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Moscow Times
July 27, 2004
The Foreign Press Is Blinded by Illusions
By Alexei Pankin
A few months ago my pocket was picked in St. Petersburg's House of Journalists. For some reason the thief took everything in my wallet except for the credit cards. As the theft occurred while I was writing my latest "anti-democratic" column for The Moscow Times, I concluded that the freedomologists were trying to give me a scare. I decided to call a news conference right then and there to accuse President Vladimir Putin of failing to ensure the security of independent journalists.
"You ought to carry your wallet in your front trouser pocket, not leave it in your jacket hanging on a peg in the next room," said the streetwise New Yorker who was sitting next to me.
As you may have guessed, this story is a somewhat far-fetched allegory of press coverage -- mostly Western, but also here at home, such as Yevgeny Kiselyov's editorial in Moskovskiye Novosti -- of Paul Klebnikov's death. Ethical considerations would have stopped me from taking issue with what has been written since Paul was murdered on July 9. But last week I found a like-minded ally in Paul's widow, Musa. She told The Sunday Times that she didn't believe her husband's death was an attack on freedom of the press by powerful figures close to the Kremlin. "I don't believe the conspiracy theories," she said. "I don't think it was some big player."
I have faced rifle-toting soldiers in Transdnestr. And I have feared for my children's lives when my wife was working on an in-depth investigation of criminal activity and corruption at the Mir television and radio company, founded by the CIS member states. I have buried friends and acquaintances: the American journalist Chris Gehrig, who was killed in Kazakhstan, Sergei Yushenkov, Yury Shchekochikhin. I know that in the case of shocking, mysterious deaths like these you need to consider all sorts of scenarios -- money, politics, plain old street crime. Learning the truth most often requires thinking outside the box. Focusing exclusively on political motives, and leaping to broad conclusions based on this assumption, is simply unprofessional.
Two points appear in nearly every article written about Paul's death. First, the murder dispelled the illusion that Russia had become a more or less normal country in recent years. And second, Putin's Russia is not a safe place for journalists.
At times I get the impression that the country we live in and the country depicted by foreign journalists exist in separate dimensions. If Russians shared the illusions of Western reporters or took our government as seriously as they do, we would not be here today. And any journalist working on a sensitive investigation would be considered loony by his colleagues if he thought that the president would be there to protect him.
In today's Russia, planning your life involves risk assessment. Accurate assessment leads to success, and miscalculation to failure. In these occasionally tragic conflicts, civil society takes shape and the space of freedom expands. And these processes are little affected by whoever happens to be in power at the time. Paul Klebnikov was one of the few foreign journalists who understood this fact. His comments on the normalization of life in Russia must be understood in this context.
If foreign journalists writing about Russia are just out to entertain their readers and viewers, they're doing a bang-up job. What could be more entertaining than a thrilling battle between an evil regime and heroic journalists? If their task is to help their audience understand what's really happening in Russia, however, they shouldn't pass off as revelations things that are self-evident to anyone who lives and works in this country yet manages not to lose his sense of optimism.
Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals.