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Above all, the participants in this year's WAN conference need to understand the way Russians get their information -- a process that separates Russia from all developed countries.
More Russians get their news about events at home and abroad from television today than during the Soviet era. Minute by minute, day by day, television forges the national consciousness. For several weeks now, Soviet -- sorry, Russian -- television has been hammering home the image of an unpredictable, aggressive Georgia that is feverishly arming itself for an attack on the defenseless, peaceful enclave of South Ossetia. Television has similarly filled the airwaves with images of "average Crimeans" protesting against the Yushchenko regime's flirtation with the "anti-Russian" NATO.
Television creates domestic and foreign enemies and it destroys them. Television fashions the image of the latest wise and courageous leader guiding Russia toward a new renaissance. The propaganda techniques honed by the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting in the Soviet era are alive and well. All of the national television stations are under the Kremlin's tight control. Every last independent television journalist has either been strictly censored or driven out of the business altogether. The major television stations have unwritten blacklists of opposition politicians and political parties that have been banned from the airwaves. Pressure on the few remaining regional stations that offer more or less independent news coverage increases by the day. Television, not the law or even the bureaucracy, is now the Kremlin's main tool for running the country.
Newspapers and magazines have far less political importance. Fewer people get their news from the print press in Russia than in almost any other country. The reasons for this small readership include widespread poverty, high subscription rates, slow delivery and the poor quality of the publications themselves. What's more, the most popular newspapers -- Komsomolskaya Pravda, Argumenty i Fakty, Moskovsky Komsomolets and Izvestia -- are loyal to the regime. The last authoritative, independent newspapers, such as Kommersant, Vedomosti and Novaya Gazeta, do not reach enough readers to exert significant influence on public opinion nationwide. And the situation is only getting worse. A number of once-independent publications have been acquired by new owners loyal to the Kremlin, and pressure on the free press in the regions is on the rise.
The radio market overall is dominated by stations with a straight entertainment format, while the leading news stations are state-run Radio Rossii and Mayak. Stations with a more independent editorial policy like Ekho Moskvy reach a relatively small audience.
The Internet remains free for now, and several news sites have attracted a large audience of devoted readers looking for an alternative to the nauseating propaganda on television. Internet penetration remains limited, however. More than 75 percent of Russians do not have even sporadic access to the Internet. Yet the spread of alternative views on the Internet has led to growing calls for the government to clamp down. Many appeal to the "positive" experience of China in this area. So the introduction of state censorship of the Internet in the near future cannot be ruled out.
The ruling elite in this country now enjoys a near-total monopoly on information. It controls de jure or de facto all national television stations and 90 percent of regional and local stations. The regime has de facto control of the overwhelming majority of newspapers and magazines. In sum, the ruling elite and the bureaucracy control roughly 90 percent of all socially significant information in this country.
This political opposition and institutions of civil society clearly suffer as a result of this control. It would therefore be naive in the extreme to think that the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections will be free and fair. When the political playing field is this uneven, free and fair elections are impossible in principle, as observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted after the 2003 State Duma election. And the situation has only deteriorated since then. The 2007-08 election cycle will be dominated by unscrupulous propaganda and counter-propaganda, all in the service of United Russia -- the so-called party of power, which already counts 71 governors among its members -- and Putin's successor. The population will be led to believe this lie, just as it is now being force-fed the lie about the imminent military threat posed by tiny, half-dead Georgia.
Meanwhile, the silencing of free speech places the modernization of Russia in question. Corruption has spread so precipitously in recent years that Russia now ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. The bureaucracy has grown just as quickly, and is now twice as large as it was in the Soviet era.
The investment climate has deteriorated, and property rights have been violated. The quality of governance has diminished, and bureaucrats have become even more brazen than before. Unchecked by a free press and pumped up with billions of petrodollars, the bureaucracy has gone crazy with greed, forgetting both conscience and the law in the process.
It would be a good thing if the participants in this year's WAN conference, who have gathered on the main square of this Put ... (oops) Potemkin village, informed the villagers that modernization is impossible without substantial freedom of press. That there is a direct correlation between the number of newspaper readers in a country and its wealth. That corruption cannot be held in check without a free press. And a host of other useful truths.
But where would the average Russian ever read or hear about it if they did?
Vladimir Ryzhkov is a State Duma deputy and co-chairman of the Republican Party of Russia.
