TARTU – The predominantly ethnic Russian leaderships of the Finno-Ugric republics of Mordvinia, Mari El and Udmurtia are moving quietly but quickly to suppress the last vestiges of a free media in all three.
They are clearly doing do both to protect their own power locally as well as to curry favor with Moscow. And they appear confident that they will get away with this campaign because their republics, like many other regions in the Russian Federation, seldom attracts much attention from the Moscow media, either Russian or foreign.
But thanks to the Moscow Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations and a few independent journalists in the Middle Volga and the Russian capital as well as the ability of the three Finno-Ugric countries of Estonia, Finland and Hungary to force the international institutions to pay attention (see the April 26 press release of the Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples about the European Parliament’s discussion of this trend by contacting ), enough is know about the efforts of these officials against the media to cause genuine concern.
On the one hand, the methods employed by officials in these three republics represent the kind of stealth attack on a fundamental right increasingly characteristic of the Russian Federation today that must not go unnoted. And on the other, what is now known to be taking place in these three almost certainly is happening in others about which even less is known.
The situation in Mari El appears to be particularly acute. Over the last year, several journalists have been beaten up by people the opposition media believe are tied to the government. They note that none of the perpetrators have been brought to justice and that the official media has sometimes implied that the independent journalists had it coming.
Moreover, Republic President Leonid Markelov has long indicated that he is now friend of a genuinely independent media. In one now infamous comment, he rhetorically asked journalists in Mari El, "How can I allow government publishing houses to print anti-president newspapers?"
That apparently pleased the Kremlin – President Vladimir Putin gave him an award – but it sent a clear signal that Markelov was ready to support other steps against media freedom. In its bulletin, the Moscow Center for Extreme Journalism has chronicled in recent weeks just what those steps now include (
http://cjes.ru/bulletin/ various dates).
First of all, the watchdog agency reports, Mari El government publishing houses decided to charge non-governmental publications four times as much they charged government ones for printing the same number of pages. And they did so without informing the newspapers and journals in advance thus landing many of the independent outlets in debt.
In the hope of continuing to appear, the independent media turned to print shops outside the republic, but now Margelov is blocking that avenue as well: Valeriy Komissarov, a Margelov man who heads the Duma Committee on Information Policy, has worked to force printers outside Mari El to stop publishing his home republic’s non-government newspapers.
Meanwhile, in Mari El itself, the Margelov regime has begun to impose censorship by telephone, blocking stories it doesn’t like in the government press at the source and ordering the printers to delete stories it does not approve of from the few non-government outlets that continue to appear.
Mari-language media have been particularly hard hit by this campaign, one that has left its outlets as boring as many Soviet-era publications. The leading daily there has seen its print run decline from 11,000 copies a day in 2000 to 6500 now, a decline paralleled in the electronic media thanks to Moscow’s recent reorganization of the agency overseeing that sector.
In Udmurtiya, the government has also moved against the press, but there it has directed its ire primarily against the Russian-language opposition newspaper "Den’." As "Nezavisimaya gazeta" reported on April 11, officials at the republic’s Informpechat’ organization simply have refused to distribute the paper through its kiosks.
Bricks have been thrown through the newspapers windows by persons unknown and to date uncaught. And when the authorities learned that the paper intended to post information about an anti-government demonstration on its website because the editors were doubtful they could get it into print, the Internet cable leading from their building was cut.
In addition, leaders of the republic government reportedly personally telephoned major firms and told them not to purchase advertising in the paper. Furthermore, the Udmurt Republic authorities have ordered local government publishers not to print the paper. For the last month, "Den’" has been printed in Perm, but that possibility could end as well.
And in Mordvinia, the authorities have stepped up their moves against the press as well. Sergei Ryabov, the editor of the weekly "Saranskiy kur’yer," has been forced to resign because the authorities have created conditions in which he as a professional journalist can no longer function.
After he took over the paper in August 2004, he increased its circulation over 30 percent by interviewing members of the local opposition. But the local authorities responded with lawsuits and pressure on the paper’s founder to make the paper „more loyal both to the authorities as such and individual republic and municipal officials in particular.”
In response, Ryabov quit, commenting that "You can’t speak about the authorities these days." That is a sentiment many of his colleagues in the media of the three Finno-Ugric republics share.
Unfortunately, it is exactly the conclusion the authorities there want them to draw.
