E L E C T R O S P H E R E    Issue 1.08 - December 1995

The Russian (Media) Revolution

By Andrew Meier



In that tense Moscow winter of 1991, before the failed Kremlin coup, I visited the godmother of Russia's dissident movement, Larissa Bogaroza - one of the four in 1968 who dared to protest in Red Square when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Dangerously frail, Bogaroza was still full of fire and pulling hard on her beloved papirosi, those slow-burning, foul-smelling Russian "cigarettes" made of cardboard rolled around sawdust. We spoke of the revolution in progress and I asked her the eternal question: "Could the clock turn back?"

"Never," she retorted. "Television won't allow it."

Last spring when I was up in Humboldt County at the world headquarters of Internews, a thriving American nonprofit organisation dedicated to developing private TV in Russia, I recalled Bogaroza's hoarse voice echoing from her Moscow kitchen. The times in Russia are as troubled as ever, and history may be poised to repeat itself, but you can't blame it on television. To the surprise of Western media gurus, TV news in Russia has taken off, vastly improving its image, objectivity, and range of reporting. And while Russia may be mired in a slow crawl to democracy, Russian TV has already found its way to the free market. Much of the credit - particularly for the birth of independent local stations and their development into regional networks - must go to the unorthodox enthusiasts at Internews, a nongovernmental media organisation at work in the former Soviet Union. Through an odd mixture of grant-gathering and commercial ambition, this anomalous collection of idealists is exploiting every angle it can find to steer the course of TV in Russia.

Since opening its Moscow office in 1992, the staff members of Internews have fed TV equipment - editing packs and SuperVHS cameras - to more than 40 local stations across the old USSR. More importantly, they have developed news and public affairs programming to give some semblance of public discourse to Russia's otherwise chaotic airwaves. Internews has also formed a backbone for more than 100 fledgling private TV companies, providing training - by American TV news producers and executives - in everything from production to ethics to advertising.

The organisation's peculiar funding cycle follows a flow chart that might raise a few eyebrows among charities toiling hard for a few donations. Although born and bred a nonprofit organisation, Internews funds for-profit TV enterprises half a world away, thanks to multimillion-dollar contracts from the Agency for International Development, the US government's foreign aid bank, along with grants from more than a dozen foundations, including one handsomely endowed by financier-philanthropist George Soros. Over the last few years, no other nonprofit developing post-Soviet new media has garnered more American aid dollars than Internews.

Not long ago, in the bad old days of Russian TV, "independent television" (stations at least in part privately owned) amounted to off-the-books companies broadcasting pirated Western films around the clock via satellite. On state-run Soviet TV, there was only one evening news broadcast, Vremya, meaning "time," during which an expressionless mannequin delivered the party line: the latest factory stats from Minsk; the grain report from Ukraine; and, on a good night, an "exclusive" with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which some flunky in polyester lobbed an opener and Gorby ran with it for an hour. After a steady diet of WWII victory films and boy-falls-for-tractor romances, the masses were starving for anything different.

Today, as the country marks the 10th anniversary of Gorbachev's ascent to the Soviet throne, Russian TV is taking on a new form. Nearly every Russian family - or household - in the former republics now owns a television; and, this year, TV advertising in Russia is expected to top US$700 million (£439 million) up from $250 million (£157 million) in 1993. True, channel surfing is still limited in Moscow with just six stations: OTR (the old Soviet state-owned channel, formerly named Ostankino), RTR (the Russian Federation-owned channel), NTV (the largest private channel, which hits most of European Russia but is on the air only eight hours a day), Channel 5 (the St. Petersburg government-owned station), 2x2 (a privately owned station that reaches only the Moscow area), and TV6 (a private net-work that reaches about 60 cities). But that's double the number the Russians could watch a few years ago, when the TV went dark during the day.

NTV, the first fully private channel founded two years ago, has proven popular, defiantly independent, and resilient. And in the burgeoning TV markets of the hinterlands, local state and nascent independent stations are engaged in a lively battle for ratings and advertisers. As independent TV makes its way to more and more outposts of the former USSR, Internews plays a critical support role. The news-production and distribution outfit is working with executives and journalists in private TV to bring Western know-how and equipment to the former Soviet world. "We have only two criteria for the stations we'll help," explains Manana Aslamazyan, the Moscow executive director of Internews. "First, the station has to be private. They can get some state money, but most of it has to be nongovern-mental. And, two, they have to run their own news broadcast."

