No One is Free until We All Are
Boris Kagarlitsky
The Moscow Times, 20 April 2001
For seven years now you have been broadcasting that you support the market economy and capitalism. Now, we have it - and for you, too. We've had enough of communism for one television channel. Now you can have some of the capitalism that you have been pushing all these years". In a nutshell, this is the message that Gazprom-Media's Alfred Kokh delivered to the journalists of NTV.
And, hard as it is to admit, it is difficult not to agree with him. Those who have been dreaming of a free market have now seen their dreams come true. After all, the basic principle of capitalism is "money decides everything". Our naive, perestroika-era intelligentsia sincerely believed that free trade was the equivalent of freedom of speech. But things have turned out a bit differently. In reality, free trade means the freedom of the victor to shut the mouth of the loser.
Gazprom has treated its debtor very badly. But who forced Vladimir Gusinsky and Media-MOST to borrow Gazprom's money in the first place? It is obvious that the money was borrowed on political terms. When the loans were taken, the company had no political problems: Gazprom and Media-MOST both wholeheartedly supported Boris Yeltsin. Both were happy to smear the Communists in 1996, using whatever dirty tactics they could think up. Although it is hard to sympathize with the Communist Party, they never deserved the treatment they got in 1996. In effect, the state took away the people's right to choose.
Then the situation changed and the political camp split. NTV supported Yury Luzhkov over Vladimir Putin in the 1999 political race. And that is when the accounts came due. Politics seamlessly turned into business and the struggle for property.
It is bad taste to delight in the misfortunes of others, even when those people are tripped up by their own mistakes. There can only be one freedom of speech and it must be the same for everyone. If a legally operating opposition - such as the Communists were in 1996 - can be silenced and if the public consciousness can be openly manipulated, then all talk of democracy is pure demagoguery.
Gusinsky's journalistic team never understood this. Nonetheless, the current attempt to silence the liberals of NTV is also an assault on the rights of us all. We must defend the freedom of journalists by proceeding from general, democratic principles. After all, even the most compromised democracy is better than the finest form of fascism.
However, we must defend freedom of speech not only from the likes of Alfred Kokh and Boris Jordan, but from the free market itself.
In Russia, property rights ultimately mean the right to wield force. But in this we are not unique. The history of capitalism is characterized by a constant and sometimes brutal struggle between journalists and media owners. In many countries, this struggle has led to the passage of laws protecting journalists from their bosses.
It is interesting to note that the methods chosen by the NTV journalists are typical of those used by millions of workers throughout history: an ordinary sit-down strike. And in a society where strikes do not work, this method was doomed to fail. Possibly, if post-Soviet Russia had some tradition of successful strikes, the NTV situation would have turned out differently.
You can't defend the rights of a few without defending the rights of all. When that lesson is finally learned here, the government will be faced not with a few dozen journalists but with millions of people who have learned to stand up for their interests.
Copyright 2001 The Moscow Times
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