'I am Putin's propaganda'
There are certain subjects we steer clear of completely. We can’t touch anything connected with Chechnya, or controversial stories about Rosmolodyozh (the Federal Youth Agency - trans) and its head Vasily Yakemenko. And of course any minister can phone Putin and a story will be dropped immediately.
This is normal practice, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can just close your programme down, like Andrey Kolesnikov recently did. But Kolesnikov is also a reporter for Kommersant, and the editor in chief of Russky Pioneer magazine. Whereas I have no other work. We are in a rather unhealthy situation, where there is no real media industry, and anyone can be thrown out of a job at any moment and banned from following their profession. Parfyonov [Leonid Parfyonov, an outspoken journalist whose current affairs programme on NTV was closed down by the government in 2004] is one example of this. So self censorship is the order of the day. Everyone is afraid of something.
In this situation all you can do is get on with your job: to entertain and inform the public. It is difficult to identify with the people who watch TV, but in Russia they are in the majority. Only 19 million households have broadband internet access, which means the rest rely on television for their information. All you can do is try to tell them about what is happening, but as obliquely as possible. You have to resort to the language of Aesop. What you can’t say directly, you have to say not even between the lines, but through an extra layer of parable.
These are guerrilla tactics. The paradox is that the better you do your work, the more risky it becomes. I work on the ‘do what you can and hang the consequences’ principle. We are not required to call black white, but we can be fired if we call it black. The most seditious thing you can do on TV today is to describe what is actually happening in plain Russian. And this is what we try to do. You can vote with your feet, like Kolesnikov, but then you will be doing nothing at all...