So when, for example, the Kremlin tried to strong-arm the press into supporting its war in Chechnya, regional independent stations trained and supported by Internews helped to prevent a slide back to single-sided, totalitarian news. Far afield from Moscow and St. Petersburg, fledgling stations reported the catastrophe's real costs. Many sent their own correspondents to the front. Others revealed the impact of the war back home. The Internews affiliate in Kaluga, a town south of Moscow, filled TV screens with coffins returning from Chechnya, even as the Kremlin downplayed losses. Other sta-tions showed images of the decimation of Grozny, despite Boris Yeltsin's declaration that it had ceased. The bombing continued, but the reign of The Big Lie across Russian airwaves had ended.

During the early 1980s, Internews was a little-known, low-budget nonprofit formed by a trio of eco-activists who found each other and their mission in the throes of the "no nukes" crusade. Its founders came together from across the United States in a union of politics and technology: David Hoffman, a Zen-inspired union activist with a Midas touch for fund-raising, joined forces with Evelyn Messinger and Kim Spencer, a pair of video crusaders devoted to alternative energy.

In its initial incarnation, the ambitious collective produced the first television "spacebridges" in 1982 and 1983, two-way live transmissions via satellite that linked American and Soviet studio audiences into an electronic discussion forum for political and social issues. In an era of mutual distrust, when all lines of communications were either jammed or clogged with Cold War propaganda, these TV bridges - or telemosty as the Russians dubbed them - brought citizen diplomacy to the small screen.

They may not have made for action-packed TV, but the spacebridges did make history. American Cold Warriors dismissed the broadcasts as free programming for Soviet propagandists, but, in the USSR, telemosty mesmerised millions. These TV bridges revealed that ordinary Russians and Americans shared many of the same fears and desires. The bridges also broke down a fair share of taboos: in one show, a woman from Boston inquired about Soviet contraception. The answer beamed back from Russia remains a running joke: "In Russia," a woman declared, "we don't have sex."

Internews's success with the space-bridges soon led to a partnership with ABC News. The resulting Capital to Capital series on ABC and Soviet State Television united leaders of Congress with the Supreme Soviet via satellite for live debates on contentious topics ranging from arms control to human rights. From 1987 to 1990, the series produced seven spacebridges and earned Internews an Emmy for pioneering the technology which made spacebridges possible.

Only after the Berlin Wall came down, however, did the enterprise physically move into the former USSR. In late 1989, Messinger, now the outfit's executive managing director, got a call from an artist friend in Leipzig. "Ingo [Gunther] was all excited," she recalls. "He was going to start a pirate station as an art project and call it Kanal X. I had never imagined such a thing as private TV was possible."

Ingo pulled off the project, and Kanal X, one of the first nongovernmental TV stations in Eastern Europe, inspired Internews to begin its media-building odyssey behind the old Iron Curtain. After 1989, Internews moved fast and far into Russia and the newly independent states of the old USSR - Ukraine, the Caucasus, and, most recently, Central Asia. "It wasn't just a case of being in the right place at the most amazing time," says Spencer. "Thanks to our work on the spacebridges, no one had better contacts in Russia."

David Hoffman drives a Toyota Tercel, wears smart-but-casual clothes, and keeps his graying curls short. He's an odd mix of selfless crusader and self-promoter, bold enough to tease me with a job offer as we head from the airport to the Internews headquarters in Humboldt County, California, and passionate enough to make a convincing case for his cause. Both The Celestine Prophecy and Foreign Affairs lie on his desk. And he reveals no signs of the hard-driving business sense which, in post-Soviet circles at least, has media-watchers half-jokingly calling him the "nonprofit Ted Turner."

Until he speaks. "I hate that word - peace." It seems a strange opening line from someone who has devoted the past three decades to promoting international understanding and tolerance. "I learned early on in New York, talking with the network execs," he explains, "that you so much as mention the word peace and you can see the faces fall. They write you off in minutes."

But peace, nevertheless, has been very good to Hoffman and his compatriots at Internews. While no one cares about live videocasts anymore (although they did one not long ago between the Mir spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and schoolkids from both countries), Inter-news has become top scorer in the fund-raising big leagues. Few former peaceniks carry the clout and budget Hoffman now commands, and probably even fewer would take up the government banner as avidly. Among American nongovernmental organisations facilitating independent media in the former Soviet Union, Inter-news ranks near the top in funding. "No one we've funded," reports Wade Greene of Rockefeller Financial Services in New York, a philanthropic adviser to one of Internews's earliest backers, "has made this kind of leap." In the last four years, it has won 57 grants from 19 donors, for a total of $27 million (£17 million).

