Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday, Poser said that he would not tolerate further censorship of his program. The most recent instance occurred when management at Channel One decided to nix a part of a February 6 interview that discussed Alexei Navalny – a leading opposition figure and one of the organizers of a massive opposition protest over the weekend.

“It might be that at the end of the day it’s not as a result of [the incident concerning] Navalny, but if anything else like this happens, I might just tell them – that’s enough!” Posner said.

At the same time, the host expressed hope that it wouldn’t come to such an extreme measure.

He also promised that if the show is cancelled, a press conference would be held to explain the specific reasons why.

“I’m very glad that, thanks to the Internet, anyone who’s interested can see: here is the program and here is what they cut out of it. It’s becoming meaningless to cut things out,” Posner said.

The host admitted that February 6 was not the first time he’d agreed to air a censored episode. While it happens “relatively rarely, this is one of the compromises that I sometimes make,” he acknowledged.

The interview in question was with fellow television host Tina Kandelaki, during which Posner asked whether or not she thought that he would be allowed to interview Aleksei Navalny on his own show: “I could call up Aleksei Navalny, but what do you think, would they let me?” According to Gazeta.ru, this fragment was cut out of the episode that aired in most of Russia, with the full version only broadcasted in the Far East, where it is regularly airs live.

In an interview on February 24, Posner spoke to GZT.ru about his plans to invite oppositionists who are effectively banned from appearing on state-controlled television onto his show. The first, he said, would be Solidarity co-leader Boris Nemtsov, whom he planned to invite sometime in March.

“I plan to invite Boris Nemtsov. I’m definitely going to refer to the conversation with Putin that took place in the presence of [Channel One General Director] Konstantin Ernst and another 25 people from the channel,” Posner said at the time.

But on April 1, which happened to be Posner’s 77th birthday in addition to the end of March, Nemtsov wrote in a birthday greeting to the host that neither he nor fellow opposition leader Garry Kasparov had received an invitation to appear on the show:

“There’s a man named Vladimir Vladimirovich, whom it’s a pleasure to address. That man is you. When I was very young, I saw you for the first time on the Russia-America teleconference, where you- spoke with Phil Donahue and the American public in an absolutely professional, open and candid manner. It was striking, unusual and became etched into my memory. It was my first lesson in openness and glasnost. Many thanks to you for that. To be an independent journalist working on federal television – in our times, few people have the strength for that. Sometimes this miracle works out well for you. May god grant you good health and a long life, and Garry Kasparov and I will continue to wait for your call. I shake your hand.”

Posner himself was unavailable for comment.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin first announced that oppositionists may be allowed on state television during a meeting with the Channel One creative team on February 3. The next day Posner said he had asked the station’s management for permission to invite oppositionists onto the air, and a few weeks later announced his intentions to invite Nemtsov sometime in March. Garry Kasparov has expressed skepticism that the invitations would ever come.

On Monday, Police Colonel General Nikolai Golovkin said an investigation of the incident concluded that the conflict arose after journalist Natalya Seybil made a remark about how Major Aleksei Klimov had parked his car, “and we also established his inappropriate behavior in the form of an assault of Natalya Seybil.”

“Following the assertion all circumstances by the administration of the Moscow Regional Main Department of Internal Affairs, a decision was made to fire the officer in question from internal affairs,” Golovkin explained. “The question is being decided on whether to file criminal charges and transfer materials to the Investigative Committee of the Moscow Regional Main Investigative Department of the Russian Federation to make a lawful decision.” He added that the order to fire Klimov was signed on April 4.

As Seybil told Ekho Moskvy radio on April 3, the attack came after a car pulled up to her building while she was outside walking her dog. The driver – Klimov – attempted to flirt with her and asked for her name, but the journalist brushed him off.

“I said: ‘Excuse me,’ – and kept walking. He began asking me again and I said ‘Vasya’ – and kept walking,” said Seybil.

After that, the man jumped out of the car, grabbed her hair and punched her in the face.

“After that, everything was like in a television show – hands on the hood of the car, he bent my arms behind my back, threw my phone to the ground. I called for the police. He threatened me, peppering it all with expletives. My neighbor came out and said: ‘What are you doing, that’s a woman!'”

