Last Mic Standing

Russia’s last independent broadcaster – the radio station Ekho Moskvy – operates out of a few cramped offices on the 14th floor of a Soviet high-rise which towers over Moscow’s Novy Arbat. Looking out the window over the busy streets of the sprawling capital, one is tempted to succumb to a feeling of self-importance.

The feeling fades quickly. All one has to do is look around. At the makeshift quality of the offices. At the improvised quality of the goings-on.

When Ekho Moskvy journalists hold one of their five daily editorial meetings to determine the content of the next news broadcast, there are often not enough chairs to go around.

And, said sound technician Natalya Tselevanova, a 10-year veteran at Ekho,”there are no soundproof glass partitions isolating the sound engineer from the journalist talking on air.” Thus, if one is not extremely careful, every smallest movement can create a sound that could be inadvertently broadcast.

“Everything can change at the last moment,” Tselevanova added, turning to journalist Oleg Filimonov during a sound bite, asking him to extend his reading of the news, or else there would be a one-minute gap after the news and before the beginning of the next program. But Filimonov could not pull it off, so Tselevanova ran an unplanned one-minute announcement about the day’s guests.

Despite all of this, Ekho Moskvy remains the most significant broadcast outlet in President Putin’s Russia where one can hear news critical of the Powers That Be. It is the one place where what goes on the air is not one way or another vetted by someone answering to the Kremlin.

On the day I visited the station, the news broke that Russian physicist Valentin Danilov, accused of passing state secrets to China, had been found guilty in a retrial of his case (after having initially been cleared of all charges a little under a year ago). Danilov had always claimed his innocence, arguing that the material in question had been declassified 12 years ago. The Danilov affair was one in a string of controversial spying cases that have been prosecuted over the past five years (see Russian Life November/December 2004).

As soon as the news broke, Ekho Moskvy (literally, “Echo of Moscow”) went into action. Soon, Danilov himself was on the air, live from Krasnoyarsk, where he had been tried, saying that he had not anticipated such a verdict and that he intended to appeal his case to the European Court of Human Rights. A little later, the station broadcast a sound bite of Danilov’s lawyer decrying the sentence.

This might look like basic reporting, the minimum one would ask of any professional medium covering a controversial topic. But independent reporting in Russia is not what it used to be. The profession took a near fatal blow when, in 2001, the Kremlin dismantled independent media group MediaMost, taking de facto control of the group’s flagship, then-oppositionist television channel, NTV. Subsequent projects to create a TV channel offering independent coverage floundered. Through it all, Ekho Moskvy has been the only Russian broadcasting outlet that dares to voice views independent of the State. (True enough, the Russian language services of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC offer balanced coverage, and cable television operators offer European news programs; but none of these are homegrown broadcast outlets.)

“Ekho Moskvy is Russia’s most aggressive broadcast medium,” said Ekho reporter Natalya Shopen.”It always reports on difficult topics.” Shopen, a blonde woman in her early thirties, has had experience in several Russian media outlets, including Interfax news agency. She left the latter out of professional frustration, she said, despite the fact that “the money there was good.”

Shopen cited as an example a press conference she had just covered on the Russian government’s highly controversial plan to exchange the free benefits offered to pensioners and veterans and replace them with cash payments. “One of the speakers at a press conference devoted to this plan said the whole thing was such a mess that eventually, people would get neither benefits nor money,” Shopen said. “And all the other broadcast media reported that there were still a few ‘technical problems,’ but that they would all be solved by the end of January. We were the only ones to say that, come January, some people would have neither benefits nor money. And we do things like that almost everyday.”

This kind of straight reporting is essential in times of crises, like last September’s Beslan school hostage crisis, in which over 400 people were killed. Ekho’s intimate knowledge of Russian authorities’ anticipated reaction gave it a distinct edge over other media, in particular Russian language services of Western radio networks, said Oleg Pamfilov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, an organization linked to the Russian Journalists Union.

In the early stages of the hostage crisis, Russian authorities announced that there were 354 hostages inside the school. Most media outlets, Russian and Western, relayed those figures. However, said Pamfilov, “Ekho operates in a Russian mindset, and they immediately smelled a rat. So they were able to approximate the real number of hostages, which they calculated based on the number of children normally studying at the school and the number of parents thought to be on the school grounds when the hostage taking began. Early on, they said there were some 1,300 hostages, regardless of what the authorities said, and they were the only ones to report figures so close to the real ones at such an early stage.” By Western standards, this might be seen as little better than an educated guess, Pamphilov added, but he said it was the proper thing to do in a Russian context, and allowed the station to account for authorities’ tendency to play down the severity of the crisis.