Of course, many observers might look upon Hoffman's history of using US taxpayers' dollars to infiltrate Russia's airwaves and to establish mega-advertising nodes amongst millions of new consumers as mighty suspicious and ethically complex. But Hoffman fails to see any conundrum. "What we're doing is fairly straightforward: taking US money to help build free media over there. It's in our interests, too. Yes, it's visionary and maybe even radical. But I've been advocating a redirection in the US information campaign for years," says Hoffman. "One away from just beaming American propaganda to the Russians and, instead, developing their own internal indigenous media." Hoffman is unflinching in his conviction. "It wasn't possible then, but it's what the US government should have been doing all along throughout the Cold War."

A survivor of the anti-nuclear movement, Hoffman exemplifies the boomer shift from movements to markets. He spent the early 1970s organising trade unions in the San Francisco Bay area - "I even did one at Lawrence Livermore National Labs," he boasts, "the first union of nuclear weapons scientists" - before moving north in 1976. For his first three years in the coastal county of Humboldt, Hoffman lived barefoot in the forest.

"I was living in San Francisco when I saw Taxi Driver," he explains, the Tercel negotiating a mud road high above the Pacific as we make a detour en route to the Internews headquarters, a historic 19th-century house in downtown Arcata. "And I knew I had to leave Western civilisation." He moved into a house without electricity, a 30 minute drive from the nearest phone, and spent the nights reading Eastern philosophy by the light of a kerosene lamp. Finally, when his eyes couldn't take it any longer, he hooked up a cable to the battery in his truck.

This spiritual exile helped Hoffman overcome his self-described "New Left Marxism." Perhaps it was then that the notion of working within a system - several systems at that - began to seem like a legitimate, if ungroovy, path.

One day in 1979, while visiting his ex-wife in San Francisco, Hoffman happened to catch "something unbelievable" out of the corner of his eye. It was PBS's live broadcast of an anti-nuke rally on the Mall in Washington, DC, after Three Mile Island. Hoffman was wowed. "For the first time, the power in the streets was joined by the power of TV." And he vowed, "I've got to find the guy who pulled this off." Spencer is modest about his groundbreaking PBS "Three Mile Island" broadcast. "It was really about 40 producers from all over the country who did it," he says. Spencer had been an early explorer on the video frontier, one that Internews is now helping to extend to Russia, and beyond. "I had one of those Sony portapacks, and I realised for the first time that you could make TV as an individual."

Using half-inch, black-and-white tape, Spencer had been making videos on environmental issues on the Eastern seaboard, and quickly discovered the political power of the medium. "It was an incredibly powerful tool for changing politicians' minds and getting funding for these organisations." But he did not believe in broadcast television. "It was top-down, one-way, no interaction. I only wanted to use the medium for social purposes. Then along came Three Mile Island."

Within a month, Spencer was on the Mall covering Jackson Browne and Jane Fonda at the rally that would capture Hoffman's attention and, before long, lead to the first Internews spacebridge. "We were looking for cracks in the monolith," says Spencer. "The PBS show was a way to break the monopoly of the skyscrapers, of CBS's Black Rock and Rock Center."

When she found Spencer through a video trade journal report on the no-nukes demo, Messinger was no stranger to no-budget, guerrilla filmmaking. In the 1970s, after single-handedly shooting her own quixotic documentary about windpower, Messinger joined VideoWest, an infamous San Francisco production team making music videos long before MTV arrived. "I was first drawn to video," she says, "to the image itself, to the way things looked on the screen."

Today, Hoffman remains Internews's primary networker and fundraiser. Even during his eco-warrior stage, he was a promoter at heart. Whether he's driving his Tercel along Pacific coastal cliffs, ploughing through a salad at lunch, or working the phones in his office, Hoffman is rarely without words - and anecdotes, in which the likes of American television news-anchormen and out-of-work Politburo types crop up with regularity. Messinger, the organisation's executive director, charts new projects across the former Soviet Union. And Spencer, who married Messinger 13 years ago, serves as its roving technical trouble-shooter, shuttling between their home in the Marin hills near San Francisco and Internews outposts in Europe, the former Soviet states, and the Middle East.

