REN TV and St Petersburg’s Fifth Channel, the last semi-independent private TV stations, will come under state control next year. According Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, news bulletins on both channels’ news bulletins will be restructured next year. The state-owned, pro-Kremlin English language television station “Russia Today” will take over responsibility for their news broadcasts from 2010.
Campaigners accused the Kremlin of killing off the last vestiges of independent television in Russia.
“This means independent TV will be destroyed. It will disappear,” said Oleg Ptashkin, a former correspondent with Russia’s state-run Channel One TV who now runs an independent journalists’ union. (Guardian)
It is hard to get a firm handle on the latest development in the Kremlin’s “history wars” — its militant campaign to censor all but the most positive assessments of the Stalin period. The arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a history professor in Arkhangel’sk, for collecting personal data on German POWs and Soviet Germans in the Gulags of the Arctic North is unprecedented and, on the face of it, so extreme and absurd that there may be something more to it than meets the eye. But it is an alarming development. For two reasons. (more…)
Index on Censorship’s associate editor Rohan Jayasekera has just come back from Gori, Georgia — birthplace of Josef Stalin. He didn’t buy the t-shirt though.
Index on Censorship contributor Orlando Figes discussed the bizarre defamation case brought by Stalin’s grandson on behalf of the dictator on the BBC’s Today programme this morning.