Over the years, Ekho has also become distinguished by its mix of guests. While it does invite government officials for live, on-air interviews (and they may find themselves fielding sometimes less than kind questions from listeners), the station has become a refuge for a wide range of personalities, including opposition politicians of all stripes, who simply do not have access to other, state-controlled, broadcast media.

“We invite people who are banned elsewhere, because they criticize Putin’s policies. And we talk about subjects banned in other media,” said Ekho’s chief editor, Alexei Venediktov. A former history teacher who has been at the helm of Ekho since its beginnings in 1990, Venediktov, who is recognizeable by his shock of unruly gray hair, beard and faded blue jeans, has become the unofficial don of Russian independent journalism. Among an editorial staff where most journalists are in their twenties or early thirties, he stands out as an avuncular figure, pushing his younger staff for fresh ideas in editorial meetings, while cracking frequent jokes.

On the day I visited, the main guest of this liberal-leaning station was Communist Party boss Gennady Zyuganov. The antithesis of a liberal politician, Zyuganov never misses an opportunity, among other things, to praise Stalin’s accomplishments. But he looked perfectly at ease in Ekho’s studio, shaking hands with everyone while holding a bag stamped with the Communist Party logo, casually joking with the anchor before going on air.

The irony of the situation was not lost on Venediktov. During the 1993 stand-off between then-president Boris Yeltsin and a parliament pining for a return to the Communist era, “I was reporting inside Moscow’s White House [which then housed the parliament and is now the government headquarters],” Venediktov recalled later in the day, “Zyuganov and his goons, accusing me of spying on behalf of Yeltsin, arrested me and beat me up. And now he comes here, all smiles, and jokes around. But I don’t care. The Communists’ ratings are at about 12 percent in the opinion polls, so I give them a place where they can talk. If I didn’t, Ekho would go down in the ratings and would thus lose money.” For Venediktov, not covering the full diversity of the Russian political spectrum would harm the quality of the station.

Zyuganov also recognized that he and Ekho made for strange bedfellows. “Listen,” he said, after his interview was over. “I know Ekho and I do not exactly see eye-to-eye on many issues, but that is another problem.” Touching his Soviet flag lapel pin, he continued, “Today, this is the only station where I can talk.”

Ekho listeners, who Venediktov described as liberal-leaning, white-collar workers and intellectuals, also seem to think that unusual times call for unusual measures. Asked by the Radio Station whether they thought that Russia needed a strong Communist Party, 73 percent answered “Yes.” Even Zyuganov was flabbergasted.

“Of course, our listeners are liberals,” Venediktov said, “but they voted that way to signify that they want Russia to retain its political diversity.” Political diversity has been something of an endangered species in Russia since Putin’s United Russia party won an overwhelming majority of seats in the Duma’s lower house in December 2003.

Another way Ekho ensures a diversity of opinions is by hosting weekly commentators with very different leanings. They range from undisputed liberals, like economic commentator Yulia Latynina or former MediaMost manager and journalist Igor Malashenko, to conservatives like Mikhail Leontyev, to far-left firebrands like Sergei Dorenko. Beyond their sharp differences, they have one thing in common: like Zyuganov, they cannot get on the air anywhere else.

Foreign guests are also a staple of Ekho’s mix. Hardly a foreign leader has visited the Russian capital in recent years without putting in an appearance. Simultaneous translations into Russian of guests speaking in a foreign language are almost daily occurrences.

The trend was set in motion when Bill Clinton came to Moscow in June 2000 and was persuaded to pay the station a visit. A framed White House Communication Agency Certificate of Appreciation, hung in the makeshift Green Room, still marks the occasion.

Since then, there has been no shortage of visiting foreign leaders. Their portraits, along with those of other guests, decorate Ekho’s corridor: from French President Jacques Chirac to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to European Union envoy Javier Solana.

There is apparently a joke making the rounds in the German embassy, Venediktov said with a laugh, that, while in Soviet times, a visiting foreign leader had to “do” the Bolshoi, the Kremlin and Lenin’s Mausoleum, today, the list of “must-dos” includes the Bolshoi, the Kremlin and Ekho Moskvy.

On a more serious level, regularly having high-ranking foreign guests enhances the station’s international notoriety, said Masha Gessen, a political analyst with the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace (Gessen was a deputy-editor of Itogi news magazine back when it and Ekho both used to belong to MediaMost). This, in turn, may protect the station, she added, since pulling it off the air would probably cause an outcry in the West.

How long Ekho Moskvy will be able to continue in the present context of a crackdown on media freedom is anyone’s guess. Certainly many, be they Ekho employees or outside observers, are amazed that the station has survived this long.

“When the Kremlin destroyed MediaMost in 2001, I was convinced that was going to be the end of Ekho as a station providing independent coverage,” Gessen said. “But they managed to weather the storm.”