If the funding side of the Internews machine is fraught with political confusion, and, some would say, philosophical compromise, its front end is an example of straight-to-the-mark effectiveness. The group has given an accelerated professional education to more than 1,000 journalists, producers, and station managers at more than 250 independent stations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Each year Internews brings over working professionals from American TV to train journalists and would-be journalists from the former Soviet republics. Its Moscow office, on the top floor of The Central House of Journalists, is a buzzing nexus, the primary support system for numerous indepen-dent stations across 11 time zones from St. Petersburg to Ulan Ude.

In Kiev, Internews runs the International Media Center, Ukraine's largest nongovernmental training and news production facility. "The shows produced there are so popular," reports Messinger, who oversees the three-year-old operation, "that the head of Ukrainian state TV has asked us to do all the news on the state channel, too."

But the prized project of Internews is the Independent Broadcasting System International (IBS), which has linked - financially and in terms of shared programming - 120 independent stations across 7 former Soviet states in a network protected from government control and attuned to local concerns. Largely funded by advertising, while competing assertively with other networks, the IBS has the capability, says Moscow-based executive director Andrei Vdovin, to reach 106 million viewers. In September, the heads of the six regional networks met in Georgia to hammer out a 2-inch-thick protocol for future development. (The Russian network comprises 54 stations; the Belarus-sian, 12; the Kazakhtan, 13; the Ukrainian, 25; the trans-Caucasian region is home to 9). Currently, the stations are broadcasting four hours of common programming each day, with an additional hour provided free by Internews.

Of the programming provided by the IBS, Open Skies is a favourite. Launched in January, the project aims to deliver, free of charge, highbrow European, Russian, and American documentaries and cultural programs to more than 170 stations. "The stations love Open Skies most of all," says Aslamazyan, "because it allows them to attract viewers and advertisers without pulling down pirated Schwarzenegger films." Internews has developed other successful programming. Vremya Mestnoe ("Local Time") is a half-hour news show with reports from 40 regional stations. When it d/buted in the autumn of 1993 in make-shift style - the anchorwoman doubled as the receptionist - viewers in the former Soviet states saw other regions' local news for the first time. "For 50 years people watched TV made in Moscow and beamed to them from Moscow," says Aslamazyan. "Now they can learn what's going on right around them."

And last year, Internews created Esli? ("What If?"), a series hosted by Vladimir Pozner, Russia's closest equivalent to Clive Anderson, about everyday post-Communist legal quandaries. What if - one recent episode asked - you buy a new apartment and someone is squatting there? Before a studio audience, Pozner and a panel of legal experts explained Russia's new constitution and the rights it guarantees.

Unquestionably, the stations' operations are still run on the primitive side. Distribution of Open Skies programming, for instance, costs a lot in train fares. "Most stations send someone with a tape on a train to Moscow," Messinger explains. At the Internews/IBS studio in Moscow, where 30 dubbing machines run around the clock seven days a week, cassettes are filled and returned to the provinces. But a new uplink in Kiev has recently spread the availability throughout Ukraine. "The result is that they get good, quality movies. Legally," says Messinger.

Russian TV still has no sitcoms, but, thanks to more funding from the Agency for International Development, Internews is moving further into the entertainment realm. Thanks to the USAID-financed, $10 million (£6.3 million), three-year Russian American Media Partnership, which Internews was selected to manage, Russian viewers will get their own version of NYPD Blue.

And the company's latest plan, Hoffman giddily reveals, is to develop a daily news broadcast for independent stations from Moscow. "It's the only thing they're missing to become a fully fledged network. We'll start out with a weekly show, then eventually go daily. With Local Time, we've got a great opportunity to develop our own cadre of correspondents."

In Newt Gingrich's Congress, "sustainability" has become the foreign aid buzzword, and Hoffman's crusaders have obliged, not just by nurturing the tender shoots of private media in the former Soviet republics, but in strengthening their ad base. And this is where Hoffman stubbornly stands firm in his unorthodox economic position: while public and private money is pumped from the US to the ex-Soviet states, the Internews local IBS stations are taking a 180-degree turn to make a profit. "We've had no trouble selling ads," says Michelle Berdy, a Moscow veteran and mainstay of the Internews office there, "though there's a vast dis-crepancy in prices between the stations." For example, not long ago, a minute in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, went for around $5 (£3); the strongest stations in Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk charge between $200 (£125) and $400 (£250) per minute. For Western firms who well understand that St. Petersburg and Moscow comprise only 10 per cent of the Russian market, regional advertising is a bargain. Not surprisingly, the IBS has already attracted advertisers such as Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Revlon, Cadbury-Schweppes, and Procter & Gamble.

