177. And now let us praise Yelena Trebugova
In my opinion, we can call ourselves a democracy in England, not because
of our political system, our House of Commons, our right of voting every
four years, the way one Party in government gives way to another
gracefully if defeated, and so on and so on. We can only call ourselves a
democracy because we still have a free press. If it were not for this,
then I am quite sure that we would have descended into a dictatorship a
long time ago. At this point -- and at the risk of being tedious -- let
me quote one of the most quoted of all quotations: "Power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord Acton 1887).
And, while I am at it, let me also give a quotation of Albert Camus
I have just come across in my dictionary of quotations -- a writer whose
life was cut short but who, I am sure, would have written many other
great books than the few that he did. In The Fall (1956) he wrote:
"We can't do without dominating others or being served .... Even the
man on the bottom rung still has his wife, or his child. If he's a
bachelor, his dog. The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get
angry without the other person being able to answer back."
Answering back -- yes. What is absolutely essential in any democracy or
indeed, any system of government is for someone to be able to answer
back. The wise king in medieval times -- albeit all too seldom -- made
sure he had a fool at court. In my opinion, Blair came very close to
becoming a dictator earlier this year when he decided -- quite against
the will of his cabinet -- and without consulting parliament or people --
to throw in his lot with Bush in the invasion of Iraq without the consent
of the Security Council of the UN. Quite beside the tragic destruction of
innocent women and children in Iraq, Blair's decision almost wrecked the
UK constitution. As we don't have a written constitution I can write that
and get away with it. But what happened is that the evidence presented by
a BBC reporter and the general line taken by others meant that the BBC
generally was felt to be against Blair's decision. The subsequent anger
and threats made by Blair and his cohorts against the BBC were so nasty
that I and many others wondered what country we were living in and
whether we were descending into totalitarianism. The Blair government
even tried to ban a public demonstration against the Iraq invasion in
Hyde Park -- which turned out to be one of the largest ever in the
history of England -- on the grounds of public safety (because the ground
was muddy!). If it hadn't been for the BBC and several independent-minded
newspapers, then we would now be living in a much sadder country than we
are now.
When Russia threw communism over, its citizens had a wonderful
opportunity -- and many took it -- to bring about many media institutions
which could freely criticise the government. Unfortunately, since Putin
and his FSB henchmen have been in the driving seat, free comment has been
almost totally driven away. All the main TV channels, almost all the
newspapers and all but one radio channel have now been sterilised in
various ways. I fear there is little hope for Russia now. It is dropping
back into its old ways -- that of the communist nomenklatura, and of the
Tsars and secret police of former times.
There are a few brave souls left and for one of them, Yelena Trebugova,
we can only have the greatest admiration and praise.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
DIGGING THE DIRT IN PUTIN'S KREMLIN
Meeting Yelena Trebugova, the woman whose exposé of Putin's regime is a
Russian publishing sensation
Mark Franchetti
It is 1998, two years before he becomes Russian president, and Vladimir
Putin is seated alone in a fashionable Moscow sushi bar waiting for his
lunch date. He is the head of the FSB, the former KGB, and his armed
bodyguards have cleared the restaurant. Yelena Trebugova, a young and
attractive Kremlin reporter, finally arrives half an hour late. The heel
on her shoe, she explains, broke as she hurried through the
snow.
After lunch, Putin drove the 25-year-old in a bulletproof Mercedes with
tinted windows to the nearest shoe repair shop and offered to wait before
dropping her off at work. Little did he know that his charming lunch
partner would one day become a thorn in his side.
Now, five years later, Trebugova has rocked Moscow's byzantine political
circles by publishing an account of her time as a Kremlin reporter. Only
hours after it hit the shops her book. Tales of a Kremlin Digger,
became a publishing sensation. The first 10,000 copies sold out
immediately. As Russians queue to buy her book, another 80,000 copies are
being printed.
Tame by the standards of most western kiss-and-tell memoirs, Trebugova's
work nonetheless paints a damning picture of the Kremlin's systematic
clanipdown on the free press since Putin became president in 2000. His
entourage is said to be furious.
