Freedom of Speech in Russia

Politics and Media from Gorbachev to Putin

Daphne Skillen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138787667
• eBook ISBN: 9781317659884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the life of free speech in Russia from the final years of the Soviet Union to the present. It shows how long-cherished hopes for an open society in which people would speak freely and tell truth to power fared under Gorbachev's glasnost; how free speech was a real, if fractured, achievement of Yeltsin's years in power; and how easy it was for Putin to reverse these newly won freedoms, imposing a 'patrimonial' media that sits comfortably with old autocratic and feudal traditions. The book explores why this turn seemed so inexorable and now seems so entrenched. It examines the historical legacy, and Russia's culturally ambivalent perception of freedom, which Dostoyevsky called that 'terrible gift'. It evaluates the allure of western consumerism and Soviet-era illusions that stunted the initial promise of freedom and democracy. The behaviour of journalists and their apparent complicity in the distortion of their profession come under scrutiny. This ambitious study covering more than 30 years of radical change looks at responses 'from above' and 'from below', and asks whether the players truly understood what was involved in the practice of free speech.

Part 1

1 Liberties and rights

Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrived at unlimited despotism.

(Dostoyevsky, The Devils, 1871–2)

I Liberty or licence?

The discussion of freedom, its intrinsic appeal and ‘what is to be done’ to attain and sustain it has a long-established history in Russian political thought and literature. Reflections on the meaning of freedom of speech, however, have been surprisingly rare. Perhaps the very magnitude of censorship under tsarism and the totality of its grip in the Soviet era made a discussion of the subject vague and irrelevant, other than in poetic lament. If the concept of free speech was considered at all, it tended to be seen as the flip side of state censorship. Once censorship was removed, free speech would naturally follow. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian commentators and international observers alike assumed that as the barbed wire had been torn down free institutions and values would flourish. Of all the pillars of democracy – good governance, free and fair elections, the rule of law, civil society – it was thought that free speech would be the simplest and fastest to implement. It turned out not to be so.

In signing up to the model of western democracy, the Russian media could turn for examples to the Anglo-American tradition with its belief in the pre-eminence of free speech. Illustrious moments in the development of free speech run like a golden thread from Milton to Mill, from the First Amendment to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ that lie at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They could have turned to Voltaire and the French Enlightenment. Russians also have their own illustrious figure in Aleksandr Radishchev who, in denouncing serfdom in the eighteenth century found time in his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow to elaborate, in Voltairean tones, on the value of free speech. Radishchev might well have been a role model, much as the English might turn to Milton for a rousing defence of free speech, but as the father of radical thought with its thread running all the way to communism, Radishchev was not an acceptable icon in post-communist Russia.

Yet Radishchev had a great deal to say that was in fact relevant to Russia’s launch into democracy. Having emerged out of the freer climate for the press instituted by Catherine the Great, who had embraced the values of the Enlightenment, he became a victim of that dilemma common to the Russian scene between declarative liberalism and political ruthlessness. Self-printing his Journey in 1790 after the French Revolution, not the best of times, Radishchev incensed Catherine by his critique of her corrupt court and the brutal conditions of serfdom. He was sentenced to death, to be beheaded. His book was banned, seized and burned, but copies were in great demand and were circulated and read secretly (the ban was lifted only in 1868). Although the day after his arrest he had pleaded for mercy and apologised for his ‘insane’ book, it was some time before Catherine commuted his sentence to ten years’ exile in Ilimsk in central Siberia. Radishchev was clear about why autocratic governments prohibited freedom of the press:

The free thinker … will stretch forth his … fearless arm against the idol of power, will tear off its mask and veil, and lay bare its true character. Everyone will see its feet of clay.¹

Like J. S. Mill, he believed in the power of truth and the destructiveness of censorship where even ‘a single stupid official’ in the police can hold back the advance of knowledge and progress. He saw no reason for censoring religion and in a very modern tone, pornography. Censorship made a mockery of human dignity, a value he saw everywhere desecrated. It demeaned and infantilised its subjects, like a ‘nurse’ who has outstayed her welcome:

censorship has become the nursemaid of reason, wit, imagination, of everything great and enlightened. But where there are nurses, there are babies and leading strings, which often lead to crooked legs; where there are guardians, there are minors and immature minds unable to take care of themselves. If there are always to be nurses and guardians, then the child will walk with leading strings for a long time and will grow up to be a cripple.²

