Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter

Issue 19     Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law     June 27, 1995 

Signs of the Times

    1.  Russian Papers Curtail Publication for Economic Reasons. Two Moscow papers, NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA and KURANTY, announced their suspension or closing down for economic reasons. An interview with Vitaliy Tretyakov, editor of NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA, appears in this newsletter on page 3.

    The Moscow daily newspaper KURANTY was forced to suspend publication for several days because of “financial difficulties,” the newspaper’s chief editor, Anatoliy Pankov, wrote in its edition on 10 June. “Trouble overtook our newspaper” because money allocated to pay off a debt to the MOSKOVSKAYA PRAVDA publishing house failed to reach KURANTY’s creditor.

    Pankov thanked KURANTY readers, some of whom proposed to raise money for the daily or to protest “the ruling regime’s senseless policy toward the mass media.” He added that the “powers that be” seemed to be indifferent to the paper, apart from the Press Ministry, news agencies and Western mass media. “Some so-called democratic publications reported, not without malice it seems, that KURANTY [‘Chiming Clock’] has had its last chime,” according to Pankov. Pankov wrote that KURANTY was holding talks with “well-established firms” to secure its survival, “but, for the time being, we will, unfortunately, publish weekly.”

    2.  Ukrainian Language Deficit. Mykhaylo Onufriichuk, Ukrainian Information Minister, in an interview with DEMOKRATYCHNA UKRAINA on 20 June, said the number of publications in Ukraine has increased to more than 3,000, despite financial difficulties and declining circulations. He said plummeting living standards and rising subscription rates caused the total circulation of Ukrainian publications to fall from 63,700,000 copies in 1992 to 14,700,000 in 1994. He said Ukrainian publishers are heavily dependent on imports from other CIS countries. Some 80% of their supplies, mainly paper, are imported. Onufriichuk also said he was concerned about the small number of Ukrainian-language publications. Of the 400 nationwide newspapers, only 103, or 25%, are published in Ukrainian. Most are in Russian, he said. While several printing companies are scheduled for privatization this year, many publications will remain subsidized by the government. Chrystyna Lapychak, OMRI, Inc.

    3.  Ukrainian journalists accuse Crimean authorities of limiting free speech. The Union of Journalists of Ukraine issued a statement condemning the presidium of the Supreme Council of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea for “an unprecedented move,” namely withdrawing permanent accreditation to the local parliament from one of Crimea’s leading journalists, Hryhoriy Yoffe. “The pertinent decision by the presidium of Crimea’s Supreme Council provides no essential explanation but only unfounded accusations to the effect that the journalist infringed Ukraine’s laws on information and the printed mass media. As a matter of fact, the presidium of the legislative body assumed the powers of a judicial authority.” The statement called the action “another attempt to gag the freedom of speech and introduce political censorship in Crimea, because journalists who do not share the political views of the parliament’s majority are deprived of access to information.”

    4.  Ukraine inks broadcast TV deal. According to the June 13th issue of DAILY VARIETY, Greece’s Vardinoyannis family, heavily involved in the shipping, oil, hotel and media industries, has reportedly reached an agreement with the Ukrainian government to further develop the republic’s private broadcast market. The deal would allow the Vardinoyannis family to organize the country’s broadcast market and to open or to become an investor in a private television station there. The Vardinoyannis family controls Greece’s Star Channel and has a share in Mega, another major national channel. It also owns video production and distribution companies. According to local press reports, the broadcast deal was part of a broader agreement for the Vardinoyannis family to supply the Ukraine with all its oil products, a minimum of 6 million tons in 1996, and an option to buy half of the country’s largest shipyard.

    5.  Dnestr parliament sets up board to control media. In Tiraspol, the parliamentary presidium of the self-styled Dnestr Republic has set up a public board for control over the media. Anna Volkova was appointed its chairperson at the presidium’s session on 12 May. Local observers interpreted this as Tiraspol’s intention to establish control over the media, preventing “situations like the one with DNESTOVSKAYA PRAVDA, when the official organ stood in opposition to the authorities.” INFOTAG previously reported that the Tiraspol city council, one of the newspaper’s founders, attempted to change the paper’s political course by replacing its editor-in-chief. To further strengthen the Dnestr statehood, the presidium has established a committee for international relations, a new structure in the local parliament.

    6.  Price Hikes for non-Ukrainian press distribution. According to Leonid Terentyev in KOMMERSANT-DAILY, Kiev has instructed all local post-offices to substantially raise subscription rates for Russian papers, which will now be ten times higher than those for local papers. Local observers explain this repressive measure against the Russian press by stating that Russian newspapers print unbiased information about the real situation in Ukraine, Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet. Kiev officials do not want Ukrainians to read articles about the decrepit Ukrainian economy, blunders committed by Ukrainian leaders and corruption in the higher echelons of power, they say. Ukrainian papers do carry critical stories about life in Ukraine, but their criticism is not as sharp.

