How Putin Muzzled the Moscow Times
Put yourself in Andrew McChesney’s shoes.
You’re the American editor of the Moscow Times, a newspaper published in Russia in English with a miniscule print circulation but a website that is ranked by Technorati as one of the most linked sources of specialized information about Russia in the world. Funded by foreigners, you have a long, proud history of employing Russian reporters and issuing blistering editorial and news content documenting and criticizing anti-democratic moves by the Kremlin. And now, the Kremlin is in the last stages of a final crackdown on the last vestiges of critical media, a crackdown that nobody in the West seems willing to do too much about.
You have two choices. Keep holding the Kremlin’s feet to the fire and get snuffed out like a candle in the wind (but a blaze-of-glory kind of candle) or tone it down and see how long you can last, figuring that even a little real journalism is better than none in a neo-Soviet dictatorship.
What do you do?
Like a turkey on Thanksgiving morning, you look across the barnyard and you see Farmer Putin sharpening his axe. On June 5, your own pages report that the Kremlin is moving against an obscure little English tabloid called the eXile, an odious little screed that supports itself by hawking Russian mail-order brides to sweaty, pimply, prepubescent readers and trades in self-congratulation, topless women and silly, bitter attacks on anything and everything American (because the paper’s American editors hold the country where they couldn’t quite make it — hence their exile to Russia — in rather low esteem).
And you realize the horrible beauty of this move. You see that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin understands nobody cares in the least what happens to the eXile. In fact, the world will actually be better off without it.
The eXile attacks the Kremlin’s enemies far more often than the Kremlin, so if the Kremlin shuts it down how can anyone complain about a crackdown? (For instance, one of the eXile‘s more childish, idiotic and ludicrously self-important contributors, himself an avowed Marxist and atheist, recently ran a pathetic hatchet job on the brilliant work of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in documenting the failures of the Putin administration, a smear that might as well have been paid for by the Kremlin itself. No matter that the New York Review of Books and the Carnegie Center, to name just two eminent sources, have praised Nemtsov’s work to the sky. The real truth is to found in this off-color Russian comic book!)
It’s like when Chief Justice John Marshall grabbed the power of judicial review by using it for the first time to rule in favor of Thomas Jefferson. How could Jefferson complain? And what could he say a few years later when that power was turned against his presidency?
On June 11, the MT reported that the eXile had bit the dust. It quoted Mark Ames, the editor/publisher:
“‘The paper is dead, unless a miracle happens.’ The newspaper missed an issue this week after its financial backers ‘got scared away by the government focusing its attention on it,’ and now The eXile is very likely to cease publication all together.’”
There’s probably no harsher critic of the Putin regime in the world than me, but even I have to take my hat off to the KGB spymaster on this one. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get too worked up about the closure of the eXile. It’s as if the National Enquirer were written by frat boys at a community college in Daytona Beach, a seedy masturbation club for nasty anal retentive children with nothing better to do. Russia will be better off without it. The world will too.
The same can be said for Eduard Limonov’s freakish National Bolshevik Party, a gathering of racists and nationalists whose leader routinely publishes tracts in the eXile‘s pages along with a coterie of other ragtag losers and weirdos. Putin has already liquidated the formal aspects of the Party, and nobody shed a tear — nor should they have.
Except of course when these actions are seen philosophically as stepping stones, precedents for totalitarian extermination. No sooner had the NBP gone the way of the dodo, for instance, than Putin purged every other political party that opposed his policies from the Russian parliament and from the presidential elections. And, I believe, no sooner will he strike down the eXile then he will turn his Evil Eye, like Sauron from Rohan to Gondor, toward the Moscow Times. To the extent there’s any blowback over the eXile — and there probably won’t be — he’ll simply take that into account when carrying out his next attack. To the extent there isn’t, he’ll feel free to do his worst.