At that point, Klimov flaunted his identification as a criminal investigative officer.

According to Seybil, the police officers who arrived on the scene released Klimov, saying that there was nothing they could do: “This is our chief,” they told her.

“I’ve been assaulted – my face has been punched, there are bruises all over my body and I had a hypertensive crisis,” Seybil told reporters.

Colonel Yevgeny Gildeyev, a communications officer with the Moscow regional police department, issued an apology to the journalist. “On behalf of the administration of the Main Department of Internal Affairs, I extend sincere apologies to Natalya Seybil. I hope that nothing like this ever happens again; indeed, only true professionals should be police officers,” he said.

Russia’s federal Investigative Committee says it is looking into the case.

Seybil has worked as the editor-in-chief of the talk show Pust Govoryat (“Let Them Talk”) on Russia’s state-controlled Channel One, as well as for the programs Gordon Quixote and Zakryty Pokaz (“Private Screening”).

It should have been no surprise, then, that what could have been a uniquely lighthearted affair – a nationwide televised vote for Olympic mascot – has instead morphed into an Orwellian nightmare. The editorial team at Gazeta.ru explains:

Mascot of the Monarch’s Will
Russia has one voter – Vladimir Putin. The real mascot of the Sochi Olympics is him
February 28, 2011
Gazeta.ru

The nationally televised election for mascot of the Winter Olympics in Sochi became a telling model for Russian elections in general and a possible repetition in the upcoming Duma and presidential elections.

The elections aired on Channel One for Russians to choose the mascot for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi bore an entirely predictable result, albeit one that directly contradicted the population’s opinion. The winner was the snow leopard, with 28% of the vote. This only happened because Vladimir Putin, while in Sochi, spoke out in favor of the snow leopard right on the day of voting. It’s true that the Olympics had to be split between three mascots, since not one received more than half of the vote – the polar bear (18%) and bunny (16%) were added to the leopard.

Meanwhile, according to a VTsIOM survey conducted on February 5-6, 2011, Russians had no plans whatsoever to vote for the leopard. By all criteria [listed by VTsIOM as factors that could influence voters’ decisions – ed.], Russian citizens chose Father Christmas as the most popular mascot. Moreover, the dolphin and brown bear were on the shortlist of favorites.

With 20% of the vote, the leopard actually took second place (in first was the snowflake) for anti-mascot – ones that Russians definitely did not want to see as symbols of the Sochi Games.

Incidentally, Sochi residents themselves chose the dolphin as mascot for the games in 2008, although the Olympic organizational committee immediately warned that the opinion of these hosts of the Olympic Games was not going to be decisive.

It turned out like always. The decisive factor was the opinion of Vladimir Putin, lord of the Olympics and of Russia itself. It did not differ greatly in form from what happened, for example, with the verdict in the second Yukos case. Then, right on the eve of the reading of the verdict (it’s true that it was then postponed for two weeks) during his live annual broadcast, Putin not only said Mikhail Khodorkovsky was guilty of all incriminating charges, but also tried once again to pin him with murder. Naturally, the court took Putin’s retort as a call to action. This is exactly what happened with the leopard for Olympic mascot. Putin had only to state his personal preference for this adorable animal (which, in essence, has nothing to do with either winter sports or Sochi) for Channel One to immediately bolster this private point of view with the people’s supposed approval. At the same time, the mascot leading in public opinion – Santa Claus – was removed altogether from the ballot, as if he represented the non-systemic opposition. In this way, even a ceremony to pick a mascot for the Olympic Games, meant in principle to united the nation and remain bereft of political subtext, was turned into a triumph for the political will of the “national leader.”

Channel One has shown how the prime minister turned public opinion in his favor in a single word – before his retort, Russians categorically did not want to see the leopard as mascot of the Sochi Games, and afterwards made him the leader. Or how to manipulate the nation’s will – the Russian authorities have plenty of experience falsifying election results.

At the same time, President Dmitri Medvedev did not express his own preference for mascot. But then, in a move no less telling of role casting in the tandem, he brought attention to the disparity between the election results for Olympic mascot that were held on television and online. At a session of the Commission for Modernization and Technological Development of the Economy, the president called for deliberation to be carried out – including over the internet – over the design of a universal electronic card for Russian citizens. “I hope that it turns out fairer than the consideration for our Olympic symbols was,” Medvedev said. “In any case, there won’t be the kind of discord as there was between votes on television and votes over the internet,” Medvedev added.

