The double white line

The new management of the RBC media company (owned by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov) has met with the journalists, and explained the new rules of the road.

Although the actual word “censorship” wasn’t mentioned, observers are convinced that RBC’s independent reporting is now history.

RBC came under the cosh in April 2016. On the 14^th of that month, the headquarters of Onexim Group – Mikhail Prokhorov’s holding company – were raided by the FSB even as President Putin was painting himself as a champion of business on his phone-in programme Direct Line: “Together with the business community, we will seek out additional resources and deploy them to create a favourable business climate.”

Many experts are convinced that Prokhorov is being targeted due to RBC’s editorial policy. The last straw, it is believed, was its publication of materials relating to Putin’s youngest daughter and the business interests of her husband, 33-year-old businessman Kirill Shamalov. RBC journalists managed to ascertain that Putin’s son-in-law had become a dollar billionaire upon borrowing over $1 billion from Gazprombank and acquiring a 21.3% stake in Sibur, Russia’s largest Russian petrochemical holding.

To criticise the Kremlin is to put oneself in the firing line: very soon afterwards, Yelizaveta Osetinskaya (editor-in-chief of the overall media group), Maxim Solyus (editor-in-chief of RBC newspaper), and Roman Badanin (chief editor of rbc.ru) all departed simultaneously. Many RBC employees followed suit.

On July 7, RBC’s journalists met their new bosses, Igor Trosnikov and Elizaveta Golikova, who spent the last few years at the state news agency ITAR-TASS. Trosnikov and Golikova asserted that they had no intention of fundamentally altering RBC’s editorial policy. But when the journalists cast doubt on the suggestion that new management had appeared on the scene only to keep things as they were, Elizaveta Golikova replied that there was a double white line in the profession, and that nothing good would come of ignoring it.

When pressed by RBC journalists as to what this double white line actually meant, Trosnikov would only say that “it is always shifting.”

The current situation at RBC is hardly unique. Back in 2011, billionaire Kommersant owner Alisher Usmanov ignored the prevailing opinion of the newspaper’s staff and dismissed chief editor of Kommersant magazine Maxim Kovalsky for publishing a photograph of a poll card featuring an obscene hand-scrawled remark directed at Vladimir Putin. Kommersant was never the same again. Usmanov, who is close to the Kremlin, had no intention of quarreling with the government over freedom of speech. In March 2016, oppositionist Alexei Navalny said, quite plainly, that the paper had “no scruples about telling lies.”

In the spring of 2014, the super-popular Lenta.ru found itself in a comparable situation. Second-guessing the will of the regime – or perhaps carrying it out directly – Lenta.ru’s billionaire owner Alexander Mamut (owner of Waterstones booksellers in the UK) fired chief editor Galina Timchenko. Realising an overhaul of editorial policy was imminent, Lenta.ru staff chose to resign en masse. Before doing so, however, they issued the following statement: “The dismissal of an independent chief editor and the appointment of an individual who can be controlled from without, including directly from offices in the Kremlin, is already a violation of the media law that makes clear the inadmissibility of censorship.” Lenta.ru has done nothing remotely “uncontrolled” since.

In today’s Russia, media outlets are regarded as “oppositionist” even if they do nothing more than adhere to the standards of quality journalism. How they survive is the question. A particularly apt example is Vedomosti, the country’s foremost business newspaper. It is precisely their unwavering devotion to professionalism that makes Vedomosti’s journalists the most principled and accurate critics of the current regime. So why hasn’t the regime destroyed them yet? Perhaps it’s simply not got around to doing so. To some extent, Vedomosti’s high-brow content also serves as a safeguard against repression – the regime knows your average Russian isn’t likely to read it.

Novaya Gazeta – oppositionist newspaper, and an erstwhile employer of the murdered Anna Politkovskaya – also continues to be published in Russia. Putin once expressed the cynical opinion that “the murder of Politkovskaya inflicted far greater damage on the current authorities than her publications ever did.” Which tells us that one can still write the truth in Russia, as long as the regime believes that nobody is reading it.

But perhaps not: it had previously been believed that the regime was interested in exercising total control only over major, electorally significant media outlets. As long as the federal TV channels continued to stultify the country with their propaganda (so the theory went), the so-called “minnows” of independent media could carry on being as nonconformist as they wished. But the economic crisis – and the concomitant increase in paranoia – has changed all that. In the eyes of the regime, “media minnows” no longer exist – anyone and everyone is now seen to be dangerous and influential. It’s only a matter of time, then, until a new wave of repression is unleashed against individual journalists and entire editorial teams are pulled over for crossing that shifting double white line.