Critical Media Analysis

2 Journalism and Capitalism The First Encounter

Press freedom is commonly thought of as media’s ability to disseminate information to large audiences without interference from the state. The fact of private media ownership is implied in this understanding of press freedom but is usually not highlighted. When transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are dis- cussed, Western commentators usually want to know whether the state is still pressuring the media rather than what shape private media ownership has taken in the region and how it has affected the practice of journalism. Such questions are crucial to ask in a postsocialist context, though, because relations of private media ownership had to be created anew and under specific historical circum- stances, and the meanings and practices of journalism were profoundly affected by that process. This is a distinctive feature of post-Soviet media transitions: in Latin America, East Asia, and Southern Europe, media transitions away from authoritarianism were arguably less dra- matic because they were occurring on top of already existing relations of capitalist media ownership (Voltmer 2013).

Scholars studying media institutions in the former Soviet bloc began to examine this relationship between journalism and capitalism after 1989. In particular, we know that immediately prior to and after the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe, many editors rushed to launch their own private media outlets, straddling the roles of editor and owner. Few of those outlets survived past the first few years of the transition, though, because consumer advertising – the main economic engine of private media – was in short supply after the collapse of planned economies across the region. German, Swiss, and Scandinavian media conglomerates saw this situation as a unique investment opportunity. They quickly moved into emergent media markets in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries, more or less divid- ing those markets among themselves – to the point that in some of those countries, up to 80 percent of national print output and up to

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75 percent of national television market share were captured by for- eign-owned companies by the mid-1990s (Gulyas 1999, 2003; Perusko and Popovic 2008; Voltmer 2013).

West European media conglomerates brought with them certain rules of engagement about how a successful capitalist media enterprise operates and what kind of journalism it relies on. Business, financial, and consumer-oriented press represented one kind of model of media entrepreneurship that was successfully transplanted eastward; tabloid press was another (Gulyas 2000). Business and tabloid media are generally two of the most efficient ways to make money through the mass media: the former sells quality news to wealthier audiences and charges top dollar for it; the latter sells a cheap news product in high demand to large audiences.

For those privately owned outlets in the former Soviet bloc that were not bought up by Western European media conglomerates and that continued to make ends meet amid the economic collapse of the early 1990s, minimizing production costs wherever possible was a top prior- ity. For general-interest publications, this meant relying on the feed from news agencies, on press releases, on reprints from other publica- tions, and on punditry and opinion pieces, all of which were inexpen- sive to produce compared with the investments required for quality investigative reporting or in-house research projects (Balcytiene 2008; Voltmer 2013). “Advertorials” – promotional pieces masquerading as editorial opinion or news produced by advertisers – were, and continue to be, yet another way to quickly generate media revenue across the former Soviet bloc (Erjaevic and Kovacic 2010; Ornebring 2012).

As such, these money-making and cost-cutting trends in news pro- duction are not particularly unique to Eastern Europe or to Russia. Since the late 1980s, journalism scholars and practitioners in the United States and elsewhere have been documenting how the increased pressure for profits, coming from stockholders of media companies, has been eroding journalistic professionalism in favor of market-driven journalism where “MBAs rule the newsroom” (McManus 1994; Underwood 1993). Yet journalism’s encounter with capitalism in the former Soviet bloc in the early 1990s was in many ways unlike what was going on in newsrooms in the United States and elsewhere in the West. The sheer extent of “checkbook,” or paid, journalism in Eastern Europe and Russia and the speed with which it became the norm in many outlets have taken observers and researchers aback (Voltmer

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2013: 207–216). Moreover, much of the advertising masquerading as news has been negative political advertising aimed at discrediting or damaging political opponents – a genre recognized across Eastern Europe by the Russian word kompromat (Ornebring 2012). What is particularly disconcerting about kompromat is that it does not seem to matter to any of the parties involved whether or not kompromat is factually correct. Kompromat can be fabricated, mixing fact, opinion, and fiction; journalists may be forced to produce it; it can be blocked from publication for an additional fee; and it can have a “paid by” notation next to it – all of this while having the rhetorical trappings of a muckraking report (Koltsova 2006; Ledeneva 2006: 28–90).

What is going on here? What sense are we to make of these practices? I do not see the wide spread of paid journalism in Russia and Eastern Europe as simply an extension of the profit-maximization imperative that has been gradually taking over newsrooms worldwide. Something else is surely going on. As this and Chapter 3 will argue, what we observe in Eastern Europe, but especially in Russia, following the privatization of the media is a full-blown deprofessionalization of journalism as an occupation. In the sociology of professions, profes- sionalism and capitalism are usually seen as closely linked: Professional groups are understood to have been formed by first creating and then monopolizing the markets for professional services – by turning profes- sional knowledge into a standardized, recognizable commodity, dis- tinct and identifiable by potential consumers (Larson 1977). What we see with the introduction of capitalism after socialism, I will argue, is a reverse trend, at least when it comes to journalism. Capitalist rela- tions of production broke open the meanings of public and private from which journalism as a collective project takes its bearings – both in state socialism and in liberal democracy. This sudden erosion of meanings of public and private left many journalists uncertain as to who they were representing, to whom they owed their labor, and what should be the relationship between information and money. This uncertainty undercut the opportunity for journalists to develop new, post-Soviet forms of professional solidarity, leaving many of them – as this and Chapter 3 will show – estranged from one another and feeling that they are “on their own” and working primarily “for themselves.”

Why do I believe that deprofessionalization of journalism has been especially pronounced in Russia compared with countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states? More comparative work needs to

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be done to conclude that with certainty, of course, but I do think that the early and massive entry of foreign capital onto the scene in Eastern Europe played one important role in stabilizing not only the media ownership structures in those countries but also, to some extent, the professional routines and practices of journalism as well. EU accession requirements such as the passing of requisite freedom-of-information laws and other EU-mandated media regulations must have additionally helped to forestall a full fragmentation of journalism’s “cognitive core” in Eastern European countries. Neither of those conditions were present in Russia. As this chapter will show, at least throughout the 1990s, Russian journalism was pulled in multiple directions by a variety of social forces that prevented any sort of professional stabilization. To back up my claim – that the beginning of journalism’s defragmenta- tion in Russia is to be found, in part, in the absence of the stabilizing force of foreign media ownership – let us examine what those early practices and relations of private media ownership in Russia looked like, what historical forces fueled their formation, and what those practices and relations of ownership meant for Russian journalism in the immediate post-Soviet period.

