Alexander Kuchma has long been known as the man who slashed Khodorkovsky’s face with a cobbler’s knife, claiming that “I wanted to cut his eye out, but my hand slipped.” At the time, the incident gave rise to speculation that Soviet-era tactics of recruiting mentally unstable prisoners to attack others were being employed against the jailed oligarch.

Indeed, on May 16, 2011, just months after finishing a seven-year sentence for armed robbery, Kuchma told Gazeta.ru that he had been forced to carry out the attack. He did not, however, name names. Shortly afterwards, an unnamed federal television channel paid Kuchma “a certain sum of money” and shot a ten-minute interview where he recounts the story of how he was made to carry out the attack – this time, complete with specific names and dates.

Kuchma was then told by an employee of the channel that the interview would not be aired because it had “caused alarm and was being reviewed by the general director.” A representative of the channel told Gazeta.ru that it may still be aired at a later time.

Fearing for his life, Kuchma again phoned Gazeta.ru and retold his story, complete with the details he’d given in the filmed interview. “After they taped the broadcast, I decided to tell you everything sooner than they could come crashing down on me,” Kuchma told editors. “What do they need me for if I’ve already told everything?”

In the interview with Gazeta.ru, published on Thursday, Kuchma explains how two law enforcement officers organized the 2006 attack on Khodorkovsky. The website stipulates that, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty, they have changed the names and certain positions published in the article – but are prepared to release them in the case of an investigation. They also note that fact-checking has found that the people named by Kuchma indeed either worked or still work for the Federal Penitentiary System.

The incident began in March 2006, when Khodorkovsky and Kuchma were placed in disciplinary confinement as punishment for drinking tea. Shortly afterwards, two officers met Kuchma in a separate room and began beating him almost immediately. “They started saying I should take revenge on Khodorkovsky for supposedly getting me put in the disciplinary cell. They said that I should take a knife and stab him in the eye, like to stab it out. The plan was such that I needed to attack him in his sleep,” said the former prisoner. “I told them: ‘What are you getting at, guys? He’ll die.'”

“The first time I didn’t agree, they called me back, beat me again,” Kuchma went on. “They said that I already knew everything and if I didn’t agree they’d hang me in the disciplinary cell and say that I hung myself. The second time they convinced me that they’d kill me if I didn’t agree. I pretended to agree.”

Kuchma said the men, whose names he didn’t know, gave him a knife and that while they didn’t say directly to kill Khodorkovsky, “I understood that that’s what they meant. They said that they won’t add onto my sentence for it, that I’d live peacefully. That these were serious people from Moscow, that the government will defend me, very big people, that’s the sort of stuff they said.”

The ex-prisoner explained that he decided not to kill his cell mate, but just to slash him in the nose. “It was clear that there was more and more noise, that the bosses, lawyers, journalists had come running. I had hoped that those guys would leave me alone because of all this clamor,” he explained.

After attacking Khodorkovsky, Kuchma was put back in a disciplinary cell and the same plainclothes officers came back. “They beat me again and said: ‘what, you sleazeball, you didn’t do what we asked?!’ I apologized and said that I missed because I couldn’t see anything at night. They beat me some more.”

According to Gazeta.ru, representatives from the Federal Penitentiary Service refused to comment on Kuchma’s remarks. In addition, the editors have issued an open call for a criminal investigation.

Kuchma’s accusations come at a turbulent time in the Khodorkovsky case. The former oligarch’s extended prison term was upheld by a Moscow appeals court on Tuesday and he is now officially considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Next week, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is set to rule on Khodorkovsky’s complaint against the Russian government about the legality of his arrest and conditions of his confinement.

Gazeta.ru’s full interview with Kuchma can be read in Russian here.

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.

In the days following Monday’s deadly suicide attacks on the Moscow metro, Russian television has come under mounting criticism for largely ignoring the incidents during the first critical hours after they occurred. As opposed to radio and print media, which are overall less subject to censorship, state-controlled television remains the primary source of news for most Russians.

