(Anna Politkovskaya)
Despotism in Russia...

This two-part article in today's Guardian details the critical part played by the Russian media in the evolution of the modern Russian oligarchy. Americans, whose own media is evolving into a corporate-controlled, sports-and-celebrity-obsessed government lapdog would do well to read it in its entirety.

Regarding the lack of official censorship:

...'It's a magic process now,' Anna Kachkaeva, who broadcasts a weekly interview show on Radio Liberty, told me. Kachkaeva, who is also the head of the television department at Moscow State University, went on: 'There is no censorship - it's much more advanced. I would call it a system of contacts and agreements between the Kremlin and the heads of television networks. There is no need to start every day with instructions. It is all done with winks and nods. They meet at the end of the week, and the problem, for TV and even in the printed press, is that self-censorship is worse than any other kind. Journalists know - they can feel - what is allowed and what is not.'

Gee, she could be describing the New York Times and ABC News.

The article also explores the brutal assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, one of 13 journalists murdered in Russia in the seven years since Putin came to power.

The Putin government has made a clever calculation: a few newspapers, with tiny elite audiences, can publish highly critical investigations and editorials as long as that reporting and criticism stays absolutely disconnected from television. (And as long as their reporters keep out of Chechnya.) Anna Politkovskaya began writing about the war in 1999, after the rules of press freedom changed, and she violated those rules every time she went to work. Not long before her death she wrote, 'I will not go into the ... joys of the path I have chosen - the poisoning, the arrests, the threats in letters and over the internet, the telephoned death threats, the weekly summons to the prosecutor general's office to sign statements about practically every article I write (the first question being, "How and where did you obtain this information?"). Of course I don't like the constant derisive articles about me that appear in other newspapers and on websites presenting me as the madwoman of Moscow. I find it disgusting to live this way. I would like a bit more understanding.' The fact that Novaya Gazeta [Politkovskaya's paper] continued to exist says more about the paper's minimal impact than about its openness.

Politkovskaya didn't only write truthfully about the Chechnyan war, but about the modern Russian state, where economic stability has become everything.

Putin, who has called the break-up of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century', clearly agrees. Sick of the queues, the empty shops and the false promises of Soviet life, Russians looked first to the west - and particularly to the United States - to provide an economic model. What followed was an epic disaster: the sell-off of the state's most valuable assets made a few dozen people obscenely rich, but the lives of millions of others became far worse. The healthcare system fell apart, and so did many of the social services networks. Russia became the first industrial country ever to experience a sustained fall in life expectancy. Russian males born today can, on average, expect to live to the age of 59, dying younger than if they were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is not surprising, then, that by the time Putin became president most Russians were only too happy to exchange the ideas of free speech and intellectual freedom for the concrete desires of owning a home and a car and possessing a bank account. They also wanted to feel that somebody was in control of their country.

In today's Russia, as Politkovskaya wrote, stability is everything and damn the cost. Gorbachev and Yeltsin are seen by an overwhelming majority as historical disasters who provoked decline, collapse, chaos and humiliation before the triumphal west. The opportunities created in those years, the liberation from totalitarianism, have been forgotten. 'Yes, stability has come to Russia,' Politkovskaya wrote. 'It is a monstrous stability under which nobody seeks justice in courts that flaunt their subservience and partisanship. Nobody in his or her right mind seeks protection from the institutions entrusted with maintaining law and order, because they are totally corrupt. Lynch law is the order of the day, both in people's minds and in their actions. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'

Of particular interest to me, an opponent of Shell's corrupt agreement with the Irish government to exploit the Corrib gas field in Ireland's west despite staunch opposition on the part of local residents, is the following paragraph.

The Kremlin recently provided a particularly audacious example of how it sees its role as an 'energy superpower': Royal Dutch Shell, which had invested billions of dollars to develop the world's largest oil-and-gas field, Sakhalin II, in the Russian far east, was forced by the government to sell its controlling stake in the project. The company had endured a year of regulatory harassment - including ludicrous threats that the pipeline would not meet Russia's environmental standards. The moment Shell surrendered to Gazprom, however, those environmental concerns vanished. And what was Shell's response after its holding in the project was reduced from 55 to 25 per cent? 'Thank you very much for your support,' the company's chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, told Putin at a meeting three weeks ago. 'This was a historic occasion.'

Complete story here.