Where Do Private Media Come From?

In the summer of 1990, the first law on the press was passed in the Soviet Union. The law forbade media censorship and removed party and state monopoly on media ownership.1 Although the law did not contain any provisions for the transfer of assets (office buildings, printing presses, or national distribution networks) to journalists, it was still greeted with euphoria in editorial offices across the Soviet Union. Many groups of journalists quickly asserted their newfound independence by reregistering their media outlets as owned by journal- ists themselves. Many new outlets sprang up as a result of internal conflicts within existing editorial collectives, when a group of journal- ists, led by an enterprising member of the editorial board, would split off to launch a new outlet. Other, less entrepreneurial editors began steering their outlets toward hybrid forms of ownership where the

1 The law legalized the tendencies that had already been underway in the Soviet Union for some time: the Party had effectively relinquished press censorship by 1989–1990, and private media outlets had begun to appear before the law was passed.

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outlet would be jointly owned by journalists and a governmental or a commercial entity. These included democratically elected parliaments and city councils and newly set up private banks, stock exchanges, and other businesses whose founders also wanted to try their hand in media entrepreneurship.

The reason why teaming up with a governmental or commercial body seemed like an attractive option to groups of journalists in the early 1990s was an important provision written into the new law on the press. Motivated by the desire to protect journalists’ independence not only from government officials but also from private media owners as well, the authors of the law gave groups of journalists the right to keep their own accounting even when their outlet was co-owned by a governmental or commercial body.2 That is, the editorial staff (redaktsia) of a media outlet were given the status of an independent legal entity with the capacity to engage in commercial transactions separately from the out- let’s external co-owners. As Mikhail Fedotov (2002), one of the authors of that law, explains, the framers of the law intended to give journalists the best of both worlds with this arrangement. On the one hand, external co-owners would presumably contribute the startup capital to the media outlet as a condition of becoming that outlet’s co-owner. On the other hand, the journalists were given the option of earning money on their own so that they could keep enough distance between themselves and their co-owners in cases of editorial conflict.

In fact, the term media owner did not even appear anywhere in the law; the statute spoke more euphemistically of “media founders” (uchrediteli) instead. Such cautious wording was a testament to the public discomfort surrounding the notion of private media ownership in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like journalists, the authors of the law welcomed the revocation of state monopoly on media ownership. At the same time, many people, including the authors of the law, were uncomfortable with some of the connotations of private media ownership – particularly the idea that private indivi- duals could in principle do whatever they please with an institution as fundamentally public as the mass media.3 The euphemism media founder seemed like a good compromise. As the meaning of the term

2 For more on the blurred boundary between private and state ownership of the media in 1990s Russia, see Koltsova (2006: 73–85) and Roudakova (2008).

3 For an example of that discomfort, see the work of Slovenian media scholar Slavko Splichal (1992, 1994).

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suggests, founders were imagined as people or entities who would contribute assets to help launch independent media outlets off the ground and who would enjoy the prestige of having their name asso- ciated with a media outlet. This, the authors of the law estimated, would give groups of editors and journalists some space in which to breathe and to learn how to make money on their own.

The vagueness of this legal arrangement meant that the rights and responsibilities of media owners vis-à-vis journalists were left unspecified, and this ambiguity turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it indeed gave more entrepreneurial journalists a unique opportunity to both draw startup capital from co-owners and to maintain some distance from those co-owners through a separate stream of revenue. On the other hand, the limits this arrangement placed on the power of media owners discouraged systematic financial investments into media outlets on the part of co-owners, leaving many groups of journalists severely strapped for cash and unable to hire additional personnel to take over the business side of operations. The arrangement also bred an understanding among existing and potential media owners that media property was different from other forms of property in that the co-owner had no obligation to bankroll the media outlet when it was of no strategic or tactical use because journalists could “just as well” earn their salaries themselves. Finally, this arrangement created a valve through which the external co-owner could effectively control the editorial policy of the outlet despite the law’s guarantee of editorial independence: if journalists were unable to make money on their own, the co-owner could manip- ulate the disbursement of donations to the outlet depending on whether the editorial line was to the co-owner’s satisfaction.

Despite these entanglements, and despite rising prices on paper, the years 1990 and 1991 were still relatively favorable for press freedom in Russia. Importantly, during those years, the new Russian government, quickly gaining in stature over the ailing Soviet power, offered periodic bail-out packages as a sign of its commitment to democracy to pub- lications on the brink of financial trouble without asking for much, if anything, in return (Zasursky 2004). Russia’s first post-Soviet Minister of Information, Mikhail Poltoranin, himself a former journalist, was behind the idea of targeted state subsidies to the press, arguing that press freedom required both editorial independence and financial sol- vency and that the young Russian state had an obligation to support the media in achieving both goals at once (Poltoranin 1990, 1994).

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So between the passing of the first law on the press in the summer of 1990 and the onset of neoliberal reforms in early 1992, the majority of Russian media outlets, while practicing a variety of relations of own- ership, managed to remain fairly independent editorially and stay afloat financially through a combination of subscription, newsstand sales, government subsidies, some advertising, and some private spon- sorship, all in an atmosphere where public demand for and trust in the printed word remained exceptionally high. Journalists’ reputations soared, sometimes nearing that of national heroes. Without fail, jour- nalists across the post-Soviet space remember that short period with fondness and nostalgia as the time when they were truly free and extremely influential at the same time.4 At least in part, that sense of political agency and potency was nurtured by the discourse of the Fourth Estate that perestroika-era journalists eagerly embraced – a discourse that merged together classic liberal caveats about freedom of speech and expression, an Enlightenment view of men of letters as telos-setting intellectuals (Carlyle 1849); the outgrowth of US constitu- tional theory where the media are seen as the “fourth branch of govern- ment” working closely with the other branches (Cater 1959), and a historically specific yet internationally mobile discourse of journalists as government adversaries. A 1990 editorial in Zhurnalist, appropriately titled, “What Are We to Be Called Now?,” captures this awesome moment:

These days, it is not only an organization or a group of persons, but also an individual citizen who can launch their own newspaper or magazine. This right gives our press, our culture a chance to produce exceptional public figures, wielders of societal thought of Herzen’s magnitude5 . . . The citizen who starts his own newspaper takes on the highest kind of responsibility before society – because he is not sharing it with anyone . . . Instead, he has the courage to speak as an individual thinker [imeyet muzhestvo govorit’ iskliuchitel’no ot sobstvennogo imeni]. (Zhurnalist Editorial 1990)

In line with their newly understood roles, many former Soviet journal- ists ran for public office, participated in the drafting of legal codes, and

4 For a similar sentiment among East German journalists, see Boyer (2005: 220–225).

5 Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) was one of Russia’s most prominent political writers and philosophers of the nineteenth century.