The problem is not that the Olympics are going to have three mascots at the same time, none of which are the ones that the hosts of the Games in Sochi or the majority of Russian citizens wanted to see. The problem is that neither the wave of revolutions against kleptocratic regimes in the Arab world nor the abundant history of revolutions and plots by the elites in Russia itself is going to teach the Russian government. As before, it is prepared to falsify public opinion on any matter to satisfy the personal ambitions of its leader.

In this sense, it is critical for Russia that the elections for Olympic mascot not resemble the coming elections for the Duma – or, especially, for president.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

“I plan to invite Boris Nemtsov. I’m definitely going to refer to the conversation with Putin that took place in the presence of [Channel One General Director] Konstantin Ernst and another 25 people from the channel,” Posner told the publication.

“As of now, I can’t say I’ve been told ‘no’ in regards to my wish to have oppositionists on the air,” he went on. “Inviting Boris Efimovich in February didn’t work out. I had already planned to have other people on. Why am I starting with Nemtsov? I see him as the most interesting and striking person from the opposition.”

Speaking to Kasparov.ru, Nemtsov said he has not yet received an invitation to appear on Posner’s show, which is simply called “Posner.”

“As of now, I haven’t received an invitation, but I’ll go to the interview; why not?” said Nemtsov. “It’s a live broadcast, otherwise I simply wouldn’t agree; another matter is that the live broadcast is shown in the east of the country and it’s possible that they could cut something out afterwards, having consulted with the Kremlin. It’s hard to control, but in this case it would be Posner’s reputation that would suffer, and not mine.”

Nemtsov said he expects the piece to be a fluff interview that would avoid any controversial topics. “I think the questions are going to be posed in such a way as to follow the general outline of the channel,” he said. “They’ll be about my health; my children.”

Posner said he also sees Eduard Limonov, leader of the Other Russia and National Bolshevik Parties, as another striking opposition figure – but does not plan to have him on his show.

“Limonov… it’s unlikely that I’d invite him, because I promised myself not to invite fascists,” Posner explained. “As long as he has the party banner that he has, he’s not going to be on my program.”

“I know what fascism is and what Nazism is. And when I see a person whose flag is a copy of the Nazi flag but has a hammer and sickle instead of a swastika in the middle – for me this is a definite, as they say nowadays, message. And I told myself: I’m never going to give these people speak,” the television host concluded.

Such sentiments represent both state censorship over television and Posner’s personal enmity, Limonov told Kasparov.ru.

“I think that there’s both censorship and enmity, even though Posner doesn’t know me. He called me a fascist, and that’s slander in general, which is disproved by my close cooperation with Garry Kasparov and many other honest people,” the oppositionist said. “The party that I head is the most repressed party; about two hundred of its members have gone through prisons and camps – in the past two years, 35 people have been convicted on the 282th article [banning extremism – ed.] alone.”

Kasparov.ru noted that Posner claims he has been threatened by members of the National Bolshevik Party. Limonov denied the accusations.

Posner also said he would like to host an interview with incisive liberal commentator and politician Valeriya Novodvorskaya.

“I would invite Novodvorskaya,” he said. “She, of course, is a frightfully brave person. She is a wonderful writer and has a wonderful sense of humor. But at the same time, she is totally radical. It seems to me that it’s very difficult to agree with her on anything. That is to say, everything is black and white to her, either/or; she doesn’t allow for any shades of gray. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t invite her on. It’s just that I understand how it could be difficult.”

It is also possible that leading Russian oppositionist Garry Kasparov could be invited on Posner’s show – he was among the original figures Posner referenced at the beginning of February – although GZT.ru pointed out that he hasn’t yet been invited. Kasparov himself expressed skepticism of the entire affair and discontent with the host’s objections to Limonov and other controversial oppositionists.

