ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 7.

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, Sep 15 1998 (IPS) - While some Russians are busy hoarding everything from food to toilet paper, ahead of expected shortages in the coming winter, many others aim keep their minds active as well as their stomachs full.

There were queues everyhere in Moscow last week, but the most unexpected line was outside the 11th International Moscow Book Fair. Held at the very height of September’s financial and political crisis, some described the event as a ‘feast in the time of plague’.

About 1,500 publishers, wholesalers and retailers gathered for the All-Russian Exhibition Centre, joined by tens of thousands of Muscovites. “Surprisingly, there is still a big appetite for books, including French publications,” exhibitor Stephane Bardi net of France Editions told IPS.

There were some bargain hunters, but interest in new editions was high. Willard Dickerson, director of education with the American Booksellers Association, admitted surprise that “so many Muscovites preferred books to hoarding”.

Many books are still imported as Russian printing houses must still rely on imported materials. Rouble devaluation has made these operations more expensive.

“Russian publishing and related operations, notably book imports, have been dealt a crushing blow by the crisis,” says Yuri Kurenkov, manager of the Mezhdunarodnaya Khiga publishing company. “New operations are unlikely to go ahead before the dust set tles.”

Since 1991 hundreds of independent publishing firms and media outlets have emerged. Competition is fierce and sometimes violent. Two top managers of the Drofa publishing house, which prints about 80 percent of the textbooks for the hugely profitable Russ ian schools market, were murdered by contract killers apparently on the order of gangs who wanted a cut.

The Russian media business faces threats of its own. There are some 2,000 magazines in Russia, and every week, up to 20 new magazines and newspapers are registered by the Russian Press Committee.

Though the Kremlin hails press freedom as one of the biggest gains of democratic Russia, many parliamentarians, and would-be president Alexander Lebed among others, are worried by the way the mass media has fallen under the control of a small group of fi nanciers.

Wide-ranging businesses formed by billionaire Russian financier Boris Berezovsky have stakes in the partially state-owned ORT channel and the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily. Vladimir Gusinsky’s Most-Media group owns NTV commercial television, Ekho Moskvy radi o, the liberal daily Segodnya as well as the weekly Itogi magazine. There are other millionaire barons, who go under the collective name of the ‘oligacrchs’.

“These days the free press is one of the few remaining outposts of democracy in Russia,” says the well-respected Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily. But his newspaper is also part of Berezovsky’s media empire.

The oligarchs’ influence can be blatant and easily spotted. The major banks Uneximbank, owned by Vladimir Potanin, Gusinsky’s own MOST-Bank and the Bank Menatep, all had their own daily papers, all mutually antipathetic, especially on the affairs of thei r rival’s banks. But as a crashing rouble left them staring bankruptcy in the face, the three banks merged to form Rosbank. The newspapers’ antipathy ended overnight.

“Russian TV channels and other media outlets have to learn how to survive in crisis environment,” says the former general director of ORT television Ksenia Ponomaryova.

She recently resigned over what she called a “managerial” conflict with Berezovsky. He installed one Sergei Dorenko as anchor of ORT’s main news programme, Vremya, over the head of Ponomaryova, who quit in protest. Dorenko has come out in support of Le bed, who appears live on air several times a week.

The businessmen are also exerting their influence in other ways. Leonid Zlotin, chief editor of the daily Russky Telegraf has just been ordered to start cutting expenditures by Gusinsky’s Uneximbank, an investor in his paper. “We are going to do our bes t to cut costs,” was all he could tell IPS.

“The old tycoons may use their remaining media holdings to jockey for influence, but forces that are currently in play are stronger than television,” wrote analyst Leonid Bershidsky in the Moscow Times last week. “The media weapons that worked in a mo re stable country may now be less effective.

“Right now, however, the media are practically all the oligarchs have left. They will try to keep unprofitable media holdings afloat even if it means saving on yachts and villas abroad.”

Until recently up to 95 percent of media revenues came from adverts, but the advertisers have been badly as purchasing power declines. Few of Russia’s major dailies raised their cover prices and subscriptions when the crisis hit — keeping their readers, but undermining their economic viability.

And before the crisis the media had targeted the emerging middle classes, notably in Moscow. They were generally the only section of the community with spare money to spend. But the crash is likely to result in massive ‘white collar’ job losses.

“Our staff would rather work without salaries, rather than halt publication,” says Vasily Zaharko, editor of Izvestia daily, once the second largest national newspaper of the Soviet era. They may have to.

The Russian media has also been targeted by politicians unhappy with their revelations. Novaya Gazeta, an outspoken political weekly, has made plenty of enemies with its hard-hitting exposes of corruption in high places.

Reporter Alexander Minkin was sued for libel by former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais over allegations that he had accepted a bribe from a commercial bank. The court dismissed the case in April.

The state was not so easily deterred. The paper, which claims to have a national circulation of 600,000, was then ordered to pay more than 100,000 dollars to the government in fines for alleged tax violations — effectively closing it down.

Backed by other media and liberal politicians, it successfully challenged the order in the Moscow Arbitration Court. But the paper’s struggles will not end so easily.

“Capitalising on confusion during the deepening crisis,” says Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the Yabloko faction in the lower house of parliament, “the authorities are trying to get even with Novaya Gazeta, one of the few genuinely independent and democratic publications in this country.”