While Russian television has been routinely criticized for refusing to air prominent oppositionists, anti-government protests, reports containing scenes of graphic violence, and other events that could cast the government in an unfavorable light, the public response to its failure to cover Moscow’s worst terrorist attacks in six years has been uncharacteristically harsh.

In a column for the online newspaper Gazeta.ru, Natalia Gevorkyan argues that today’s Russian television has gone beyond the breaking point and become an alternative reality that only its producers seem to believe in.

A Crooked Broadcast
By Natalia Gevorkyan
March 31, 2010
Gazeta.ru

Russian television has definitely ceased to be a form of news media. Its design of a virtual form of reality has reached the peak of perfection. TV has its own reality – with little jokes, idiotic talk shows that take one week to write, and programming that is in no way affected by reality. But in this country there is grief, the dead, the wounded, and shattered metro cars in the center of the capital. The result: on the day of the terrorist attacks, it was only the published news media that lay out the real reality, and not all at once. The remaining programs left the impression of a broadcast from Mars. They did not concern this life, or these deaths. (I’m not talking here about Russia Today. The television broadcasts for foreigners turned out to be more adequately realistic. This channel is in a different competitive milieu, the western one – normal, sensible, professional. They have to correspond.)

I was abroad when the events in Beslan began. Except for the breaks for headline news, which also began with Beslan, CNN showed only Beslan. RTR-Planeta at the time was telling me about prostitution. Now I’m in Moscow. The explosions occurred a kilometer away from my home. Or the explosions in Kizlyar, where another twelve of my fellow citizens were killed. Today. I turn on the television. Literally right now, Wednesday mid-day. Movie, movie, movie, drama, drama, drama, talk show about photography, talk show about court, something about Pasternak, songs, laughter. And only in the news breaks do you understand that people still haven’t been buried, people are still carrying flowers, still lighting candles, people are still crying, the prime minister is reanimating ten-year-old jargon, the Federation Council is apparently planning to institute the death penalty.

When cell phones stopped working on Monday, when cars with sirens sped off down Komsomolsky Prospekt and crowds of people moved towards them – if my arm had reached for the television switch, it would only have been as a last resort. The computer. The internet works. Everything is there. That’s all understood.

Then the radio. A more democratically accessible form of media. A separate thank you to radio hosts for their work on this black Monday. They did what television should have done. Right on time, the radio broadcast experts, opinions, and conversations, which are always better than silence and uncertainty. Even if they’re just empty responses to the primary questions: who, how, why? But the analysts, comparisons with analogous terrorist attacks, broadcasting information as it became available, interviews with news people – all of this is absolutely normal journalistic work. The radio flexibly reworked itself during the tragic events. It worked in person, live, broadcasting directly. A few radio stations even cut out their commercials.

The television managers couldn’t decide to do a live broadcast even in a situation that, in my view, obliged them to do so. They have betrayed their profession. They betrayed it long ago, when they allowed Putin’s TV watchdogs to erase live television from our lives, from the lives of citizens. They then began to design a country that was pleasant for the leadership to look at. This country, ideally, either cracks up at moronic jokes, or empathizes with the heroes of dramas, or is terrified at dissected corpses, or gets divorced together with a wealthy couple, or shares a child together with a famous singer, or is moved by its leaders, who crop up in the news clips so periodically that Brezhnev would have been jealous, or in a united fit of emotion even votes for them. This television, which the new president has not abolished either, looks like a meaningless, imitation Chinese vase, decorating the empty corner of a room.

Everything that radio did should have been done by television. Live broadcast, open studios where they could have questioned specialists, intelligence officers, doctors, witnesses of the events. Live. Effective editors, conversations, attempts to come together to understand, to overcome, to grieve, to calm, to unite. And the live programming, the latest information, the reaction of the government, the reaction of the world, the reactions of people in Moscow and Vladivostok, in Grozny and Irkutsk, and so on, that this television was already capable of doing ten years ago.

