Committee print

25 US. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2001, Russia.
114
Michael Wines, ‘‘ None of Us Can Get Out Kursk Sailor Wrote The New York Times, Oct.
27, 2000. Ian Traynor, Putin Faces Families Fury The Guardian, Aug. 22, 2000.
116
Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to
Putin’s War, Atlantic Books, at 277-78 (2015).
117
See Jonathan Steele, Fury Over Putin’s Secrets and Lies The Guardian, Aug. 21, 2000. Robert Coalson, Ten Years Ago, Russia’s Independent NTV, The Talk Of The Nation, Fell Silent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Apr. 14, 2011. NTV was founded by opposition oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky and was known for its popular satirical puppet show called Kukly Dolls) that lampooned Putin and other politicians.
119
Inna Denisova & Robert Coalson, ‘‘Kursk Anniversary Submarine Disaster Was Putin’s First Lie ’’ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Aug. 12, 2015; Oligarch Who Angered Putin Rise and Fall of Boris Berezovsky,’’ CNN, Mar. 25, 2013.
120
Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia, at 281. Conversely, media outlets that criticized President Putin or his actions risked retaliation.
113
A seminal moment in the Kremlin’s efforts to capture the media in Russia came after the August 2000 Kursk submarine disaster that killed 118 Russian seamen. Questions swirled about how much the government knew about the accident and whether it had done enough to mitigate it.
114
Putin, who had been vacationing in
Sochi when the Kursk disaster unfolded and did not speak about it until days later, held a town hall with families of the dead, in which several relatives excoriated him for incompetence. Despite Kremlin efforts to limit media access to one Russian state broadcaster and to heavily edit the footage that was aired, international and Russian print media released details of the meeting and interviews with family members that cast Putin’s young government in a harsh light.
115
In a secretly taped record of the meeting by a journalist from Kommersant, a national Russian newspaper, Putin fumed that national television channels were lying about the Kursk events and accused them of destroying the Russian military through their corruption and efforts to discredit the government.
116
The independent channel NTV, founded by oligarch Vladimir
Gusinsky, had swiftly challenged the government’s explanation of the Kursk tragedy and criticized its refusal of foreign assistance for the first five days following the initial explosion.
117
(NTV had also aired apiece in 1999 asserting an FSB role in the failed apartment bombing in Ryazan, after which the Kremlin informed Gusinsky he had crossed the line In 2000, Gusinsky was briefly jailed, exiled, and pressured to sell his stake in NTV to the state energy company
Gazprom.)
118
In October 2000, a critical one-hour TV special aired about the Kursk disaster on ORT, a public television channel partly owned by oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had helped to execute the smooth transfer of power from Yeltsin to Putin a year earlier but subsequently fell out of favor with the Kremlin and announced his opposition.
119
The Kremlin took steps thereafter to further rein in both NTV and ORT, and then other media outlets over which it lacked effective or editorial control. Beyond targeting its patron Gusinsky, the Kremlin began after Kursk to target NTV’s investigative journalists and editorial infrastructure. A popular NTV presenter was questioned by prosecutors early in 2001, and the phone line of NTV managing director Evgeniy Kiselev was reportedly tapped.
120
Gazprom undertook a corporate coup of the channel in an early
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