“It’s pointless to comment on Posner’s routine, seasonal promises,” Kasparov responded. “This isn’t the first time we’re hearing them. If I get an invitation, then I’ll go. It’s interesting that ‘squeamish’ Posner doesn’t want to see Limonov on his show. On the other hand, he’s expanding his list with Novodvorskaya, ‘the boogieman of Russian liberalism.’ But has he heard of the names of [liberal blogger Alexei] Navalny or [Left Front leader] Udaltsov? Or does he not watch anything other than Channel One?”

Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky sees Posner’s promise to invite oppositionists on his show as a manifestation of “Perestroika 2” – a continuation of processes that began in 2010, when it became unfashionable for members of the more glamorous portions of Russian society to be associated with the government.

“This is a mature stage of protest, in which people who have spoken out against Khodorkovsky are beginning to speak out in favor of him or redact their objections,” the analyst explained. “Perestroika begins not when dissidents come out against the system, but when people who were recently loyal to the government come over to its moral and political opposition, like the Komsomol workers did in the ’80s.”

Channel One, one of Russia’s state-run television channels, broadcast the award ceremony, but not Parfyonov’s speech, which was only posted online. Expert opinions differ as to whether the usually non-political host’s remarks were given the go-ahead by the authorities or if they were a complete surprise. The New Times magazine has published a series of photographs of significant media personalities below a video and transcript of the speech. An English translation of the speech is below:

I was given the chance to speak for seven minutes about the topic that seems most relevant to me today. I’m worried, and will not try to speak by memory; for the first time in the studio I’m going to read aloud.

This morning I visited Oleg Kashin in the hospital. He had undergone another routine operation, surgically restoring, in the literal and figurative sense of the term, the face of Russian journalism. The brutal beating of the Kommersant newspaper correspondent evoked a much greater resonance in society and the professional sphere than any other attempt on the life and health of a Russian journalist. The reaction of the federal television channels, it’s true, could be suspected of having been prepared ahead of time; indeed, the tone of the immediate response by the head of state to what happened was different than what was said by the person in charge after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.

And another thing. Before his attack, Oleg Kashin did not exist, and could not have existed, for the federal airwaves. In recent times he has written about the radical opposition, protest movements, and street youth ringleaders, and these topics and characters are inconceivable for TV. It seems that the marginal sphere is beginning to change something in the public situation, forming a new trend; but among television journalists, Kashin simply has no colleagues. There was one, Andrei Loshak, and he left altogether. For the internet.

After the real and imaginary sins of the ’90s, there were two points in the 2000s – at the beginning, for the sake of the elimination of the media oligarchs, and then for the sake of the unity of the ranks in the counter-terrorism war – when federal telecommunications were nationalized. Journalistic topics, and with them all of life, was definitively divided into what was allowed on TV and what wasn’t allowed on TV. Each politically significant broadcast is used to guess the government’s goals and problems, its mood, attitude, its friends and enemies. Institutionally, this is not information at all, but government publicity or anti-publicity – what else was the broadcast artillery in the run-up to Luzhkov’s dismissal – and, of course, publicity of the government itself.

For a federal television channel correspondent, the highest official persons are not newsmakers, but the bosses of his boss. Institutionally, a correspondent is then not a journalist at all, but a civil servant, following the logic of service and submission. There’s no possibility, for example, to have an interview in its truest sense with the boss of the boss: it’d be an attempt to expose someone who wouldn’t want to be exposed. Andrei Kolesnikov’s conversation with Vladimir Putin in a yellow Lada Kalina allows one to feel the confidence of the prime minister, his attitude towards 2012, and his ignorance about unpleasant topics. But can we imagine in the mouth of a national television journalist, and then on a national television channel, the question posed by Kolesnikov to Putin: “Why did you corner Mikhail Khodorkovsky?” This is again an example from Kommersant. At times, one gets the impression that the country’s leading social/political newspaper (which is in no way programmed as oppositionist) and the federal television channels talk about different Russias. And the leading business magazine, Vedomosti, was actually likened by [State Duma] Speaker [Boris – ed.] Gryzlov to terrorist supporters, including by their contextualization of the Russian mass media, television most of all.

The rating of the acting president and prime minister is at about 75 percent. On federal television broadcasts, no critical, skeptical or ironic judgments are heard about them, hushing up a quarter of the spectrum of public opinion. The high government comes across as the dearly departed – only good things or nothing is spoken about it. On that point, the audience has clearly demanded other opinions. What a furor was caused by almost the only exception – when the dialogue between Yury Shevchuk and Vladimir Putin was shown on television.

