The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy Read Online Free Page B

motivated, and the trial was widely criticized for gross irregularities. Nevertheless, he remains in prison to this day, an object lesson for anyone who fails to heed Putin’s warning.
    The country’s regional governors followed. In a land the size of Russia, these governors had been able to run their corners of the country as personal fiefdoms. Under Yeltsin, Kremlin edicts had been treated as suggestions, more easily ignored than enforced. This, too, would eventually come to an abrupt end. In 2005, Putin did away with the direct election of Russia’s governors, opting instead to give himself the power to appoint them. In addition, their finances would now be supervised by Kremlin loyalists, whose ranks were drawn from Putin’s friends in the KGB.
    Perhaps most remarkable was the way in whichPutin brought the media to heel. At the beginning of Putin’s presidency, only one of the top three television networks was state owned. Three years later, the Kremlin controlled all three. (The oligarchs who owned two of the main television networks—ORT and NTV—were forced to sell their shares or face imprisonment. Both sold and fled the country.) Kremlin cronies also began to buy up the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines. Today the Russian government controlsroughly 93 percent of all media outlets. Some print publications and radio stations are still able to operate with a measure of independence; the radio station Ekho Moskvy, for example, is one of the most critical remaining voices. But more incredible than the takeover of many Russian media companies is the degree to which the Kremlin is willing to manipulate the news—especially the news you see on TV.
    Until recently, a senior Kremlin official met withthe directors of the three major TV channels every Friday to plan the news coverage for the week to come. Television managers reportedly received a steady stream of phone calls throughout the week, honing how that coverage should be presented, even delving sometimes into how a particular news story should be edited. The Kremlin is not shy about giving TVexecutives instructions to follow. For example, after Dmitri Medvedev became president in 2008, the television networks were instructed that news broadcasts each day were to begin with coverage of him, followed by nearly equal time for Prime Minister Putin, whether or not either of them did anything newsworthy. When I was in Moscow, I would watch the evening news just to see how bizarrely balanced the coverage between the two men would be, with each of them getting roughly the same airtime. A senior television executive at one of the networks called this rule “the principle of informational parity.” A journalist from
Russian Newsweek
reported on visiting one of the state-controlled radio stations. While there, he saw notes in front of the radio announcers reminding them to “say only good things about Kazakhstan” and “don’t mention that Dmitri and Svetlana Medvedev arrived to the summit separately.”
    The Kremlin wasn’t satisfied with simply taming billionaires, governors, and media heads, though; it also sought to stage-manage politics. From as far back as his Millennium Statement, Putin always stressed the need for political and social unity. He naturally sought to extend this cohesion to the realm of political parties, which had been among the most unpredictable and fractious players in post-Communist Russia. But Putin and his team did not wish to crush all opposition with a single dominant ruling party. Rather,they engineered space for a small handful of opposition parties to exist and in some instances invented the parties out of whole cloth. These parties—typically referred to as the systemic opposition—ostensibly play the role of regime critics while never pushing their criticism beyond the boundaries set by the Kremlin. In their ideological orientation, these opposition voices are intended to represent social interests—namely,