Russia’s new “president” Dimitri Medvedev has spouted some rhetoric recently about protecting the media and freeing the judiciary from influence. But as Russian journalist Yevgeny Kiselyov (booted off the airwaves after stepping on too many Kremlin toes) wrote recently in the Moscow Times:
Perhaps Medvedev is simply taking a page from Putin’s book, however. After all, in his first term Putin also spoke nobly about the need for the rule of law (albeit with a Russian twist, introducing his “dictatorship of the law” model). But in the end, far from creating an independent legal system, Putin created a judiciary that applied the law selectively to eliminate his political opponents.
Medvedev hasn’t called for Kiselyov to be put back into a position of prominence on national TV, and a recent piece in the New York Times documents how, in fact, the Kremlin’s foes are still being aggressively purged in that forum. When the article was translated into Russian and published on a Russian website, a reader responded:
There is room on TV only for those who work to strengthen the country. If your actions are destructive, i.e. you do not support the unidirectional progression of your country, then there is no place for you there. I really want to say: write in newspapers and on the Internet, but TV is too strong a tool to hand over to everyone. TV should be for propaganda.
Indeed, Putin is better positioned today to carry out an escalation of this crackdown than he was a year ago. Now, he has a puppet “president” to blame when the blowback comes, a luxury he didn’t have when he was on point. He can conveniently retain all the power of the presidency (he recently made a state visit to France and was received by Nicolas Sarkozy just as if he were still Russia’s prime ruler) and deflect all of the blowback for a draconian new round of oppression.
This is some pretty impressive stuff from Mr. Putin, a bravura performance worthy of the highwater period of Soviet cloak and dagger. Even Grampa Joe Stalin never managed to populate the corridors of Russian government with so many KGB spies (and he wasn’t one himself).
Just as in the time of Stalin, it hardly matters if, on balance, like the eXile, you’re actually friendly to Putin and hostile to Russia’s “enemies” in the West (including their basic standards of professionalism for journalists). That won’t save you from being shoved onto a train to Siberia along with folks like Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Take, for instance, Khodorkovsky critic William Browder. Head of a large investment fund with heavy commitments to the Russian market and a strident advocate of Putin who approved the Khodorkovsky arrest, Browder recently found himself facing exactly the same kind of attack that sent Khodorkovsky to Siberia, and is now exiled from the country. The fact that, today, you might profess loyalty to the dictatorship means little to Putin; what matters is how much influence you are generating independent from the Kremlin, influence that makes you a theoretical threat tomorrow. That’s what motivated Stalin, and it’s what motivates the neo-Soviet chip off his block.
Remember now, you’re McChesney. And don’t forget that the Kremlin hasn’t hesitated to go much further than merely shutting down offensive journalism outlets. As the tragedy of Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Khlebnikov reminds us, the final solution is always on the table, too.
So, what do you do?
I’m afraid the decision has already been made. When opposition leader Oleg Kozlovsky was recently arrested to prevent him from participating in a protest against Medvedev’s inauguration and the first meeting of a new shadow parliament organization, he was sentenced to an outrageous two weeks in prison where he launched a hunger strike. The Moscow Times didn’t report it (other than a one-sentence reference in a wire report.)
When, from behind bars, he published the lead op-ed in the Washington Post, including a photograph of himself in the clutches of Putin’s goons, the Moscow Times website didn’t carry it. Instead, it ran a column from a Kremlin sycophant announcing a meeting in Washington DC funded by Russian state-owned propaganda network Russia Today designed to drum up support for Putin. The Moscow Times has recently redesigned its website apparently to downplay and bury any content that might be offensive to the Kremlin. And to all appearances it has stopped publishing critical letters to the editor (it’s quashed not one but three of mine in the last two months).
I can’t be too tough on McChesney. He’s got a staff of Russians with families that don’t want to see them unemployed, much less in prison, and the paper is still a beacon of truth in Russia, though it is flickering. McChesney tells me he sometimes has problems getting permission to put material from big American papers on his website, and that’s an outrage. But there’s nothing to stop McChesney from generating original editorial material from sources like Kozlovsky, and he’s just not doing that. To repeatedly feature those who are directly confronting the Kremlin would be dangerous, and it doesn’t seem he wants to run that risk.