Radishchev’s disinterested passion for truth could have inspired the democracy movement when the assaults on free speech began, but if anyone had called Putin a ‘nanny’ (nyanka), as a nod to history, instead of acquiescing to his macho image, the cultural reference would have been lost. Radishchev also produced Russia’s first essay on the history of world censorship, entitled ‘A Brief Account of the Origins of Censorship’ in which he, like Milton before him, attributed censorship to the Inquisition. The ancient Greeks and Romans may have put truth to the sword, Radishchev argued, but censorship qua prior restraint was the invention and exclusive prerogative of the Roman Catholic clergy. Once the darkness had spread, he said, the fetters of ‘clerical superstition’ were replicated in ‘political superstition’. In all cases the rule of censorship is ‘to strike out, blot out, prohibit, tear, burn everything that is opposed to natural religion and Revelation, everything in opposition to the government, every personal reflection, everything contrary to public morality, order and peace’.³

Free speech ‘above all other liberties’

Although centuries of political struggle had gone into the development of free speech in the West, Russia, like other unexpectedly liberated societies, would have to do it in one leap. As Russians say, you can’t take two leaps to jump over the abyss. Yet everything was being done on the hoof, with little time for reflection or study of the experiences of other countries. What did a free press mean and how was one to deal with the obstacles to its exercise: intolerance, prejudice, conformity, ignorance, vested interests? The playwright Aleksandr Gelman pondered how much time had been spent in cursing the Soviet Union, all those free radios beaming from the West and spies everywhere, yet no preparation for the day when Russia would be free: not one scenario, no programmes – ‘what a strange country, wouldn’t you say, such intellectual nonchalance?’.⁴

With hindsight, leading politician Boris Nemtsov admitted the reformers’ naivety: ‘I was sure that to cancel communism meant a great life in a few months … Not only me, but Yeltsin and all of our team … But unfortunately reality looks much more serious and much more complicated than we believed at the time’.⁵ The Soviet experience had given reformers scant understanding of time or scale. The belief in Yavlinsky’s 500 Day Plan to deal with the huge problems of the economy was another delusion. When Karl Popper, whose book The Open Society had some circulation in the country, was asked if the plan stood any chance of success, he answered that it might – in 500 years rather than days.⁶ Yeltsin’s generals were also confident it would take a few weeks to suppress Chechen rebellion, but its issues are still not resolved even if the general fighting has ended. Neither were the issues of free speech as simple as journalists thought.

They could have started by looking at the first modern defence of free speech and the rights of journalism: Milton’s Areopagitica: For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644). The censorship structure that Milton confronted was not dissimilar to the Soviet Union’s Glavlit. Milton, writing as a Puritan at the time of the English civil wars, was outraged by the onslaught on the publication of pamphlets, books and news sheets produced by religious dissenters. In Areopagitica, he attacked the state-controlled machinery of censorship that had been instituted in 1643, preventing publication without prior permission. All materials needed to be licensed and registered by the Stationers’ Company, which was also responsible for the seizure and destruction of offensive literature and the arrest and imprisonment of offending writers, printers and publishers. In the same way, Glavlit was a state-controlled machine, where censorship took place at the point of publication and nothing could pass without the censor’s stamp. Although Milton demonstrated his courage in refusing to license or register Areopagitica, he was not, as was Radishchev, punished.

What Milton and free thinkers despised about censorship was the implication of the government’s ‘infallibility and uncorrupted-ness’. Milton mocked those who feared that free expression would lead to anarchy, the ploy of most repressive governments and one overused by Putin. ‘Whoever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’ he asks.⁷ For Milton free speech was God-given and it was his duty to God to defend it, introducing for the first time the role of conscience over the will of monarch and state, with these famous words – ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties’.⁸ For Russians free speech came ‘from above’, but as a gift from the tsar: to act according to conscience was rebellion. Milton, however, lacked Mill’s belief in pluralism and tolerance. He feared that if the Roman Catholic Church was given the rights accorded to other religions, it would bring the Inquisition and the banning of books to England. He had seen the effect on Galileo in Florence, grown old as a prisoner for voicing heretical views on astronomy. Thus Milton failed the test of tolerance – ‘not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate’.⁹

