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Boycott
Averted as Government The Russian government has proposed dramatic new approaches to address the constant question of indirect public financial support for newspapers and other publications—controlling the cost of printing and related services still in government hands. Editors were ready to go to the barricades, stop publication of newspapers during the Clinton visit, even cancel the annual Media Ball to demonstrate the danger to a free press from an across-the-board increase in these costs. In Krasnoyarsk and the autonomous republics of Khakassia Tuva, Rossiyskaya Gazeta remained unpublished because of the decree. But on January 13, the government capitulated, suspending—as to the press—a November 25 decree, Resolution 1233, “On the Reassessment of Fixed Assets of Enterprises and Organizations.” We publish the full decree, as issued by Chairman of the government, Viktor Chernomyrdin in the Supplement. As Andrei Richter points out in this issue, the problem of direct financial subsidy—how much to distribute and to whom, and the implications for coziness between government and the press—have been an ongoing problem since the process of desovietization began. So, too, has the question of the manipulation of rates for publishing and distribution, usually government controlled services. The government’s solution calls for lowering the tax burden on periodicals and literature that is determined socially significant (including children’s books and teaching materials). The stated aim is to move to a system of subsidies that makes the press less dependent on the government for handouts. The decree calls for the new Federation Committee for the Press (headed by Boris Mironov) to come up with recommendations in a month. Possibly more important are the property implications of the decree. Who gets control of the massive printing facilities, and at what cost, is a central issue in the architecture of the publishing industry for the next decade. The decree calls for the State Property Committee (together with the Press Committee)( to determine ways of privatizing the great presses in a way that allows the editorial staffs of newspapers to participate. Pavel Gusev, chair of the Moscow Union of Journalists, called the government action “a Christmas present.” Vsevolod Bogdanov, head of the Union of Journalists, praising the government’s decree, dismissed critics who ridiculed “passionate free market advocates among the press” who were crushed by the first difficulties inherent in a market economy.” Yuri Baturin, the respected adviser to President Yeltsin (and drafter of the 1991 Mass Media Law) put his finger on the constant trap in the problem of state support: “it is practically impossible to find a “right” solution to the question of independent status of the mass media in a “wrong” economic and political situation in which publications won’t survive without material tutelage by the state.” Just two years ago, on January 2, 1992, a first round of price liberalization—the lifting of price controls—created a similar emergency. The cost of newsprint went up forty times; and again, there was government leverage because the essential publication services, such as distribution and printing, remained under government monopoly. There was, as this year, a threat to strike and a clear danger to the newspaper industry. On February 20, 1992, President Yeltsin’s Decree on Additional Measures of Legal and Economic Protection for the Periodical Press and State Book Publishing, took the form of measures designed to mitigate market reforms. (Much of this is traced in an excellent recent article by Frances Foster, “Izvestia as Mirror of Russian Legal Reform: Press, Law, and Crisis in the Post-Soviet Era,” 26 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 673 (1993). |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
Policy Newsletter |
