Following the furore over ABC’s interview with Shamil Basayev, which some have interpreted as a (not very thinly) veiled warning to Russia’s own journalists not to overstep the line when reporting Checnhnya, Masha Gessen has published an instructive essay on the history of foreign journalism during the Soviet Union:
Before 1961, all foreign journalists were required to file their reports from a particular room in the Central Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street. The reports were read by the censor, who sometimes held them up for days and sometimes returned them with multiple deletions — or marked "not cleared." The censor made few decisions by himself or herself. During the Stalinist era, all questions were phoned directly in to Stalin’s secretariat, which issued instructions.
When they got caught cheating the system, reporters would get expelled. At one point in the late 1940s, expulsions became so frequent that there was only one foreign correspondent in Moscow: the great Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times.
Alarmingly, though, Gessen notes that some of the bad old ways seem to be returning:
Expulsions of journalists resumed after the second war in Chechnya began. But until recently there was always a formal reason for expelling journalists, banning them from re-entering Russia or revoking their accreditation. An exception is a bizarre incident in May when a Latvian TV crew was detained in the Pskov region and kicked out of the country with no explanation.
- What next?
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