POLITICS
2. SILENT REGIONS
SOURCE. Robert Coalson, ed. The Silent Regions. Moscow: Sashcko Publishing House for the Glasnost Defense Foundation, 1999. Available online at http://www.gdf.ru/books/books/silence/index.html
A good way of assessing the character of political regimes in Russia's regions is to look at the pattern of control over regional media. Between September 1997 and February 1998 Moscow-based journalists visited eight regions of the Russian Federation on behalf of the Glasnost Defense Foundation with a view to investigating this question. Their accounts, together with some updates, are published in this entertaining and depressing booklet with an introduction by Robert Coalson, editor of The Moscow Times.
Seven of the eight regions visited were ethnic republics -- Kalmykia, Udmurtia, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and Ingushetia. The eighth region was the Altai Territory in southern Siberia, which though not an ethnic republic has a multiethnic population. So the focus of attention is not Russia's regions as a whole but regions of a special kind.
In four of the eight regions -- Kalmykia, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and North Ossetia -- all media are effectively under the control of authoritarian republican presidents. Opposition newspapers and radio stations have been suppressed by a variety of means ranging from bribery, police harassment, and trumped-up lawsuits to outright murder. For example, Larisa Yudina, editor of the sole independent newspaper in Kalmykia -- it had to be printed outside the republic in Volgograd and ferried in each week by car -- was killed in June 1998 under highly suspicious circumstances.
The media in the Altai Territory are also under strong pressure from the regional authorities, but this pressure does not take forms quite as harsh as in the four ethnic republics already mentioned. A small independent newspaper has continued to come out, and a private radio channel has been able to broadcast intermittently. The media serving the local ethnic German community, assisted by financial support from Germany, have also maintained a degree of independence.
The media of another two regions, Udmurtia and Dagestan, do exhibit a measure of pluralism. But this is a limited pluralism reflecting divisions within the local political and business elite, allowing little scope (in the case of Udmurtia) or no scope (in that of Dagestan) to the expression of opinion independent of all elite factions. The pattern of media control shifts in accordance with developments in the regional power game.
In Udmurtia the president's power structure and media confront those associated with the mayor of the capital city Izhevsk -- a pattern similar to the governor-mayor bipolarity so common in the "Russian" provinces. One of the mayor's allies is local journalist, entrepreneur, and city councilor Vasily Shatalov, who owns the Alva TV company. Larisa Shamsutdinova, editor of the newspaper Panorama, lays claim to the independent but cautious role of "the polite and intelligent guest at a madhouse."
Most deceptive is the apparent diversity of the media in Dagestan, all of which are controlled by criminalized elite groups who do not hesitate to use violence to intimidate any journalist or editor who dares to undermine their interests. Freedom of expression is additionally constrained by powerful local taboos. In particular, everyone takes care to avoid the public airing of issues that might jeopardize the fragile equilibrium of inter-ethnic relations in the republic.
The region that comes out best in the comparison is Ingushetia. Though starved of resources, the Ingush media are relatively open and democratic in tenor. It appears that the president of the republic, General Ruslan Aushev, really does welcome constructive criticism of his administration.
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