freedom of press in Russia

[John Dunn]

I think, with respect, that it may be going a little far to say that the governemt effectively shut down The Exile.  I don't imagine that we will ever know if that was the ultimate aim of the exercise and whether the main target of the наезд [naezd] was Limonov, in which case The Exile was, so to speak, collateral damage, or the publication itself.

It would seem that Mr Ames and his colleagues have, to say the least, been naive.   They appear to have misinterpreted the climate of the 1990s as ushering in an era of вседозволенность [vsedozvolennost'] and not to have realised that эпатаж [èpatazh] is a dangerous weapon to use, especially in someone else's country and especially somewhere where the 1960s never happened.  It is on thing to subvert established norms of public behaviour and communication if your name is V.V. Zhirinovskii and you have backers in the right places, but another if you are foreign journalists.

In this context I would agree that the question whether Russia should have the same standards of freedom of speech as America (or Britain or Italy – we all know that there things that can be said in any one of these countries that cannot be said in the other two) is not the point.  What can be argued, though, is that laws limiting fredom of speech should be written with clarity and precision and applied with consistency, and that is the issue with the law on extremism.  It may also be a matter of concern that the regulatory body on whose behalf the visitation was carried out is part of the government appartus, which is not normally the case in Western Europe.

We will presumably never know if this incident was inspired from on high, though I would prefer to think that those whose job it is to rule Russia had better things to do with their time than search through scurrilous publications in foreign languages.  But if by any chance it was, then the point is not whether Medvedev is more or less 'liberal' than Putin, but that the current President of Russia is, unlike his predecessor apparently, an avid user of the Internet.

John Dunn.



-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Leidy <leidy at STANFORD.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:12:56 -0700
Subject: [SEELANGS] freedom of press in Russia

Dear SEELANG-ers,
For those who haven't heard, the Russian government effectively shut 
down "The Exile," an English-language publication that has been a 
fixture in Moscow for over 10 years. This is perhaps an inauspicious 
sign for those who were hoping for a "liberalizing" Medvedev.

The paper's editor-in-chief, Mark Ames, has written a couple of blog 
articles on how the process occurred, for those interested:
http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/06/russian-government-press-feedom-putin-ames-medvedev.php
http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/06/the-end-of-the-exile.php

There will also be an article tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal about 
the closure.

bill leidy

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John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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