The longstanding techniques are familiar to anyone who caught USSR Central Television, when reporting was substituted with protocol recordings of meetings in the Kremlin; the text has intonational support when there are canons of these displays: the person in charge meets with the minister or head of a region, goes to the people, holds a summit with foreign colleagues. This isn’t news, it’s old; a repetition of what’s customary to broadcast in such situations. The possible shows lack an informational basis altogether – in a thinned-out broadcasting vegetable patch, any vegetable is going to look like a big deal just by having regularly appeared on the screen.

Having worked only in Ostankino and for Ostankino for twenty four years, I speak about it with bitterness. I don’t have the right to blame any of my colleagues, I myself am no fighter and don’t expect any heroics from others. But things at least need to be called what they are.

Television journalism is doubly shamed given the obvious achievements of large-scale television shows and domestically-created serials. Our television thrills, captivates, entertains and makes you laugh with all the more sophistication, but you would unlikely call it a civic socio-political institution. I am convinced: it is one of the main reasons for the dramatic decline in television viewing among the most active part of the population, when people from our circle say: “Why turn the box on, they don’t make it for me.”

What’s more frightening is that a large part of the population already feels no need for journalism. When they’re perplexed: “So they beat someone – do you think there so few among us who are beaten, and what’s this fuss over some reporter?” Millions of people don’t understand that a journalist takes a professional risk for the sake of his audience. A journalist isn’t beaten because of something he wrote, said or filmed, but because this thing was read, heard, or seen. Thank you.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

The film, titled “The War of 08.08.08 — The Art of Deception” aired on the one year anniversary of the war, and alleged that Georgian propaganda efforts falsified and staged photographs of bloodshed during the conflict. Comparing photos taken in South Ossetia with images from Iraq, the film concluded that many of the images from the former were too “clean,” a sign that they were faked. There was only one problem: a photo supposedly taken in Iraq was actually the work of a Russian photographer, Arkadiy Babchenko, and was taken in South Ossetia. The image depicts a wounded Russian soldier.

Babchenko, who works for the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was furious that his work was taken out of context, and has filed suit against Channel One. Calling those who produced the film liars in his LiveJournal blog, he has requested 100,000 rubles ($3200 or €2200) for psychological damages. Babchenko believes the misuse was deliberate, as the TV station did not want to acknowledge that the critical Novaya Gazeta reported the truth. The error raises questions about the rest of the film as well, Babchenko said.

“Now I personally have serious doubts about everything else shown in this film,” he wrote.

David Axe, the journalist interviewed as a photo-expert by the documentary, says his words were twisted out of context. In describing Babchenko’s photo, Axe said it showed a seriously injured man, which would be difficult to fake. The documentary translated his words as “Here is an injured person. I shot his photo in Iraq. It would be hard to call this a fake.”

For their part, the film’s creators claim that the error was caused by a technical mistake that happened during the editing process. Sergei Nadezhdin, one of the producers, said the audio went out of synch and connected two different parts that should not have been side by side. The audience, Nadezhdin says, was not misled, since the intention of the clip was to provide an example of an undoctored photo.

Irina Laptiva, a media analyst working for Park.ru, told Russia Profile that journalists are only human and make mistakes, but that they must be quickly corrected.

“If mistakes are made,” she said, “there must be a public apology within the mass media, which would state what was incorrect and when. If they do not do this, then I believe that it is a breach of human rights and copyright.”

Channel One, well known for its other over-the-top documentaries, has yet to issue a formal apology.

—

For further details on the story, read an account by journalist David Axe.

The screening follows a recent tradition of airing one-sided “documentaries” that voice conspiracy theories and put Russia at odds with the West. Films recently broadcast on Russian state television have asserted that the West was responsible for democratic “color revolutions” in former Soviet countries and that the West was behind Russia’s war in Chechnya.

The article below first ran on the Grani.ru independent online newspaper.