Still, though, the problem doesn’t ultimately lie in Moscow, but in Western capitals where our leaders are collaborating in the rise of a neo-Soviet state in a manner that seems little different from the actions that facilitated the rise of Hitler. If we won’t provide the leadership, how can we expect to have any followers?
The Moscow Times is the canary in the mine shaft. If we let it drop without a fight, we’ll pay a heavy price later on.
So you didnt shed any tears when they came for Exile, because you’re not an obnoxious fratboy, etc.
You didnt shed any tears when they came for Limonov, because you are not a natzbol.
So when they came for Moscow Times… you know the rest, dont you?
The real challenge in a democracy is not to hold an unpopular view; it is to fight for the right of your opponent to hold his. Otherwise you might just as well be another Kos Kid.
Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately, I don’t think your American attitudes towards the press have much relevancy in today’s Russia.
While I understand and share your concern, I hardly think it’s incumbent upon me to feel regret that The eXile is gone. I believe that, on balance, The eXile was doing more harm than good in Russia, actually contributing justification for further crackdown on the media. I hardly think you can find anyone in the world more active in opposing Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on civil society in Russia than me, and I’ve clearly said that this move against The eXile is part of that crackdown.
A new national poll by the state-owned VTsIOM survey agency reports that 60% of Russians think government censorship of media is “absolutely” (25%) or “fairly” necessary. A publication like The eXile only helped contribute to that terrifying attitude. I don’t support its closure, but nor will I shed crocodile tears over it for propaganda purposes.
Because of this attitude, when we stand and fight it has to be over something unquestionably worth fighting for.
Have you ever considered for a moment that the reason the Moscow Times does not publish your letters is that they almost certainly written in your trademark hysterical screeching fashion? You are a joke and not worthy of serious consideration. The Moscow Times would not dream of publishing anything so foolish as your articles.
The paper publishes pieces critical of the Kremlin on a very regular basis, but unlike your writing they are usually well-argued and based on empirical fact.
You allege without a shred of evidence that the Moscow Times redesigned its site because it is trying to avoid appearing to confront the Kremlin. On point of fact, that is arrant nonsense. The site is being redesigned, I have been told by people who work there, because the previous version was old and clunky. Work is still in progress improving the site I am told, but there are technical difficulties that are more complicated than just the site itself.
Since you claim to have the ear of the editor (no doubt a bare-faced falsehood), you should know this already instead having to make up some drivel of your own. You would be funny, if your ill-informed squawking were not so grim. Your blog platform is a mockery of the real challenge of the opposition, who have to operate with reality and with the difficulties that prevail for them in modern Russia.
And how absurd is it that you claim to be the foremost opponent of Vladimir Putin, when your site is little more than a litany of copy and pastes. Indeed, you criticize the Times for supposedly burying its editorial content, when it is clear to anybody who reads the hard copy that it does no such thing. Of course, you wouldn’t know that as you fearlessly collate your ridiculous blog from several thousand miles away from Russia and anyway you could get your hands on the newspaper.
CARL:
You speak without proper reflection. The Moscow Times has published my letters in the past, and I have an ongoing dialogue with its editor, I assure you he does not consider me foolish. For your information, the Times recently published not merely a letter but an entire article about my blog. However, it took pains to avoid any of my specific personalized criticism of Vladimir Putin’s regime. You really ought to exercise a bit more care before launching such an absurd ad hominem attack. Moreover, for you to suggest this is somehow the main basis of my criticism is simply demented and offensive.
You’ve also failed to read my article with the proper care. I didn’t say that MT has gone silent on criticism, I said it is avoiding the worst kind of criticism, that from the actual opposition forces, and it is burying rather than featuring the criticism it does publish, and that I’m worried its on a path towards silence.
I’d appreciate it if you’d be a bit more careful in offering your comments in the future.
