Like the Censors of Old
By Masha Gessen
Back in the dark old days of the Soviet Union, foreign journalists in Moscow led pretty ridiculous lives. They lived in hotels and, later, in special closed compounds. They were required to use interpreters, drivers and office staff supplied by the Soviets -- and, generally speaking, employed by the KGB. They had to ask for permission to venture outside of Moscow.
Before 1961, all foreign journalists were required to file their reports from a particular room in the Central Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street. The reports were read by the censor, who sometimes held them up for days and sometimes returned them with multiple deletions -- or marked "not cleared." The censor made few decisions by himself or herself. During the Stalinist era, all questions were phoned directly in to Stalin's secretariat, which issued instructions.
Obviously, most journalists were constantly looking for ways to circumvent this system. Some slipped idiomatic expressions or literary allusions into their copy in the hopes that the censor would miss the subtleties -- and it often worked. Radio reporters filing by phone from a special booth in the Central Telegraph would try to speak fast so the censor would not notice when they diverged from the approved copy. Some journalists sent their copy through diplomatic mail so it could be published under a pseudonym.
When they got caught cheating the system, reporters would get expelled. At one point in the late 1940s, expulsions became so frequent that there was only one foreign correspondent in Moscow: the great Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times. Several others were writing for foreign media, too, but all of them were married to Soviet citizens so their presumed loyalty was to the Soviet state. Eventually, other newspapers and radio companies got new people accredited, and the pool widened.
Expulsions continued after the lifting of censorship, well into perestroika. A UPI reporter was expelled for interviewing a hospital doctor soon after the Chernobyl disaster. Briton Edward Lucas claims to have been the last reporter kicked out of the Soviet Union -- he was asked to leave the Baltics in 1991, though he later returned to Russia as an Economist correspondent.
Expulsions of journalists resumed after the second war in Chechnya began. But until recently there was always a formal reason for expelling journalists, banning them from re-entering Russia or revoking their accreditation. An exception is a bizarre incident in May when a Latvian TV crew was detained in the Pskov region and kicked out of the country with no explanation.
But the current brouhaha over ABC's airing of an interview with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev takes the practice of punishing journalists to a whole new level. After the interview aired, the Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. envoy for a dressing down, then issued a note of protest. Then the defense minister said ABC would lose all access to information about the military. Then the Foreign Ministry said that no one from ABC would have their accreditation renewed. Even in Soviet times, repressive measures were always taken against individual journalists, not against entire media companies. An interesting wrinkle in the scandal is that the interview was recorded by Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky, a Russian citizen living in Prague who can't be expelled.
So some of the most senior officials in the country, feeling helpless to do anything about Babitsky, start flailing and doing what comes naturally. They appeal to the higher-ups -- as though they thought Ted Koppel could make no editorial decision without consulting ABC executives, who, in turn, could make no move without Washington. Of course, this is not how the real world works -- but it's a valuable insight into the way the Russian ministers' lives are organized. Like the censors of old, they call all questions in to the Kremlin.
Masha Gessen is a contributing editor at Bolshoi Gorod.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/08/04/006.html
(via chechnya-sl)
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