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launched new social and political movements, all the while continuing with their editorial and entrepreneurial duties.

Unfortunately, this relative equilibrium when the Fourth Estate seemed to rule side-by-side with the other branches of government while enjoying an unprecedented credit of trust with the broader public did not last past 1992 as a cluster of factors quickly began to undermine it. General price liberalization launched by President Yeltsin’s eco- nomic team in January 1992 led to a steep hike in the prices of paper and printing services, which led to drops in the production of paper and newsprint while the demand for them remained high, which, in turn, disrupted the production cycles of many newly launched outlets. An even greater blow, however, was delivered by inflation, which began to spiral out of control soon after prices were freed. During the late Soviet period and especially during perestroika, most Russians were avid media consumers: members of an average household sub- scribed to several publications and regularly bought several more at newsstands. Starting in 1992, shrinking incomes and fast-disappearing life savings of the majority of Russians meant that the consumption of printed matter began to drop sharply precisely at the moment when the number of media outlets continued to grow as more and more editors were putting their entrepreneurial ambitions to the test.

Spiraling hyperinflation also brought a severe restriction in cash flow across the entire economy, paralyzing the operation of many of its sectors, including the mass media, and forcing many businesses to turn to barter instead of cash (Humphrey 2002; Woodruff 1999). Barter deals for advertising space became common in the first half of the 1990s, with media managers scrambling to convert barter into products and services that would be of use to the outlet. As one regional editor put it at the time, “barter is when advertising space is exchanged for gasoline, electricity, pantyhose, chocolate, and funeral services” (Kachkaeva and Richter 1999). Even with the reliance on barter, newly launched businesses in the consumer sector were themselves struggling with price liberalization and hyperinflation to find money for advertising campaigns, so the majority of them tended to advertise selectively or not at all,6 which further frustrated media managers who

6 The businesses were also constricted by the new Russian tax code, which demanded that advertising be paid for from posttax profits. Russian lawmakers in the early 1990s had an understandable anxiety about advertising and opted for laws that restricted rather than encouraged it. This is in contrast to the way

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had originally placed high hopes on commercial advertising as their major source of revenue. Finally, the government subsidies on which many outlets relied in 1990–1991 petered out throughout 1992 as state budgets at all levels became stretched extremely thin due to the epidemic noncollection of taxes – an unsurprising result of the collapse and subsequent “barterization” of the economy.

Left largely to fend for themselves and unwilling to give up, editors and publishers in the first half of the 1990s acted like most people would in highly volatile economic environments: many learned to quickly recombine their existing resources and continued to devise short-term strategies to stay afloat. In addition to skillful use of barter, they sublet7 parts of their offices to commercial firms, launched parallel businesses such as real estate or marriage agencies, and applied for Western aid, if knowledgeable in English and the discourses of press freedom. Starting in 1993–1994 and increasingly afterwards, most media executives also began to rely on regular influxes of electoral cash to keep their outlets afloat.

For a dramatic illustration of these processes, consider the post- Soviet fortunes of Leninskaya Smena (LS), the popular regional youth daily published in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) discussed in Chapter 1. After the law on the press was passed, LS journalists reregistered the newspaper as solely owned by the newspaper’s editor- ial collective (redaktsia) – thus becoming formally independent from their Soviet-era Komsomol overseers. Soon, however, several leading journalists left LS – some to join new business-oriented media ventures in what was now Nizhny Novgorod, others to launch an independent news agency, and still others to work for regional television and new opportunities there. Those who stayed behind and those who newly joined them began to navigate the uncharted waters of private media entrepreneurship as best they could. Responding to hyperinflation and price hikes on paper and printing services, LS tripled its yearly sub- scription price in the fall of 1991 and then dramatically raised it again several months later, recanting on its contract with subscribers and

advertising is treated in the majority of Western countries: it is defined as a “business expense” and is entirely tax exempt. The clause obligating businesses to pay for advertising from posttax profits was finally dropped from the books in 2002.

7 Many newly independent editorial collectives were now renting their offices from the government organizations of which they were part prior to 1990.

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angering and losing many of its readers. Instead of closing down the newspaper, asking for governmental subsidies, or inviting a commercial entity to become the newspaper’s co-owner, the chief editor of LS at the time, Igor Kryzhkov, urged journalists to search even harder for commer- cial advertising and to absorb some of the production costs by accepting drastically reduced salaries. According to his former editorial staff with whom I spoke, the chief editor did not have an entrepreneurial streak, could not think commercially, and did not understand the importance of investing in the business side of operations. Instead, the chief editor believed that the prestige of the LS brand – its reputation as the most trusted newspaper in the region – was going to be enough to pull the newspaper through, sooner or later generating enough sales and advertis- ing income to keep it afloat.

A profound crisis of governance within LS staff ensued. In the winter of 1993, yet another large group of journalists, led by deputy chief editor Alexander Volkov,8 left LS to start a new outlet; many remain- ing journalists took to the bottle. Igor Kryzhkov himself left in 1994. Despite all of this, LS continued to be published through 1995, turning into a tabloid to sell more copies through newsstands. Remarkably, during this period, LS still managed to produce some good journalism, including some of the better regional coverage of the Russian-Chechen war, sending its own correspondents to Chechnya. Financial woes continued to plague the newspaper, though, contributing to journal- ists’ growing demoralization. In late 1995, the newspaper finally stopped coming out, but some journalists continued to show up at work for a few more months anyway out of habit.