In a telling example of the growing censorship gripping Russia, last
month Trebugova was fired by her editor at Kommersant, even though
the influential daily is owned by Boris Berezovsky -- the controversial
Russian tycoon and one of Putin's fiercest critics -- who was recently
granted asylum in Britain. The rumour is that she lost her job after her
editor came under pressure from the Kremlin.
"I don't regret writing the book," she says. "Ordinary
Russians are starting to understand that under Putin almost all sources
of free information have been shut down, and they don't like it. The book
gives an insight into what the Kremlin is really like."
The idealism that Trebugova felt when she started as a journalist in 1992
during the days of glasnost andperestroika, and her disillusionment a
decade later, are an indictment of the way Russia's press went from being
one of the most vibrant in me world to one of the most
controlled.
Since the collapse of communism, Russia's media have been plagued by
corruption. Nonetheless, under Yeltsin's erratic rule even his fiercest
opponents credited him with allowing journalists to criticise the
Kremlin. That changed when Putin succeeded him, bringing to power a group
of former colleagues from a secret police that was ill-disposed towards
the press.
The new regime's first victim was Vladimir Gusinsky, an influential
businessman who owned Russia's only independent media empire, including
the hard-hitting NTV channel. Gusinsky refused to back Putin's
presidential bid and paid for his dissent. He was stripped of his assets,
briefly jailed on fraud charges and later fled Russia to avoid
prosecution.
Even the man chosen by Putin's, aides to replace Gusinsky at NTV was
removed two years later for failing to toe the Kremlin line with
sufficient zeal. His successor, a doctor who had written a study on how
best to cure piles, had never worked in the media.
Trebugova, now 30, covered the Kremlin as a pool reporter for four years.
A year after Putin became president her accreditation was withdrawn
because she refused to let her articles be censored. In her book she
reveals that shortly after Putin's election victory, Alexei Gromov, his
press spokesman, told her and other journalists that from then on all
questions to Putin during press conferences had to be cleared with him
first. In addition, he warned them not to talk to members of Putin's
delegation during foreign trips.
Asked by one journalist what they should do if a delegation member
approached them for a chat, Gromov replied that they should seek his
permission before striking up a conversation."I constantly felt
under psychological pressure, said Trebugova. "It started as soon as
Putin came to power. First I was barred from going on a few trips abroad
and finally they just tore up my Kremlin accreditation. They are bent on
total control of the press."
Trebugova was told by colleagues that during a visit to North Korea,
Putin asked Kremlin pool journalists not to write negative articles about
the communist regime whose policies have caused millions of deaths. In
her book she recalls how, following another visit abroad, the plane
carrying the press and Kremlin officials had to make an emergency
landing. One Putin aide warned journalists on board that if they wrote
about the incident they could be refused accreditation on the next
trip.
At one point during a visit to London in April 2000, Russian journalists
accompanying Putin were split into two groups by his press officials. She
and others were put on a bus and dispatched to the hotel, while a second
group of more obsequious journalists joined Putin for a private
dinner.
During one visit to a Russian hospital, a little girl told Putin that she
was afraid of him. Journalists were warned that they would be stripped of
their accreditation if they reported it.
After nearly four years of Putin's rule, all national Russian television
channels are controlled by the Kremlin. Except for one liberal Moscow
radio station and Novaya Gazeta, a daily newspaper that regularly
publishes exposés of the war in Chechnya but sells only 125,000'copies,
there is no free press left in Russia.
Privately, editors say that under Putin the Soviet practice of calls from
Kremlin officials to pressurise them into killing off critical stories
has once again become common practice. The tapping of journalists' phones
by the FSB is also widespread.
Last month, when the Russian stock market lost 15% of its value following
the dramatic arrest on fraud and tax evasion charges of Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, the country's richest man who fell out with Putin, Russian
state television led its nightly bulletin on this year's flu
epidemic.
In such a climate, finding a Russian publisher brave enough to take on
Trebugova's book was no easy task. Aware of the risks, she kept the
project secret. Interest grew only when she gave a copy to an opposition
politician weeks before publication. Within days dozens of deputies in
the Duma, the lower house of parliament, were smuggling xeroxed copies of
the book around Moscow.
"Under Yeltsin we journalists had a wonderful honeymoon," says
Trebugova. "He would never have allowed the crackdown on free speech
which Putin has orchestrated. Those days are now over."
The Sunday Times -- 23 November 2003
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