    KOMMERSANT recalls in this connection that President Leonid Kuchma said recently that people who would provoke an armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia would be damned forever. Shortly after that, the Ukrainian government, according to the paper, declared a “cold war” on the Russian press.

    7.  Reuters accused of controlling news market. The Reuters news agency is using its financial might to take control of the Russian news market, according to an article in the 25-31 May edition of OBSHCHAYA GAZETA. The author said Reuters is not a “fair fighter” and accused the agency of offering higher salaries to the best Russian engineers, photographers and reporters. He also charged that the Reuters Moscow bureau, which is oriented primarily towards financial and economic news, has established “exclusive” relations with Russia’s 50 most powerful banks. The author noted that AP is also expanding its presence in Russia, warning that if laws are not written to protect the media, all the news in Russia might soon be controlled by “foreign information empires.” OMRI, Laura Belin

    8.  Advertising to be resumed on Channel 1. The Russian Public Television company (ORT), which stopped running advertisements when it took over Channel 1 broadcasting from Ostankino TV on 1 April, will soon resume advertising on the network, SEGODNYA reported on 1 June. ORT Director General Sergei Blagovolin said a new advertising code for the network was near completion. Shortly before he was murdered on 1 March, Vladislav Listyev, then ORT director general, announced a temporary ban on Channel 1 advertising and permanent changes in advertising rules. The new rules reputedly will diminish the role of middlemen, who earned tens of millions of dollars annually re-selling advertising time purchased at cost from Ostankino. OMRI—Laura Belin

    9.  FSB prohibits publishing of winter harvest projections. According to OMRI, for the first time in several years, the Federal Security Service (FSB) has forbidden the publication of official winter-crop harvest projections, EKHO MOSKVY and INTERFAX reported on 1st June. An FSB spokesperson told EKHO MOSKVY that harvest information should be considered a “commercial secret.” However, another FSB spokesperson denied the reports the same day, according to Reuters. Duma Security Committee Chairman Viktor Ilyukhin and Duma Budget Committee Deputy Chairman Gennady Kulik supported the idea of keeping harvest projections secret. Ilyukhin argued that releasing such information would give Western nations leverage to use against Russian security interests. Agriculture Minister Alexander Nazarchuk has previously forecast a winter harvest of 82 million tons, but the real figures are expected to be much lower. Laura Belin

    10.  U.S. copyright law benefits Russian journalists. Oleg Pogrebnoy and his NEW YORK KURYER were recently defeated in a lawsuit filed in the Federal Court of New York by Russian media enterprises ITAR-TASS, ARGUMENTY I FAKTY, MOSKOVSKIYE NOVOSTY, KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA, NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA, EXPRESS-GAZETA and the Russian Union of Journalists.

    The Russian-language weekly, popular in Brighton Beach, had been able to achieve a high profit margin by reprinting articles from the Russian press. U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl ordered KURYER to stop reprinting Russian articles, stating that the practice violated both U.S. and Russian copyright laws. The judge based his decision on findings that Pogrebnoy’s enterprise damaged Russian newspapers, used the fruits of their labor, decreased sales of Russian newspapers sold in America and competed unfairly. Pogrebnoy’s defense was that the suit should have been brought by the authors of the articles and not the newspapers.

    11.  Soviet Hieroglyphics.

    The transformation of retail outlets is but one example of what might be described as a shift across the Moscow city landscape from a totalitarian culture in ruins to a consumer culture in disarray. Most visibly, this shift has played itself out across the surfaces of the urban landscape—on the billboards, busses,m dirigibles,m and plastic shopping bags of the city. . . .

    As culture turns from the Soviet bureaucratic patron—chiefly, in one form or another, the Ministry of Culture—to the mercantile patron, its reimagining of the Merchant past again becomes a task of major significance and urgency. The Moscow celebrations marking the respective centenaries of Eliseev’s and GUM were more than mere historical acknowledgment. They were ceremonies that reaffirmed old alliances and lineages within the merchant profession and the Merchant class (whose motto 
    “For the Merchant Corps” adorned the original GUM when it opened in 1893), and between Russian and foreign capital, whose GUM outlets include Benetton, Galeries Lafayette and Christian Dior.... The spread of visualization—together with the culture of titillation—has now affected every branch of the Russian culture industry and has extended across all of society. And predictably, each branch of the culture industry has responded and adjusted to these two new dominants.

From Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov, “The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture, in Nancy Condee, editor,Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth Century Russia, Indiana University Press, 1995