I am sitting in the Akademiya Cafe reading a newspaper and sipping a cappuccino, which I would give the title of “Best in Moscow” if I still practiced the fattening profession of food critic. But my attention is drawn from the coffee by Kommersant’s headline: “Reporters Without Borders Assigns Russia 153rd Place in Its Worldwide Press Freedom Index.” Only in Russia could the lack of press freedom be front-page news.
Russia has slipped a dozen points since last year and is now between Fiji and Tunisia — beneath even Belarus, but still above China. Since there are only 175 countries under consideration, it means that Russia is not too far from Journalism Hell — Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea. I wonder in just what ways North Korea is worse than Turkmenistan yet superior to Eritrea.
There are some hard criteria used — the number of reporters killed, wounded and imprisoned and the number of opposition media allowed — while others like censorship are a little more difficult to quantify. Where would they get information about censorship in Russia? The media that are censored wouldn’t admit it, while those that aren’t could only speculate about those that are. A subtler but more interesting question is: Are the free media like Kommersant and Ekho Moskvy radio really free or only purposely tolerated to let the intelligentsia blow off steam and give the outside world a misleading impression? And how much is any of that relevant in the Internet age?
I take another sip of cappuccino, which at a cost of 190 rubles (more than $6) is pricey by any standard. Now I realize that the coffee may have more to tell me than the newspaper. The people around me in the cafe drinking their cappuccinos are in their 30s, casually but tastefully dressed and would blend in well in Berlin, London and New York, places they have surely visited. Well-off but far from oligarch-rich, they are exactly the sort of people — “inventors, innovators, researchers, teachers, entrepreneurs who introduce new technologies” — who President Dmitry Medvedev is counting on to transform Russia from a “primitive economy based on raw materials and endemic corruption” to one that is contemporary and competitive.
Medvedev’s clout is nowhere near Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s, but he provides an essential service for Russia by laying out in clear and explicit terms what the country must do to regain its greatness, integrate itself into the community of advanced nations and become a 21st-century economy. “The modernization of Russian democracy and establishment of a new economy will, in my opinion, only be possible if we use the intellectual resources of post-industrial societies,” Medvedev wrote in his now-famous “Go, Russia!” article, available of course on the president’s web site.
Smart is the new strong. The combination of the qualities represented by Putin and Medvedev may be needed for a good many more years — say to the end of Putin’s fourth term in 2024 — but Medvedev is unequivocal in pointing to which forces must triumph for Russia to survive and thrive.
In New York, the progress of the recession can be charted by how well cobblers and dry cleaners are doing. In tough times, people fix their old shoes rather than buy new ones and wear their clothes longer than usual. Perhaps the fate of the new Russia could be chartered by the number of cappuccinos sold. But how would we get accurate statistics on that? I guess some European will have to form a Baristas Without Borders.
Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”