What a strange, malicious article. Instead of discussing the Moscow Times, the author rants on and on about this other, obscure publication, the eXile. She seems to have some sort of personal grudge there, but for the life of me I can’t understand what her point is supposed to be. And her grammar and style are painfully amateurish (“…has bit the dust.”) Please, let’s try to maintain editorial standards here.
NINA:
Sad to say, it seems your comment is every bit as “malicious” as you accuse the article of being (you even stoop to attacking my grammar!), and certainly very much detached from reality.
This article isn’t only about the Moscow Times, it’s also about The eXile. While obscure to many, it wasn’t (as the article clearly states) obscured to the Kremlin, which is the reason it was shut down. Moreover, there were those who admired it, for instance Owen Matthews, the Moscow Bureau Chief of Newsweek magazine — ironically, in the Moscow Times itself.
So, to put it mildly, you’re simply not getting your facts right, and your comment is hardly an example of the type of journalism you claim to want to see.
Doesn’t Pajamas Media have an editor who can assist this struggling immigrant with her syntax? It is almost as if this very article is a prank played upon the real Kim Zigfeld. Oh I forgot, there is no real Kim Zigfeld. And so alas, here she comes across just as a spurned lover, disposed of by both the Moscow Times and The Exile. Or rather, never even acknowledged by them in the first place. Funny stuff, but very odd for Pajamas to run this.
Incidentally, for all of Ms. “Zigfeld”‘s righteous indignation, she fails to disclose that by publishing in Russia! magazine, she is earning money from a Kremlin project and Kremlin-tiedcompany, SUP, which she herself once accused of censoring the Russian internet after SUP purchased LiveJournal. Poor, poor Ms. “Zigfeld,” no lover, no integrity, and not even a real name or face to show to the world.
Kim Zigfeld said:
“Because of this attitude, when we stand and fight it has to be over something unquestionably worth fighting for.”
While I certainly understand that the reality of Russia is lost on anybody who hasn’t experienced it, I think the reverse can also be said. You may not realize that fighting for everybody’s freedom, even those you disagree with, is indeed worth it.
From YOUR perspective, and perhaps many others’, the eXile was not worth preseving. You state the polls show that it had been “dangerous” because it made others fearful enough to vote for governmental censorship. In the final analysis, you are advocating for keeping a low profile out of fear, rather than defiantly crying against freedom of the press. I challenge you to this question: Is it worth it simply to disagree with MT for not fighting, when you yourself advocate a duck-and-cover strategy? Asked differently, Is occasional freedom worth fighting for?
This question begs others. Who decides in what situations you receive an allocation of freedom of the press? Who decides which publication is worthy of staying alive? What happens if blogs are next on the chopping block of Farmer Putin’s, and yours is not found “worthy”?
Again I state unequivocally, I have no concept of the realities of living in Russia. But I have to believe that those who think freedom is worth it in fits and starts would enjoy it better as a permanent reality. I guess it depends on what you’re really fighting for. Whatever it is – I hope you keep freedom in your sights. Free speech is “something unquestionably worth fighting for” from many people’s perspective.
Carl Pineta: is a obvious Marxist or Brain washed College Student or ELITE SOCIALIST Professor . 21 people have been murdered in the media in the last 5 years in Russia as was a former KGB agent in England and Maryland three years ago and no one has one person has brought to trail .
Now to mention a famous Russian born America lady Journalist who was reporting on Putin’s taking over the media in Moscow .
She walked out of her office Building late at night and her head blown off .
Mr. ReCon USMC,
Sorry to disappoint you, but your description of me does not match reality. Not that I find that surprising, since you accusing me of denying something I never even mentioned in the first place.
Kim Zigfield,
You mentioning Owen Matthews displays just how ill-informed and bitter your tirades against a fundamentally harmless paper like eXile really are. Because you don’t know what you are talking about, you don’t realize that Matthews was one of the original founders of the eXile. He met Matt Taibbi when they both worked at the Moscow Times in the mid-1990s.
They soon fell out and Matthews’ erstwhile allies never passed up a chance to mercilessly mock him (far more than they ever have to you, I should add). Nonetheless, because he is slightly more mature than you are and has a sense of humour, he doesn’t crow and caw at the eXile being shut down.
