It may well never happen. But the mere fact that President Boris Yeltsin has announced a plan to merge the two state television channels into a single monolith is deeply worrying.


Yeltsin let his plan out into the open last week during a meeting with, of all the people least likely to appreciate it, a group of "intellectuals." Details remain sketchy, but the bottom line is that Yeltsin wants control over programming at Russian Television and Ostankino to be centralized.


The Kremlin line is that this will save money, and it is certainly true that the state television companies are wildly inefficient and overstaffed. But Yeltsin's plan can do little to correct this.


Around 80 percent of the stations' budgets go to meet the cost of transmitting their signals across Russia, and these costs would not be affected by a programming merger. As regards the remaining 20 percent of costs that could be cut, there is no reason to believe that centralizing management would lead to the massive reductions in staff that are required.


Far more plausible is that the president is looking for more control over television. Yeltsin of all people understands that Russian Television, or RTR, has an anti-monopolistic role. It was created in 1990 to provide an alternative voice capable of challenging the official all-Soviet television channel and helped Yeltsin personally in his political battles with Mikhail Gorbachev.


Both Gorbachev and the former Soviet Union are gone, so Yeltsin no longer needs RTR's services. But in a country where national newspapers hardly make it beyond the limits of a few major cities any more, while there are only two television channels that reach the whole country, the "merger" of those two channels is a matter for national concern. One can only speculate as to what Yeltsin would like to achieve by tightening his already considerable grip on the airwaves. But the most plausible explanation is that he wants to make sure there are as few unpleasant surprises as possible when it comes to parliamentary and presidential elections in 1995 and 1996.


There are probably two ways to look at the media. The first is as a Fourth Estate that informs the population and acts as its guard dog to monitor the government. The second is as a powerful tool that can be controlled by the government or, if the government is too weak, will be controlled by somebody else in order to seize power.


This latter appears to be Yeltsin's view and can only have been reinforced by his experience with RTR, which he himself once used as a tool to help him to power. Russia, however, is no longer a totalitarian state. There is no excuse for robbing the airwaves of one of only two nationwide voices.