Monday, 12 July, 2004

Through the Looking Glasnost Last Thursday I watched a difficult episode of PBS's Wide Angle series Wide Angle. The Russian Newspaper Murders | PBS. As the title hints it was about the murder of newspaper editor Alexei Sidorov in the Russian city Togliatti, and his immediate predecessor as well. The two days later I read that the Russian-American editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, Paul Khlebnikov, was shot to death on his office door step in Moscow BBC NEWS | Editor shot dead in Moscow street (the Guardian, New York Times , and Washington Post American Journalist Shot Dead in Moscow all covered this too. The details are somewhat sparse in these stories, after all who's going to cover this? As Nick Cave once asked rhetorically in a Birthday Party song "Hands up, who wants to die?" (Sunny's Burning) . When asked, people say "its like the nineties", or "it might had to do with his work". That's more then the police in Togliatti seemed willing to admit about Sidorov since they seemed to go out of their way to label that murder a ordinary mugging gone awry. The earlier murder they seem simply not to have investigated at all. The accounts of Paul Khlebnikov's activities point to an article he ran last month right after arriving in Russia from New York, listing Russia's new billionaires as his one unforgivable sin. They are shy people apparently. A Reuters wire piece by a Russian journalist Moscow murder, TV rows expose risks for journalists points out that this happened in a temporal conjunction with an official crackdown on the media, especially the NTV network. He quotes a director of an independent radio station as saying: If a journalist does not behave in appropriate fashion, he is either dismissed ... or promoted and therefore taken off the air. If this proves impossible -- as in the case of an American publication -- he gets killed and the rest are intimidated.. There being no other way of sending him a message that suggested itself. The Wide Angle episode made the point that most Russians seem willing to give Vladimir Putin a pass on the New Authoritarianism - as long as he brings a semblance of order back to Russia. This disorder at the same time many lay at the feet of the ultra oligarchs. One question is whether Putin, as we see him take apart a company like Yukos oil, is really engaged in this struggle to tame the oligarchs - or is he merely answering to a subset of the new wealth (re)building a national socialist Russia. Another consideration made apparent here is that few societies are as dangerous as those that have been held in check by police state and censorship when that power slips or is interrupted. There is neither deepness of memory of law and ethics whether in a person or an institution that can stand against fear and greed. 11:23:45 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2004 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 8/03/04; 00:18:47.