The guiding principle of Internews is that "commercial viability is the key to independent media." The leverage created by this growing ad base fosters more than just financial independence. According to Aslamazyan, the mafiya and biznesmeny have found it harder to lure local stations into their lairs. "Many of them have tried to invest in us," she says. "But our stations don't want their money. They know they can't trust them."

The passion for self-reliance is understandable. Everywhere in Russia there is a palpable fear of any omnipotent organa, any locus of centralised control that enve-lops individuality and free choice. TV, naturally, is no different. So even as the IBS hooks up with mega sponsors, it has been careful to keep a low profile in Moscow. And it has succeeded - both because it keeps in the shadow of larger, Moscow-based private networks like NTV and TV6, and because so few originally thought it worth noticing. As Aslamazyan explains, "No one was afraid of these stations coming together, because no one ever expected them to do anything."

If Hoffman and Internews have their way, the IBS will succeed where Ted Turner has already failed. As a decentralised network, IBS is more a grass-roots consortium than a traditional Western broadcasting company of owned and operated affiliates. Most important, in the suspicious eyes of Russian nationalists fixed on the foreign Goliaths, the IBS was not created by the corporate fiat of interlopers. It accreted organically.

"Internews is singular in its success," says New York financier Wade Greene, "because it didn't go in there for a fast buck or for any ideological reasons."

Now the aparatchiki have begun to take notice, but it's too late. Thanks to the IBS, the next time revanchists stage a coup in Moscow they'll find it a lot harder to pull the plug on TV. "It's not a single switch any more," explains Spencer. "Now there's all these regional networks with their own TV towers and transmitters. It's no longer one guy in Moscow who makes the call."

Internews has not disappointed its backers. The footage from the Chechen war on Local Time testifies to the organisation's good work. As a March telex from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State Department crowed: "Russian independent television has applied one of the few legitimate points of pressure on the government during the Chechen crisis and by and large has done a brilliant job...."

"They've been so successful, it's kind of scary," says Sandy Socolow, an Internews board member and a venerable network news producer who helped create the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. In 1992, Internews recruited Socolow to train Russian broadcasters on a month-long tour of the provinces. "I left thinking, We won't know for 20 years whether we've accomplished anything," Socolow says. But after viewing Hoffman's latest highlights tape - with segments from recent Local Time and What If? broadcasts - he changed his mind. "I'd have to say it's accelerated way beyond what I expected."

In the post-Soviet era, television has been both a source of power struggles and a means for their resolution. By now - after Chechnya, with its televised scenes of charred Russian soldiers littering Grozny and a Russian prime minister negotiating an end to a terrorist siege; after October 1993, when armed nationalists stormed the Ostankino TV center in Moscow in a futile attempt to seize it; after January 1991, when Soviet special forces besieged the Vilnius TV tower, crushing a woman under a tank but failing to quash the Baltic drive for independence - there is no denying that in Russia, as Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev's forward-thinking ideologist once said, "The television image is everything."

Thanks in large part to the expanding reach of Internews, any Russian revanchist hoping to restore the old empire would now have to shut down a host of nongovernmental TV companies. Hoffman and his cohorts, of course, cannot claim all the credit, but the regional stations they've helped to stand on their own are forming the bulwark of Russia's first free electronic mass media. In the country's 1996 presidential election, TV news and advertising will play a pivotal role. Every candidate, not just Vladimir Zhirinovsky, wants to take a stand on the platforms offered by the new media.

Meanwhile, the first regional ratings for Russian TV are out. To the surprise of everyone - except the free-media missionaries at Internews - the nascent independents are keeping pace with the state-owned local stations. A few are even striding ahead. In the West, television may have already become little more than a bland vehicle for corporate sponsorship and advertising, and it may well end up hitting that dead end in Russia, too - The Love Boat has already arrived on the IBS - but in a land where The Big Lie once clouded the airwaves, The Box, free from state control after half a century, promises to keep the clock moving forward.

Andrew Meier (ameier@infowebb.com) is a San Francisco-based writer specialising in Russian affairs.