An Open Order
Boris Sokolov
Grani.ru
9/15/08

“Zero: an investigation into 9/11,” a film by Italian journalist Giulietta Chiesa and his French colleague Thierry Meyssan, went practically unnoticed in the world. Its authors openly complained about this as they spoke on Channel One, hinting at machinations by America’s intelligence agencies. In Russia, on the other hand, the film was shown on TV on Friday evening, during prime-time – on the “Private Screening” program, which gave it an audience of many millions. In and of itself, this proves that the Cold War is in full swing, at least on Russian television. Mr. Chiesa laments that “the level of democracy in the world is very low. And with every year, it becomes lower and lower.” And that’s why the Italian departed for Russia in search of genuine democracy.

Chiesa and Meyssan’s basic thesis is that the September 11th terrorist attacks were organized by the Americans themselves, in order to justify limitations on democratic freedoms in America and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, and in order to stave off a crisis in the American economy. Almost all the participants in the discussion readily agreed with them. The debates only centered on who in particular among the Americans was behind the terrorist acts. Some insisted that it was the multi-national corporations and intelligence agencies, carrying out imperial designs, with the involvement of individuals within the administration, but not the highest ranks –not the President and not the Secretary of State. This resembled Soviet times, when all the problems in the world were blamed on American imperialists, presented as anonymous monopolies and equally anonymous senior officials in the CIA and the Pentagon. Presidents and Secretaries of State shouldn’t be directly offended, since negotiations have to be led with them. The second version consisted of the idea that President Bush was directly involved in the conspiracy behind September 11th. Well, I guess this shows the relative freedom of speech as compared with the communist era, and moreover, everyone knows that Bush is working his last months in the White House.

The film’s authors call on Dario Fo (presented in the credits as a Nobel laureate), as a leading expert of the explosions on September 11th. The overwhelming majority of Russian viewers will remain convinced that there is a distinguished scholar before them, who has knowledge about airplanes, explosions and fires. In actual fact, Dario Fo is an Italian playwright, who received a Nobel prize for literature in 1997 for “emulat[ing] the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” He appears before us as a descendant of jesters as well.

From a professional point of view, the film is made extremely primitively. It is based almost exclusively on “talking heads,” and presents only those witnesses and experts who criticize the official version, that the terrorist attacks were organized by Al-Qaeda, led by [Osama] bin Laden (several of them look to be mentally unbalanced). Along those same lines are the endless, mesmerizing repetitions of captions with the author’s theses. Testimony and evidence from adherents of the official version is not mentioned in any way in the film. This is roughly like taking only the testimonies showing the innocence of the defendants during the Nuremberg trial, and ignoring all the materials in the extensive file documenting their guilt.

It is interesting that both the film’s authors and the participants of the discussion [that followed], having spoken out against American globalism and defended the dignity of the downtrodden peoples, demonstrate a barefaced contempt to these same peoples. The theme of the discussion sounded like this: “How could these 19 arabs do something like this? They couldn’t even learn to operate a plane!” True, the main question then remains unanswered – who was at the helm of the planes that crashed into the twin-towers. Could it be true that CIA agents turned from through-and-through WASPs into fanatic-suicide bombers? Here, to Chiesa and Meyssan’s assistance came Geidar Dzhemal, a homegrown Islamist-conspiracy theorist, who proposes that the planes were controlled from the ground by expert hackers, who changed the autopilot program on the killing-planes. No one bothered to refute this delusion.

The films authors, and the organizers of the discussion sought to convince viewers that two realities are competing on equal terms in the world: the official and alternative versions of the events of September 11th. Proponents of both versions, they say, have their own arguments, and even in the hard science field, experts at times have directly opposite opinions. Therefore, they say, the choice between them is a matter of faith. The discussion moderator, Alexander Gordon, tried at the start to play to objectivity and the cooperative search for truth, but by the end, confessed frankly that he had long ago come to a firm conclusion that the American establishment was behind the September 11th tragedy, just like the other terrorist acts on US territory.

Proponents of the official version were chosen essentially from obedient sparring-partners, whose arguments amounted to saying that Chiesa and Meyssan’s version could not be truth simply because this would be intolerable from a ethical point of view: after all, if would imply that the US leadership would kill their own citizens for political gains. But here, director Vladimir Khotinenko, political analyst Vitaly Tretyakov, and other adherents of the American conspiracy theory immediately took the floor, assuring the viewers that for the American authorities to kill even thousands, even millions, was as easy as batting an eye.