A striking document I found in one of Nizhny Novgorod’s archives illustrates the extent to which LS journalists’ professional lives had unraveled by then. On January 24, 1996, after LS’s rental agreement with the city had run out (recall that the privatization of LS meant only the transfer of the LS trademark to journalists, not the transfer of assets), officials from the municipal property fund visited LS offices and conducted a property inventory of the building. They wrote up their report as follows:

Most of the rooms were locked and could not be inventoried . . . Six rooms were open. In the rooms, there is old furniture, sacks of flammable debris, baskets full of trash; the rooms are dirty, the doors are broken . . . Several of

8 A pseudonym.

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the rooms do not have central heating. It was not possible to speak with Y. V. Kozonin, the [new] editor, because he was asleep in his office during work hours (at 3:30 PM). In the same room with him was [the head of the news department] O. V. Kapitanov and several strangers (postoronnie). They were sitting around the [editor’s] table amidst open vodka bottles and chasers. The editorial staff of LS was requested to hand over their keys to the building. (GOPANO f. 8892, op. 10, ed. khr. 40)

If this story represents the nadir of Russia’s transition to a privately owned press in the early and mid-1990s, then another story can stand for a more successful but still problematic version of the transition. This is the story of The Sentinel,9 a private newspaper launched by Alexander Volkov, LS’s former deputy editor. In early 1993, Volkov convinced about a dozen of his colleagues to quit LS and join him at his new publication, The Sentinel, with him as the editor and publisher. To fund this new enterprise, Volkov told me, he had first contemplated a parallel launch of “some sort of commercial firm that would support the newspaper” but eventually settled on co-ownership of his new outlet with an acquaintance of his, a founder of one of the first stock exchanges in the city, who provided Volkov with initial capital to start. As Daria Moskvina,10 who worked for Volkov’s Sentinel in the first half of the 1990s, speculated to me, the new co-owner of The Sentinel must have been “a bit of an idealist, had ambitions to become a public figure, and Alex [Volkov] must have convinced him that investing in his paper was the best way to gain the public stature the guy had hoped for.” Daria’s husband, however, who had also worked in the paper in the early to mid-1990s, speculated that the reason behind the new co-owner’s investment in Volkov’s paper was the possibility of “nega- tive PR” against the region’s then young and charismatic governor, Boris Nemtsov, and the business interests allied with him.

One way or another, the new co-owner was shot and critically wounded about four months into the operation of the new outlet and decided to quit business and politics, leaving The Sentinel to fend for itself. “I felt responsible for the people who were working under me,” Volkov recalled to me in an interview in 2000:

And I didn’t want to give up. It was 1993, the year of hyperinflation. Every month I was getting telegrams that would categorically inform me that the cost of paper is going up by 200 percent this month, or that the cost of ink or

9 A pseudonym. 10 A pseudonym.

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whatever is going up 100 percent next month, or that our rent will increase five times, and so on. I had to hustle unbelievably. Once we had no money left to pay for the print-run – so I went to the director of the printing plant and told him, “Take some of our shares!” And he did, so we did not pay for print for the next eight months, and I was instead able to pay journalists their salaries. Then the next time I ran out of cash I went to a bank to ask for a loan, telling them that we’d pay back the interest in advertisements. They agreed, and we eventually made enough to pay back the loan. Then another time I went to the director of the printing house to barter a high-speed copier for free print. High-speed copiers were still rare, and I had promised free advertisement to the company that sold those copiers in exchange for one of them. And then there was a moment when I had exhausted my resources and still could not come up with cash to pay the journalists that month. So I went to this other businessman, and told him: if you place your advertisement with us right now, I’ll be able to pay people their salaries this month. And that worked, too . . . Only through all of this I realized that the newspaper is a commodity – a very specific one, but still a commodity.

What Alexander Volkov only hints at here (via the reference to the newspaper as a commodity), and what becomes clear from conversa- tions with journalists who had worked for his paper in the first half of the 1990s, is that the largest share of The Sentinel’s revenues by 1994 came from electoral campaign contributions. Unlike the initial wave of democratic elections and referenda in Russia in 1989–1991, the second wave of electioneering, which began in October of 1993 (and, for Nizhny Novgorod, continued through 1994 and 1995), attracted much larger pools of electoral cash from the region’s newly minted capitalists. In December of 1993, Nizhny Novgorod was electing six representatives to the new Russian parliament (Duma), and immedi- ately afterwards, three other campaigns were being launched, to cul- minate on March 27, 1994, in the Nizhny Novgorod regional legislative assembly, the Nizhny Novgorod city council, and a direct plebiscite for the position of the city’s mayor.

Like many other media executives in the city, Alexander Volkov was quick to realize that this train of elections, and the large number of candidates hoping to fill those positions, was an opportunity not to be missed. Importantly, until 2002, there was no comprehensive attempt at a legal definition of political advertising, so almost any kind of electoral coverage that seemed favorable to a candidate or unfavorable to his or her political opponents could, in principle, be interpreted as

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positive or negative advertising by media managers and could be charged as such. This opened a major loophole for the monetization of electoral coverage in the absence of media outlets’ other reliable sources of income. This, in turn, set in motion a process of moral and professional unraveling of journalism – the process that would be complete by the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Monetization of Electoral Coverage

The first campaign in which electoral coverage was successfully mon- etized in Nizhny Novgorod was the mayoral campaign of 1994. That campaign was the first in a series of especially fierce battles among the city’s new political-economic elites, battles that ended up pulling most journalists into their vortex and pulling them apart. Like many political conflicts in Russia’s regional centers in the early 1990s, this particular conflict was a contestation over spheres of influence between the gov- ernor of the Nizhny Novgorod region (which is home to about 3 million people) and the mayor of the city itself, which is the capital of the region (and is home to about a million and a half of those 3 million people).

The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region at the time was Boris Nemtsov. Until his assassination in February 2015, Nemtsov was a prominent figure in Russia’s opposition movement, but in 1994 he was a charismatic thirty-four-year-old favorite of President Yeltsin and was known for his swift neoliberal policies in the Nizhny Novgorod region (which, among other things, earned him the praise of Margaret Thatcher who visited the region in 1993). The incumbent mayor of the city of Nizhny Novgorod, who crossed paths with Nemtsov, was a former lawyer named Dmitry Bedniakov. Bedniakov had been appointed mayor of the city in 1991 and now wanted to be democrati- cally elected. A few weeks before the election, Bedniakov had proposed that, on election day, the city also vote on a city charter, which, if passed, would have strengthened the position of the mayor and the city council and would have taken some power away from the regional authorities, including, of course, the region’s governor. The governor, Boris Nemtsov, did not want to cede power to the city and did not want the city charter to pass. Instead, the governor wanted his protégé, the speaker of the regional parliament, a man named Yevgeny Krestianinov, to be elected mayor instead.

