The Rollback of Democracy In Vladimir Putin's Russia

Control of Networks

Putin was obsessed with television. Each night he would bring home videos of that day's newscasts to watch how he was covered, then return to the Kremlin the next morning with his judgments. "He watches himself on television, he goes through everything," a top aide confided.

The new Russian president grew particularly irate early in his tenure when the submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea in August 2000 and Russian television aired tough reports about the government's slow response and dishonest public statements. Even state-controlled Channel One, under Berezovsky's control, broadcast critical segments, including interviews with the wives of Kursk sailors distraught at the way the situation was being handled.

Outraged, Putin called personally to rail about the report and accuse the journalists of faking it. "You hired two whores . . . in order to push me down," Putin exclaimed, as anchor Sergei Dorenko remembered it. Dorenko was taken aback. "They were officers' widows," he said, "but Putin was convinced that the truth, the reality, did not actually exist. He only believes in [political] technologies."

Putin's anger boiled over at a closed-door meeting with relatives of the crew six days after the submarine sank. When fuming relatives shouted him down, saying they knew from television that the Russian government had initially turned down foreign assistance, Putin bristled.

"Television?" he exclaimed. "They're lying. Lying. Lying."

After that, the die was cast. Determined to dominate television, the Kremlin drove Berezovsky, who controlled Channel One, and Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of independent NTV, out of the country and seized control of both networks. No one understood better than Putin just how powerful television could be in the new Russia. "He came to power through television, and that's why, to have an independent channel that covers 65 percent of Russia, that creates a danger," the top aide said.

With troublesome owners out of the way, the Kremlin convened meetings each Friday with the top television directors at which Putin aide Vladislav Surkov, Kremlin consultant Gleb Pavlovsky and others handed out weekly talking points. Over time, the agenda became nakedly political, aimed at supporting Putin and his political party, United Russia. "It turned into an instrument of control," one participant said later. ". . . It was so direct and unsophisticated, like propaganda."

At each session, a written agenda was handed out with the week's expected news topics and recommended approaches. "At some point," the participant said, "the list started including the phrase 'recommendation -- don't cover.' It was things not to mention, like Chechnya."

As parliamentary elections approached in 2003, the Kremlin dispensed with even that subtlety and dispatched Marat Gelman, a top political strategist, to oversee Channel One. His programs, Gelman later said, were all guided by a single mission: "to create the image of United Russia and to destroy the Communists."

A Turning Point

By that summer of 2003, the Kremlin had taken a turn. Since the beginning of his presidency, Putin had balanced the remnants of the old Yeltsin crowd with his compatriots from the KGB known as siloviki , or men of power. But now the veterans of the Family noticed the balance of power shifting away from them.

"We got the feeling that something changed for the wrong direction," one Yeltsin alumnus said. When he went to the Kremlin each day, he found the place filled with unfamiliar faces, "a whole floor of former or current KGB" in newly prominent positions on the president's staff.

Chief among the siloviki faction were two shadowy presidential deputy chiefs of staff, Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin, both with KGB backgrounds and both longtime Putin associates who had followed him from St. Petersburg to the Kremlin. Ivanov was put in charge of personnel, and he used his power to eliminate the commission that recommended pardons for prisoners. Sechin controlled the paper flow that reached Putin and served as the president's guardian. "His main asset is his loyalty," said Valery Pavlov, who had worked with both men in St. Petersburg.