Mr. Tretyakov put forth the thesis that the answer to the question of who profited from the September 11th terrorist attacks clearly pointed to the American government. The majority of the audience backed him enthusiastically. But no one did clarify what exactly the American advantage was. Maybe it was the need to hold a significant contingent of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for years to come? Or high oil prices, affecting the American economy in far from the best manner? If they really had some desire to figure out the reasons for the tragedy from the “who profited” principle, it would have been more logical to note that for Russia, the growth in energy prices which started after September 11th turned into a golden rain of petrodollars and the opportunity to demonstrate its solidarity with the US in the fight with international terrorism. Which for many years created the illusion of Russian-American partnership in the world. But we didn’t hear this kind of discussion.

Chiesa, Meyssan and their adherents propose the following circumstance as the main argument favoring their version of events. After September 11, 2001, there were no more terrorist attacks in the US. Which means that the American intelligence agencies were accessorial to the terrorist acts, while terrorists, Islamic or otherwise, do not have a real opportunity to perform such massive terrorist acts on American territory. But, following this absurd logic, one must come the following conclusions. Since there haven’t been any explosions of buildings in Moscow since September 1999, it means, that they were organized by the Russian intelligence agencies. Since after the “Nord-Ost” [theater siege] and Beslan [school takeover], there haven’t been any new seizures of hundreds of hostages, it means that those terrorist acts were also an inside job by the FSB.

At the end, the discussion smoothly turned to the present Russian-Georgian conflict. It was not in vain that President Medvedev recently said that for Russia, August 8th (the start of the war with Georgia) –was almost like September 11th for the US. Naturally, the assertions poured out, that the notion of Russian aggression against Georgia, spread through the Western world, was the results of the same kind of propaganda as the official version of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the US, with Georgia’s help, in truth wants to engineer a new cold war, to solve its domestic and foreign problems. As result, the discussion closed with a hysterical call from one of the film’s authors, for Russia to defend the world from the American predators who are tearing the planet to pieces. A plea most insincere.

translation by theotherrussia.org

The Turkish embassy in Moscow has already discounted the “unfounded assertions regarding Turkey,” questioning the conclusions of the self-designated “documentary.” The film, which first aired on April 22nd, alleges that ENKA, a Turkish construction company with major market share in Russia, directly funded Chechen rebels. It also alleges that the U.S. State Department as well as Turkish authorities staged a number of cunning plots to exacerbate separatism in the North Caucasus region, including smuggling weapons and injecting the market with counterfeit dollars. France allegedly gave a hand by printing new regional passports, and Germany provided assistance by minting new currency.

A statement from Channel One called the project an “investigative journalism” documentary based on a number of on-the-ground witnesses.

In response, ENKA quickly released a statement: “We state that all information regarding our company broadcast on April 22 in ‘The Caucasus Plan’ TV program on Channel One is totally groundless and untrue. We deny all such accusations.”

Experts called the film a joke, adding that it resembles Soviet-style propaganda rather than a serious investigation. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty quotes Said-Khasan Abumuslimov, a historian who was Chechnya’s vice president in the 1990s:

“The Russians have always claimed that the Chechen struggle was instigated by outside forces,” he said. “They say we always wanted to live in peace with the Russians, but first Turkey, then England, and now America is sowing seeds of discord in the Caucasus. I don’t even want to comment on these silly allegations. This is not serious.”

Government critics commonly describe television in Russian as the most strictly government-controlled media. At the same time, television serves as the major source of news for the largest share of the population. Channel One (also called Rossiya), a state-run enterprise that broadcasts across the country, has been repeatedly criticized for serving as a Kremlin press-agency, and not a serious source of news. In September 2007, the channel aired another anti-Western special titled “Barkhat.ru” (lit. Velvet.ru). The prime-time special described a mass-conspiracy wherein the CIA was using foreign NGOs, the western media and opposition groups in an attempt to overthrow the government and foment a “color revolution” in Russia.

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Watch “The Caucasus Plan” (RUS)
Watch “Barkhat.ru” (RUS)
Read an analysis of conspiracy theories aired by Russian television, and more information about Arkady Mamontov, who produced Barkhat.ru – Kommersant Newspaper (ENG)