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A few months prior to the election, both candidates for the mayor’s seat launched their election campaigns. Two other candidates entered the race, but as the campaign picked up momentum, it became clear that the incumbent mayor and the speaker of the regional parliament were the two candidates most likely to win the election. Businessmen across the city began to fund those two campaigns, knowing that supporting the mayor-to-be meant having privileged access to lucrative government contracts, difficult-to-obtain construction permits, and new opportunities for the privatization of municipal property that was in full swing. Now, for journalists, this was an exciting time as well. This was the first time the city was electing a mayor, and for journalists it was a chance to partake in the shaping of the future of the city in a way they had not done before. So most journalists approached the campaign as community activists who believed their active stance in the campaign was instrumental to the future well-being of the city. And for the city’s newly minted publishers and broadcasters, who were desperate to make ends meet in the absence of commercial advertising, the campaign was a golden opportunity to earn much-needed income for their outlets. In a few years, journalists would begin to refer to the months and weeks prior to election as a “harvest yield” (strada) that their outlets would rely on during the barren periods in-between campaigns.

Consider the stories of these three journalists who were actively involved in the coverage of the 1994 mayoral campaign. Two of them worked for The Sentinel, Alexander Volkov’s publication. In the poli- tical conflict between the governor and the incumbent mayor, Volkov decided to side his paper with the governor and his protégé rather than with the mayor, in exchange for some funding for his paper. Volkov told his journalists that he would not force them to write anything they did not want to, but if any of them had anything positive to say about the governor or his protégé or anything negative to say about the incumbent mayor, they were free to put their talents to use, in exchange for some extra pay. Svetlana Bulgakova11 was one of the journalists who had generally been a supporter of Nemtsov and his neoliberal economic policies. So she became one of the journalists who took up Volkov’s call to take the side of the governor and his protégé in that

11 A pseudonym.

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campaign. For her, this was a win-win situation where she got to channel her political sympathies in exchange for additional pay.

Another journalist, Daria Moskvina, mentioned earlier, was among Volkov’s employees at The Sentinel as well. Daria expressed no interest in supporting the governor or his protégé in her writing. She was not a fan of either the governor or the mayor. Her journalistic convictions had been shaped instead by a combination of a watchdog stance vis-à- vis all holders of power and by a late-Soviet understanding of journal- ists as public intellectuals. It so happened that by the time the campaign rolled around, Daria had been working on a story investigating the incumbent mayor’s preference for foreign investors at the expense of encouraging local entrepreneurship. Daria did not plan her article as part of the mayor-bashing campaign that was picking up in multiple outlets across the city, including her own. But once Daria’s article was published, it made a big splash and was quickly perceived to be part of the media attack against the mayor. Many of Daria’s colleagues across the city were now discussing her article in their columns, suggesting that her investigation might have been ordered and paid for by Krestianinov, the governor’s protégé. Without Daria’s consent, the article was then made the centerpiece of promotional materials mailed to every household in Nizhny Novgorod as part of Krestianinov’s campaign. The article became so well known that for many years it was taught in one local university as a classic text of negative political advertising.

My third story is of Yelena Yakovleva,12 at the time a political correspondent for a local broadcasting station (NNTV). The station was founded right before the fall of the Soviet Union by the Nizhny Novgorod region’s first democratically elected parliament. Because NNTV was not only founded but also funded by the regional parlia- ment, and because the speaker of that parliament, Krestianinov, was now running for mayor, journalists working for the station were expected to lend their support to the speaker’s campaign. Yelena dis- liked the speaker and had no intention of supporting him. She did not feel strongly about the incumbent mayor either, so at the beginning of the campaign she had decided to be as detached in her reporting as possible. As the campaign gained momentum, however, Yelena rea- lized that the two opponents were on unequal footing and that the

12 A pseudonym.

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speaker, with the governor behind him, commanded much greater political and media resources than the incumbent mayor. This made her rethink her role in the campaign. Reluctantly, and guided in part by her understanding of balance and fairness, Yelena began to lend some additional publicity to the incumbent mayor – by interviewing him in her programs and offering him a platform to express his views. The moment she did that, she discovered, she began to be perceived as one who sided with the mayor and against the governor and who might have even been paid by the mayor’s campaign headquarters to offer him additional publicity.

The campaign had an unexpected and inglorious ending. Four days prior to election day, the governor (Nemtsov) annulled the incumbent mayor’s initiative to hold the referendum on the city charter. Bedniakov, the incumbent mayor, disobeyed the decree and ordered the preparations for the referendum to continue. The next day the governor convinced his protégé to withdraw his candidacy from the mayoral race. This prompted the local elections commission to cancel the elections. Finally, two days later, President Yeltsin (who was known to support Governor Nemtsov) issued a decree dismissing Bedniakov from his post as mayor of Nizhny Novgorod.13

Journalists who supported Bedniakov were livid at the campaign’s outcome; journalists who supported governor Nemtsov and his protégé Krestianinov were ashamed and perplexed; and journalists who tried to keep their distance, like Daria and Yelena, were perturbed by the ease with which they were pulled into the campaign against their choosing.

Journalism’s Fragmentation

What I would like to highlight here is a number of unintended con- sequences that journalists’ participation in that campaign brought about. Throughout the 1990s, those consequences would take on a life of their own as social forces fueling journalism’s fragmentation. First, the initial encounter of journalism with money resulted in a substantial blurring of the boundaries between news and advertising via the notion of publicity that could refer to both. As mentioned ear- lier, until 2002, Russia had no comprehensive legal definition of

13 In 1998, Boris Yeltsin annulled the decree as erroneous.

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political advertising. From the word’s common usage in Russian, advertising could mean “copy paid for by the client,” or it could simply mean “favorable publicity.” This ambiguity meant that during election campaigns, media managers could capitalize on candidates’ need for publicity by construing just about any mention of a candidate in press or appearance on air as advertising. Like Volkov’s Sentinel and many other outlets across the city, the broadcasting station where Yelena Yakovleva worked (NNTV) invited mayoral candidates to sign adver- tising contracts for the duration of the campaign. Because the definition of advertising could be stretched widely, the contracts did not stipulate in any precise terms what media outlets were, in fact, promising to candidates. Not surprisingly, this introduced tensions into relations between journalists and NNTV’s management, but perhaps more important, it made many journalists doubt themselves as to whether they were, in fact, offering “free advertising” to candidates and, if so, what they could or should do about it.

