HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

We need a qualitatively improved leap forward in our policy of openness. I must emphasise that simply turning the clock back now to the time of Vladimir Yakovlev’s Kommersant  newspaper, or Igor Malashenko’s NTV television channel is no longer enough. What suited the young, post-Soviet society wouldn’t suit a society that has gained great and varied experience in fighting for democracy. Even if we were to ignore what Putin has sliced off it, Gorbachev’s version of glasnost is no longer the ideal that we should be striving for.

We have to go further, to a fully free and open information market, regulated by very precise laws. Only such a market, where there is genuine competition, can guarantee that the right to freedom of speech will be ensured.

Of course, a free market environment would solve some problems and at the same time create new ones that society would then have to find the answers to. But this doesn’t change my choice of the strategic direction we must move in: competition and the market should provide society with genuine openness.

It stands to reason that only a properly functioning democratic political system can provide freedom of speech. This means there would have to be genuine separation of powers, a properly functioning justice system and so on, and, most importantly, society’s readiness to protect this freedom using armed force if necessary. If freedom of speech is political currency, then it has to be guarded by the whole democratic infrastructure of society. But alongside all of these general guarantees, there are specific measures, including institutional ones, without which there can be no freedom of speech.

Among these specific measures there are economic and political ones. Each of these help to achieve the single main aim: not only to prevent the state from limiting freedom of speech, but also to remove the possibility that the state could begin another such predominant information flow, thanks to which the regime manages to manipulate the population with the help of lies, notwithstanding the “islands of freedom” that would be built into the system. The democratic movement must use the experience of post-Communist neo-totalitarianism to ensure that this mistake is not repeated.

I’ll start with the economic measures.

However paradoxical this may seem, the main problem for the Russian press is not censorship, but poverty. The main challenges in the battle for freedom in the last two decades were not fought on the political front, as many think, but on the economic front. There has never been truly economically independent media in post-Communist Russia. Up until the default of 1998 the media retained some freedom of maneouvre – they had the freedom of choice as to “who they depended on”, and therein lay their specific freedom. From then on, the process began of the state completely taking over the media, and around 2006 to 2008 it became the sole donor, directly or indirectly. It was at that point that the fiercest and most frightening blows were rained down on the freedom of the press and, consequently, freedom of speech, and they’ve never been able to recover from this.

Furthermore, in order to give independent media systemic and transparent support and to help them out of difficulty, the government made use of the situation and carried out a large-scale, indirect nationalisation of the independent media by taking the place of the previous owners – often by way of raiding seizures and criminal methods. “Production” was “balanced” between various state-owned companies and financial and industrial groups affiliated with the regime. In time, the state (as the owner or sponsor) took indirect control over all the more or less significant information resources. The picture looks even more depressing when you turn from the giants of the media market to the provincial press, which was already in a dire state.

At first sight, an ideal solution to the problem might appear to be to create normal market conditions for the media, both the traditional media and online, where the state would take on the role of impartial arbiter and regulator. But unfortunately, global practice shows that nowadays this doesn’t work anywhere. Increasingly the media is either a subsidized ancillary business, or else exists on sponsorship funds, made on the basis of a variety of motives, including political ones.

Very few countries get by without having the media subsidised by the state; but it’ll be a long time before Russia can be counted in their number. Therefore, it’s important for us to see how exactly subsidising the media from budgetary funds is organised and how exactly the management of mass media subsidised from budgetary funds is organised. By answering these two questions in sequence, we will largely solve the problem of neutralising the totalitarian claims of the state to form the dominant information flow described above.