CARL:
That’s an interesting strategy you have there, very neo-Soviet in character. I expose your ridiculous set of lies and so you just forget about them move on to a different set. But it didn’t work out too well for the USSR, and I doubt it will serve you either. The only point I made about Owen was that he’s a prominent person who wrote about the eXile, in response to a commenter who said the eXile wasn’t worth talking about because it was too obscure. Nothing you wrote about Owen has anything to do with that, and for someone as virulently bitter and hostile as you to accuse me of bitterness is the height of hypocrisy. You’re so eager to attack me that it blinds your sense of reason, if indeed you have any. Dude, take a chill pill!
DITTO:
I quite clearly say in my article that when seen as a stepping stone towards encroachment on publications like the Moscow Times, the move on the eXile is abhorrent and I condemn it.
My point is that the eXile betrayed democracy by setting itself up as an easy target for the Kremlin, helping it set a precedent for future such moves, and because of that I condemn the eXile as well. Anyone who knows me knows that it would be quite convenient for me to praise the eXile and use that praise as a lever to attack Putin, but in the interest of truth I decline to do so.
I hope you will spend some of your energy working to help save Russia’s remaining worthwhile publications by encouraging our leaders to take aggressive steps to stand up to Putin, and I applaud your concern for a free press. Without it, I’d be out of a job!
Kim:
The reason Owen Matthews (you call him by his first name – he must be another of your intimate friends) wrote about the eXile is that he was instrumental in setting it up and the subject is of interest to people who actually live in Moscow – which of course excludes you. His article bears no import on the issue of the relative importance of the magazine. Just to clarify, since I have not expressed my view on this, the magazine was crude and often offensively banal, but it could be witty and surprising in its ability to produce interesting and incisive journalism. And it is a shame for plurality that the Moscow Times, as good as it is, now remains the only proper English-language publication in the Russian capital. Just so the reader can understand, the single reason you are happy that it has shut down is that you didn’t much like it and that they called you some rude names. That you cackle contendedly at their demise serves only as proof of the fact that you typify the mean, authoritarian, vindictive, crude and petty strain of attraction to despotism that you claim to despise and fight against.
As you for you suggesting that I have ducked your withering logic, the very suggestion is laughable. Your mode of argument is simply to direct bile and senseless invective on anybody that doesn’t share your personal grudges and bugbears. Even if one wanted to engage with you on some sort of rational level, it would be an exercise in futility.
My point in commenting initially was to say that you are thoroughly unqualified to contribute useful insight on Russia and that no disinterested reader should take any notice of you, because you are unbalanced (in every sense) and use your platform to shovel out spiteful personal attacks. Your don’t live in Russia, have a poor to non-existent grasp of the language, and lack any sense of perspective, context and analytical skills. The process of trawling through news and selectively picking and often skewing publicly published material on Russia is a feat any child could perform. It does a disservice to Russians, Russia-watchers and anybody that genuinely wants the good of the country.
Pajamas Media may be attracted to a hysterical polemicists’s ability to draw attention and readership by screeching like clapperboard prophet on a street corner, but Kim Zigfeld ultimately impoverishes the site and hollows out all proper understanding of a complex, fascinating, powerful but often self-destructive country like Russia.
Carl Pineta,
I stand struck dumb in admiration and adulation of your immense logic and overpowering intellect. Why indeed should anyone who doesn’t live in Moscow write about journalism in Moscow? The last time I heard anyone who even remotely approached your grasp of logic, that person was telling me that I was a hypocrit for supporting the Iraqi war unless I was willing to go fight there. What insight!
Right.
I’m someone who speaks Russian, who has lived in Russia, still travels to Russia, and has relatives in Russia. On that basis, I’m here to tell you that Kim Zigfeld runs intellectul rings around you and everything that you wrote in this thread. You haven’t addressed the issues she raised- it’s not that you brought a knife to a gunfight, it’s that you jumped into a gunfight and started flicking boogers.