The incumbent mayor did not sign an advertising contract with NNTV because he was initially reluctant to pay for political advertising on television altogether. But NNTV expected all candidates to sign advertising contracts with them; in fact, NNTV’s director, Olga Noskova, admitted as much into Yelena’s camera in a documentary film Yelena produced about the election. After it became clear that the mayor did not intend to pay NNTV for his electoral promotion, the director of NNTV signaled to journalists that any neutral or positive coverage of the mayor during the campaign was to be brought to a minimum, because it would count as advertising that he did not pay for. As a result, aside from Yelena Yakovleva’s reporting, NNTV’s coverage of municipal issues during the campaign more or less came to a halt. The mayor began to be mentioned primarily in the context of media attacks against him by Governor Nemtsov and his protégé. It is at this moment that Yelena rethought her role in the campaign and began to offer additional publicity to the mayor by interviewing him against her boss’s injunctions.

Yet even Yelena was uncertain as to whether she was doing the right thing in those circumstances. Her documentary about the elections, titled “The Fourth Power,” betrays this uncertainty. In an interview with the mayor on the eve of the election, Yelena asked him, “How do you explain the fact that a number of journalists are openly agitating (angazhirovany) in your favor?” The subtext of this question is, “Are

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you paying those journalists to promote your positions?” Mayor Bedniakov responded:

Okay, as far as journalists’ engagement [angazhement] is concerned. Indeed, we have signed a contract with one federal channel to increase the coverage of the city’s problems because I’ve been virtually shunned from the other channels. But if you analyze the programs on that channel in which I took part before I registered as a candidate, you will not find a single program where I promoted my electoral platform or where I spoke about my preparation for the elections.

A lawyer by training, Bedniakov seems to be putting forward a definition of (political) advertising here as media content that pro- motes a candidate’s electoral platform – but only after the candidate has been registered as such. Whether or not such content is paid for by the candidate is secondary in this logic. Bedniakov did admit paying for the promotion of his platform (for “increased coverage of the city’s problems,” as he put it) but he made it clear that he was forced to do so. In an ideal world, according to Bedniakov, candidates should not pay for the promotion of their electoral platforms: the media should provide candidates space to do so for free.14

Yelena Yakovleva was suspicious of the distinctions Bedniakov was trying to draw, so she asked a clarifying question: “But [the mere fact of] your appearance on the screen is already political advertisement in your favor, is it not?” This question speaks volumes about the confu- sion and uncertainty of political journalists in Russia in the early 1990s. The view that any electoral publicity is already advertising is the view Yelena’s management would have liked her to adopt so that the station could collect enough advertising income to last until the next cam- paign. Yelena was suspicious of that view, but she was equally suspi- cious of Bedniakov’s perspective, where journalists hand the control over the message to the candidates themselves and do so “for free.” It seems to me that Yelena found herself in a “lose-lose” situation professionally – caught between what the politicians wanted, on the one hand, and what media managers wanted, on the other. We could also interpret Yelena’s question to the mayor as a throwing in the towel of sorts – as a turning of the issue of what separates news and advertis- ing into a public matter in the face of journalism’s seeming inability to

14 This is in fact the principle behind the prohibition of paid political advertising in a number of Western European democracies.

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make those distinctions on its own. Mayor Bedniakov snapped back: “Well, you know, if we follow this logic [where any publicity equals advertising] then I should just leave this place, forget about all of the city’s problems, stop talking to the press, to anyone, because my onscreen appearance in conjunction with housing issues, with social issues can always be interpreted as political sympathies on the part of journalists and as electoral advertising on my part.”

It is ironic that of all the players in this drama, it was the incumbent mayor who came closest to articulating a view about the porous border between news coverage and electoral publicity that journalists in Western democracies have long come to accept as a matter of fact. To Western journalists, political campaigns are inevitably periods when candidates try and often succeed in using journalists instrumen- tally. To counteract that, journalists in the United States and elsewhere have come up with ways of covering electoral politics that are intended to put journalists back in the driver’s seat – by framing elections as strategy and tactics, discussing candidates’ image-making efforts, assessing the accuracy of candidates’ claims, and so on (Hallin 1994: 133–152). Beyond the free publicity they receive in the news, candi- dates may or may not be able to pay for additional publicity depending on what lawmakers in a particular country have decided is in the public interest. In the early post-Soviet environment, though, where the mean- ings of public and private and the relations between information and money were not yet stabilized, none of this was apparent. Defining advertising “simply” as that which the client pays for seemed unsatis- factory to many parties, including journalists such as Yelena. It also continued to be unsatisfactory to public officials working in Russia’s regulatory agencies. Russia’s advertising regulator, for instance, had issued several clarifications on the subject, specifying that “payability” does not constitute a valid criterion of advertising.15

The first law on advertising passed in Russia in 1995 did introduce the concept of political advertising (politicheskaya reklama), but it did not develop it. It was not until 2002 that a more comprehensive legal distinction between informing citizens about elections, and political campaigning for or against candidates (predvybornaya agitatsia) was spelled out in Russian electoral law. The problem in 2002 was that the

15 For the latest clarification, see www.fas.gov.ru/clarifications/clarifica tions_30337.html (accessed February 4, 2014).

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lawmakers more or less wrote journalists out of election law. Journalists were left with the responsibility for informing citizens about elections but were proscribed from engaging in political cam- paigning without explicitly marking it as such. Political campaigning was defined extremely broadly – as “activity aiding to create a positive or a negative impression of a candidate among voters” rather than as promotion of a particular platform or as copy paid for by the candi- date. Under such broad definition of political campaigning, editorials and political commentary during election campaigns had to move into the advertising segments of newspapers and broadcast programs, which further shifted the control over the message to the candidates and away from journalists (see Chapter 3). Thus what started as media managers wrestling the right to make news judgments away from journalists during election campaigns turned into the perceived inabil- ity of the media on the whole to regulate themselves. With that percep- tion in mind, the lawmakers stepped in, effectively weighing in on the side of media managers and candidates and against journalists.

Another unintended but long-term consequence of the 1994 cam- paign in Nizhny Novgorod was the emergence of real fault lines among journalists across the city, who only a short few years prior to that thought that they were in this together. Journalists’ embroilment in electoral politics introduced a real sense of estrangement among them and a perception that there may be as many journalisms as there are journalists.