If Milton’s nightmare was Roman Catholicism, democratic Russia’s was the Communist Party. The argument is a familiar one – those who advocate intolerance lose the right to be tolerated. Philosophically, however, there is no logical validity to be illiberal to illiberals, as Anthony Skillen points out in his article on free speech: ‘Intolerance, injustice or cruelty do not justify, a priori, retributive intolerance, injustice or cruelty. The vision of a society in which only liberals have the right to liberty is conceptually as well as actually comic’.¹⁰ Free speech is not innocuous, but whether it is so injurious and dangerous as to warrant censorship, whether the danger can be diluted by increasing the plurality of voices rather than eliminating incendiary ones, whether it is ever justified to stop the flow of the creative imagination and discussion – these are the issues that revolve around the debate on free speech. For the democrats in new Russia tolerance was a frightening proposition: to give an equal voice to opponents or subscribe to honest elections ran the risk of the communists returning to power. Arguably, Putin’s repressive regime stems from the way these issues were resolved by the media industry in the 1990s.

Free speech as an end in itself

A different approach to censorship would have come from readers convinced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), the classic liberal thesis in defence of freedom of speech. Although in many Russian universities this text was on the list of courses of foreign journalism, few students appear to have read it from what I have been told by different generations of graduates. Mill’s view that censorship was ‘evil’ because it robbed people of truth and justice was especially relevant to Russia. Mill had a special word to say about Russia’s ‘melancholy condition’. He considered the problem lay in Russia’s permanent bureaucracy, which was so strong that even the tsar could not dislodge it. As a result, it would crush individualism and ‘not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this … country free otherwise than in name’.¹¹ Mill’s analysis of mid-nineteenth-century Russia has an authentic ring for today’s Russia, free in name but not in fact, and burdened by a bureaucracy considerably larger than the one that had served tsarism and the whole of the Soviet Union.

The supremacy of the individual was central to Mill’s thesis, so that every opinion was valuable. Mill argued that all human beings should be free to form and express opinions without interference from governments or other individuals provided the voicing of these opinions did not directly harm or threaten anyone, as would be the case if a person incited an angry mob to lynch a suspect. In the creativity of discussion, people would be able to seek the truth because: ‘if the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error’.¹² As people are not perfect and may not be able to recognise all sides of the truth, a reconciling and combining of opposites is required so that conflicting doctrines ‘instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them’.¹³ He went further, saying that if either of two opinions had a better claim than the other, it was the minority, because that view represented neglected interests.¹⁴

Mill believed the benefits of free speech to humanity were manifold: the development of individuality would lead to more responsible and rational citizens; a free and tolerant society would contribute to greater happiness; and the ever increasing number of uncontested truths, having survived the cut and thrust of rational argument, would assist in a genuine consolidation of opinion. Mill did not only see free speech as a means to the betterment of society, he saw it as good in itself. Because freedom was intrinsic to a highly civilised society and to mature human beings, the exercise of judgement and individual spontaneity was not simply a means to happiness but the very essence of happiness.

These views were startlingly alien to Russian culture. Mill’s horror of the unanimity of views, where even the silencing of one opposing voice would diminish the pursuit of truth, was obviously hard to accommodate to an autocratic society with rigidly enforced political values brokering no opposition. The Leninist dictum of ‘those who are not with us are against us’ showed political loyalties overrode issues of truth. Tolerance of minority views was never a part either of the tsarist or Soviet empires. The Marxist class-based ideology focusing on the primacy of workers gave official justification in the Soviet Union for the persecution of whole classes and groups – the bourgeoisie, kulaks, ‘enemies of the people’, ethnic and cultural minorities. We can see a return today to the scapegoating of minorities in Putin’s Russia. The idea that free speech is good in itself has not found currency in Russian practice where media have been and continue to be used principally as a means to an end: either a tool of the state or of opposition to the state.

Nor does the role of reason hold the same Enlightenment aura in Russia as it does in the West. Apart from some of its intellectuals, Russia did not experience the Reformation or the Enlightenment, and many concepts borrowed from there remain alien. Mill’s belief in individual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Conclusion
• Index