MOSCOW - As the Kremlin cracks down on critical voices in the news media, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has cast himself in the unlikely role of a champion of press freedom.
The Russian parliament, controlled by the Kremlin's allies, overwhelmingly passed tough new amendments last month restricting coverage of everything from terrorist bombings to the brutal war in Chechnya. But when journalists asked Putin to veto the measure, he did as they asked.
"We need to strike a finer balance between curbs and fully informing society about the actions of the state," Putin said Monday, to an audience of newspaper and television executives he summoned to the Kremlin, "so that the state does not start seeing itself as infallible."
But efforts to restrict the press have not ended, and in the end Putin may benefit most. Russia's lower house of parliament, or Duma, plans to debate another overhaul of the nation's press laws in the next few weeks, and to restrict reporting on terrorist attacks. At the suggestion of the Kremlin, legislators will work with a committee of journalists to draft those changes.
"I think this is the worst possible outcome for freedom of the press," said Boris Kagarlitsky, editor of a new political magazine Smysl, or "Sense." "Instead of imposing censorship, they will get self-restriction by the press. Instead of having policemen or experts control us, our own colleagues will control us.
"More than that, the president is now acquiring some kind of liberal image," he said. "'The deputies of the Duma are bad and stupid and they are enemies and freedom and blah, blah, blah. And the presidency is good and a friend of journalists' - which is nonsense."
Putin's government has been trying to rein in Russia's freewheeling media since he took power almost three years ago. But that effort entered an aggressive new phase last month when Chechen guerrillas seized more than 750 hostages at a Moscow theater.
After three days, elite troops flooded the theater with a potent narcotic gas, then blasted their way inside. The gas - never fully identified by authorities - was blamed in the deaths of at least 124 of the 129 hostages killed during the siege, one of whom died yesterday. Seven former hostages remain hospitalized, apparently from the effects of the gas.
Russia's legislators resisted calls for an inquiry into the government's failure to better prepare for the treatment of hundreds of hostages drugged by the gas. But politicians were quick to criticize the aggressive coverage of the event, and to seek to limit reporting on future crises.
Forceful tactics
Authorities also launched a campaign against critical journalists, using political pressure and questionable police tactics.
A squad of agents from Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, raided the muckraking weekly newspaper Versia on Nov. 1, as it prepared to publish a detailed account of the storming of the theater. The Kremlin also called for the firing of two popular talk show hosts on the NTV television network after they broadcast interviews about the theater siege that irked authorities, colleagues said.
Russian journalists aren't the only ones feeling the heat. A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Berlin sent a letter to ARD, German public television network, calling its coverage of the crisis "shocking, totally untenable and reprehensible." The letter, the newsmagazine Spiegel reported, warned that the "cooperation" of Russian authorities with ARD correspondents would depend on the tone of future coverage.
Hans-Wilhelm Steinfeld, the Moscow correspondent for Norwegian state television, said FSB agents last week erased two videotapes containing interviews with Chechen refugees in tent camps in Ingushetia. Norway's foreign minister in Oslo summoned the Russian ambassador Friday and delivered a letter of protest.
Steinfeld, who has been working in Russia since the Soviet era, said the measure was something new. "This was the first time I have experienced Russian authorities destroying journalistic material," he said.
Rustam Arifdhanov, managing editor of Versia, said Putin's veto of the restrictive press legislation was pure theater - intended to depict him as a democrat while preparing the public for new controls on the press. "I think that there will be some cosmetic changes, but in essence, the amendments adopted by the Duma will remain," Arifdhanov said.
Among the journalists on the panel that will meet with members of parliament is Alexei Venediktov, managing editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy, Russia's major news radio network.
Venediktov, one of Russia's most respected journalists, has set up an Internet site for his radio show in the United States, fearing his station's Russian site might be closed.
Venediktov said he would prefer that Russian journalists, like those in the West, adopt voluntary guidelines rather than face new legal restrictions on their work. "I do not agree with this," he said yesterday of the negotiations with the Duma. "But I will participate in this work on a new law, to minimize the losses for the press."
Against any deals
To others, though, any compromise is surrender because it undercuts the strong guarantees of press freedom written into Russia's constitution.
"The press themselves are involved in working out a document that will end in limits on the freedom of the press," said Kagarlitsky, editor of Smysl. "Having Venediktov on the panel is one of the biggest successes for Putin in his campaign against the free press. These deals shouldn't be made at all. Freedom of speech is not something to be negotiated."
Russian media executives were quick to admit that they occasionally blundered in coverage of the hostage crisis. Ekho Moskvy carried a live interview with one of the hostage-takers. "It was a big mistake," Venediktov said.
One television channel broadcast the maneuvers of military vehicles near the theater during the opening hours of the siege. Another aired an interview with an employee of the theater, who told viewers he was drawing up plans of the complex to help troops plan an assault.
But when authorities asked, journalists halted the broadcast of sensitive information. Government officials have not alleged that the reporting led to any deaths or injuries.
Yasen Zasursky, professor of journalism at Moscow State University, said yesterday that he thought Putin "did the right thing" in vetoing the amendments. But he questioned Putin's criticism of the press Monday for allegedly endangering the lives of hostages and security forces.
"It's very unfair to criticize journalists," Zasursky said. "They played a positive role. People knew more, and knowing more, they reacted more patiently than they would have otherwise."
Andrei V. Ryabov, an expert on Russian domestic politics with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the Kremlin was probably interested in tightening its grip on the media, which had become more openly critical of Putin's administration in recent months.
But Ryabov doubted that Putin wanted the drastic restrictions endorsed by the Duma, where legislators may have been carried away by their anger at the Chechens. Nor, he said, was Putin likely to be the instigator of the more aggressive efforts by security services to muzzle the press - such as the FSB raid on the newspaper Versia.
"On the one hand, Putin tries to look as a liberal politician who really shares all democratic values, one of the main ones being a free press," he said. "He tries to emphasize he doesn't have a real problem with the press.
"At the same time, in the context of his policy of trying to strengthen the state control in various spheres of public life - of course, the state apparatus interprets his striving for state control as a striving for control over the press as well."
'No censorship'
Supporters of restrictions on reporting say they would not seriously limit press freedom. "There will be no censorship," said Valery Fyodorov, a member of the upper chamber of parliament and who voted for the amendments blocked by Putin. "The idea is not to put any restrictions on the creative work of journalists."
But, he added, reporters need to be taught how to "assist" the authorities in "emergency situations and in fighting terrorism and releasing hostages."
Critics say supporters of press curbs are more interested in limiting political damage than casualties. A week after the siege ended, television satirist Viktor Shenderovich delivered an acid-etched commentary on the hostage crisis. Speaking on his weekly television program, he charged that Putin acted purely out of political self-interest.
Putin, he reminded viewers, had boasted that terrorism had "no future" after security forces stormed the theater. The hostages who died certainly had no future, Shenderovich agreed. "But the president has."
The Kremlin reacted by summoning the TVS network's co-owner, Anatoly Chubais, one of Russia's super-rich "oligarchs" - to explain the remarks.
Shenderovich said he knew that his remarks would provoke the Kremlin. But he didn't let that stop him. "The grounds for saying it were far too serious," he said. "I realize that if I would put brakes on myself, then I would never be able to speak freely again."