The documentary about the 1994 mayoral elections produced by Yelena Yakovleva and aired on NNTV a few weeks after the failed election conveys that estrangement particularly well. Yakovleva inter- viewed editors, publishers, prominent journalists, and her own boss, the director of NNTV, to get a sense of the effect the mayoral campaign had on the profession. The topic was obviously a sensitive one because interviewees shifted in their seats, sighed, and paused between sen- tences. A local correspondent for a national television channel, Nina Zvereva, who was a particularly ardent supporter of the governor during the campaign, admitted that she lost objectivity in her coverage of the election and proceeded to rationalize and justify her actions. A former LS editor, Vladimir Lapyrin, who became a publisher of a business weekly, said that he did not feel sorry for colleagues such as Zvereva – because “no one [was] forcing us to stay in this profession: we [could] always quit.” Another former LS journalist, Valery

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Semisalov, a columnist at an evening daily in Nizhny Novgorod at the time, expressed disbelief at the ease with which his colleagues across the city seemed to be “ready to sell not only their pens, but their souls.” A colleague of his at the same paper shamed Daria Moskvina for having tainted her reputation by associating her name with the media attack against the incumbent mayor. “She is a young journalist – how is she going to live with this reputation?!” Alexander Volkov, editor and publisher of The Sentinel, however, was unapologetic. He claimed that he knew which media outlet was financed by whom during these elections, and he saw nothing wrong with it. When political advertising is the only game in town, Volkov said, media managers cannot afford to ignore it.

By the time I was conducting fieldwork in Nizhny Novgorod in 2001–2002, the rift among journalists that began with the mayoral campaign of 1994 graduated to entrenched animosities. By the early 2000s, there was a discomfiting history of acrid public fallouts between former colleagues, to the point that some were publishing kompromat against one another. Many journalists who worked during perestroika and the early post-Soviet years left the profession by the end of the 1990s, or like Daria and Yelena, they left political journalism in favor of business and financial reporting or consumer-oriented “news you can use.”

Finally, yet another unintended outcome of the mayoral campaign, which would intensify with each subsequent set of elections throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, was readers’ and viewers’ growing distrust of journalists as people who have the public’s best interest in mind. The fact that candidates were paying for coverage of their campaigns was not lost on anyone: as journalists supported “their” candidates and criticized, denounced, or shamed others, it became less and less clear to anyone watching the campaign whose civic-political ardor was genuine and whose was “bought” and “paid for.” To most observers, campaign contributions flowing into media outlets during “harvest” periods cast a long shadow of moral doubt over the sincerity of journalists’ rhetoric, no matter how independently arrived at that rhetoric might have been.

Yelena Yakovleva’s documentary captured the beginning of this process, giving a glimpse of what Nizhny Novgorod dwellers thought about the press during the mayoral campaign of 1994. On the eve of the election, Yakovleva conducted about a dozen street interviews with

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people of various walks of life, all of whom turned out to be bitterly disappointed by what they were observing:

YELENA YAKOVLEVA (Y.Y.): Who are you going to vote for, Bedniakov or Krestianinov?

VARIOUS PASSERS-BY: No one! There is too much prattling, babbling, lying on television – we stopped believing what journalists have to say!

Y.Y.: Do you think there is press freedom in Nizhny Novgorod today?

VARIOUS PASSERS-BY: No way! Journalists are unfree like everyone else; they depend, like all of us, on their bosses, holding on to their jobs. Journalists used to be dependent on the Party before; today they depend on the ruble. Here, I am a university professor. My salary is 800 rubles [about $27 a month at the time]. How much is yours?

Y.Y.: A little more. VARIOUS PASSERS-BY: A little more, hah? And who pays you? Y.Y.: The state [NNTV is funded by the regional

parliament]. VARIOUS PASSERS-BY: The state . . . So it buys you! The state

buys you!

My goal in offering these historical and ethnographic vignettes has been to give an account of the economic, political, and cultural forces that worked together to produce new relations and practices of private media ownership in Russia in the early 1990s, which, in turn, had a profound effect on how journalism continued to be practiced and understood. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, my hunch is that in Russia these historical forces were operating in a social space characterized by much greater uncertainty than in countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. Culturally, the postsocialist transition in those countries was broadly perceived as “a return to Europe,” which was not the case in Russia. “A return to Europe” frame meant fewer reservations on the part of East European elites to imitate and, in some cases, to seek absorption by political, economic, legal, and cultural institutions of Western Europe. This imitative and absorptive logic

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extended fully into the domain of the mass media (Splichal 2001). Foreign capital was invited to enter East European media markets early on and with very few restrictions.

Unfortunately, there is very little ethnographic work that examined this process in Eastern Europe in greater detail. Dominic Boyer’s (2005) ethnography of the absorption of the East German media system by its West German counterpart in the early 1990s remains the most insight- ful examination to date of how relations of private media ownership and the new practices of journalism were historically and culturally produced in a post-Soviet context with the advent of foreign capital. Admittedly, the German case is an extreme one: media institutions in East Germany went through a drastic top-down restructuring during the reunification process. The vast majority of journalists over the age of fifty were let go; many outlets were simply closed down; and control over others was turned over to media managers, editors, and owners appointed specifically for those jobs from West Germany.

Still, the process of media transformation in East Germany docu- mented by Boyer (2005) is helpful for getting a general sense of what the initial encounter between journalism and capitalism looked like on the ground in the context of foreign media ownership. West Germans, Boyer (2005: 190) notes, acted as the “adults” of the transition: East Germans were understood as in need of guidance, seen as not quite capable of executing the transition on their own. The shift to West German ownership brought about “an immediate shift in organiza- tional management to install what were described as ‘western stan- dards of democratic journalism’” (Boyer 2005: 190). Aside from replacing almost everyone in senior editorial positions, new owners “hired consultants to determine which former GDR journalists should be retained and which should be laid off or sent into early retirement” (Boyer 2005: 191). Some of the criteria for the layoffs included older age, lack of enthusiasm toward the transition, combative attitudes toward the new management, a lack of competitiveness, an inability to work under time pressure, and so on. Many of those who were retained or hired anew went through retraining seminars and paid internships at Western media organizations.