“I stopped worrying about our survival about a year ago,” Venediktov said. “In my mind, we have been living under a reprieve since 2001.”

Still, Venediktov said Ekho remains under constant pressure from authorities, and he regularly receives phone calls from “higher-ups” complaining about the station’s news coverage.

“At the begining of the Beslan hostage crisis, I received a call from Putin’s spokesman, Alexei Gromov,” Venediktov said. “He said I was spreading panic in Beslan, since people there were listening to Ekho and we were reporting that the parents of children held hostage inside the school were going to write a letter to Putin, asking him to do anything in his power to secure their release.”

In fact, Ekho’s signal was being pirated and transmitted in Beslan by a third party, since the station cannot normally be received there. As to the content of the report, Venediktov said, Ekho was merely quoting a statement by the local North Ossetian parliament. But it was enough to set the Kremlin boiling. And, Venediktov said, this was just a recent example among thousands.

Ekho journalist Shopen said there was a definite feeling at the station that Ekho was standing on the edge. “I do not know how we have managed to still be around,” she said. “You know, in Israel, every family has experienced death, and they relate to death in a very calm, detached way. There is a somewhat similar feeling here at Ekho. In fact, we even joke about this amongst ourselves.”

Analysts, however, think that Ekho has weathered the storm because the station has been able to satisfy its main shareholder, natural gas monopoly Gazprom, despite the fact that Gazprom is controlled by the Kremlin. After the demise of Ekho’s parent company, MediaMost, the station was taken over by Gazprom. Yet the station’s journalists have retained a 34 percent share in the company, meaning they can block any decision they do not like and retain editorial independence. More importantly perhaps, Ekho attracts enough commercials to be profitable, although it cannot afford to pay very high salaries. “Since 1999, our shares have yielded a profit to our shareholders, so I do not have any problems with Gazprom,” Venediktov said. “As long as we are profitable, they do not try to lean on me.”

But analysts say that the chief reason for Venediktov’s success is that he has not compromised Ekho’s editorial independence. This, combined with his political savvy and his ability to talk the talk with the Kremlin and the Russian government. “He is always engaged in talks with them,” Gessen said. “He is a very shrewd negotiator, and he has so far convinced them that they would have no particular interest in closing down Ekho, particularly since that would probably cause an outcry in the West.”

Venediktov acknowledged that, in contrast to NTV up to 2001, Ekho, while critical of the government, has not served any one political or electoral interest. “We let everyone talk and we criticize everyone, so we do not clearly take sides,” he said. Pamphilov agreed: “They cover everything, and they let everybody express themselves, but they do not criticize only the Kremlin, and they do not always criticize it, so they are not really partisan.”

But perhaps the real reason Ekho survives is that it is simply not big enough or influential enough to seriously worry the Kremlin. With just 800,000 listeners in Moscow and about two million in the regions, mostly in larger cities, it is listened to by less than two percent of the Russian population. And, being a radio station, it will never have the power of a television channel.

“The Kremlin long ago understood that a television channel can make or break an election, especially in Russia, where it is the main medium through which the population has access to the news,” said Yasen Zasursky, the dean of Moscow’s Faculty of Journalism for nearly forty years and one of Russia’s most experienced media watchers. “In fact, [the Kremlin] has become obsessed with television. But the flip side of this is that they care much less about radio, at least if it does not take a deliberately offensive stance toward them.

“Ekho is listened to mostly by intellectuals, by people who take an interest in the news and politics. These people are comparatively few in Russia. In a way, Ekho is a place where intellectuals can listen to interesting things and be happy. But Ekho can never influence a significant part of voters.”

Still, Zasursky said, this reality does not condemn Ekho Moskvy to irrelevance. Far from it. “Ekho is listened to by a small minority, but they are decision makers,” Zasursky said. “In a way, they are the people who, through their decisions, shape Russia.”

For all that, Ekho is not necessarily out of the woods. Indeed, several developments could still put it on a fatal collision course with the Kremlin. “One thing that could provoke a strong reaction from the authorities is if Ekho succeeds in increasing its reach throughout the country, reaching millions of new listeners,” said Pamphilov. “If that happened, it could reach the critical mass that could make them appear threatening to the Kremlin, triggering a devastating response.”

Venediktov also admitted that events might force Ekho to adopt a position which could put it in harm’s way. “If, come 2008, Putin decided to alter the constitution [which bans the president from being reelected more than once] and run for a third term,” he said, “we would of course oppose this move. Then, we could find ourselves in real trouble.”

But, in spite of the uneasy modus vivendi, the greatest danger the station faces may simply be the Kremlin’s unpredictability, Zasursky said. “The truth is, we simply do not really know how these people think, what move they might make next, and what might be the trigger. Anything could happen.”  RL