The Invention of Russia by Arkady Ostrovsky

Author:Arkady Ostrovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

NTV seized on Chechnya several months before the war actually started. ‘Starting from June, there was hardly an Itogi programme that did not mention Chechnya,’ Kiselev recalled.19 In September, NTV’s future war reporter, Elena Masyuk, reported from a southern Russian region neighbouring Chechnya that field hospitals were being set up. In November 1994, Malashenko ran into Evgeny Savostyanov, the soft-spoken head of the Moscow KGB whom he knew from his days at the Central Committee. ‘He told me in his carefree way: “Igor, listen, forget about Chechnya for a couple of weeks. We will finish it all off and then I will tell you all about it.” I realized that they really didn’t understand what they were doing.’20

At the time of this encounter, Savostyanov had signed a contract with forty-seven tank crews, behind their commander’s back, to lend President Dudaev’s disparate and weak opponents in Chechnya a helping hand. But when the Russian-contract soldiers reached Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, they came under intense fire from Dudaev’s army. Most of them fled and some were captured. Chechen ‘opposition forces’ broke ranks and started to loot Grozny. While the state media peddled the official line that Dudaev was fleeing and that there were no Russian soldiers on the ground, NTV exposed the operation for what it was – a humiliating debacle.

Malashenko had no sympathy for Dudaev – a paranoid and narcissistic dictator. In fact, his biggest problem with the war was not what it might do to Chechnya, but what it would almost certainly do to Russia. The war was not just an assault on separatists, it was an assault on everything that NTV stood for: professionalism, respect for individual rights, normal life and common sense. ‘I realized that the war in Chechnya would inflate the role of the army and security services and that it would change the rules of the game in Russia, because once you start shooting people in Chechnya, you can shoot them anywhere, the hand almost involuntarily reaches for the gun or a truncheon,’ Malashenko said.21 So Malashenko and Dobrodeev decided that NTV would show the war in its full and gruesome details. Its correspondents reported it from both sides. They went behind the Russian lines and interviewed Chechen commanders, inciting the outrage of the Russian army chiefs.

When the government said there were no prisoners, NTV showed a line-up of captured young conscripts, disarmed and helpless. When the government kept silent about its losses, NTV showed a downed Russian helicopter and bodies of Russian soldiers. When state TV channels said that civilians had left Grozny, NTV showed wounded civilians bombed out of their houses, old people desperately looking for cover, a woman whose face was just a bloody wound. The Kremlin was not only losing militarily; it was also losing the information war to NTV.

The images of devastating military action, blood and destruction provided by NTV’s own correspondent and particularly by its star war reporter, Elen Masyuk, were invariably more powerful than written statements supplied by the Kremlin or even official footage of Russian tanks driving down a dusty road.

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