Western owners and consultants also had some say in editorial matters. Boyer (2005: 192) describes a case where the conservative media conglomerate Axel Springer acquired a regional daily newspaper in East Germany and sent a consultant to oversee the transition to new

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ownership. The consultant “informed the chief editor . . . that he should discontinue covering media politics: ‘No one is interested in this. Put more information in . . . about the soaps and other TV series.’ That command ended the only systematic coverage of the unfolding East German broadcasting politics within the east press” (Boyer 2005: 192). All the leftist journalists were soon let go; the reform-era chief editor himself was also fired, with the explanation that “he wasn’t a ‘newspaper man’” (Boyer 2005: 192). Not infrequently, Boyer’s East German inter- locutors commented to him that going through the transition made them acutely aware that West German journalism, too, represented a “System” – that is, a set of ideologies and disciplining practices of its own. Many journalists noted that people who seemed best adjusted to this new “System” were, in fact, the “Yes men and women” of the socialist period, whereas their more outspoken colleagues tended to be dismissed by the new management (Boyer 2005: 192).

Foreign ownership also meant the ability of unprofitable media out- lets to absorb losses. Many foreign-owned outlets in Eastern Europe were able to remain unprofitable for a substantial period of time while the retraining of journalists – and the training of advertising and marketing personnel – continued. Unlike their Russian colleagues, journalists working for those outlets did not have to search for adver- tising on their own under the continual threat of losing their income. The fact that foreign-owned outlets set up advertising departments as distinct from news operations must have also helped to formally sepa- rate news and advertising, sparing many journalists in Eastern Europe the uncertainty of telling the two apart experienced by their Russian colleagues. It is also likely that the new managers of foreign-owned outlets brought with them specific criteria on evaluating and pricing journalistic labor. In the Russian context, in comparison, the question of who owed what to whom and what moral and human rules were to govern the practice of buying and selling journalistic labor and judging its value remained open for negotiation and contestation throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

This is not to say that the unfolding dynamics of private media ownership I described for Russia were absent in Eastern Europe. After all, many of the historical forces that propelled the formation of private media ownership in Russia were present throughout the former Soviet bloc. Intrabureaucratic battles over the spheres of influence that involved the media, like the conflict between the mayor and the

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governor of Nizhny Novgorod region described earlier, were a common feature of the postsocialist landscape where the state was in the process of de- and recomposition. Economic destitution of newly private media outlets was certainly another historical condition shared across the region, as was media proprietors’ reliance on politically motivated capital to keep their outlets afloat (Splichal 1994, 2001). A regulatory vacuum that resulted from the delayed passing of relevant media legislation was another common feature of the postsocialist media landscape (Voltmer 2013: 136). Finally, there is similarity across the former Soviet bloc in how journalists continued to understand their societal role and mission. The idea of journalistic objectivity, or the separation of fact and value, has always had little traction in Russia and Eastern Europe – before, during, and after the demise of socialism. Journalists’ understanding of themselves as public intellectuals has often translated into their willingness to openly take sides in political conflicts. It may have also meant that compared with their Western colleagues, Russian and Eastern European journalists were less queasy about the presence of politically motivated capital in their media outlets.

Nevertheless, the substantial presence of foreign capital in Eastern European media markets, the shorter period of regulatory vacuum before the requisite media laws were passed, and the overall cultural frame of “a return to Europe” – all these forces worked together to create a centripetal pull that helped to standardize journalists’ encoun- ter with capitalism in Eastern Europe. In Russia, however, the unpre- cedented level of uncertainty that characterized journalism’s encounter with capitalism in the early 1990s created a strong centrifugal push, splitting journalism into bits and pieces and sending them in multiple directions. Early post-Soviet journalism became a personal rather than a collective project. As many of my interlocutors pointed out in the early 2000s, whoever did not leave the profession by the mid-1990s now felt that they were “on their own” and working primarily “for themselves.”

The claim I am making here – that there were few, if any, centripetal forces to counteract the fragmentation of journalism in Russia during the 1990s – can also be illustrated by another fieldwork finding of mine. I discovered that while there was at least some agreement (among the journalists I worked with) on what constituted egregious violations of journalistic behavior, I found that there was no corresponding position

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of journalistic virtue on which they could collectively agree. Instead, one had plenty of opportunities to witness mutual accusations among journalists in unprofessionalism, irresponsibility, disrespect for the audience, abuse of press freedom, selling out, and other journalistic sins. These accusations were compounded by the breakdown of the Soviet system of on-the-job mentorship and peer control among jour- nalists, by fast spread of behind-closed-doors appraisals of journalistic labor by private employers, by fast turnover of personnel, by a sharp loss of occupational solidarity and prestige, and by an understanding that journalism ethics was now a deeply personal rather than collective matter.

To make sense of such fragmentation of a profession, I find it useful to talk about the privatization of journalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Privatization is usually thought about in economic and legal terms as a change from public (state) to private ownership, accompa- nied by legal mechanisms to support the new economic forms. But as scholars of postsocialism (Dunn 2004; Humphrey 2002; Verdery 1996, 2003) and neoliberalism (Barry et al. 1996; Ferguson 2006; Hibou 2004) have amply documented, privatization is never only a shift in forms of ownership: it has a profound effect on the state itself, transforming practices of governance, and on the public and social realms, reconfiguring people’s senses of solidarity, obligation, and commitment. Privatization does this by prying open and letting loose the meanings and structures of public and private, creating unexpected and often confusing spaces for political, economic, and moral actions. Individual actions gain special importance during such transitional moments – as nodes around which the newly reconfigured structures of public and private take shape.

Following Beatrice Hibou (2004: 15–18), we can view the process that unfolded in and around journalism after socialism as a case of private actors treading public territory in the atmosphere of continu- ing moral and institutional uncertainty and volatility unleashed by privatization. If we think of Soviet journalism as public (state) terri- tory that journalists occupied as public (state) actors, then the various forms of hustling in and around the media we observed in the 1990s can be seen precisely as a case of private actors treading formerly public territory. It is important, Hibou (2004) emphasizes, that we do not reduce this process merely to corruption or adulteration of a public domain by private interest. Rather, Hibou suggests, both

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public and private domains go through a metamorphosis as a result of such encounters: the public domain experiences a degree of devolu- tion, while private actors arrogate new public roles, infusing the public domain with new logics. What this new and substantially devolved public domain ended up looking like in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s is the subject of Chapter 3.

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