Guys, you already can’t do it, you’ve lost your instincts, you’ve killed them off within political labyrinths. Now you ponder what to let on the air and whether to let it on the air at all, but people are already dead, and your viewers already hear the emergency sirens; they already know what happened, they’re already pulling out the wounded and tying tourniquets. One day later, with you, the Caucasus don’t blow up; the screen shows some kind of different, glamorous life – while it’s already blown up into a multitude of dangerous splinters that get to us everywhere, including in the capital. Television has erased real life from its programming. It has wiped society off of its screen – living, reflective, disagreeable society that is unable to afford the new housing and utilities tariffs, is unemployed and hard-working, has not become spoiled, and has not ceased to think. It has wiped out everyone from its programming who was capable of asserting our right to monitor the authorities and control over the intelligence agencies. You didn’t notice when the country stopped trusting the state, the cops, the intelligence agencies, the prosecutors, the investigators, the courts. And you. You didn’t notice because you already have come to believe that the country consists of what television shows, prepares, dresses in Prada, writes on the prompter and sends out onto the air.

How many more tragedies have to happen, and what kind, so that those who answer for and create today’s television to trembled and shook, so that the viewer became more important than the government, so that they would decide to say in a stern voice: “We’re going live.” And so that instead of Karpov, as previously scheduled, Pozner‘s guest today was a girl saved at Lubyanka Station.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

Theotherrussia.org provides glimpses into the Russian media, documenting self-censorship, spin, and other inaccuracies.

TV Channel Pulls Putin Caricature

The 2×2 television channel, which broadcasts primarily animated series, was taking no chances after it had a scare involving its license last fall.  In its latest season of the popular South Park cartoon, the channel has edited out the character representing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Novy Region Information Agency reports.

Putin was shown in a scene receiving a phone call from one of the young characters in the cartoon, asking to help him blast a whale to the moon.  In the sketch, Putin thinks that he is receiving a prank call from US President George W. Bush.  The clip came from the “Free Willzyx” episode first broadcast in 2005, when Putin was the President of Russia.

2×2, which started broadcasting in 2007, faced the threat of license revocation in 2008, after a hardline Christian group filed suit for alleged extremism in 12 cartoon series shown by the station.  The channel was issued a warning from Russia’s media monitoring body, and management eventually pulled the offending cartoons.  In the end, the station managed to renew its license after a public campaign to save the channel garnered more than 50,000 signatures.  In June, Russian authorities retracted the warning against 2×2.

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Russia Today Invents “Mystery”

Russia Today, a government-funded news channel that broadcasts in English, was meanwhile busy spinning US President Barack Obama’s meeting with the Russian opposition.  The Chessbase news blog breaks down the not-so-subtle slant in the reporting, which downplayed the political career of United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov.

The coverage described what Russian opposition leaders said to Obama as a “mystery,” despite the fact that transcripts of the statements made by the opposition have been made publicly available.

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Deputy Reinterprets Obama’s Words

State Duma Deputy Konstantin Kosachev was quick to reinterpret Barack Obama’s position on Georgia for the Russian public.  Kosachev, who chairs the Duma Committee on International Affairs, said the following at a July 8th press conference.  The sound byte of Obama’s supposed reversal of the US position on the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was then repeated frequently throughout the media cycle.  Kosachev was responding to a question on the US support for Georgian territorial integrity.

“Obama affirmed the well known US position,” Kosachev said, “but a clear assertion followed in the same statement, that this territorial integrity must not be restored through military means.  I take these words as a signal to Tbilisi.  A serious transformation of the American position has appeared here.

“Yes, we differ on this issue, but there is no longer the same absoluteness in the words of the US representatives, as there was during the time of the George Bush administration.  Barack Obama understands the haste of the judgments made in August 2008.  And during our interactions, American congressmen admit that they obviously rushed to judgement.  This affirms the truth of our position.”

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Russian Media Imagine Agreement on Oil Price at G8 Summit

The Russian media were quick to report a statement from President Dmitri Medvedev’s office, that Medvedev had floated $70-80 per barrel as a fair world oil price.  Unfortunately, they also didn’t delve too deeply into the second part of the statement, where spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said that “G8 leaders generally agreed in their remarks.”

While news outlets spun the report as a success by Medvedev, other world leaders were more than skeptical. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had this to say in response:

“We didn’t discuss a specific figure and we didn’t discuss in detail any price range … There’s no agreement on ranges.”

