus a pervasive security force he and Cheney would have 80%! Lukashenko is at 90. Saddam was at 99% Also, criticizing the top man is just not done in a KGB environment. Ask the people about their lives, and policies, and you get negative responses.

  2) GDP and foreign reserves aren't what matter to the 100 million Russians not enjoying the fruits of the energy boom. It's like taking the average temperature of the patients in a hospital. The vast majority are seeing their standard of living decline.

  3) The laws on extremism actually prohibit the criticism of officials now.

  
  
• [4] Dmitry Kiper from Queens June 14, 2007 - 10:48AM

  With Russia’s last free election, the free speech experiment ended

  Russia’s last free election was eleven years ago, but it is still relevant today. The degree to which Russian journalists did everything in their power to re-elect Boris Yeltsin—including cooperating with his campaign team, spreading rumors about the Communist party and making sure Yeltsin appears regularly on television in a positive light—was hardly mentioned, if at all, in all the recent obituaries and editorials about him.

  Yet the 1996 election was a turning point, and it placed the media into an uncomfortable position: help an unpopular president get re-elected or go back to communism. Many journalists did what they thought was the right thing to do. As the press raised Yeltsin’s popularity from below five percent to above 50, Vladimir Putin, then largely unknown, took notice. The lesson was clear: get the press on your side and people will believe what they’re told. Of course, this is not a new lesson, but the specifics were different, especially when it came to television.

  story continues at dmitrykiper.wordpress.com

  
  
• [5] Jamey Gambrell from New York June 14, 2007 - 11:10AM

  The war against the press is not just a matter of murdering journalists. Economic and administrative measures are being used systematically to quash NGOs and all truly independent manifestations of civil society. For example, the Educated Media Foundation, (formerly know as Internews Russia), an NGO that has trained over 15,000 Russian broadcast journalists, mostly from the provinces, was recently raided by the Russian police. The police confiscated ALL of the NGO's servers and 1 1/2 years of financial documentation, effectively shutting it down and interrupting its ongoing training programs.

  The ostensible reason for this was a minor personal infraction of customs laws by the EMF's director, Manana Aslamazyan. This infraction was used (four months after the fact)to basically obliterate the entire organization.

  Ms. Aslamazyan is a well-known and highly respected figure in the Russian media community; she has been on the Federal Broadcast Licensing Committee and received numerous awards). After the raid over TWO THOUSAND RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS hailing from all corners of the country signed an open protest letter to President Putin, among them country's most prominent television journalists, Svetlana Sorokina, Vladimir Pozner, Leonid Parfyonov, Mikhail Osokin, Sergei Dorenko, and others.

  Despite this totally unprecedented display of support, most of the signees would agree that their protest will have little or no effect. Everyone recognizes that the object of the government exercise was to "manage" another aspect of Russian "democracy": i.e., NGO's that have received funding from FOREIGN sources--in this case, USAID, TACIS and numerous Western foundations including the Open Society Institute.

  Though the impact of any single act of this sort may appear negligible from the outside, the tactics being used are much the same as those employed to dismantle the oil company Yukos, and prevent anyone even remotely related to it to exercise the political freedoms that were in fact written in to the Russian Constitution.

  
  
• [6] Jamey Gambrell from New York June 14, 2007 - 11:31AM

  For more on the Educated Media Foundation, and to read the Russian journalists' Open Letter to President Putin, go to

  http://www.internews.org/prs/2007/20070503_russia.shtm