Zigfeld buttresses her (his? I wouldn’t know) statements with links and quotes. Your response is to insult her on every point, while bringing up a single fact about Owen Matthews. Otherwise, your barrage is remarkably content free.
Didn’t we see you on YouTube recently- the teenage would-be beauty queen who made a fool of herself blathering about US education? The resemblance between her logic and yours is striking.
I see the Ad hominidae are well represented in this display. It does my heart good to see that creationists and the anti-vaccine crowd aren’t alone in vitriol and prevarication. Add in Holocaust deniers and there will be four for bridge.
When you read the stories of Russian refugees on the borders of Finland, Poland, and Hungary, then you’ll now the end has come, and the 21st century has truly begun.
I for one miss the eXile and I hope it manages to resurrect itself, as promised, on “undisclosed servers in a Putin-proof location.”
A little bit of anarchy is good for the soul.
Uh oh, time to buy a dioxin-ometer for soup testing. Do they make little test strips?
Travelling,
While trying to supress the immediate suspicion that you are one of Kim Zigfeld’s own minions if not Kim herself, let me attempt to address the causes of your dumbstruck awe.
Zigfeld maintains that the Moscow Times has buried its op-ed content. It has not. How do I know this? Because, unlike her, I pick up the newspaper daily and see perfectly well that it has done no thing. I can do that because I actually live in Moscow. She bases her flimsy argument exclusively on the piss-poor quality of the MT’s site, on which we are principally in some area of agreement.
Zigfeld also relates with wince-inducing glee that a small and scurrilous tabloid magazine in Moscow has been shut down. I say that she does so only out of personal animus for the eXile. She claims ridiculously that the eXile’s outrageous style is conducive to censorship and that it’s existence was therefore regrettable. If you are convinced by that logic, by all means stick to your line. You have to do so at the cost of any credibility, of course, but that’s a choice you seem to have made already on several fronts.
More generally, Zigfeld not living in Russia is by no means a cardinal sin, but it does mean that her understanding of contemporary developments in the country are grievously deficient. My point, one that I could illustrate fully only in an encyclopaedic post, is that she is anyway interested not in reporting reality but further persuading herself of her horrendously jingoistic and offensive views. I have no interest in your views on Iraq, but if they as preconceived and ill-informed as Zigfeld’s are about Russia, then you are quite welcome to them.
Carl Pineta,
Me:”Zigfeld buttresses her (his? I wouldn’t know)..”,
You: “While trying to supress the immediate suspicion that you are one of Kim Zigfeld’s own minions …”
That’s all we need to confirm your powers of deduction and to assign your rantings the attention they deserve. I mean, jeez, before you can claim minion status you have to at least know the gender of your miniee. If you hadn’t been so busy thumping your chest you could have figured that out on your own.
“the problem doesn’t ultimately lie in Moscow, but in Western capitals where our leaders are collaborating in the rise of a neo-Soviet state in a manner that seems little different from the actions that facilitated the rise of Hitler.”
As indicated in the above quote, you claim the ultimate problem is not Moscow (or Hitler), but Western leaders “collaborating” in a “manner…little different” from that which “facilitated the rise of Hitler”. If that is truly your thesis, isn’t it your responsibility to provide the proof of it? Nothing in this article indicates that the thuggery of Putin and his cronies is only made possible by the West.
What this article makes clear is that the thuggery is made possible by the Russian failure to properly identify and protect rights. The next quote is evidence of this failure:
“My point is that the eXile betrayed democracy by setting itself up as an easy target for the Kremlin…”No man acting within his rights can betray those rights. The betrayal is the claim a man must *not* act within his rights for fear that thugs will attack him and others *for* acting rightfully. In other words, the man who is acting within his rights is not the one enabling the thugs. The man who demands other men not act within their rights out of fear of the thugs is the man who is enabling the thugs. His is the very nature of appeasement.
Mark Ames is editor-publisher of Moscow Times. That says a mouthful.