Pressure to report positive news comes from many sources.

Yevgeny Gontmakher is a sociologist who wrote a newspaper article theorizing that the global financial crisis could bring about social unrest. After the column appeared, the national media regulatory body approached the paper and suggested they not print extremist materials.

“This is censorship,” said Gontmakher, who heads the Academy of Science’s Social Policy Center. “The situation in the country is changing; you can no longer utter the word ‘crisis’.”

Journalists allege that the Kremlin is using its controlling role in the media to hide the truth of the economic situation from ordinary Russians.

One reporter told Die Welt that editors at a major Russian newspaper advised writers to remain cautious when reporting on the impacts of the crisis.

“It comes from the top, via the meetings the top editors have with the government and the Kremlin,” said the reporter, who asked not to be named for fear of losing his job.

“The reasoning is to prevent panic from spreading inside Russia. We can still report on the crisis but we have to be very careful of how we term things, so it is a way of reporting rather than an outright ban.”

While authorities have taken some action to combat the crisis, including measures costing more than $200 billion, they have painted a rosy picture for the public, and have not allowed public discussion on the airwaves.

The trend is most noticeable on the three state-run television channels, where the financial crisis is discussed mostly as a foreign and US problem. The majority of Russians watch television as their primary news source.

Garry Kasparov, a leader of the United Civil Front opposition party, explained what he saw:

“It’s amazing. You don’t hear anything about the crisis,” Kasparov told Reuters. “It is a total virtual reality. There is a crisis in America, the United Kingdom, (but) Russia?”

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)

“Our law on the mass-media is failing substantially,” Posner said. “I insist, that on our television, and not only on television, free speech does not exist.” As an example, Posner explained that during recent Parliamentary and Presidential elections, “there were things that were absolutely forbidden: you can’t talk about him, you can’t show this one, and that one you can’t invite.”

Posner was once one of the Soviet Union’s best known spokesmen, and now hosts Russia’s most popular political news show. He told “60 Minutes” last year that democratic reforms had definitely been rolled back since President Vladimir Putin took office. Commenting on why opposition leader Garry Kasparov never appeared on his show, Posner openly admitted the reason: “Because Channel One will not allow it.”

Eduard Sagalaev, the president of the National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters, agreed with Posner, adding: “we have very little truth and much banality on television.” “An information policy has formed in Russia, which de facto does not consider free discussion, and which de facto does not consider live programming,” he said.

“And I don’t know what to do here.”

Alternate spelling: Vladimir Pozner

In total, 31 members of parliament have come together on the issue, sending a formal declaration to Russia’s Central Electoral Commission (CEC). Two presidential candidates, Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Gennady Zyuganov, included their signatures on the document, which charges that federally-owned television channels have been dominated by coverage of a third candidate, Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev, widely favored to win in March, carries the endorsement of President Vladimir Putin.

According to the statement, a single January 29th meeting of Dmitri Medvedev with the Association of Russian Jurists received 1038 seconds of television coverage. The same day, all reporting on Gennady Zyuganov totaled at 204 seconds. Zhirinovsky received 197 seconds of airtime, and Andrei Bogdanov, the final registered candidate, had just 95 seconds.

The report also considered the duration of direct quotes from the candidates. Medvedev’s lecture at the Association of Russian Jurists was given 301 seconds, while all of Zyuganov’s speeches for the day had 94 seconds of coverage. Zhirinovsky saw 98 seconds, and Bogdanov had 36 seconds for the day.

Based on these figures and other instances, the authors of the statement reach a conclusion:
“Violations of electoral law [and] disregard for the corresponding legal principles of the Council of Europe, reiterated time and time again by decisions of the European court, [are now] documented by monitoring of the informational-political TV airtime in the electoral campaign for President of the Russian Federation, [and] call into question the legitimacy of the presidential electoral campaign as a whole.”

Vladimir Churov, the head of the CEC, has previously dismissed any such allegations, saying that the electoral campaigns of each of the presidential candidates are equally covered in the mass media. Dmitri Medvedev’s appearance in the news is not connected with the electoral campaign, according to Churov, but with his work in the government and his position as First Deputy Prime-Minister.